Fallout 3 is really one of the most atrociously-written games ever. Your character has little to no actual agency throughout the story and this comes to a head at the end. The entire climax is you walking behind a mega-cool giant robot and watching it kill everything in sight. You are fighting a conflict between two factions over the right to flip a switch - both sides want to turn on Project Purity, but are fighting over who gets to do it, for no reason. In fact, your character is arguably the bad guy because Colonel Autumn explicitly rejected President Eden's genocidal designs with the anti-FEV virus and launched his own coup, your character might have accepted Eden's proposal to put the genocidal virus in the water supply. The final dilemma is an extremely stupid one over which character goes inside an irradiated room to commit suicide to push a button, while you potentially have a companion standing next to you who is immune to radiation; a proto-Mass Effect 3 ending controversy that provoked enough backlash the developers literally had to make and release a DLC explicitly retconning that ending.
EDIT: Also the entire conflict is doubly pointless because apparently by Fallout 4 the Brotherhood have pretty much adopted the genocidal Enclave worldview anyways
Didn't it basically end up becoming New Vegas? Like all the major plot points and character are there, it just changed shape a fair bit between the initial drafts and when they were finally realized much later.
Fallout 3 is really one of the most atrociously-written games ever. Your character has little to no actual agency throughout the story and this comes to a head at the end. The entire climax is you walking behind a mega-cool giant robot and watching it kill everything in sight. You are fighting a conflict between two factions over the right to flip a switch - both sides want to turn on Project Purity, but are fighting over who gets to do it, for no reason. In fact, your character is arguably the bad guy because Colonel Autumn explicitly rejected President Eden's genocidal designs with the anti-FEV virus and launched his own coup, your character might have accepted Eden's proposal to put the genocidal virus in the water supply. The final dilemma is an extremely stupid one over which character goes inside an irradiated room to commit suicide to push a button, while you potentially have a companion standing next to you who is immune to radiation; a proto-Mass Effect 3 ending controversy that provoked enough backlash the developers literally had to make and release a DLC explicitly retconning that ending.
EDIT: Also the entire conflict is doubly pointless because apparently by Fallout 4 the Brotherhood have pretty much adopted the genocidal Enclave worldview anyways
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Didn't it basically end up becoming New Vegas? Like all the major plot points and character are there, it just changed shape a fair bit between the initial drafts and when they were finally realized much later.
Also a much smaller scope because of engine limitations.