[Magus]

Tenpenny Tower annoyed me at the time, too, although in retrospect the fact there is no "good" solution IS kind of appealing. Although apparently there is a glitch on that one that lets you basically get the "good" solution-- kill Tenpenny after you get everyone to agree to let in the ghouls and after telling him everyone is all for it, but before telling Roy. Supposedly this will break the part where Roy murders all the humans after you leave. Of course, they may have fixed this in Game of the Year edition...I don't know if I'm going to play the game again with high Charisma/speech to check it out personally.

But then I played Into the Pitt and that did the same thing again with the totally morally gray outcomes and I was annoyed again.

Which is odd, really. Because morally gray outcomes are better than the stark white/black choices the game offered most of the time. Maybe I had gotten so used to the game only offering such contrasting choices/outcomes that that was why it annoyed me there was no completely, totally good outcome to these two quests.

Like an example of just pointlessly white/black quest outcomes: in Broken Steel you can turn the satellite missiles on the Citadel instead of the Enclave mobile platform. Turning it on the Citadel is just pointlessly evil, even more so than destroying Megaton (which has clear rewards in that you get 1000 caps, get to live in Tenpenny Tower, and so on), whereas destroying the Citadel is pointless, since if you are that evil you wouldn't have helped the Brotherhood in the first place or got inducted in (seriously, if you are still inducted into the Brotherhood at the end of the super evil path I'm taking in my second play through, the game is really poorly thought out), unless you can't get into the armory any other way. I haven't tried, so maybe that is the "reward" for annihilating the Citadel? There were also other choices to fire on which the game handwaves away as "wrong flight path coordinates". What if I thought that pesky purifier was the cause of all the problems in the world? And the thing had four payloads, too, the perfect amount. Why give the illusion of freedom? It was worse than their deus ex machina "you got kidnapped/knocked out" unavoidable plot points.

Oh, and something else annoying about Fallout 3: you can't kill children. And no, I don't really oppose that sort of self-censorship normally, but they built Little Lamplight totally around the concept of a society of children, and being unable to talk my way in (one of the few times speech failed in my whole play through--I even got President Eden to blow up the base), my super blindingly white Paladin character thought for a few moments about just shooting their way in...but you simply cannot draw your gun in the cave until after you get the gate open by doing the sheriff's quest. After that the normal "can't kill kids" physics are there, of course. But still. They should have avoided setting it up that way with their "can't kill kids" rules. At least put that sheriff behind some bullet-proof glass he can mock you from behind or something.

At least they fixed the ending so you can ask Fawkes to go into the irradiated room and he does, although it acted like this was some kind of moral failing on my part instead of just the intelligent thing to do since he is totally impervious to radiation. I'm presuming you can ask any of the other companions to do the same, though, so I guess they coded it in as "ask Paladin Cross to go into the radioactive room" which would indeed be cowardly, I guess.

I hear New Vegas fixed most of these problems with Fallout 3, though, so I'm looking forward to that.