So, in many respects, F2 is a big improvement over the original. Two technical issues I had with the last one were fixed - there's now an option to push a companion aside if he's blocking you, and it's definitely easier to move the little screen around. As well as that, there's a lot more story, a lot more character (particularly with the companions), and the world itself is larger, more complex, and more developed. It's less "post-apocalyptic" and more "post-post-apocalyptic," you could say.
The writing is, for the most part, of the same high quality as F1 and NV. There are still moral dilemmas, social commentary, and deep stuff like that. The one aspect in which it's quite a bit different is the comedy, which I have mixed feelings about. This game does not take itself seriously, and it shows. It's constantly throwing jokes at you, constantly trying to make you laugh. There are pop culture references, fourth wall jokes, zany random encounters, and the like. The writers must have especially liked dirty jokes, too, because there's a ton of them. Now, are these jokes funny? Absolutely. They're hilarious at times. But they're so silly and excessive that they have a tendency to overshadow the ostensibly-serious parts of the game, like the main story. It's kind of hard to worry about my kidnapped tribe when I'm deciding if I should be called Courtney Coxsleeve or Pokeahotass, after all.
There's one more issue that I had with this game. With both games, really, but it's more prominent in this one because the main story is so much more complex. There isn't much organization or structure in the main quests. You're given only a few vague clues, and then it's up to you to figure out where you need to go and what you need to do there. By itself, that's fine. I'm not saying there ought to be quest markers or hand-holding or anything. But the problem is that the game assumes that you're doing every step in the order that the developers must have had in mind when they wrote all this. As a result, you can stumble onto a step out of order when you're just asking around for clues.
Here's the biggest example of this I encountered. My tribe has been abducted. My only clues are that the kidnappers were armed with energy weapons and were headed towards the sea. So I travel to a city on the coast, San Francisco, and start asking around. One random guy on the docks I'm talking to is guarding a boat. An option is there to ask him to use the boat, so I select it, and all of a sudden a speech check pops up in which I give a long spiel about how I need to travel to the oil rig to rescue my tribe from the Enclave and therefore I need his boat to get to the submarine. Wait, what? Who are the Enclave? How do I know they abducted my tribe? What oil rig? How do I know that's where my tribe is? What submarine? What does a submarine have to do with an oil rig, anyway? It was very jarring, and dare I say it, immersion-breaking.
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Ignore me all you want, but I'm going to keep posting! You're all going to read what I'm saying just out of boredom, in any case. It could be worse. You could be reading Parsifal's Zappa reviews. Anyway, now that I've played the first two games, I feel like I can address Crudblud's criticisms of the lore in F3 a bit better than when I had just read the information on the fan wikis, so here goes.
First of all, the super mutants in the Capital Wasteland were complete bullshit. The development of the mutants on the West Coast wasn't some simple accident that could have happened anywhere there was FEV; the Master had arranged it all carefully from the start. He created more of the mutants, he organized them, he armed them, he directed their activities, etc. It makes no sense that these mutants would be doing all this similar stuff of their own accord. Basically, what Crudblud said. Also, Tim Cain himself called out this element as being a rehash in an otherwise highly-complimentary review of the game, which I found to be fairly interesting.
Then there's the Enclave, and yeah, they're another repeat performance. Their involvement is certainly more justified than the mutants, being that they're obviously a powerful national organization, but from a writing perspective, very little that's new is offered. Maybe one new element that they could have expanded on a bit was Autumn's motivation - as ruthless as he was, he didn't want to wipe out the inhabitants of the wasteland, but to make sure that the Enclave were the ones distributing water to them rather than the Brotherhood, thereby gaining their loyalty and trust. That's an interestingly political goal, and might have made for a better focus than Eden's rehashed plan from F2, but alas, we didn't get to see much of it.
Speaking of the Brotherhood, I'm going to stick to my guns on that point. If the way it worked was that you met the Brotherhood and they just handwaved away their history with something like "We used to collect technology, but now we help people lol," there would be reason to complain, but that's not what happened. Bethesda made a big effort to stress that it wasn't what the Brotherhood usually does, and that Lyons's decision to prioritize helping people was extremely controversial within the organization, with a number of members deserting, others growing openly resentful of him, and most of the senior leadership only supporting him out of personal loyalty. I'm not saying that it was fantastic writing, and I wish they could have made a bit more of it, but as it is, I really don't think it's unfaithful to the lore.
The Capital Wasteland is overly ridiculous to the point of stretching credibility, as has been discussed. However, Bethesda doesn't really deserve all the blame for that one, not after Black Isle got the nonsense ball rolling with F2. Is the mere existence of Megaton, a town built around a nuclear warhead, absurd? Of course it is. But you know what, so is a giant fucking molerat who's worshipped as a god and determined to take over the world! And so is the wizard who lives by a bridge and somehow has the power to blow you up if you answer a question wrong. And so are the aliens that you randomly just run into sometimes. The point I'm making is that the franchise was in a very silly state when Bethesda started working on F3, and the game we got was scarcely more goofy than the one that came before it. Of course, they didn't have to continue the trend of silliness, and I'm glad that NV took a few steps back in that regard, but it wasn't unreasonable for Bethesda to assume that fans wanted more of what they saw in F2.
Maybe there was something else I wanted to mention, but I can't remember anything now. Eh, whatever.