6. Fallout 3 - Take It Back
Fallout 3 is a beast of a game. An absolute, towering beast which will devour any amount of spare time you have available. Here was a game where you truly could play as exactly the kind of character you wanted. A law abiding citizen bringing hope to the denizens of the Capital Wasteland, a relentlessly evil war monger or something in between, Fallout 3 had something for everyone. Except a good ending. Now, I am not a game designer but I am pretty sure that the emotion you are aiming for when ending a game would amount to more than "Is that it?". Yet this is exactly the emotion I, and many other gamers, felt when the credits rolled at the end of Fallout 3. This is mainly down to the expectations that the game had set by the time you reached its finale. Missions could be played out in a number of different ways or even bypassed completely based on the choices you made. It was extremely liberating to feel that a game was being shaped and defined by every little action that you performed. To then have the game end so definitively and depressingly was like a slap in the face. For, no matter what kind of character you chose to play as, the end simply boiled down to a Good or Bad morality choice, followed by a tedious selection of static images playing over a phoned-in voiceover from Ron Perlman. The fact that you could not continue your character's exploits after this mission only served to piss off the fans even more and led to Bethesda releasing DLC which continued the main quest.