Excellent point. I find this strange as well. I personally think many of the haters are simply intolerant of new ideas. Fallout 1 and 2 were great games…for their time.
As to those who didn't enjoy exploring Fallout 3…are there other games you did enjoy exploring? From my perspective I'm sorry to say I wonder if you aren't allowing yourself to be immersed because of external factors or prejudices regarding VATS or some such thing? I'm honestly curious.
Agreed. Some people are simply close-minded I feel. I'm sorry to say that, but that's how I see it.
I'll go even a bit farther when it comes to this point. Exploration and immersion ARE the main factors when playing a pen & paper RPG - the GM may have the best story ever, but if he is imposing it to gamers then… railroading happens, and nobody likes that. Strangely (these) same rules apply in video games. Most people who like RPGs don't like cinematic games - let's say a Telltale game or, even more cinematic, a David Cage game, because the whole thing is centered around a story and hard-core gamers normally feel they are being shown a movie than playing a game. So, where is the line? Bethesda's games have too little story, and are too conducive to immersive exploration, cinematic games have too much story, but are too linear and look like movies? There must be a middle point. I bet it's old-school RPGs…
Also, I can't agree with the popular opinion in RPG sites that Bethesda's and BioWare's game stories and dialogues suck. No, they (usually) don't. Neither Obsidian's (usually). That's so true as the statement "old-school games had the best stories and dialogues". No, they did not. They had the biggest, most boring dialogues, crammed full with game lore because they had no voice acting. Text is cheaper than voice acted text. Long text may even be cheaper than short text, because a bad writer usually fills pages and pages to say a very simple thing. Assuming that a game has better story because it has more text is not the way to go. I'm quite sure other people have different theories about that, but it all ends in the same place: gamers who like old-school tactical games can't say just that "what I like is tactical combat". They have to come up with brightest explanations. "Old-school games are deeper, they have better stories". Deeper where? Are they philosophical reflections on the meaning of life? Not really, they are deeper because they are more difficult to understand, you must read the manual to understand how to play. And the gameplay is also harder. Is that deeper? No, it's just more complicated. For some that might be good. If you like reloading and replaying and improving characters to the end of times. For me it's just frustrating. I don't like playing 300 hours of the same game.
Returning to the Fallout thing. The first time I played the first two games was about 8 years ago. I had been a pen & paper serious gamer since the late 80s/ mid 90s but, by that time (and although I had been playing video games since ZX Spectrum, back in 81 or 82), I never really got into cRPGs, as they felt always centered around combat and game mechanics, exactly the kind of game I abhorred in pen & papers.
As I recall, the first game that I played which reflected the way I played a pen & paper was Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines (not saying it was the first one that did it, it was the first one I played).
A few years later someone lent me Fallout 1 and 2. Again, as I said before, I was never into cRPGs while I played pen & paper so, many of the "classics" passed me by. I had never heard of Fallout in the beginning of the millennium. They were both kind of old by then, but not so old as to be completely outdated (I thought). When I played the first one I was mindblown by the intro. Ron Perlman, as usual, does a amazing job narrating those short intros. The choice of soundtrack was terrific, the setting sounded great and even graphically the intro (well, both of them, actually) looked very good. Then I started to play… What a disapointment. I just thought to myself, after that bloody great intro what I get is a midget sporting a blue spandex walking around mazes that look like dungeons and killing giant rats. There's so little voice acting, the background music sounds like wind and where the hell is the future that intro was pointing to? All I see is rock, wood huts, tin huts, things that might have been car wrecks or bike wrecks… Later I found out that the setting was really only in the intros. And in the fallout bible. The first Fallouts had little more than text to show us the wonders of the Fallout universe.
Then came Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) and, suddenly, the gap between intro and game there was no more (except you don't get to hear Ron Perlman's voice in-game, and that's a real shame, but at least he narrated the endings as well). The Fallout universe only really shows up by the time of Fallout 3. Before it was only mentioned in dialogue, diaries, computer entries and such. And in the Fallout bible. So, yeah, hating Fallout 3 or NV because of the story, quests, dialogues or one of the usual old-school lover responses is just a lame justification for not liking the combat in first person view…
