I just saw the video. Yum! Honestly, just from the video alone it has everything I want in a game:
stuff to pick up
improving stats
action
hacking & lock-picking
item creation
nifty post-apocalyptic landscape
If it’s nothing but Oblivion with guns, I’ll be in 7th heaven. In fact, at this point the only thing that could screw it up for me would be bugs.
I didn’t like Oblivion. I didn’t like the leveling up system, I didn’t actually care about the main quest, and the only side quest that I even remotely cared about what the one for the Assassins Guild. I thought it was a very pretty game but I didn’t think it was a very fun game.
So I’m not really sure how good Fallout is going to be. I loved the first two games but I’m not upset that the game play is changing. I have a hard enough time enjoying the games these days because the interface seems so clunky compared to modern games. I’m just not convinced that Bethesda can make a game as good as the original Fallout.
Marc
I’m with MGibson ( and others ) - the vanilla leveling system in Oblivion was an abomination. Far as I’m concerned it broke the game ( I’m not super-patient with at times counter-intuitive level-grinding ). It was a reasonably decent game only if heavily modded, otherwise it was just pretty.
However one would hope that Bethesda has learned their lesson on that one.
And let’s not forget the ridiculous “dungeons” which existed in Oblivion. It was room, hallway, room, hallway. Each with one enemy per hallway or room. Sometimes two. Yes, the game had a lot of dungeons. They were pintless and I stopped ever going to any dungeon whihc wasn’t required for a quest because those were the only ones which any effort had gone into.
They didn’t learn their lessons about weak design from Arena, Daggerfall, or Morrowind so I don’t see how they’d learn them from Oblivion.
This bears repeating. Bethesda clings to that abominable level-up design like a life raft in the middle of the ocean. One hundred percent of the people they ask for an opinion on that leveling system would tell them it was atrocious, and they like Oblivion DESPITE it, yet I’m sure it’ll make its way into the next elder scrolls game anyway.
I didn’t play it, so I can’t really say, but I’m given to understand it worked better in Arena and Daggerfall because the monsters were not nearly so tough relative to the character. By Morrowind it wasn’t ideal but I was willing to forgive them. In Oblivion the flaws were glaringly obvious and I can’t understand how that even got past the beta stage of testing.
Oddly enough, I really liked the dungeons and the leveling in Oblivion.
Different strokes I guess.
Well, someone must like the games because afaik Bethesda made money on all of them…and people keep buying them.
Myself I’m neutral…I didn’t buy Oblivion when it came out because I knew I didn’t have the time for such a game. I note however that there has been several expansion of it, so SOMEONE out there much like it. 
Looking at Fallout 3 so far I like what I’m seeing. I think the game is going to be in the spirit of the games before it, though probably not the same thing. That’s fine by me as long as it’s fun.
(As an aside I tried to load Fallout 2 on my laptop for my trip but I guess the CD is bad. Had to settle for Fallout Tactics…not my favorite game of the series, but needed a quick Fallout fix after watching the videos and it was all I had that would work.)
-XT
Oblivion is a great game despite the leveling system. I played the hell out of games that were flawed in one way or another, like Call to Power, Final Fantasy 6 (the goggles, they do nothing!), Alpha Centauri, and Super Mario Brothers.
If you were playing on the PC, there were almost immediately fixes for the leveling system. Obviously the region of “fun” is somewhere between “too easy” and “too hard” but all the attempts I’ve seen to automatically upgrade everything to “fun” all the time have failed. But the other extreme, such as in the games Gothic I & II where the whole effort is for you as a player to find the path of least resistance is kind of dead. I myself am precisely the kind of gamer Gothic I was made for, and even I used a crack to level out the ponderously steep curve of Gothic II.
Both Morrowind (the better game by far) and Oblivion forced you into an anti-build if you weren’t a straight combat character. You had to specialize in precisely what you wouldn’t be doing so that the game didn’t start biting you in the ass for actually daring to gain levels.
Near as we can tell from previews, Bethesda seems to have done what our favorite mods to Oblivion did – selectively level the world up, so that you can’t just make the main quest trivial through farming random encounters, but making the world so that you have to, and indeed can and are motivated to, build up to the nastier parts. A consistent balance between “too easy” and “too hard” turns out not to be a lot of fun. Finding that sweet spot rather than having it handed to you, however, is.
I sincerely hope so. I want this game to be good, but I’ve been burned too many times to really hope. And I have bad memories of Oblivion. When the game was good, it was good. But there were just a lot of aspects of that game I don’t like to recall. It was evident tome that they’d spent a lot of time on relatively trivial things and kinda let the really improtant stuff on the back burner. And they really did flat-out lie about the actualy game experience, AI, etc.
I myself hope that if nothing else they can convince game companies that there is a demand for something like V.A.T.S. in first-person shooter games. I can take a certain amount of twitch gaming, but the ability to take time out to think about what you’re doing is vastly preferable. Mass Effect was nice in this respect. I generally didn’t find it useful at all to futz around carefully placing my NPCs when I could just have them running loose, drawing fire and causing chaos as I sat back and used the pause feature to take headshots. But when the option became useful, I was very glad to be able to direct my team to perform specific actions even as I carefully set up my own shots. It’s nowhere near the kind of strategic planning that used to go into my Baldur’s Gate battles, but it’s all we get anymore.
Anyway, we’ll have more to say on how “Fallouty” the game is after we can actually see it, but it looks like a pretty damn fun game in either case. Of course, so did Oblivion, and who could have known before it came out that it would be so dumbed down and tarted up compared to Morrowind? But I fully expect the game to be fun.