Fallout 3 was my first Fallout game, but years after playing it and with experience with other Fallout games, I think it's safe to say that looking back, I can't believe I actually thought this was an RPG. It can hardly be qualified as an RPG - you build your character's stats, you get to customize their appearance, you can name them yourself, but rarely if ever to you get to apply your build to quests and events in the game in a meaningful way. Most quests in the game have a straightforward path to victory: and that's it. There are no alternate paths to quests that you can affect based on certain parts of your character build and very rarely do quests gate you off for a decision you made. When there IS a branching path to a quest, ultimately, they lead to the same place: Bethesda tends to hamstring the player into making decisions whether they want to or not (see: the original ending before Broken Steel) and it can make the game feel quite linear.
If there's one thing I can say about the game that I enjoy, it's the actual exploration. There's a lot of areas which are, admittedly, copy-pasted corridors and caves lifted from Oblivion, but there are unique, memorable areas that help to stick in a player's mind (See: Republic of Dave, the Oasis, Vault 108, Little Lamplight), and even the context they can give to certain areas can prop up even visually uninteresting ones (see: The Dunwich Building). Sometimes they can get a little lofty with their ambitions and it often ends up creating hub areas which are frustrating to navigate, Rivet City popping out as a great example, but overall, Bethesda has always had a good sense of how to stick in the player's memory with small areas like the ones in this game. I haven't played Fallout 3 for YEARS and I still remember the Republic of Dave.
Bethesda is not very good at letting you build a character and definitely not good at telling an over-arching main storyline (at least, not since Morrowind), but if there's one thing they definitely excel at, it's creating memorable moments and self-contained stories whether through environmental storytelling or entertaining, quirky side quests. It is entirely inappropriate to call their games proper roleplaying experiences, I have to say.
If there's one thing I can say about the game that I enjoy, it's the actual exploration. There's a lot of areas which are, admittedly, copy-pasted corridors and caves lifted from Oblivion, but there are unique, memorable areas that help to stick in a player's mind (See: Republic of Dave, the Oasis, Vault 108, Little Lamplight), and even the context they can give to certain areas can prop up even visually uninteresting ones (see: The Dunwich Building). Sometimes they can get a little lofty with their ambitions and it often ends up creating hub areas which are frustrating to navigate, Rivet City popping out as a great example, but overall, Bethesda has always had a good sense of how to stick in the player's memory with small areas like the ones in this game. I haven't played Fallout 3 for YEARS and I still remember the Republic of Dave.
Bethesda is not very good at letting you build a character and definitely not good at telling an over-arching main storyline (at least, not since Morrowind), but if there's one thing they definitely excel at, it's creating memorable moments and self-contained stories whether through environmental storytelling or entertaining, quirky side quests. It is entirely inappropriate to call their games proper roleplaying experiences, I have to say.