FALLOUT 3 V. OBLIVION

I mean, drink a bottle of water a day and you'll be hydrated enough to be healthy.

It might have more to do with the relatively rarity of decent water in the game (the setting and gameplaywise), the conserving skills of that particular player, and the fact that you need WAY more than a bottle of water a day in the real world, much less a post apocalyptic, desert world where you're walking around on foot expending energy and stress fighting giant mutants.

I prefer Fallout 3 to Oblivion- at least, until the Broken Steel DLC came out. I thought it was really cool that the game had an actual ending, a sense of resolution, that it didn't just end with you waiting a week in-game to pick up some kewl lewt (which isn't even that important.. since the difficulty can be changed on-the-fly.) I also liked how Fallout's protagonist had a much stronger personal stake in what was going on compared to TES4.

I poured a hundred hours into Oblivion, and twice that into Fallout 3... and now I'm pretty sick of these games, and not ready to play New Vegas or TES5 when they're released. It just seems like a huge task in things that are mundane- go to X, kill enemy Y (or, alternatively, somehow use diplomacy or sneakiness?), and get reward Z. Rinse and repeat. The futility of this was impressed on me by the sliding difficulty. I had a lot of fun when I cranked up the difficulty to Very Hard on F3, and I really dug the challenge provided by the Broken Steel baddies.

But the whole engine kinda gets old. You know what to expect, what to predict; if anything exciting or new comes up, it will be a one-shot that's nearly entirely cinematic, like the final battle in Mothership Zeta or the mission(s) with Liberty Prime. The bulk of the game is blow shit up to get better weapons to blow shit up better. In comparison, there are more action-oriented games that integrate these big set-piece events so much better- my best examples are the Gears of War and the God of War games. If I want big set-piece events, I'll buy or rent games like these (or, more directly, shooters like the Call of Duty games.) And if I want a game that's rich on gameplay, storyline, and depth, with much less of a 'huge setpiece' setup, I'll play an RPG or strategy game.

I know the complaint may not really make sense, but... as a comparison, when I play an RPG I prefer, there's a single strong cohesive storyline with characters interacting with my party characters. There are incentives to keep playing besides working harder-faster-stronger-better. And sometimes the game doesn't even give me the choice- if I want to keep playing, I should invest an hour leveling up and earning some cash so I'll do really well later. It really pays off. But in TES4/F3, the sliding difficulty makes that unnecessary. There's no such thing as "grinding levels," and there's no point to seeking out the best items or attacks except to see some cool new animation, because if I'm ever really overwhelmed and out of stimpaks I can crank down that high difficulty. Please understand- I'm not some 'hardcore RPG gamer' who came to the Bethesda games with the wrong idea, only because he plays Etrian Odyssey to death. And I did enjoy TES4/F3 an awful lot, and am probably to blame for playing them to boredom. But yeah, at this point, the games just feel flawed to me- they're not what I really like in a video game. Maybe I'd prefer changes for the next games that tied the hours-long side quests more directly into the main story, or that offered incentives beyond cool animations and the ability of playing better at the same difficulty without modifying.