Yeah, the UI is a bit on the consolish side - just like the stock one on Oblivion was. However, there are mods on http://www.fallout3nexus.com that make it make sense on a PC (smaller fonts, less line height etc).
Fights are indeed pretty easy at first, especially if you're sneaky. But all in all you don't HAVE to fight everyone and since it's an open gameworld you can usually carry the fight to somewhere that you're at an advantage.
One change I like to the way the NPCs react to combat situations (unavoidably in comparison to Oblvion) is that they seem to flee more often and sometimes they do so when you take out someone from their faction. In several occassions I've seen raiders panic, while they haven't taken any damage, when I blow someone's head off with a sneak attack.
Got it yesterday and I've pretty much done exactly the same. I find this is a bit too easy starting out. Fun to see mods already being released - the one that makes the dialog selection box a bit bigger is really handy.
In a secluded parallel context, I agree - kids should be kids and enjoy being kids. But this includes all of the usual adult crap that revolves around politics, sex, religion and their combinations.
I do find it pretty ridiculous though that we've brought our society, through pious fear and hide-it-under-the-rug puritanism mostly, to a point that we need to use a faceless mechanism like an educational system - which traditionally, but not practically, values bare facts, rationalism and logic - to teach things that should, and for most do, come naturally and are in the end but a personal issue.
Using the term "acceptance" or "tolerance" in relation to such private matters shows that such subjects as sexuality and religion have indeed been filtered though a sterile and inhumane establishment. As much as I hate allegories or metaphors: if the nucleus is so stupidly based on post-industrial revolution values it is only logical that any orbiting particles which attempt to alter the balance of the whole system will have their origins, for sake of compatibility, in the very same material.
Futile is what I'd call any attempt to patch a rotting collective of fake and hypocritical social values.
I concur - quests in ES games, either the "main" ones or the sidequests (with few notable exceptions) have always had a sort of disjointed feel to them. It can either give an unwelcome and alienating feeling or work for it to create a sort of eerie atmosphere. I found the second more prominent in Morrowind, possibly due to the entirely non-standard fantasy surroundings - Daggerfall kind of worked in the alienating direction, possibly in conjuction with the fact that the gameworld was ridiculously large also that the terrain was randomly generated, thus not providing any real landmarks.
Another prominent "feature" of the stock quests is that there is rarely a time constraint on them - meaning you can do any section at any time, even game-years later, and it won't matter. And while that stands true for many other games - there is not even some sort of "pressure" or sense of urgency introduced to the player via typical story-telling mediums.
Non-surprisingly, I've found that the quests I enjoyed the most in Morrowind and Oblivion came from plugins.
True enough - I usually base my opinion on certain review sites and by searching about specific queries I might have on the game's forum. Especially if there's some much hyped feature involved.
However, unless it's an open-ended game or a simulator and thus gets my attention I'm usually watching indie games which tend to have demos available.
Indeed, people do get quite vocal about things like this. The one thing that everyone seems to forget is that no one is forcing you to play a game and playing a game is for enjoyment - if you don't enjoy it, then you're playing the wrong game. On their defence though, the only way to (legally) find out if they like the game or not is to buy it. And I can't see Gunn being happy if he don't like the game after giving $99AU for it. Actually, I have a hard time picturing him happy in general - but that's just me being a smart-ass.
It would be a catastrophic disaster, and other cliches with redundant wording, to not be tolerant towards intolerance - and no one likes failing a Turing test like that.
I'm not going to get into the man-on-man and girl-on-girl action debate that seems to get everyone's hormones working around here.
However...
Actually, it is.
Traditionally speaking, it is one of your strict obligations as a democratic citizen to vote - regardless if the system finds it easier to not impose it legally and thus bring on a loose and careless oligarchy. A fine mechanism for dumbing down the population and making them not care - works much better than any sort of propaganda in the long run.
Only review I had time to read was Eurogamer's rather odd in it's vagueness 10/10 review which essentially didn't answer any of the things I cared about.
Yeah - that sort of "forced" attachment I'd assign to adventure games (which I haven't played in many a year). The ES series which is so open-ended appeals more to my idea of an RPG since it basically allows me to do anything I want based on what my character is, whom in turn I have defined. Although, granted I mostly ended up playing a roguish character who (in post-moded Oblivion) could usually be found hugging some piece of valuable loot and running from a horde of stupidly powerful foes.
What I'm hoping for in FO3 is the world to be as open while being less static to my character's or others' actions.
Some boats with well-designed enough hulls (read: mostly shallow and not meant for open waters) can achieve faster speeds than the speed of the wind which is apparently propelling them - but not downwind, only with crosswinds and in what would look like slightly upwind IIRC from what a pal who's into sailing was telling me as it all has to do with maximizing relative wind speed - a bit of quick trigonometry would probably give you the ideal angle that would give you the largest possible speed vector.
However I doubt that the difference would be that big between boat speed vs actual wind speed on a boat. On land however that there's less friction it just might be possible.
Don't have a clue about the cart though - I'd need to read up a bit on that.
The diversity bit reminds me the time Rossi challenged Alonso, after Fernando flapped his trap about Rossi's abilities in an F1 car as he had done some testing at the time, to time trials: in an F1 car, on a motogp bike and in a rally car. Sadly that never went through as the chicken spaniard out.
EDIT:
Think of it in a reasonable manner though - why should they try to push and keep up with the SC and risk crashing into it because they can't see it? When they were given the "go" to pass it and get back into normal race order they did so using as much caution as possible. All in all I think the SC example isn't what the original road car vs f1 comparison was about.
Under the same conditions I fail to see how it would suddenly lose speed like that to an extent that it would drastically change the ratio.
Example
In 1998 the race in Silverstone was held in heavy rain - fastest lap was 1:35 (I suspect on a damp track - not during the heavy rainfall)
In 1999 the same race was in the dry - fastest lap was 1:28
The F1 car laps at a decent 1:33 and the road car at 2:54. I imagine that the road car under dry conditions would make up a corresponding amount of time.