jesus christ, is it really worth ridiculing the people that don't like the same couple gigabytes of code that you do? Some vocal Fallout fans are retarded shut ins, but then again some of the people hyped for the new one are ritalin-popping 2sec attention span kiddies.
I'll get the game, and give it an honest shot. I did the same for Morrowind and Oblivion, and kinda disliked both. But I am not hyped up at all about this, more like dreading it while slightly hopeful. Bethesda has a proven record of being as bad as Molyneux at overhyping their games and making unrealistic promises, like a vastly redesigned magic system from Morrowind to Oblivion, and the revolutionary AI that amounted to pretty much nothing. Also, the 200 endings thing. It's combinatorics, not 200 discrete ending sequences with cutscenes. 3 locations with 2 choices each give 8 endings, if you have each ending be a recap of the choices you made during the game, like the Fallouts do. I've read somewhere that by that measure, fallout 2 had 47 "choice nodes" that showed up in cutscenes, meaning over a million endings. Developers playing semantics like this don't exactly fill me with confidence.
I think the biggest complaint sane fans of Fallout have is that FO and TES are two series that are as far apart as possible from each other as it is possible to be while still being called RPGs. TES are sandboxes with a more or less loose story that reward exploration, inventiveness, and "emergent" gameplay of a sort. Fallout is more of an adventure game with combat, where the emphasis is on puzzles, storyline, and a more structured gameplay. Non-linear, but a different kind of it. So Beth's track record means pretty much zilch in regards to whether people can trust them to deliver a good game in the Fallout style.
Of course, that's not what they're doing. They're taking some stuff from Fallout and adapting it to fit their tried and tested gameplay mold. That's fine if you like both, but fans of Fallout continue without a good, new Fallout game to play. Can't really blame them for their angst, especially considering Troika (a company run by the original creators of the game) also bid on the FO license at the time and was shut-out by the bigger company, eventually going under due in part to the disruption in their release plan.
On the other hand, most Fallout fans I know liked S.T.A.L.K.E.R, a post-apocalyptic first-person semi-RPG in the same mold as beth's F3, so I don't think the anger really comes from the gameplay style. I think it's really more about Beth paying for the license to presumably get the associated fanbase and then more or less shitting on them
Meh. I'm pretty sure I'll get flamed for this as a rabid fanboy, even though I don't really care that much about the games. For some weird reason there's this huge rift between fanbases and stereotypes and insults come fast and easy in these discussions (like, say, last thread I participated in about this). This is what annoys me more than anything about the stupid games themselves. Why the hell do people that can speak rationally and critically about movies and even politics seem unwilling or unprepared to do the same about games in general? The levels of criticism and analysis on the film and games forums of this site are absurdly different. And it's not because games aren't as high-minded as movies, because utter dreck gets discussed seriously here.
