Huge post, so I'll put tags in:
Gore and VATS headshots -
Oddly enough, the game seems a little more gory than I want in a game. It's just kind of overkill. I know, Que saying too much, gore, wtf? But sometimes when I kill somebody it's just more gruesome than it needs to be. I heard someone on a podcast talk about that as well, and it's kind of funny. It's mostly the all too frequent decapitation. Which is often quite hilarious and fun to watch when heads go bouncing off things in funny ways or a body and head get separated in extreme fashion... but sometimes it's just a little too gruesome. They were trying to be true to the over-the-top nature of Fallout's gore, but I think the fact that this is in such real-looking (at times) 3D just pushes it a bit far. It would be far less of a problem if it wasn't so easy to get headshots. I think that needs to be the first thing to be modded: make headshots about 40% harder to pull off. I won't say there's no reason to shoot another body part, since disarming a guy temporarily if you can't kill him outright and he's part of a large gun-toting group can increase your survivability, and taking out a heavily-armored target's legs if he's chasing you with melee (hello Super Mutants with sledgehammers) can make it easy to pick him off at your leisure as he stumbles after you, but your average target is just... headshot, headshot, headshot. That kind of annoys me. It should be harder to hit the head than anything else, yet it's usually easier than the limbs. Which is realistic... but fuck realism. Gameplay first.
Inventory -
As for the inventory, you guys should be glad that this is a step up from the first games, which gave you a giant pile of shit to sort through without any item differentiation at all. It was one long, giant list, and it didn't support mousewheel scrolling. So count your blessings. They had to improve it with this game because you generally get more stuff, I think. Tabs would definitely have been a nice feature, but at least it's less annoying than the first two games, and at least it's organized alphabetically so you always know where to find something in the list. Which I realize is a stupid statement since this was developed ten years later, and the inventory sure as hell better be more functional than before, but it still works well enough for me as is... I don't even use the context-sensitive buttons, I just hit tab and go to whatever.
Screens, FPS, technical performance -
And MyD, for screens just press PRTSCN, just like Oblivion. The .INI has it turned on by default now, so you don't have to worry about switching it. I don't know about turning on an FPS counter... I have no need for one as the game runs perfectly at ultra-high settings on my modest rig. This game performs unbelievably well for how good it looks. Huge, huge improvement over Oblivion and more than a little in competition with other games of its ilk, I'd say. And I was wrong about how long I'd been playing the game. I ended last night at about 3:30AM with probably just about 16 or so hours of gametime. So as far as crashes go, the game's remained pretty stable on the whole for a Bethesda game. It's easily the most stable game from them I've played on my rig, for what that's worth.
Un-PC? -
I don't really get what's so un-PC that MyD's linked review talks about. I don't have time to read the whole thing, granted, but I'm curious, because this struck me as being perfectly functional and not overly consolized. That isn't to say it feels made with the PC in mind, necessarily, just that nothing jumped out at me as un-PC. Menus are nice and functional, and stylized so that it feels a little different from the average menu no matter what platform you're on. Control is fine, mouse is obviously superior to controller even without this being a full-on FPS. I have no complaints. Though if what idol is reporting is true, that's kind of lame. I haven't noticed, though, as it seemed to me that my own controls were mapped in various ways to other functions in the game. I use ESDF, not WASD, and E makes VATS go through when I've selected points, S moves the screwdriver in the lockpicking minigame, F forces the lock, and A, the keyboard jump key the game gave me (I also have it mapped to the RMB, which will back out of VATS and remove VATS actions), does "Take All" in a loot screen while E or Space, my action button, closes it. Hopefully if there are any control-mapping issues they'll fix that up in a patch. Those would be super-easy fixes.
I fucking love this game -
Despite the nitpicks, I think this is one of the most fantastic games I've ever played. There are problems, but to me if you spend all your time complaining about them, you're missing the point. The original Fallouts had problems, after all, yet we consider them masterpieces for all they did right. The combat was unwieldy, unbalanced, and often laborious, and go soak your head if you feel otherwise. Not terrible or broken, just not really that great. If that's the big thing you played the games for, you're an idiot. Even if you were in it for character and story depth, there were a fuck-ton of spelling and punctuation errors, plus bad grammar (unintentionally bad) the likes of which we rarely see these days from anyone other than foreign companies. FO2 was quite ridiculously buggy on release as well, and from the list of items the unofficial patch I downloaded fixes, obviously the most recently patched official version was still buggy as shit too.
But you know what? The games are still masterpieces. In every way. If you sit there and nitpick and focus on the negatives all day long, any game will come out looking like a giant bag of flaws, just like if you look at a person and focus only on their weak points. We all have them and none of us are perfect. You have to look beyond that stuff to see what the games are really trying to do, what's really important to them, and that's where masterpieces are made or broken. And if you ask me, Fallout 3 is a masterpiece and exactly the Fallout game that I wanted. I know it won't be the exact thing every last person was dreaming of, but I wanted to set foot into the Wasteland, to see it and feel it and touch it after three games of flying above it and feeling disconnected from it, like I wasn't a part of it. Some people would compare this to Brotherhood of Steel in saying that it's different and nothing like Fallout and a blight upon the landscape, but that's bullshit. BoS was indeed that way, because it wasn't like Fallout in any respect: not design, not raw gameplay, not music, not atmosphere or tone. It was a disaster and everyone has a right to hate it. While Fallout 3's gameplay may be different, the spirit is intact, the tone is intact, the design is consistent with the feelings the first games gave players, the options for progression in the game are like those of the first games.
Best game ever? No. But let me tell you, I could spend years playing this. There's nothing else like it, and there are so many viable options for character building and progression through quests (taking passive, non-combat routes in an FPSRPG? you're kidding, right?)... this is a game that keeps on giving. Not perfect, but as far as I'm concerned, every bit a masterpiece for the flaws.
