I played Fallout 3 when it came out, and just got bored with it fairly quickly. It's got that Bethesda vibe where everything is great at first, but then you start to get further into the game and everything starts to seem copy+pasted to make the game artificially larger and longer. Is it like that at all? I see it mentioned as a great game all the time, but I also saw that about 3 when it came out.
The gameplay can be janky and it’s buggy as hell.
But it has some of the best writing in video games ever and building a cool character who’s specialized in certain skills is fun as fuck, making it a really good RPG. You can make a smooth talking scientist who’s good with computers, laser guns and wooing ladies, or a cannibalistic psycho woman who’s obsessed with explosives. Your choice.
Edit: Thought I'd expand on this a little.
Cons:
Buggy as fuck
The combat is not very fluid, it's real-time but has an almost turn-based logic, a lot of encounters are really just about gauging you ability to handle them and running away if you can't
The level design of interiors sucks, there are certain big interior levels that are a nightmare to navigate and make certain quests hard
Some of the more interesting quests have weird triggers, to the point that certain content almost requires you to look shit up to realize how to trigger it
Some of the more interesting solutions to quests have bizarro logic to them that's hard to figure out without hints from looking shit up online
Pros:
Dense as fuck, there's a lot of shit to do in the game world, you can either follow the main plot or just fuck around, either will yield good content
Some of the best writing in video games ever, both in terms of characters and in world building, really solid story telling
Building characters is really fun, there's a lot of different builds, and non-combat skills do actually have a lot of uses (but you will need at least some combat skills if you want to actually beat the main quest line)
Despite being overall janky, combat can be fun if only because there's lots of different ways to go about it and even some straight up goofy weapons and skills
There are certain quests that require insanely high levels of skill and gear to complete, much past even the main story, so there's a good motivation to keep boosting your character
Good art direction, they don't really change to much of the general "Fallout" theme, but they do cool things with it
It's a game that requires some patience but you can get really hooked up making a badass character who can best all the crazy tasks put before them