You could say I'm an "Old Schooler". I played FO1 and 2 when they first came out and I replayed FO1, 2 and Tactics more recently when it was re-released by Interplay.

FO1 had the great story and set the tone for the series. The "bad guy end boss" was seriously one of the creepiest antagonists, if not THE creepiest in almost any video game. It was also the first RPG on a computer in my memory at least that actually felt like an RPG, and without going the traditional "sword and sorcery" route. I haven't been that excited about an RPG since Ultima 7.

FO2 had more refinements, what the FO1 Engine should have been if the tech and the coding had been available. More factions, and a reputation system made the RP aspects more challenging and fun. You also had better control of your companions, such as changing their armor and having better control over their tactics, no more taking friendly fire from companion's burst shots. You could even go so far as marry an NPC and if you were the shady type, "pimp" your partner out. There were just so many possibilities in that game.

In both FO1 and 2 the SPECIAL was very important. One of the most obvious ways this impacted the gameplay was setting the INT of your character too low. Do so and your character had the dialog of an idiot.

With that said FO1 and 2 are far from perfect. Although the game is still playable, the graphics are just so overly outdated it's difficult to keep a healthy interest even for those who have already played and enjoyed it. The whole turn-based thing presents its own problem as well. Don't get me wrong, I love turn based strategy, it makes the whole thing feel like a game of chess. One of my favorite things to do in the game is start a fight and hide behind the town "guards" who normally did not intervene in scuffles. Eventually they got hit with a stray bullet and went after your adversaries.

Because FO1 and FO2 were turn based, one of the best characters to build was the "Sniper" type. With the proper build (Tag Small Guns and Energy Weapons, Take Finesse as a trait, keep PE high) you could kill the majority of your adversaries with a few critical hits to the eyes or head before they could even get in close enough to hit you with their own weapons. This was of course the turn based equivalent of playing with a chess "Queen" while the rest of the world had lesser pieces, mostly pawns.

As good as FO1 and 2 were, I doubt both games could hold my interest as long as Fallout 3 and the various DLCs has. In fact, I've spent more hours on FO3 that I have any other game, including Oblivion and GTA4 beforehand and some really good games in between, like MGS4, the GOW Trilogy, Uncharted 1 and 2, etc. Yes there are some RPG aspects that can be refined and yes FO3 could have been a bit more true to the Originals in terms of storyline and SPECIAL and the RP aspects, but it doesn't detract from the fact that FO3 is still one of the best games I have played for a long time and am STILL playing.

And the true beauty of all this, is that Bethesda has recruited Obsidian (with a good handful of those developers who came from Black Isle Studios and worked on FO1, 2, Van Buren, etc.) to make Fallout New Vegas, which will use the same Engine as FO3, but will be the "spiritual" successor to the original FO1 and FO2, most players can have the best of both worlds, greater emphasis on SPECIAL, more balanced stats for more specialized character builds, a storyline progression of the West Coat region where it all began.

And to satisfy the FPS fans of the series, a better variety of modifiable guns, the ability to aim down the sights, a better and tighter 3rd person view with accurate crosshairs for those who like to play in 3rd person. And to top it all off, a "hardcoe" mode to add important "survival" challenges like requiring food, water and rest and taking away the instant-heal ability of stimpacks to make them heal over time and taking away weightless ammo, so you have to have to carefully plan your inventory. While important stats like "Damage Threshold" DT has made a comeback, so the use of armor is much more meaningful so you can't take down a power armored foe with a baseball bat or even a conventional firearm without Armor Piercing ammo but if you are wearing Power Armor, those same weapons will be ineffective against you as well.

With all that said, I am definitely looking forward to FONV. I have high hopes that it will merge the best aspects of all three games...

:talk: bethesda had to introduce people to the fallout series, thats probably why the did away with traits, watered down the SPECIAL, too many skill points etc, they simplified the game a bit in some areas, i think by design, it was just their first fallout game, they said they bought the franchise to own it, and to work on it and develop it like they do with ES, so for a first time shot at a fallout game they hit a grand slam, even though fallout 3 had lots of faults, and it did have lots of faults, it was still a massive success and they did a great job in reviving the fallout series, its sales surpased any game bethesda has ever done, it was game of the year, so regardless of how good people like fallout 1 and 2, bethesdas version of a fallout game still blows away those old games, and they introduced lots of people to the fallout series. so mission accomplished by bethesda, and now they even have obsidian working on the series, that's a major move it's not an insignificant detail, bethesda knows what they are doing, they really need to get credit where credit is due.

Didn't Fallout also introduce people to the Fallout series?

I disagree. :shrug: (Not that it was GOTY :laugh: I own that one too)
There is a lot to like about FO3, but if given an ultimatum... choose one and never play the others... I would pick FO2 (even though FO1 is my favorite).
FO3 is beautiful, and its very fun to wander in... but it doesn't draw me in for the same reasons as the others... the reasons that I like the series.

But did they really? (I mean... with the abridged version of the game ~as you say).

I don't think it was bad. Just different and that it neglected more of a depth in story, to allow greater visual detail to be shown and ease of playstyle.
But its understandable as games go in trends and at that time the trend was to make everything user friendly to bring in new blood to the genre, the same could be said about oblivion as well.

They knew it was 10x better than Fallout 1 & 2.

That doesn't make sense... All Fallout fans want the best Fallout game they can get. If someone actually felt as you say, then they wouldn't say it was bad ~they'd buy it and tell their friends.

Who decides a game will become GOTY anyway? Not the fan-base imo; count most of the old-skoolers and playstation owners out! Not only that, I firmly believe that other games deserved this "title" far more. GOTY doesn't mean a damn thing if you ask me, except for all the new DLC goodies we received huh... I mean had to buy. No, the fans should dicide! Not some column-writers or advertisers payed by the corporations. The only thing fantastic about FO3 is that it is great for modding to a certain extend and I can accept the fact that FO3 re-introduced the series to a broader audience. But that's just my opinion...


I kinda liked the bomb and the crazy followers aspect. Reminded me of that cult in one of the "planet of the apes" movies. Maybe a whole settlement of normal settlers around it was a bit silly but I thought the crazy nuke worshipers were quite feasible. Would be nice if they had their own base or town like the Hubologists in FO2.

Paradise falls was good indeed. The only place that I can remember where evil karma was checked and rewarded. The raider camp however... I mean... all raiders attack on sight regardless of karma but I could talk to the raider merchant inside after killing all his colleagues. Hmm?!

A settlement of children right outside a mutant base? Yeah i agree this was simply not very sensible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_the_Year

(FO3 is actually listed four times on this page ~ Fallout is not listed once )

I just generally prefer the first two, not that I'm bashing on 3.

True, but don't you think certain magazines/websites are "sponsored" or "influenced" by big gaming companies, so that the reviews are not very reliable?

or

Maybe the reviews are truly sincere but done in a limited amount of time because of the game release hence minor flaws are overseen.
I mean I also liked FO3 very much in my first walkthroughs coz it was new, exciting, etc.

GOTY aside, I have found game reviews from magazines to be pretty reliable as to what a game is like and have yet to buy a bummer game. Though when starting a said "great" game, I admit that I have had, once or twice, strong doubts for a while, until I really got into it and found that it really was that "great".

The Fallout 3 TV video advert of a heavily armoured player walking across the wasteland and effortlessly blasting away everything in his path, did not enthral me into buying the game. I wanted something more like the old Fallout hardcoe contest games with more thought, and thankfully it actually is in the game, but how do you convey that in a short TV advert. You really need to read some magazine reviews, and it can be risky when checking to see what they say on the forums about a game... especially if the natives are having a "bit of an off-day" and trashing everything.

No, I got Fallout 3 because if it was anything like Fallout 1 and 2 then I am going to enjoy it. The mature content 'footprint' is about the same as in Fallout 1, according to interviews of the game makers, though a few players have claimed otherwise (as they would), but it seems true enough to me. As for 'hardcoe' play, there is enough flexibility in how you play the game to give a more hardcoe type of play as well.

Probably meaningless. GOTY is a way to sell magazines (and re-sell games); just as "Cinco de Mayo" is a way to sell beer.

It's just human nature.....for instance I will always love Morrowind and hate Oblivion for some subtle differences in the games that were important to me but apparently not to the new ES players.......

As part of the "old guard" myself, I think it's important that we don't generalize an entire group of people simply because of a couple of variables. Frankly, I don't think we're going to find all that many people in this particular forum that just hands-down "hated" Fallout 3. I've been on this forum for something like two years now - if all I had to offer was unmitigated hate towards this game, I probably would have stopped coming here long ago. I think that for a lot of us around here (and I certainly can't speak for everyone) Fallout 3 is kind of a mixed bag. There's things they got really spot-on; even some areas where they may have very much improved on the previous games (the art direction, for example, I thought was absolutely fantastic in Fallout 3 - even if pushing the whole "retro" aspect wasn't necessarily 100% "canon.)

And of course there are other areas about which I still have my reservations. I found the ending sequence in Fallout 3 to be kind of let-down, for example - considering that I had always thought that to be one of the primary touchstones of the series, and had been really looking forward to seeing what steps forward Bethesda could have taken with that aspect. Other things are not so much a total "evolution" of the series, so much as just different. (Switching from overhead perspective to first/third, for instance, or turn-based to real-time - these are design choices and not direct-line "improvements" in any way other than subjectively.)

So did the previous Fallouts, however. Myself, I'm not going to go into a quantitative anolysis between the two games; but for some of us, the older games (at least seemed to have) pushed the "more than one way to skin a cat" concept a bit further. Not to mention that quite often, the manner in which you accomplished a goal had more far-reaching implications down the road. I think for a lot of us, the "to blow or not to blow up Megaton" scenario we'd heard about pre-release was something we took as a sign of things to come. And regardless of whether or not they came through with that "promise," it wasn't to the extent that some of us were expecting.

That always come up in these discussions, and the thing is - it's not actually as relevant as you might think. Some might prefer one perspective over another, but personally it has more to do with what's more appropriate to the gameplay goals you're trying to accomplish. I don't particularly care one way or another whether or not I'm playing a game with an overhead view or in third-person (I rarely enjoy first-person games, but that's my own opinion.) When people say "I want something more like the old games" it doesn't necessarily mean what we're talking about is a 2D sprite-based game with 640x480 resolution.

(See my signature at the bottom - it's really hard to be "nostalgic" for something you're still playing. I get nostalgic thinking about the house I grew up in (in a state which I no longer live in) or the old He-Man cartoon. I once got nostalgic reminiscing about the old Ninja Turtles cartoon and decided to rent the first season of it. It was absolutely horrible - I couldn't even watch it. My memory of the experience was much better than the reality. However, for a lot of us "oldsters," we're still playing Fallout 1 and 2 from time to time. It does not (for us) carry that same "Ninja Turtles" experience. If I'm playing something right now, it's a contemporary experience. 'Nuff said.

It wouldn't be the same game updated. It would be a new game with different modes of interacting with the game world, which just happened to have the same quests and such. Were we to take Fallout 1, completely 3D render it, but keep the interface and everything else the same (same game, better graphics) then that would be "the same game updated." But switching perspective and the methods of interaction automatically makes it a different game.

You can't please everyone. I could likely do a Google search on literally any videogame ever released and find much the same results. I mean, I love a lot of foods. I can't understand why some people dislike sushi, or won't try escargo. But it doesn't make them stupid for not enjoying something I love to the same extent as me. I can't stand Eggs Benedict. It's my wife's favorite breakfast, but she doesn't think I'm stupid for not loving it like she does. Just because she doesn't agree with my reasons for disliking one of her favorite meals doesn't mean that I don't have perfectly valid reasons for disliking it.

:thumbsup:

It was always amusing to me that Oblivion was also 640x480 (by default) :laugh:
For me it is not a preference. Perspective alone can set the mood of a game, and affects the player's attitude and impressions ~and the way its played. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdkGC1wBoDU would not be as cool had they made it FPP (nor had they made it ISO/3d). All I can say is that (in FO3), once I marched my character out into the abandoned wastes, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BtqrjfHSnA ~It was game-heaven all over again; and snuffed out with the first encounter.

That was (and is) my favorite RPG of all time; hands down. http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/TMNT-RPG.jpg

Ah yes... the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1NiNKwueE; I know it well.

It's true that some games of old, the memories of which are better than the reality of playing again, forgetting about the defects and niggles at that time. The game, being ground-breaking at the period, probably adding to the nostalgia and desire for a sequel. The sequel comes out with the defects and niggles ironed out, and with more smoothness of animation and movement that allows greater depth of role-play reality, so it's hard to see why some oldschoolers would have any problem with that.

It's probably more to do with the chess-board type of game-play of the early Fallouts not being in the last sequel.

Some old ground breaking games really are enjoyable to replay again because they also had that certain "something" that has never been quite repeated. Such as being able to lean and pear around corners in System Shock 1, and the hacking of computers where you physically enter cyberspace, floating in a complex of mesh tunnels and junctions, overcoming countermeasures, with a timeout that means discovery and physical damage as you are ejected out of the console to reality. Or the ground breaking AV8B vertical take off plane aboard an aircraft carrier task force, supporting ground units assaulting an enemy land Or the Logicfactory's Tone Rebellion. All games that I have played again and were as good as I remembered them. I don’t see the early Fallouts as being like that, Fallout Tactics yes.

Other than the chess-board type play that some might prefer, do the early Fallouts have that unrepeated "something" good that is missing in Fallout 3, there seems very little, if anything, to me. But if some oldschooler enjoys going back to the old days of the early fallouts, I wouldn't knock their enjoyment.

This is a good post :tops:
I see things differently in some respects but perfectly in line with others. I have never (yet) looked back on a game with "rose colored glasses"; but I have come close in some instances.
I do not mean... looking back at a game and remembering it to be better than it was, but I'm guilty (I suppose) of sometimes looking back at what a game intended vs. what it actually managed to achieve.
In this case I suppose I can look at two very similar games and hold one in higher esteem than the other based solely on potential and what they were "aiming for", (but perhaps failed to achieve).
This is most certainly the case with "Die by the Sword".

As to the "chess board" like gameplay, not being in Fallout 3.... Its not the "board" its the pieces. Its being able to study the situation and choose the best course of action based on what you know your PC can likely do, and what your enemies are likely capable of; and you can play ahead of game time ( in your head ). What is so fantastic about nearly every turn based game (that is designed well), is that they usually create a tension reminiscent of the "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles". You don't usually find this in realtime games (in my experience) ~but I usually love the exceptions (games like Myth, and Homeworld ~both 3D RTS masterpieces that exhibit this "horse hair of doom" tension during play). Fallout has this (as does FO2, and Tactics), Realms of Arcania, most Gold Box SSI titles; Bard's Tale, Wasteland.

None of these games rely on slick graphics ~however :chaos: all of them have them, and one begins to appreciate just how slick they are once you start to understand the limitations they were restricted to. Fallout (for instance) has 229 colors with which to depict it's world and everything in it. Wasteland and Bard's Tale had a maximum of 4 to 16 possible colors allowed to them (and they had animated portraits to depict! ~and the computers usually had ? to ? of a single megabyte available to programs). So when I look back, I'm often impressed by what I see. *(and some of these games sold for $50)

I'll give you an example of "that certain "something" that has never been quite repeated.". The original "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XWW4j-tD48&feature=related" was a 2.5d Iso game that had the player look down 'from on high' at their dungeon and dungeon dwelling minions. DK let the player research a spell that allowed possession of creatures in the dungeon; cast that on a creature ~ and suddenly the whole game was FPP, and you could run around the complex AS that creature. The version of DK that was NOT directX based allowed the player custom vision on a per creature basis. Vampires had infrared sight, Fly's had a hexagonal lensed view of their environment; Beetles had this Fish-Eye distortion giving them a greater than 180[sup]o[]/sup view. That was lost in the Direct3D version.

I think so. I found Fallout after completing Baldur's Gate, and I distinctly remember not liking it for lack of active combat like BG1.
But it had high marks from a friend of mine, so I trudged on. It wasn't long before I was in awe, and impressed with the scope of the game and the talking heads ~I had recently played games with text interpreters, and was fascinated with Fallout's built in option (it was not incredible, but it worked, and the responses were voiced). I could read what the NPC had said, and ask them directly about things they had mentioned or things in the area. Like Oblivion, Fallout had NPC emotional reactions, unlike Oblivion it let you actually state your insults and conversation.

Try as I might, I never get that tension in FO3 (and I can never manage to take NPC's in FO3 seriously ~which was not a problem with Lou, Set, Harry, and Marcus).

On this whole turn-based thing:

I can actually see merit in switching over to a real-time combat system with Fallout 3. As the focus has always been on your single character, turns can tend to seem a bit lop-sided in the old Fallout games (ie, make your move and then wait while a dozen or so other NPCs animate through their turns for the round,) which could tend to really slow things down a bit, especially if - for instance - you decided to attack an entire town, etc. I can see the potential for a platonic ideal of a turn-based system wherein controlling your one character didn't... "slow things down" as much as it did in F1 and 2 - but it probably wouldn't necessarily resemble the same system as the older games.

That's kind of what I liked about Fallout: Tactics - directly controlling a squad felt a bit more natural for that specific form of turn-based combat.

Anyway, you gain and lose things with either approach to combat. Myself, I still have a bit of an issue with the whole "character skill" dilemma that direct real-time control of your PC brings into play. With me, I don't have the best "shooter skills" around, so I experience a bit of a paradox while playing Fallout 3 (at least any time I find myself out of Action Points.) My character may have 100 in Small Guns, but my own skills with lining the crosshair up with a moving target are much lower - so no matter how awesome my character is supposed to be, I'm always going to be dragged down by my own limitations.

Frankly, I don't think "real time" has to mean "loss of linkage to character skill." Knights of the Old Republic, for instance, had real-time-with-pause combat but was still wholely reliant on die rolls. And that's probably not at all the only solution to that sort of a problem. Some day some truly imaginative genius is going to come up with a different solution that works even better. I don't "hate" Fallout 3 because it didn't make that grand leap forward, but I sure wish it had been able to...

I think that encapsulates what Bethesda totally lost in Fallout 3.

In Fallout and Fallout 2, you see the situation and time freezes. You know what you and your teammates (if any) are equipped with. You know at this point that doing ANYTHING (even accessing inventory) uses precious action points. You have two options...fight or run for the edge of the battlefield.

If you fight, you gotta guess which target to go after first and hope the "AI" governing your teammates picks wisely. You make your choices and press the button to let the game move forward until every character in the battle has used its turn. Often you hope and pray that nobody gets killed...forcing you to load an old save. Sometimes you'll get a real sweet death scene as you cut the enemy in half or melt them to goo. In Fallout 3, there is none of that. You're too busy trying to just shoot the bad guy.

If you run, you gotta hope your health and action points are sufficient to get away before one or more of your team buys the farm. I can't recall the number of times I was just one turn away from getting away alive only to watch my guy (or others) get cut in half before my turn came back around.

My trick for not getting lost in the vaults - landmines... lots and lots of landmines. Placed at intersections. Some vaults are worse then others though, and after a while I can usually find my way around without the need for leaving a trail of landmines behind.

I think it was a lot easier to block off sections of the world in Fallout 1/2, which makes writing global-spanning quests that change the world a good bit easier. There's just less things that can go wrong. And I think a lot of the enforced simplicity in the various quest chains often hinges on: What can be done, with low risk of breakage, yet the developer can keep track of all possible outcomes in their head. So a lot of the quest issues boil down to a rather fragile quest sub-system that can be easily broken along with actors that can easily run off the rails and get stuck. In a 2D, turn-based world, actors don't get stuck on geometry. Their path-finding is a lot simpler, as is calculating line-of-sight.

Broken Steel's level cap change, with the ability to max out nearly everything to 90+, caused other issues. Now the character goes from powerful, but with some defects, to demi-god. Which means you have to introduce things like Abino Radscorpions just to give them some sort of challenge. They should've made Broken Steel more of a complete revamp of levels 1-20, maybe adding only only 4 extra levels worth of perks. So you could either play an existing character to 24, or go back and do a character from scratch and get to pick from new perks in levels 1-20.

But I'd still rather play Fallout 3 over 1/2 - just because the graphics of FO3 are good enough to svck me in for a few hours and feel like I'm truly in the world for a bit.

Looking forward to NV's hard mode - some of that I simulate now with mods on the PC (FWE, FOOK2, Simple Needs, etc).

The "tension" for me, was in avoiding stumbling into an unwinnable combat situation (similar as in Fallout3). Turn based play being more about the 'mathematical' precise chess-like calculation of movement/action and placement, with forethought of a sequence of movement/actions giving more certainty, that for me did remove tension in most situations. Though there were location situations that seemed to need more puzzle-out thought than Fallout3 has. Still, it was very satisfying to see the step-by-step calculations play out to a win, a win that was more by calculation than chance.

With Fallout3 though, I'm not sure that turn-based play would be best suited to it's size, and with such an amount of combat content that it has, quite apart the desirability of having that kind of play.

Actually, most considerations of turn-base-play are done in Fallout3. Certainly in respect of the placement of your pieces, the forethought of your follow-up movements and strengths of players. VATS being still present with the ability to set a sequence of actions according to your action points, makes a similarity that only differs really by the absence of mathematics.

Before I played Fallout 2 I thought Fallout 3 was bad

I am currently playing Fallout 2 and I still think Fallout 3 is bad (I've criticized it before and I've explained it before and I don't feel like explaining anymore. I'm not just flaming the game and going "this game suxors" I have some very valid problems with the game that I just do not like)

I like Fallout 2 but it took some time to get use to

One of the things that really started to bring me around to the game was when I got to the town of Redding. The atmosphere and the music really made the town seem desolate yet at the same time it felt like there was life thriving. Fallout 3 definitely has that same desolate feel to it and I'll say that is one of the things the game does do right.

The main difference that I see is dialogue. The dialogue in Fallout 3 felt flat and left the characters feeling 2D while the characters in Fallout 2 feel like they have a lot more personality despite not even having voices. There are also far more quirks in FO2 than there are in FO3 such as the one time I got damaged and in the little status box it said "ooh that's gonna leave a shiner that'll make a great story to tell at the saloon" (or something to that effect)

Leveling also seems really tough and it's going to be a long time before I feel like I'm god of the wastes (if that even happens). However, in Fallout 3 the difficulty curb drops severely after the first couple of levels and you can survive relatively easily. Fallout 2 I feel like I need to watch every step I make because the next random encounter will most likely kill me and this makes the wasteland feel like it really is a tough place to survive.

Thus far everything feels right about FO2. The world feels like it'll be a big place and it also feels like I got a long journey ahead of me. I haven't encountered the whole of the storyline nor have I been able to see the full scope of dialogue and consequences that the game has to offer. However, what has been offered seems to be done much better than Fallout 3.

:ribbon: FO3 was a great but it had some huge faults, really bad faults in hindsight like too many skill points and SPECIAL stats and they took away triats etc, but they did all that to simplify the game because a lot of people were new to the series, they dumbed it down on purpose, but at the same time it kinda broke aspects of the game once you were more a veteran of the game. it needed more quests, more npc's, more towns, mainly larger towns, more variation around the map, enemies etc. the city was too destroyed, it was mostly rubble and you couldn't go in hardly any of the buildings at all, impossible to navigate entire areas of the map, like near grayditch or the citadel or rivet city, and other areas, they're needed to be more varieties of structures, buildings and complexes to explore,
:batman:
maybe put in a big airport, some apartment complexes you could actually explore, more shops and stores, maybe gas stations you could actually go inside, there were hardly any houses you could go in, falls church area had lots of shops but you coudln't go in any of em, same with la enfant plaza, there were only two places you could actually enter, same with takoma industrial, that big long street that goes uphill with shops and like apartments or whatever, you could only go in one small store, thats it, lots of area like that, dupont circle was the same thing, there was lady frumpertons thats it, nothing else, all those little shops and buildings and you couldn't go in any of it. so they need to fix all that in future games when they make a city. :dead:

What speaks for Fallout 3 is the athmospheric 3d-style and live combat and drawing in more people or reviving the genre. This isn't unimportant.

On the other side is a loss of important factors:

- story was lame compared to FO1&2 and nothing really new
- decisions do not really play out (wasteland never changed after FEV) compared to FO1&2 rich alterations
- radiation is a joke and survival unbelievable (new vegas brings new hardcoe mode so lets see then)

In the end FO3 was just a step in a new direction, while New Vegas and maybe FO4 will bring back old losses (in hope).

Fortunately, on the PC, we have the "DC Interiors" project, which does add a bunch of inner store fronts and homes that can be explored. But definitely something that would've been nice to see in the vanilla FO3.

The big issue with 3D vs 2D is that it's a heck of a lot more expensive to create rooms / buildings / complexes. Players also notice a lot quicker if you do any large-scale copy/paste in 3D environments, where they might give you the benefit of the doubt in a 2D environment. In a 2D, sprite-based environment, making every house on a street unique can be done with Microsoft Paint. In the 3D environment, you have to deal with clipping issues, 3D geometry, pathing, etc. All because you can't control how close the player gets to your game world. If they want, they can get right up close to an object and look at it from multiple angles. So something that would be 5 minutes in a paint program for 2D work with a fixed camera angle and fixed camera distance becomes a 5 hour or 5 day project once it gets turned into a 3D object.

I imagine that the devs probably wanted to create dozens of side-areas, but as deadlines approached, any area not essential to a quest probably got axed.

From my limited understanding, the reason that the downtown DC ruins are not reachable except via subways probably has to do with performance. An area of the map, with that density of polygons, that many enemies, that many actors, would lag out the rest of the wasteland if it was actually part of the overland map. By segmenting the DC ruins into smaller chunks, they could crowd more detail and actors in, without worrying about impacting performance when the player is elsewhere. The "grid" system in the game engine helps a lot with this, but I'd imagine that it's still an issue.

(The last major 3D game project that I worked on was a custom map for CoD:UO back in 2006. Working in 3D is interesting...)