Oh that's a new anthem.

For people like me who began by playing 8-bit games in the late 80's, Fallout is the long awaited realisation of how great video games could become.

I'm the same... except that I find it very depressing to see the recent games as the apex that was [back then] over the horizon. I love the new hardware resources, and software tools, but I find the recent trends in gameplay to be typically disappointing letdowns due to limited scope and underestimating the player... or perhaps estimating the majority of players spot on.

I see franchise and genre as indicators for compatible games; but I've seen franchise and genre become catch-all labels that mean and indicate next to nothing, and the games are built for an homogenized crowd, with focus on no one's preferences, and including just enough of everything to interest everyone... Like labeling a dessert box, "lemon meringue strawberry cheese cake with chocolate and raspberries, with liver and onions and anchovies, in a rich sweet and sour ~and bitter, and low sodium, sugar free caramel sauce".

FO4 with its remnant [now crippled] paid mod support building mode, and tower defense... is a classic example of the problem IMO.

Fallout to me represents these tenets:

• Moral Ambiguity
• Choice & consequence
• Compelling Writing
• Societal Rebuilding
• RPG mechanics that suffuse throughout the full experience, not just mere additives or flavoring.
• Dialogue
• Humanity
• Post-Apocalypse

As DemonsBlade explained, Fallout 3 is a good game just not a good Fallout game.This is due to Fallout 3 adhering to a paucity of the original design tenets and mutating the meaning of what Fallout represents.

Fallout 4 looks set to continue this trend, Fallout 4 will be an amazing game but probably an awful Fallout game.

Well I only jumped on with F3 back in 2008 and knew nothing of the franchise or Bethesda, so I fail to appreciate these purists who say it's been transformed: I only have that game to go on and I was hooked.

However I'm not sure I like the way that Todd Howard has been praising GTA 5 and citing it as the main inspiration for Fallout 4. Yea, GTA 5 (like all the others) is bright, colorful and fun but always seems to leave a void. Fallout 3 on the other hand is the only game I ever played where I didn't feel at all guilty about sinking so many hours into it. I'm a pretty good judge and the only inspiration Fallout needs is Fallout.

I wish this was true...

Fallout to me is its unique setting IMO. This idealistic, 1950's America, "World of Tomorrow', mashed with silly scifi B-movie cliches, and all thrown under the bomb world that no other setting really has.

There isn't really any specific gameplay mechanic I think defines Fallout IMO. Nothing the old games did was really unique to them, besides their rather famous gimmick name for their attribute system. But an attribute system is still an attribute system no matter what you call it.

This.

Fallout is the whole idea, the setting and the themes it invokes. Fallout is not a first-person open world shooter-RPG, it's not a 3rd person Isometric turn based RPG, it's not a squad based isometric strategy game. Fallout is a setting that brings the optimistic idea of the future from the 50s into the current day and takes it up to 11. Add in a bit of wacky weirdness and philosophy, and you've got yourself Fallout.

It isn't the films that make Star Wars what it is, it's the universe those films take place in; the same applies to fallout, at least in my opinion.

This is certainly understandable. In my case Oblivion was my first TES game, and when I saw FO3, I saw Oblivion 2.1 set in the Fallout IP.
As I went backwards in the TES franchise, I found that I like the games better than I like Oblivion, and later Skyrim. I do expect FO4, to play like Skyrim 2.1 in the Fallout world setting.

What these games encourage and focus upon is not at all what I'd seek out a Fallout game to experience.

I thought it was inspired too much from Fallout and Fallout 2; it recycled their core plots as its own.

Bethesda has re-released Interplay's Fallout and Fallout 2 on Steam; they come highly recommended, and are Fallout from the fount.
(Fallout was about trying to get clean water filtration, and defeating the Supermutants; and Fallout 2 was about obtaining the GECK, and defeating the Enclave.)

Fun