Ok, I've done a fair bit of reading, and I just wanted to say a few things.
I am Old Guard as well, but I played F1's demo, and bought F2... so
Fallout 2 is sadly my fav of all. I think everyone who has a problem
here w/ Bethesda should blame INTERPLAY. They lost custody because
they were BAD PARENTS. Van Buren was NEVER going to be finished,
unless Interplay released it's deathgrip on the project.

Sure, I had many mixed emotions about F3. Like many here, I view
P:Torment and Fallout as the best, and beacons of writing. F2 had
the maddest stuff I have EVER seen outside the writings of literary madmen.
Is a chess playing scorpion TOO weird? Hell no. Consistency and realism
be damned, RPGs are meant to be fun. After a nuke war, we'd all be
weilding bones as weapons... if we even survived.

F3 has a badly plotted/written main quest, but pretty good sidequests
(what sick human didn't love the cantebury Superhuman mission!!!???),
EXCELLENT atmosphere(c'mon the classic music had me in tears), and the
best non essential hidden weirdness since F2. Ever been to Andale?!
Ever played the text based game?! Dunwich Building?

At least we know there WILL be a part 4, a part 5 etc, because Beth CAN
sustain themselves. And giving Obsidian a shot, well, WHO ELSE has ever
done that?

PS, forgot to add that MANY skills were NOT used to their fullest potential in the
original two games. C'mon, first aid AND doctor?!The useless gambling and
outdoorsman skills?? Traps, barter, melee, throwing and sneak were VERY WEAK.
So, I tend to find more use w/ the skills in F3, but SPECIAL is useless, true.
Despite that, it IS easy to max out several skills thus makin characters samey.

Ps2, I completely forgot, a friend had added more to Perception and had a situation
wherein he discovered a hidden compartment in a container. Not essentially game
changing, but a cool little addition nonetheless.

I used first aid and doctor quite much in the previous games...it wasn't useless unless you had low skill in it, which would cause it to fail many times.

It was poorly worded, sorry.

I meant having both was redundant. Esp. since
there weren't many instances wherein you used
the skills in dialogue/quests.

We have reached the 200 post limit.