lol, don't quote Rockstar PR statement to me.

Anyway, I'll bite. Besides common evolution of gaming advantages, such as Liam Neeson's voice acting, and the great music, I'd say that moving the game away from a rigid turn based system to a mixture of real time, helped give the game a more mass appeal, and the VATS combat system was interesting and fun.

Also, the sense of atmosphere, which isn't necessarily created by the graphics, is very heavy in Fallout 3.

That said, overall, you do have a point. I admit, Fallout 2 is a better game. It is one of the best games ever made. Most people think that Fallout 2 is the best game on the PC...ever. More than any other factor, the writing is to blame for its greatness.

Fallout 3, however, turned out great. It just seemed to me that you were bitching because Fallout 3 wasn't the best game ever, and also marginalizing it as crap, just because again...it wasn't the best game ever made, just a really, really good one.

You have to judge these things on their own merits, or you'll hate everything.

I got the Game Today , im gonna start playing on Tuesday, i am well exited. I love Fallout series, if you enjoyed it Leo-J try some other WRGP's on the PC (because you dont own a 360) Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic 1&2, Baldur's Gate 1&2, they not as free roaming as fallout but they are quality.

...You really think PC gaming was niche in the late 90s? That's pretty funny. Why is it that PC gaming is supposedly much bigger & better now, but there are far less 'big' PC exclusives versus the mid to late 90s? I'd tend to believe the opposite is true, given how many titles are forced to go to consoles to break even.

I do agree that Interplay's failure could be due to incompotent management. However, I just don't think it adds up that Fallout was some sort of rampant success, but still bit the dust and got sold as soon as it was conveniently possible.

I'm kind of close to a similar issue with the closure of Dynamix - one of Sierra's biggest & best developers in the 90s (they made the Aces series, Betrayl at Krondor/Betrayl series, A-10 series, and of course, Mechwarrior/Earthsiege). Dynamix was a great company, but got axed when Sierra got sold to Vivendi. They were a profitable, successful studio with a blundering publisher...So what happened? As soon as the studio got axed, they re-formed in to 3 different, smaller, studios that are very succuessful since their former titles did well. I now work for one of the said studios, and all 3 do work together on new projects (the newest being a Red Baron sequel). Their Tribes sequel is doing awesome, Aces just came out, and Marble Blast has been a great success on 3 different platforms.

But when we look at Black Isle - and their 'sequel' in Trokia - Why did they close as well? I tend to think that, despite the pedigree of what they were, their titles were unsuccessful, which makes me believe the former Fallout developers may not have been the financial powerhouse that shio claims them to be.

That never happened, but whatever.

Hey, funny comparing a single-platform which only had 1 ad (that no one ever saw) from the 90's to a today's multi-platform game with a multi-million dollar publicity. Dude, Fallout 1 & 2 have scores as high as Fallout 3, and that was from a time where reviewers were actually decent. Fallout 1 probably won every PC RPG of the Year award, and most RPGOTY awards, ahead of FFVII. While Fallout 2 didn't because Baldur's Gate was too tough a nut to break.

What has the date of Van Buren's cancellation got todo with anything? And while Van Buren was dropped in favour of BoS, the main reason was the financial difficulties of Interplay(which eventually ended up crushing them to oblivion).

You didn't answer my question: "What did Bethesda make on Fallout 3 that's better than it's predecessors? Apart from graphics."

Hey brainiac, why do you think Interplay went down the shitter? Piss poor management! No wonder they chose the console game instead of Van Buren, lol.

There are no records about Fallout 1 & 2 sales (atleast none that I've seen), but I remember that Fallout 1's success was a big surprise to the development team, and that Fallout Tactics had the biggest pre-order numbers ever for an Interplay game.

Am I hearing that they traded off sexual themes and slavery and betrayal and whatnot for the sake of violence?

That doesnt sound very likely.

I wish someone would be more specific when they say a game lacks the "heart" of previous installments, because I frankly have no idea what that means.

Yeah, it was niche. I was a hardcore PC gamer during that time and very few people I knew played PC games. Everyone owned a SNES or a PSOne or another console, but PC gaming was pretty small in comparison. Valve just announced that Half-Life has sold 9.3m copies. In 1999, I remember that number was a little over 250,000, about a year after the game released. It was only after CS took off did Half-Life become the monstrosity it is today. Plus, it helped that after a few years, nearly any off-the-shelf computer could run the game. When it released, that was far from the case. I spent $1700 on a PC rig to run that game shortly after release and it still didn't run on the highest settings possible. I think you're forgetting just how expensive PC gaming was until early this decade.

As for multiplatform PC titles today, isn't that obvious? Budgets vs. single-platform returns. Hell, it's even bleeding into the console realm it's gotten so bad. And you don't think budget size has something to do with it? If you can make a PC-only game for $100,000 and have it sell 50,000 copies, you're probably pretty happy with yourself. If that same game today costs $10,000,000 to make, you have to sell just a few more copies to break even. The entire notion of exclusivity is quickly vanishing and your argument is rather silly.

Interplay had to have had piss-poor management... Look at their franchises:

- Fallout

- Descent

- Earthworm Jim

- Baldur's Gate

If not for horrible management decisions, how could a company with that kind of pedigree from 1993-1999 fail so miserably?

The original Fallouts were pretty much all about doing whatever the fuck you wanted - and the repercussions that followed. Prostitution? Check. Slavery? Check. Child killing? Check.

I never even "beat" either game because I didn't feel like helping the vault dwellers. If you didn't want to, you didn't have to. You didn't have to do anything in those games. That was the beauty and the "heart" of the franchise.

Today, it's a little different. Given the budgets of games, developers can't so easily write off countries like Germany or Japan, two countries notorious for banning any game with objectional content. Plus, after the disastrous Hot Coffee incident, developers are reluctant to push the artistic boundaries of a game if the content might be deemed inappropriate by society.

So, in an attempt to keep some of these franchises alive and selling in decent enough numbers to earn them a decent budget, sacrifices must be made. I don't blame developers, really... They're just trying to keep a job. I blame the fucknuts of society who think it's okay to tell mature adults what they can or cannot do in their free time.

So are you telling me I can't shoot kids in the face and that there are no more damn, dirty slavers to go around and blow off their testicles with a shotgun?

Also that I can't bang anyone?

You can have sex but you can't hook yourself. I believe you can sell to slavers but you can't become one and AFAIK, you don't get branded as a Slaver like you did in F2.

As for kids, no killing. Probably one of my favorite bits of Fallout 2... The onslaught you brought on yourself by killing children was terrible, but interesting to see if you could survive it.

I have yet to play Fallout 2! I did not know you could get into the slave trade! That is very evil. I spent most of my time in Fallout shooting slavers in the face.

There were kids in the original Fallout, too, just not the European version (which is the one on GOG). There's a patch to put them back in. And yeah, you absolutely one hundred percent did not want to be a child-killer.