Okay, I guess its time an adult (okay, a 23 year old) stepped in to defend Fallout 3. On a side note, if you missed my other posts I'm young but have played (and replayed) torment, arcanum, 1, 2, 3, and NV so I'm hardly new to these sort of games.
Fallout 3 is designed around being able to drop in and play for a few hours without completely giving yourself to the game. Same with Skyrim and the elder scrolls series post Morrowind. It also has more content available for one play through. Same thing with Skyrim, where the civil war questline for the most part keeps a lot of the missions the same. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, its just a game design decision revolving around the drop in, drop out gamers that emerged from the rise of consoles. I compare this to the hardcore gamers for whom gaming was their main hobby. Fallout 1 and 2 take a long time to play for the content they provide and while they provide a lot of replayability, this assumes people are raring to drop another 60 hours back into a game to reach the parts they couldn't access before. As someone who runs a law office (which basically involves keeping 70 year old men from royally fucking up my filing systems), at times I'm not that thrilled to play games where parts of the content are locked out unless you go back and play the 20 or so hours of redundant content needed to get to the parts you missed. I'd like to be able to maximize my hours. This is why I appreciate how Skyrim treated leveling and how Fallout 3 (and thus NV) treated skills. Whereas in old school rpgs you needed to create a few characters before really being able to progress through the game, in the previously mentioned games you can get by with initial poor choices and make up for them as time goes on. My time needs to be rationed and "fuck you you created the wrong character" gets old faaast. Accessibility isn't a bad thing, especially if you are tying to get people hooked on a good series.
Secondly, the deathclaw junction and cazadore railroading is a bit annoying if you are looking to just drop in and fuck around. It forces you onto the main story, which isn't bad in NV because the main story is pretty awesome, but it can still be annoying in open world games where a lot of the appeal is the ability to do what you want when you want. As the writer mentions, randomly choosing a direction and just exploring can be a ton of fun. It gets dull if you spend an entire day doing it in a row, but the games are designed to be played in 2-3 hour chunks, where random dungeoneering retains its fun.
Thirdly, and this is going to get some flak, Obisidian aren't that great of game designers. They tell awesome stories because they are basically turning PnP games into computer games. However, there are a LOT of rough edges. The best example of this is to contrast fast traveling into Megaton vs New Vegas strip and Camp McCarron. In Megaton, you poof right close to your house, because Bethesda gets why you are most likely traveling back to Megaton. Meanwhile, to get anywhere in the strip means wasting a few minutes traveling through it. This is especially bad if you are siding with the NCR, since traveling to the embassy means wasting a few minutes each time. Same goes for McCarron, where getting to the terminal takes ages. In both cases this is solveable by just adding in fast travel markers to the terminal and the embassy zone. That way you prevent sequence breaking. This is something that would be obvious to a gameplay (combat, travel, loot) focused company like Bethesda, but is missed by a more story focused designer like Obsidian. As another example, the early game of Fallout 1 and 2 is a time wasting chore. Getting from Arroyo to the Den or from Vault 13 to shady sands should not be the hardest part of the Goddamn game! Lots of death works in Dark Souls because you lose maybe 5 minutes of work each time. Repeated deaths forcing you to start over 15 minutes of gameplay is not fun and locks out the game to anyone who isn't a hardcore fan of the game. I tried to get my sister into the series and it took having to set up a save file starting in the den for her so she could avoid the bullshit that is the first few encounters.
Wasteland 2 is a good illustration of Obsidian's main flaws. Great atmosphere, annoying as fuck gameplay. Antiquated inventory management, dull, repetitive combat. Oh, and tons of combat with no way around it, which basically means ignoring the lessons of the fucking games that made their legend. Note, I use Obsidian loosely here, mostly to refer to that family (troika, inexile, Obsidian, ect) of developers. Alpha protocol, Torment, Arcanum, all great stories fucked over by crappy gameplay. Toment works because the combat is a side show, Arcanum on the other hand is a chore whenever you aren't in dialogue mode. In large part what made New Vegas so much fun was that it combined Obsidian's focus on story, lore and characters with the pre made gameplay framework provided by Bethesda. I think we'd be a lot less fond of New Vegas if it wasn't built around Fallout 3's gameplay.
