Fallout 3 had its ups and downs but I felt like it was a good way to introduce the franchise to a large new console-using audience while also giving an atmosphere that was bleak and radioactive while also nostalgic.
I stand by the fact that Fallout 3 actually does show a lot of understanding and love for the originals, and tries it's best to make a new version of it. You can see homages, and subtle references throughout the entire game, and it's obvious that they put a lot of effort in.
Problem is that unfortunately the more I get in to 1, 2 and New Vegas, the more I kinda start to see the cracks in Fallout 3. It's just not as well-thought out.
It's like, you can play all you want of Fallout and constantly have an understanding of every part of it, but still not understand things like themes, tone, and other of the more subtle nuances. It's like Fallout 3 sees Supermutants and wants to write their own version in a way that's justified and in their minds consistent, but they don't have the same history and depth to what Supermutants originally were. Bethesda might read something like "The Brotherhood of Steel doesn't like mutants" in a lore document, and then make that a core part of their identity, rather than a circumstantial result of their past missions. They just don't understand why these things were present.
Moreover, Fallout 3 honestly feels incredibly naive and childish to me. Like Fallout 1 and 2 feel incredibly "political", not in a real world sense, but more in the sense of they are discussing the politics of the wasteland.
Fallout 1 has a deep mistrust of pretty much every kind of authority, with the Water Merchats being a distrust of private institutions gaining too much economic control over their society, the Regulators (And early writings of Killian) being state authority, the Children of the Cathedral being religious institutions misleading already impoverished groups of people into ideologies against their interests.
Even Fallout 2 will have some silly groups like the Slaver's Guild and kinda work them in to everything: Redding casually uses slave labour, Vault City considers themselves saviours t the slaves who they feel are better off with them, New Reno and the Enclave will gladly use slaves as test subjects or labourers with no consideration of the ethics of it all, the NCR will have a slave pen right outside their borders as people trading in the NCR realise their anti-slavery laws(Something with grounding in Free-State, Slave-State rivalries in the pre-civil war era of US history)
Fallout 3 feels kinda like a very naive understanding of history and politics, whereby up until a DLC introduces their reasons, the Slavers seem to just exist to take people as Slaves, the Brotherhood just exist to be the Brotherhood, the Supermutants just exist to be something to shoot at. The actual nuances of why they exist or why it's relevant are kinda brushed under the rug.
It kinda feels like a very naive "This person does and believes and acts like this", without much thought put in to the actual consequences of what they're writing. It kinda feels like a child's view of history, whereby things are adknowledged to have happened, but the reasons behind them are vague and not thought through.
So in short, I have a lot of respect for Fallout 3, but it kinda misses the point of everything it writes and doesn't really think things through.