One, a majority of the game dialogue is bland and unexciting. This is particularly bad for the stat-checked dialogue. For instance, there’s one marked “[Intelligence]“, which is supposed to be a point in which you impart some keen insight. Unfortunately, the “insight” is actually quite weak, and tends to merely restate the obvious. A tag like “[Captain Obvious]” would be far more true to the actual insight given. Another problem with the dialogue is that non-player characters are so easily swayed. A non-player character could be steadfastly against something, but as long as your Speech skill is high enough, you can convince them to jump off a bridge. Dialogue that involves convincing an NPC about something goes something like this:

Player: You should do this.
NPC: No! It goes against the way I have been brought up, and against everything I believe!
Player: [Speech 100%] You really should do this.
NPC: OK.

I wish this was a joke, but it really is this bad.

Two, the open-endedness seemed far too limited. In TES IV: Oblivion, you could finish the main quest and still have many, many hours of enjoyable gameplay left, largely because of the sheer number of quests. Not so in Fallout 3. You finish the main quest and it’s game over, regardless of whether or not your character does the noble self-sacrifice thing.

I would have liked a better conclusion to the Trouble on the Homefront quest, which really is not very well written. In the way I ended the quest, the player character’s lifelong friend Amata becomes Overseer of Vault 101. Unfortunately, her character does an about-face and basically takes on the personality of her father (the previous Overseer), and exiles the player from Vault 101 forever. I would have liked to see a better conclusion to this quest. Amata’s stated goal, before her character’s about-face, was to open the vault for trade and so forth. With the way the quest ends, she closes the vault for the remainder of the game. It would have made much more sense to me that Vault 101 would be closed for an in-game week or two, to allow her to restore order and bring the vault back to its former state, and eventually open, allowing the player to revisit the vault, old friends, etc. It would also have been more interesting to see residents of Vault 101 visiting Megaton or other nearby places for supplies. Other people have noted their disappointment for their results for the quest as well.

Despite these negative points, I found Fallout 3 to be generally enjoyable. The graphics were superb and the landscape was exactly what I would expect from a post nuclear holocaust environment. The sounds were nicely done as well, and it’s nice to see that Bethesda got more than a handful of voice actors for Fallout 3.

I think Fallout 3 had a lot more potential, and I’m hoping that the downloadable content packs will add something substantial to the game, unlike, for instance, this.

Put another way, computer science is about exploring new ideas and not having to worry about the practical implementation, which is the engineering portion. Prime numbers for example. Computer scientists love to talk about ridiculously large prime numbers and all you can do with such things, like unbreakable encryption and such. Engineering is taking that abstract algorithm and making it work on, say, a 200MHz ARM processor running on your battery-powered MP3 player, where things like battery life and response time matter.

What I’ve found is that computer science majors write really bad code. Not code that doesn’t work, but code that’s slow. They don’t know how to optimize. They can’t tell you the difference between an AMD Athlon XP and an Intel Pentium 4. They can’t explain why the new Core 2 is such a good thing. In their little abstract world of trees and lists and Java, they don’t need to understand the low level hardware. Many of them can’t ever read an x86 disassembly or tell me the first thing about how many registers in a Pentium processor or what the registers are for.

Parallelization is the big thing right now. The Xbox 360, for example, has a 6-way processor. How does one write video games when you can have 6 concurrent pieces of code running at the same time? How does that change your rendering engine? Your game logic? Memory allocation? The Playstation 3 has nine hardware threads. This totally changes the way one writes video games from now on.

Computer Science has a long standing solution to concurrency – the concept of a lock. Which in Linux and Windows are synchronization objects known as locks, mutexes, semaphores, and other names. They’re used in every operating system and just about every shipping Windows and Linux application today. Even calling malloc() is a seralizing operation on the memory heap that causes a lock. Have multiple threads calling malloc() and they basically get to stand in line (a queue data structure) and execute serially. That’s not very parallel. So once again, Computer Science has given us something that doesn’t translate well into real-world performance.

My point of this is that you should NOT go into pure computer science. You’ll rot your head with abstract ideas and end up writing very poor code. Take either computer science with electrical (or computer) engineering electives, what’s known as “CS triple E”, or take computer engineering to get the best of both worlds. If you can’t visualize an algorithm or a piece of code and understand what that touches in the microprocessor, in the memory, on the disk, and what the costs and delays of all the steps are, you’re going to write crappy code.