I'd like to start out by saying that Fallout 3 is an amazing game with good replayability. I've (sadly) logged on many hours in that game.

And though Fallout 3 is an amazing game, there is some stuff that just bothers me to no end.

First and foremost, the way the Lone Wanderer dismisses Fawkes.

"You're fired Fawkes, stop following me around."

??? Isn't my character supposed to be amazingly nice? It just sorta leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Secondly. The endgame when it says stuff about your character not being a true hero if you send Fawkes, who's immune to radiation in. (or Charon I guess. I keep forgetting about him) I guess it's just a reason before honor thing for me.

Being unable to properly join the Enclave. All my other "problems" are meh. But being forced to side with the Brotherhood of Steel was a bad design choice I think.

I don't think we'll ever have a Fallout where we side with the Enclave. *sigh*

Not being able to satisfactorily resolve the Tenpenny Tower impasse, or even set things right (not without being deemed bad) after the whole thing goes belly up.

The beginning of the game. I dislike the whole growing-up-in-Vault-101, daughter/son-of-James story. I much prefer the Elder Scrolls system where our backstories are ambiguous and we can fill in whatever background we want for our characters.

Or, if there has to be a fixed story, I would prefer a choice of stories as in Dragon Age: Origins.

The Tennpenny Tower quest. No matter what path you choose, you lose.

The number of quests seems a little on the dry side. When I travel east or north of Megaton, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of new quest leads, so it feels a bit barren. Most other quests usually force us into those areas, which makes exploring them rather empty on replays.

The lack of a game building itself around my character. I'm still not even sure what the Karma system is for.

The lack of sprinting for short distances.

I actually like it for that. Quite a nice slap in the face for people who though they were doing the right thing.

I don't mind the unexpected twist which happens as much as my inability to do anything about it after that. Being able to purge the whole building, or at least just the main villain, without incurring any negative karma penalties or Three-Dog snide remarks over the radio would have been good enough for me. Lesson learnt, but hell if I'm just taking it lying down.

The lack of sprinting must be a problem with either your system or your game. On PC, you hold the left shift key along with the a,w,s,or d for short distance sprinting.

That's just running, not sprinting. Sprinting is an extra shot of speed for a very short distance. It's like the difference between a professional runner doing the hundred-yard dash as opposed to a marathon.

It sounds to me like you're using a mod that adds sprinting to the game. There is no sprinting in vanilla Fallout 3.

Sprint: Verb, to run at full speed over a short distance.

Again, if you are on PC, the left shift key is the Run (sprint) key. If you press the left shift key with one of the movement keys (A, S, D or W) you will run or sprint. When you release the left shift key, you will revert to walking. This is not something I made up or comes from a mod. It is in the "Vault Dweller's Survival Guide" that comes with the retail purchased disc.

I tried it just before I wrote my post. My character went into a temporary walk when left shift and W were pressed at the same time. There is also no mention of a Sprint key in Settings > Controls > Action Mapping.

I gots no sprint on 360.

My problems are game immersion things. Like most building being bordered up. Totally lame on the developers part for not making generic interiors for those buildings. Building and road placements. Some roads don't make sense since you can see that would lead into a building. In some places roads are only a few inches from a building. Which wouldn't make sense since it would go against a law where roads have to be "X" amount of distance from a building.

I think the definition of sprint is different for some people. In FO3, just like in Oblivion and Morrowind, we use ASWD to move about in a casual walk, and if we hold the Shift key (or toggle the Caps Lock) we move faster to simulate running. In Skyrim, though, there's a "sprint" mode, where if you held down then left Alt (I think, been a while since I played Skyrim) key you'd actually move much faster than even running mode, draining your stamina bar and once it's empty you can no longer sprint until you regain some. It was really useful and I admit there were countless times in FO3 when I pressed that button on the keyboard and nothing happened. In FO3 it's just walk and run, while in Skyrim it's walk, run and sprint. There's no stamina bar in FO3 either, so it's probably not going to be realistic to put in a sprint mode, I guess. It's not something I'm terribly disappointed about, though - after all, I'd never have missed it if I hadn't played Skyrim.

fact that there is no patch available to support the new OS systems nor for newer video cards, CPU's, etc. Another bad side is that the world is rather small, even the New Vegas world is rather tiny.

There are player mods which take advantage of better graphic cards and CPUs - the NMC texture pack comes in several flavours, and I think the largest one adds a whopping 5Gb or so of textures to the original game. There's also a version for FNV.

I'm currently using the second-to-largest version and the game really feels new.

Cracks fingers, begins to type... then just goes back to 3d modeling.

~Actually I have no issues with the engine; none with the art design, none with it being 3d. I do think the developer's player expectation is lower than in the early series, and that the studio has wildly misinterpreted the setting... both of these have a deleterious effect on the writing. Other than that, my only peeves are the mechanical differences [all of them] between Fallout 3 and Fallout 2.

What really bothers me the most is that the 'whole' of the game didn't compell me at all, which would be the contrary to what the title 'Fallout 3' would've suggested at the time. Aside from landscaping everything was seemingly full of potential yet annoyingly underwhelming and feeling like only half-finished; combat, quests, characters, storytelling, dialog, C&C, skills, stats... There was so very little of the charm left the core series used to have.

Lack of development in the unarmed and melee skill. (3 iron fist perks, and one paralyzing palm perk compared to the 8+ perks for guns and energy weapons). You can't aim for specific parts with your fists like you could in fallout 2. Even in new vegas I still think it is still a little underpowered compared to how easy it is to kill with guns and energy weapons in new vegas and fallout. (Note: I am making the comparison on very hard and/or hardcoe difficulty). I like how they added much more power into new vegas don't get me wrong but it still

seems much more easy to sneak and use guns and in fallout 3 it seems more easy to just use the chinese stealth suit with taht silenced and scoped assault rifle.

There is virtuallly no way to side with the enclave. You can use the fev virus on the purifier ffs and you still have to side with the brotherhood. (Talk about choices in a ROLE PLAYING GAME.)

Iffy stealth system. Even on very hard with the chinese stealth suit people get caution when I'm like 2 feet behidn them wtf? It shouldn't matter if I'm in broad daylight if I'm behind them if they're not even LOOKING at me. So yeah the unreliable stealth system to sneak past people as opposed to sneak critting them. Every situation it's like you're forced to kill almost everyone because the sneak system is just unreliable. I want to do a quest without some brainless raider or super mutant spotting me when I'm like four feet behind them with 100 sneak and a chinese stealth suit.

Broken Steel. It effectively took the whole meaning of the game (and the series for that matter) and chucked it out the window. Broken Steel effectively broke the game...it rendered every choice you had made up to that point meaningless. It removed the consequences of your actions.

To be fair, it's not that I don't like Broken Steel, it just had no place in fallout in the manner in which it was presented. Had Beth done this from jump, and not after the game had already been released with an ending proper, I probably wouldn't complain about it too much.

This. Completely destroyed any chance at making any sort of backstory for your character. You're just stuck playing as a teenager looking for daddy.

Another thing being how linear the entire main questline is and the entire lack of choice. You're forced to follow the path of your father and join the Brotherhood of Steel to save the day. No option to join the Enclave, no option to just follow an entire new path on how the player character wants things down. They make a small attempt of choice at the end with destroying the purifier but even then there is really no reason to do it unless the player character just wants to be a complete [censored]. Perhaps it's a nod to what Eden wanted but in the smallest. It's like Bethesda's way of saying "Hey, you can side with the Enclave! Sort of. Not really.".

Then comes the unnecessary continuation that was Broken Steel that ruined the ending. Because people don't know how to load a previous save.

Not with -imagination!- \o/

I ended up ignoring the MQ on most of my characters, or I'll just end up skipping the majority of it, by heading straight to the vault. When I just want the Enclave to spawn.

But other than that, my current character is an ex-raider. I end up hotkeying the weapons, and stimpaks, so I won't have to use the pipboy much.

I'm still mad that you can't drag Uncle Leo around with you.

That is just the default run speed, it is not sprinting. Sprinting would be a short burst of speed even faster than the normal run speed for a very short distance. It does not exist in the default game, you need to use a mod in order to be able to do it.