This won best writing at the GDC Awards if you want to understand how dire video game writing and what's considered good writing has been. Emil Pagliarulo is the enemy of the written word, there is no clumsy piece of dialogue or ham-fisted theme he can't make worse beyond your wildest imagination.

The morality and gameplay have been completely gutted of previous Fallout complexity, and in its place the Bethesda formula has been injected. For what it's worth, it's not a bad formula. Exploration guarantees you finding something weird and interesting. Once you abandon the hope of finding something meaningful and thought-provoking and accept it as a series of vignettes of bizarre stuff it goes down cleaner.

It does abandon the Monty Python jokes of Fallout 2 though, which is a net improvement. Very much a mixed bag.