I didn't leave my favorite game series, my favorite game series left me.

[CrossLOPER]

You don't know what the purpose of F3 was. After F2, all the bad stuff happened financially to Black Isle and Interplay and the Fallout series looked like it was going to disappear forever for a moment. Bethesda picked it up but didn't know how well the series would go over after a 10 year hiatus. Long periods of no news tend to make people very pessimistic and overly critical since they have been "waiting" longer. (lol Duke Nukem wasn't an average game instead it was IT DIDN'T EVEN CURE MY CANCER IT WAS SO BAD)

That's the problem. It was a full price demo marketed as FALLOUT 3. Point is moot since New Vegas was nearly the exact same thing.

So Bethesda bought the IP and used F3 to test the waters. They did do their research on F1 and F2 but what some people don't comprehend is that a first person 3D sandbox is going to be a lot more limited in the amount of choices due to the engine's structure than a very graphically simple 2D top down scroller. For the most part the kind of 2D scroller that F1 and F2 is based upon makes it real easy to add a ton of complexity because it takes less effort to change simpler sprites than it is to change an entire 3D town like Megaton. The time between when F1 came out and when F2 came out was 1 year. F1 came out in 1997 and F2 came out in 1998. Modern 3D RPG's take a lot more time even to make it decent. KOTOR 2 and Dragon Age 2 shows how crappy and hollow a modern RPG is when only given 13-15 months to make, which is more time than it took to make the complex beast that is F2.

Fallout 1 and 2 were not scrollers. "3D is hard" is not an excuse. Bethesda had all the experience it needed from Oblivion, and didn't use it.

The technical differences between presenting a large area from a 2D top down and a 3D first person also makes a huge difference in how far you can make changes to the surrounding environment or even in how big the environment actually seems. What makes this situation even more apparent is that when I read on Reddit posts about F1 and F2, there are always people who say that they are surprised about how small x town is when they get the widescreen patch for computers that run at insanely high resolutions allowing the player to see a much larger square of the map from top down than normally. Areas suddenly go from winding buildings everywhere to a surprisingly close grid like pattern of 4 buildings by 5 buildings when you see the whole town.

It's not the size, it's the content.

The fact is that the Oblivion engine isn't the F1 and F2 engine and people complain about the former not providing the same level of choice as the latter as if the Oblivion engine was designed to be an ever encompassing complex branching tracking engine for Fallout.

This is all why I said earlier in this thread that the next Fallout should be within a much smaller area, not a huge sandbox in the same style as F3 or New Vegas. Make the NPC's serve more uses for more quests instead of being throwaway one time NPCs used to send you to another point on the map.

I am failing to grasp the point you are trying to make... That 3D sandboxes are hard to program? Yes, it is an endeavor, but it is not an excuse to release an empty crater of a game.

As for not following the lore, Bethesda made the decision that since they did indeed own the IP that they were entitled to change the lore as they seemed fit. But they took a deliberate policy of trying to maintain the original material as much as they could in order to keep it the Fallout everyone would recognize. It's why they placed F3 in Washington D.C. far away from the events or characters of either F1 and F2, because they were testing to see if people would respond before they went about dictating what familiar characters would do.

In short, people complain about Fallout not being what it once was, but this is sillyness. 2D top down styles have not been the mainstream style of RPG story telling for a while. To expect anything but "Oblivion with guns" was just being unrealistic and ultimately doing the same kind of expectation building that most people did with Duke Nukem.

EDIT: On Chris Avalone's twitter account he says that since F3 the Fallout Bible itself is no longer canon. So invoking the lore from that is pointless.
http://twitter.com/#!/ChrisAvellone/...00464676044800

You are confusing lore with content. Nothing you did was of any consequence. In the original games, every town you visited was affected in a way based on what you did or did not do. What was the ending in Fallout 3? "Uh, you died." or "Uh, you didn't die, but you really should have." The plot just halted.

EDIT: Let me assure you that any ire is directed towards Bethesda, not you.

My point was that I am questioning their design decisions for that game. YES 3D sandboxes require careful design and development. There isn't very much you can add between towns in the desert or indeed a forest. Want to know what the ancients who created Fallout 1 and 2 did? They realized this and decided to OMIT the areas and focus on development of areas that actually matter. They could have easily implemented a familiar system with the random encounters as well with minimal intrusiveness.