I think people give BIS a lot of credit. A lot more than they actually deserve.
Fallout 2 is my favorite game ever and I've played at least 50 complete play throughs + a lot of messing around and I still play it now.
That said, most peoples "complaints" about FO not being like the originals are mostly made by ignorant wannabe-fans or people who haven't played the games enough.
Let me just compare some elements of FO3 with Fallout 2(the better of the two Fallouts, 1 was not nearly as good) and clearly up some of that silly nostalgia.
Story - This has to be the biggest joke complain about FO3 I've ever. Fallout 2 had almost NO story. You start in a temple for no real good reason that was horribly designed(although fans blame Interplay) and then come out to a village where the elder says "You are the CHOSEN one" hence no matter what you do, you will save this village and destroy the "evils". Sorry, but this is post apoc sci fi... yet the storys basis is a vodoo fantasy theme stripped from a random Forgotten Realms series.
What do you know about:
-The War
-You Character
-The people in your village(aside from the fact that they are dying)
-The BoS
-The Enclave
-The Slavers
-The Rangers
Sure there was plenty of good story telling and personal stories but none of them gave any real story into the game. Atmosphere is what FO had and they confuse this with story perhaps because they don't really know what a story is.
Believability:
This is something that fans are super critical about while completely forgetting that FO never cared about this, nor tried to be believable.
-Again, vodoo prophecy of a story
-Ghosts
-A Federation Vessel from Star Trek in the middle of nowhere and a whale corpse out in the desert thats fresh and people complain about the AntAgonizer?
-Wasn't the VATS all destroyed in FO1? Oh no, there was a puddle at the bottom of the base and we made it into an airborn virus that kills ONLY people who have been affected by radiation... yeah...
-Talking Deathclaws... was a stupid premise to begin with.
-Talking plants and can beat a RAD SCORPION at chess...
-A tribal who can walk out of a village and 5 minutes later, have super accuracy with any kind of guns(something s/he's never seen) and scientific knowledge to repair robots and elevators.
Again, people back in the day were more concerned with enjoying these games rather than ask such questions.
Deep combat:
This has got to be a joke... the combat involved you spamming points into a weapon skill and then shooting for the eyes at 95% accuracy for the rest of the game. The combat was the opposite of deep and infact, if we were going from FO3 to FO2, the combat system would be considered dumbed down a lot. Shooting in Fallout is much harder and there is far more strategy in aiming. Even though the new aimed shots system isn't perfect, its far better than "aim for the eyes everyshot!" that was FO. There are far more weapons that are BALANCED as well.
Dialogue:
The only reason I can think of people saying FO had great dialogue is the same reason with all those old DnD RPGs. The fact that it lacked voice acting. Yes this sometimes makes dialogue seem better than it is if you execute it in your head well enough. As it stands, FO1 and 2 had plenty of good dialogue followed by much more bad dialogue. It was mostly potty humor, something that might have been amusing when I was like 15 years old... FO3's dialogue is just on par with FO2 and that pretty much means its far behind games like KotOR and ME. Say what you will about less choices in those games, but the quality more than made up for the quantity.
Bethesda Focuses on Violence because they aren't mature:
Lol what? BIS had a perk called BLOODY MESS. In fact, for their time, they were completely obsessed with violence and sex which is childish and immature.
Lastly, quests:
I think it must be peoples bad memory but I keep hearing people say that Fallout wasn't full of generic quests like Oblivion when in fact it was... I think people just remember the good parts and forgot the hundreds of "go here, kill them" quests and "find this, put it there" quests. You can talk through as many situations in FO3 as in FO2 as well and you can beat both games with no combat. Not all FO2s quests an be done with diplomacy but it wasn't really all that fun anyways. Spraying a Bozar and picking up all their loot was better than talking.
Anyways, this was a long rant. I am just tired of all the people who pretend to know the original games so well. I don't care personally what they think of FO3, I just think a lot of their reasons are stupid and makes them look like a tool.
