I will start it off...
I purchased Fallout 3 roughly a year and a half ago after hearing great things about the game. I decided to buy it for the computer instead of the XBox 360 because I had just built a new computer and wanted to take full advantage of the graphic improvements over the other versions. After installing the game and starting to play it, I quickly fell in love with it, and could not wait to get out of the Vault and reach the open world. I finally hit the door and was given the opportunity to make final changes to my character, and continued on... but then the issues started. While trying to run to Megaton my game kept crashing. At first I thought maybe an install file had gotten messed up somehow, so I reinstalled the game. Once again, once I exited the Vault, the crashes started again. It got so bad I was forced to save my game 40+ times before I made it to Megaton for the first time in fear of the game crashing. I thought maybe because I had a physical version of the game, there might be a patch available to fix this issue. I went to the Fallout 3 official site and found an update. After installing it, the issues were still there. I then turned to the forums to see if there was anybody else having the same issue I was having, and sure enough, there were hundreds of posts with the same issue that I was having. After reading through a large chunk of them so see if maybe there were any replies with attempted fixes, I did not find any. In fact, I did not find any acknowledgment on the part of Bethesda of any wrong on their part, just posts asking people to post their error report, and posts saying that it appears to be a user side software/hardware/driver error, and that their was nothing that Bethesda could do about it, just suggestions to reinstall the game, reinstall drivers, and check to make sure that your hardware is all working properly. I then decided to test their theory and installed the game on 2 other computers in my house, both with different builds then my computer, two running XP, and mine running Vista 64. On all 3 computers, the crashes all started at the same time (right after exiting the Vault). By this point, I was very frustrated and contacted Bethesda about getting a refund on my game, or having it exchanged for the XBox 360 version because it did not have nearly as many issues. As I expected, I was told that there is nothing that they could do, and to check my computer for any issues. After this I decided to stop playing the game. I went for about 6 months before I tried the game out again. This time, I did not have any issues at all with the game, outside of some lag when using V.A.T.S. in the openworld areas (I had this issue since I first installed the game, so figured it was just because I was playing on higher graphics setting then my computer could handle). Now back to the present day. I recently purchased a physical copy of the Game of the Year edition because I did not have any of the DLC and it was cheaper then buying them with Microsoft Points. I reinstalled the game, installed the DLC's, and started playing. Once again, everything was fine until I exited the Vault. Now, instead of the screen going black and the game crashing, everything just locks up, with audio still playing in the background, until I CTRL ALT DEL and end the process. There are times that I can go for 10 mins before this happens, but other times I make it literally 15 seconds. There do not seem to be any common links between the crashes. I have crashed in the train tunnels, in the open world, in Megaton, inside buildings. I have also tried dropping my graphics to the lowest possible settings, and this actually gave me my best playtime. Figuring that maybe it was something with a certain graphic setting, I started restarting the game every few minutes, increasing one graphic setting at a time to hopefully isolate the problem. eventually, the crashes came back, so I dropped back to the lowest setting because I just wanted to play the game at that point. This time, I made it about 30 seconds, and it locked up.
What I am asking for it that Bethesda PLEASE look into this issue and try to fix it. If there were only a few isolated cases of this issue, I would agree, it is probably a user side problem, but it is not. There are hundreds of people with the same issue, or very similar issues. If you need confirmation of this, please look at your own PC issues forums (http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/forum/36-pc-issues/). It is all right there. Now, I know that Bethesda has focused their issue on Fallout: New Vegas and they probably do not want to dedicate their resources on this ongoing issue, but what proof do I have that if I actually decided to purchase Fallout: New Vegas, it will not have this same issue, and receive the same response that Fallout 3 received?
Until something has been acknowledged, I will personally not be purchasing Fallout: New Vegas, and I am sure there are others with me. Maybe if we can get enough people, Bethesda will actually take notice and work to fix this issue before alienating another group of potential customers.