Capital Wasteland is still in ruins 200 years after the war because super mutants from Vault 87 were the first to colonize the area. It's almost impossible to establish a coordinated trade circuit when the region is in such disarray. At most, the wasteland has only really been inhabitable for about 30-40 years, give or take. Mostly due to the fact that the Brotherhood has only just turned up in the area and the super mutants are unable to replenish their numbers due to a lack of FEV, which is why they're on the lookout for vaults. People are resettling this previously uninhabitable frontier, and the purpose of the story is to consolidate that.
There's so many things wrong with just this first paragraph that it'd take even longer to get to the other two. Placing Super Mutants in the Capital Wasteland is, in itself, quite an issue that's been discussed at length. If you already know why that's often debated, there's no reason to further elucidate why this is an issue. The way SMs are portrayed in
Fallout 3, if they were the first to "colonize" the region, why haven't they gain control of the few human settlements in the game? Why hasn't the entire region been overwhelmed by the SMs? The game does a poor job trying to convey the intent of the Super Mutants, because they're constantly encountered in places that wouldn't even have the FEV that they're looking for, and it's not as if the player is going to know about their intent just by talking about to them. The wasteland is STILL inhabitable —
FO3's world is stagnant and unstable and your arguments trying to rationalize the game's broken world-building only makes everything worse. You make it seem as if people just started "re-settling" in the wasteland when that's what they've been doing for the past 200 years. SMs aren't the reason why there's hasn't much progress since then; progress isn't being made because the developers didn't take into consideration how this area would function 200 years after the war. No, that's not the purpose of the story. Period.
For all the things Fallout 3 gets criticized for, I'm quite surprised that a lack of iron sights is one of them. Personally, I find iron sights an eyesore. It takes up a considerable portion of the screen and distracts from the action, which is why I always disable the "True Iron Sights" setting in New Vegas. One of the worst things about Fallout 4's gunplay is that it had no such option. Iron sights in Fallout are really just an unnecessary eyesore, but having them really doesn't change the combat all too much. It just adds to the tedium.
It's really not surprising, considering how unorthodox and lazy it is to have a zoom-in function in a game that takes place in First-Person when Iron Sights would've suffice. It's a much smarter way of narrowing the spread of your weapon without it swaying across the screen as in
Fallout 3.
These games aren't modern military shooters and they don't need iron sights.
They do if they're gonna continue making combat in modern
Fallout tolerable without resorting to V.A.T.S. as a crutch.
What Fallout 3's gunplay really suffers from is a lack of pace, something which is consistent throughout every modern Fallout game. Doom, Quake, and countless other first person shooters manage to maximize the benefits of having no iron sights in the fast paced nature of their combat.
Quake and
Doom are Arena Shooters. What, do you want a
Fallout where everything moves at breakneck speeds with twitch-like gameplay?
Fallout isn't a Military Shooter, but it's not a fast-paced one, either, so what works in those games probably wouldn't work for
Fallout. Iron Sights DO work for
Fallout, and it actually has a noticeable effect on how guns are fired, rather than having the screen zoom in on the weapon.
Fallout 3 is probably not as refined as the originals.
It's
definitely less refined than the originals.
I would agree there's probably a lot more thought put into New Vegas or 1&2 than Fallout 3...
It's blatantly
obvious more thought was put into those games because they were made by people who actually gave a damn about
Fallout.
...but it's far from being a "bad" game.
A game with very sub-par writing, gimped RPG mechanics, terrible world-building, and a badly implemented combat system that's the focus for much of said game seems enough to constitute it as such. Just because there are worse games to play doesn't excuse the shortcomings of that specific game.
Maybe a bad follow-up to some people? Overall Fallout 3 still managed to be better than it's contemporaries, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, although that is an admittedly low bar.
Why bother bringing it up in the first place if it doesn't really say much? It's agreed, even here, that
Fallout 3 isn't as bad as
FO4 or
FO76. Again, just because those games are worse, doesn't excuse how bad of a "
Fallout" game
3 really is.
