INV you start in on place, travel in a big U and then fight the final battle after doing quests along the way. In fallout 3 you start in the middle of the map and then get sent into the DC ruins, then you get sent across the map to find dad and back across the map to the next thing. Repeat travelling across the entire maps for various reasons another few times and then you have the final boss battle. That is just the main quest. The side quests take you all over the map as well.

Notice the difference?

way funner exploring in fallout 3 then in new vegas, to easy to explore in new vegas, not to mention that fallout 3 also used the WHOLE map, and there was a way cooler environment in fallout 3, theres two thinks i thought nv had on fo3 and that was weapons, and the main story was alot better

The max that I have done with a Fallout 3 file is 66 hours and that's pretty much doing everything (Although I don't think I explored 100% of the world). It's a large world full of fun items and exploration. I may try to do 100% completion although that will take time.

Umm... there's no way to do all of the stuff in FO3 in 66 hours. Not even one play thru, really. There are many things that depend on other things, for example, so you can't see everything easily and must play thru multiple times with different characters.

Reading your posts, you kind of seem like a person who needs direction in a game, like a quest with markers to tell you where to go.

The glory of Bethesda's open world games are this, The ability to walk out of a town; and unravel the world.

Look, even without the DLCs (download contents) I did 90 hours just going to about three quarters of the possible named places, exploring the game content that was there, the quests that were available, taking a quest if I fancied it, and I did during that time (90 hours) only a few of the total quests available, they were big quests, intricate, interesting and almost small games in themselves, and I hadn't even started the main quest yet, I was delaying starting that for later.

That gives an idea of how much time can be spent on finding 3/4 of the locations and just taking a few choice quests, and I had not even started the main quest yet. Many of those locations found also deserve a revisit to do what was left undone. The amount of game-play content in the game is staggering, wildly varied and will give a fantastic game.

A fair estimate of time to do all the rest of the game-play would be 150-200 hours, leaving out doing things you might find of less to your taste. There are many smaller game-play details to be found that add flavour and polish, and many random events that add the same. Variation and randomisation seem to be a big factor of the game, a reload is never even quite the same, that itself should give good replay value.

Couldn't have said better myself,Fallout 3 is just awesome, every person in my family just loves it, because, its just to good of a game, I have spent so much time playing it and still haven't seen it all but this play through I am.

I'm sure there's more than that.

Anyway, on-topic. At the minute, I've just picked FO3 back up and looked at my time played, and I've clocked 34 hours, that's by playing the DLC (except Mothership Zeta) finishing it and only being I'd say half done with the main storyline. With this playthrough I just went through it without much attention to detail but I've recently started playing again to go over the game much more thoroughly. And so far I've been playing for a good amount of time. FO3 seems to me to have so much to explore an do. Random NPC's will have dialogue they have to tell you, side-quests that gain you extra items and rewards. It just seems playing FO3 even now has so much to offer.