Yea, the comparision might be a bit unfair since F3 is so much bigger than F1 and F2, but I think a worthy goal for any game designer would be for players to be satisfied at the end of the game. Sandbox games seem to go against this. With an actual sandbox (a box of sand) there is no "end." You just play until you want to do something else. So maybe that was my problem--I was looking for something more than sand. ha

maybe for you, i didn't actually finish the main quest on fallout 3 until 3 or 4 months after i bought the game and in skyrim i never finished the main quest or civil war quest lines ever and i played both those games up until recently prob thousands of hours each, from the time they both came out and it took a couple years for me to start getting bored of fallout 3, and prob a year or two with skyrim...i've played games and 15 minutes later didn't like em, the only other fairly recent games to keep my interest for a long time was deus ex human revolution and it has an ending but its a very story driven game but bethesda games aren't so they don't need to end, you just finish and then start a new character, rarely do i just keep playing on one playthru till i literaly do everything...i save plenty of stuff for my next playthru...if you're just playing fallout long after you're max out your level and have all the perks and all the skills are 100 or whatever its get kinda boring then..leving up is fun for me, i just restart on my own a little while after i reach level 30.

For me, it's quest focus instead of combat and hiking focus. That's why for me F3 is just TES with guns... Good thing that at least Baldur's Gate got a worthy successor, even though it hadn't been made by Bioware.

fallout 3 is ES with guns, its works, its my favorite game of all time and was a blockbuster, sandbox games are becoming popular, games where you have more choices on how the game unfolds. and lots of open world games are being made in the last couple years with more on the way, i'm looking forward to not just FO4 but homefront revolution and tom clancy the division, both those games are open world and set in a city which is my favorite environment for a game as opposed to being out in the wilderness like in far cry or even ES games, which i like but i'm kinda burned out on open world midevil/fantasy games i'm kinda ready for some open world city area games. and i have a feeling FO4 is gonna really highlite that far far more than FO3 did.

What [point] exactly are you saying, "maybe for you" ~to? It wasn't a statement of personal preference or opinion.

You're saying that you can take more of it than I can, that's fine; but this wasn't the point though. The point was that the psychology of it is lost on a group that demands only gratification or adulation from a game, and where proof of failure in the game is seen by some as a personal attack or bad design; both garnering ill will from the player towards the product, and perhaps the studio. They actually seem to view the game as "What can it give me!(?)", instead of 'What can I take away from this'. That's a terrible shift and an unhealthy attitude [long term] IMO.
It was remarkable to me that during E3 when FO3 shipped, there were [other] studio reps hawking their titles with special mention of "You can succeed in our game!". At the time I didn't realize how imperative they must have considered it to have to desperately blurt that out. I thought it odd, because a claim like that would tend to have me ignore their game as a forgone conclusion ~with no need to find out.

I don't remember the studio or their game; that should say plenty.


It's funny you mention that: I didn't like Fallout the first time I played it; [Fallout, not FO3] FO3 I liked ~until I tried to use the toilet in the vault. I didn't like Disciples 2 either; 20 minutes in and I thought it was a mistake to have bought it; this is a game that I later played for 17 hours with negligible pause. The first time I played the Diablo demo, I thought 'This is nice, but I won't be spending time with this game.', and I didn't for years; until I found it on sale, and could have kicked myself for missing out during its hey-day, once I'd played it for an hour. First impressions of games are not to be trusted.




I can agree with that ~for being true; except that the original Fallout allowed the player to go anywhere they wished [anyplace worth the time], and in any order they chose. But it did not ensure the PC's relative safety for their chosen path. I don't see how Fallout being converted into "TES with guns" is at all good for the series; its lost its soul, as it were.