I know this will antagonise a lot of people and get me seriously beat on, but does anyone else find that Fallout 3 is like playing a post-apocalyptic version of Oblivion? I mean, I can’t stop feeling like I’m playing Oblivion, but with guns and without the diversity of races. I know the engine has been upgraded, but it still “feels” like Oblivion.

Bethesda, lets get one thing straight. Its a great game. I’m not taking anything away from that. But this whole <tab> thing to access *everything* is just annoying. One of the first mods I installed for Oblivion was to make the map full screen and break it out from the Tab. One of the first mods I will install for Fallout when I get my machine in a state to play it again will be to do exactly the same.

Oh, and I know I shouldn’t have, but the NoCD patch went on almost instantly. I bought the damn game, why should I be penalised for owning it when any old pirate can get by without those restrictions? Sorry. I really hate shuffling discs. CDs and then DVDs were supposed to save us from that. But making me put the disc in the drive every time I just want to play it? That bothers me almost as much now days. Its *INSTALLED* on my PC, this isn’t a console. DRM does not stop piracy, it just penalises those who actually buy the game.

Just an aside, I’m looking at you EA with a very nasty glare. I will never buy another EA published game. Spore destroyed any good will I had towards the company with its dodgy limitations.

I love how huge Fallout 3 is. When you first step out of Vault 101 and you look around at everything out there, it is truly outstanding. I mean, we’re talking a massive vista from the door of the vault. The game seems to take on a life of its own almost immediately and you feel completely immersed almost from the outset.

From the moment you step outside your vault, you immediately feel like you are wandering through a post-nuclear war landscape. Trees are rare, if anywhere, and there is so much debris just littering the landscape. Husks of cars, destroyed buildings and more. It just feels like you would expect the landscape to be 200 years after a nuke goes off.

Wandering around is dangerous. When you leave the vault you have a baseball bat, a BB gun, maybe a pistol and whatever you got off the guards that were trying to catch you. The instant you step outside the vault, you have to be on the lookout for all kinds of creatures and other nasty enemies. They’re everywhere.

And thats something that doesn’t feel like Oblivion. The landscape feels … populated. Raiders and scavengers are all over the place. Mutated creatures come at you with immediately deadly intent. Later on, depending on the choices you make, guys jump out at you at random times with a contract to kill you. There are countless ways to die. Even without even starting a quest.

The Pip-Boy is a great idea, but FFS! Break away from locking everything inside the Tab key. Let me go directly to my World Map in the Pip-Boy by pressing a key of my choosing. Same with Items or the Quest log. Making me navigate the Pip-Boy is just annoying me. I’m sure it was intended to help accentuate the immersion, but the simple fact is, it detracts for me. It forces me to make too many clicks. It pissed me off in Oblivion, its doing the same now in Fallout 3, nearly 3 years later.

I think it was a mistake using the same engine as Oblivion for Fallout 3. Especially because it IS Fallout 3. This is a game with a massive loyal fan base and following. You don’t build a game like Fallout 3 on upgraded technology that was initially designed for a completely different property. I’m sorry, but this engine leaves me feeling too much like I’m looking at Oblivion 1700 years on or something. The graphical styling, the interaction with the objects and the people, the damn Tab key hiding a difficult to navigate Pip-Boy, which in turn hides … Everything.

One big change that I really do like compared to how Bethesda did it in Oblivion is lock picking. :-P I know its stupid, but the pin system in Oblivion annoyed me. Figuring out the correct angle to hold a pin and then rotating a tumbler is a much better system and definitely a vast improvement.

You want to know why I really dislike Fallout 3? Because I find that instead of comparing it with Fallout and Fallout 2, I’m comparing it with Oblivion and I hate that more than anything else. That should not be possible, but I can’t help myself.

Gameplay : 7/10

Graphics : 8/10

Sound : 9/10

Difficulty : 8/10

Overall : 8/10