Yes, to add to what appears to be the growing hive-mind consensus, I find it very difficult to criticise either points of view (out of the 'awful attempt at sequel' to 'decent Bethesda game, should have been what followed Morrowind'. That might be because I got married a year ago, and hence my wife has removed my testicles to make me less aggressive, kind of like when you raise a pet dog - don't tell the unmarried guys that happens, it will just frighten them. Alternatively, it might be because there are quite valid reasons why a rpg might like or hate this game.
Obviously if you can't get the 'it's supposed to be a FO sequel' out of your head, then the game will suck - bigtime. The reasons for that have been repeated many times in this thread - horrible dialogue, lack of TB-strategy, degeneration in companion-interaction etc (why companion interaction peaked in PS:T is beyond me. It doesn't strike me as something expensive to work on and advance - in fact, ways of advancing companion interaction, conversation, character development etc seems to be an ultra-cheap way of giving your game a competitive advantage).
But if you are one of the ones who CAN get the 'fallout' issue out of your head, then it is a good sign for TES and open-world games. Hand-placed dungeons and towns, multiple quest solutions, skill checks...it's like they buried Oblivion saying 'let's just pretend that PoS never existed' and continued on from Morrowind instead. I remember when it was first announced that they bought the FO licence - I had played Morrowind, never heard of Oblivion pre-hype and...I was happy they had it. I would have preferred Troika to have it, sure, but I enjoyed Morrowind and I was glad it went to Bethesda rather than Bioware. The reason for that? I felt Morrowind had a lot of potential hat was limited by over-ambition - that the next game Bethesda produced would have the scope and scale of Morrowind, but would be better in terms of character interaction, detail and so on. My main reason for liking Morrowind was that (and this will be a shock for those whose only TES experience was Oblivion) whilst Bioware games have a one-size-fits-all difficulty (not the combat, but the puzzles/storyline), Morrowind balanced a 'for-retards' linear main quest, with some ways that you could sidestep parts of the quest if you were hated by too many groups or if you killed the wrong people (i.e. the 'kill Vivec' method to skip to the latter stages of the main quest), and lots of love given to some non-main-quest-lines. Take the implementation of vampire mechanics. If you let yourself become a vampire, you could be pretty screwed. No one but mages will talk to you, guards attack you, and you've got no clan and no quests. If you've done some research in the libraries beforehand - nothing to point you there, btw, just up to you if you've been reading the books lying around - you could find where your clan nhas their base. Go to the wrong clan and they'll attack you, the right one will give you some more quests and a shelter. Once you're bored of that limited selection of quests, or if you want to continue the main plotline and don't want to take the 'kill Vivec' option, you can try to find a cure for vampirism. Again - not very retard friendly - the game tells you that it is incurable. But if you are reading the right series of books, they will mention a quest that can cure you...except that the details of the quest are only in one volume of those books and a damn rare volume at that. So (assuming that you aren't just using a walkthrough - if so then your loss) you have to go to the various major libraries in magician guilds and noble houses, sneak past the guards (or just blood-bath your way in) to find the book...before you can even start the quest to cure yourself. And the whole thing was done without any quest compass, without anything in your journal to mark 'this is a quest', without anything telling you to go find the books, or that the books are even out there, and once you get the book it only gives you very rough directions as to where the start of the quest chain can be found.
What a S******* Oblivion was after that!
From what I've seen, there is nothing in FO that tests the player's ingenuinty to a fraction of the extent that the vampire questline did in Morrowind. But at least it seems to be some form of return to the 'main-quest-for-dummies, other extra stuff for those who want a challenge' mantra of Morrowind. That doesn't make it a fallout game - but it is a style that I'd like to see more of, and I'm hoping that the success of FO3 causes Bethesda (and the industry) to at least raise their expectations of what the retard-console-masses can get their heads around, as well as perhaps the value of putting side-quests and flexible questlines for the rest of us. Wasn't that the original idea of side-quests anyway? So that you could add extra challenge for some gamers, whilst still allowing everyone to complete the main game?
