While there are indeed some rabid and irrational Fallout fans out there you should be more cautious with such generalisations. Something Awful isn’t exactly a very impartial source to judge the fanbase. Have you read NMAs Fallout 3 preview? Very critical but certainly not written in blind fanaticism.

The hatred of the Fallout fans has interestingly developed a life of its own, there is a monstrous thread at Quarter To Three which is basically a NMA bashing for over 100 pages. Quite fascinating phenomenon.

I guess there are two main reasons for this:

1.) Roshambo. Roshambo was a former editor of NMA and the most impressive flamer I’ve ever had the pleasure to read on the internet. He offended lot’s of people and I guess these folks remember.

2.) The old Fallout fans aren’t Bethesdas target audience. Off course I’m only talking about the hardcore fans, many people who liked Fallout will also like Fallout 3, but Bethesda isn’t even denying any more that they develop more or less Oblivion with guns because that’s exactly what many people want and that’s what they are good at. The Fallouts and the Elder Scrolls series are quite different kinds of RPGs and Bethesdas games haven’t shown much of what made Fallout great: dark humor, excellent writing and choices with consequences. (The Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion was an exception and pretty good, but even there you normally don’t had choices that made any difference)

Games like Fallout – isometric with turnbased combat – are a dying breed, only a handful of Indie developers still make them and fans of this kind of gameplay are naturally disappointed when one of the greatest RPG series is now realtime/RTwP. Maybe Bethesda makes a great postapocalyptic RPG but a worthy successor of Fallout/F2? I really doubt it. There would be much less criticism if they wouldn’t call the game Fallout 3 but Fallout: XYZ.

All I can say is don’t fall for the hype. Bethesdas PR is often, like Shamus wrote, an outrageous lie. Oblivions Radiant AI – ha! I’m still laughing. Unfortunately there’ll be no demo to check the game out before buying it and there also aren’t many gaming journalists I trust nowadays.