When it comes to exploration, Bethesda really nailed the space-race aesthetic from the previous games, creating the rusted-out and irradiated Capital Wasteland that players fell in love with. For example, Bethesda did not implement traits that the player selects at the start of the game but decided to keep most of the skills from the previous game. While the RPG mechanics were certainly still faithful to the original two games, there's a strange blend between simplification and complexity that makes Fallout 3 feel a bit clunky. While this could be said for almost any Bethesda game (even New Vegas, which was notoriously buggy at launch), Fallout 3 was a particularly bad case. If players want to get the most out of Fallout 3 today, they'll more than likely want to stop by the Fallout Nexus and download community-made patches. Bugs have plagued the game for its entire lifespan. The new direction kept up the appeal of exploring a post-apocalyptic wasteland and retained plenty of iconic elements from the previous games, including the VATS system and Pip-Boy. That isn't to say that Fallout 3 is a perfect game, though. The way Bethesda transitioned Fallout and Fallout 2 into an FPS RPG is nothing short of incredible.
Fallout 3 certainly turned heads for when it was released in 2008.
