Yesterday was the release of Fallout 3. If that sentence makes sense to you, I don't need to explain how highly anticipated this event was. If it doesn't, you're probably not going to find this post all that interesting.
I took a vacation day yesterday. This may seem like a weird thing to say when you consider that I don't actually have a job. But I didn't do any chores (except go to CostCo, and that's because I was already over there), and I didn't write. I was back home and had the game installed by 12:30 and was able to start playing immediately.
And it was everything I'd hoped it would be. I can see the Oblivion engine underneath it, and I've seen on the official forums that the modding community has already started figuring out how to mod the game, even without an official construction set. So we should be seeing new content fairly soon. But even with vanilla Fallout, I'm loving the game. I upped the difficulty to Hard, because I found VATS made the game a little too easy. I'm also walking around with a ton of junk that may or may not have any use, plus ammo for guns I don't have and guns with no ammo. I've already become addicted to one drug (Psycho, I think), and I have a tendency to stay slightly irradiated. I also have a tendency to completely ignore the quest I was just given when I head in the direction of the building where it's located and then wander into half a dozen other places.
So far I've visited an elementary school, a water treatment plant, and a sewer, and I'm about to head into a grocery store tonight.
My consensus: if you liked Oblivion and like a post-apocalyptic game world, you'll love Fallout 3. If you hated Oblivion, but only for the fantasy elements, you'll probably really like Fallout 3. If, on the other hand, you hated everything about Oblivion, I doubt you'll like Fallout 3 at all.
As for me, I have an incentive to get everything done quickly today, so that I can get back in and try to survive the horrors of the wasteland.