Yeah I hear you mate... but change can sometimes be the very best of things. Honestly, if they made another isometric "repeat" like Van Bruen was going to be, it would not only be self limiting to fans only, but it wouldn't be doing anything new. Sure it'd support widescreen, it'd have all the bells and whistles you'd like, maybe even in full 3D... but it would no doubt be much the same as F2. Not that there's much wrong with that, but we're seeing someone embrace change, and for me, that's worth waiting to see before judging.
Now for me, I never got into Fallout in a big way. It was just too "different" for me, and just too damn hard. Never learned the whole RPG thing properly. So when I played Oblivion, (RPG-lite?) I loved it. It's undeniable that Oblivion appealed to many more people than it would have, had it been hard core. Plenty of RPG fans out there hate Oblivion and what it stands for, but for me, it's simply superb. And couple that with the way Bethesda allow and support modding, you've got almost unlimited potential.
So what I'm hoping to see with Fallout 3, is the "openness" of Oblivion, with the hard sci-fi of Fallout, coupled with major mod-ability from the community. This is being built from the ground up to run on consoles and PC, so they obviously are aiming for a huge audience... it will be RPG-lite to some degree, but they've also taken on lessons learned from their experience with Oblivion. This new title, for me, holds more promise than any other in current development.
Only time will tell if it works though
