I've almost completed Fallout 3 and for me it is one of the best games I have played in years.

In the beginning I had the same problems you seem to have (repeated crashes). Then I did two things after which I didn't have crashes anymore.

First on the Fallout forum it was mentioned that pc's with a realtec audio card could cause crashes in the game, so before starting up Fallout 3 I always remove RTHDCPL.exe from memory. The second thing was that the following settings were lowered:

- res. 1152x720
- screen effects none
- AA and Anisotropic filtering off.

After these changes I had no more crashes.

I hope this will help.
 

Problem with fleeing to consoles is that due to the wonders of internet patching they now feel they can get away with the shoddyness of games at launch day that the PC gamers have always had problems with:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_Bugs#PlayStation_3

The xbox 360 list is about the same length as the PC bug list; it looks like the PS3 has the most stringent QA of the lot of them given it's minimal bug list.
 

Yep, I don't expect people are fleeing because of that - it's getting worse on consoles ;) and it's unpatchable by the community on there.

You could always try someones later save game and see if it is something specific to that loading section. The GOAT is pretty far through the tutorial, I mean, several distinct areas.

Shame you can't return it. Anything brought from a closing company is prone to this I guess.
 

I'd really like to blame your errors on the fact that you bought an actual box copy, riddled with DRM I'm sure, instead of buying it from Steam.

However I'm pretty sure that you having a box copy versus a Steam copy has nothing to do with the crash at all.

Still, I feel that unless gamers vote with their wallets as to what is acceptable and what isn't to them, we'll be laden with more and more restrictive DRM over time.

Now some would argue that Steam itself is one of the most restrictive ones. Having to be online to play, or at least having to go online to enter 'offline' mode in order to play offline.

Still, I feel it's important that gamers support digital distribution methods such as steam to ensure that gamer companies are forced to strip their crazy ass root kit DRM and distribute via these digital methods which in the case of steam carries far less system intrusive DRM.
 

I'm not much of a PC gamer any longer but generally speaking, bugs in PC games make me a lot less nervous than bugs in console titles. Very rarely do you end up in a situation where none of the myriad of suggested solutions, tweaks, fan-made inofficial patches and the like work on your system, but with a console you're more often than not stuck with the problem indefinitely (after all, it's still the case that relatively few console games ever get any patches and/or DLC whatsoever).

On a (decidedly grumpy) side note, the only malfunction I ever had with Fallout 3 (during roughly 25 hours playing it on my Xbox 360) was that the "Fun_Gameplay" subroutine seemed to have been disabled by the developers...
 

I haven't had any problems with it so far on the PS3. I'm having a blast. Better than Oblivion in my opinion!
 

Yah. I concur with both your reasons. I bought Fallout 3 on the PS3, and I'm having a good time with it, though not GoY time like I was expecting.

On the other hand, I purchased Hinterland via Steam when it was on sale, and I've had a blast with that game.

I don't regret moving to console for precisely this reason. My only regret for the PS3 is that the DLC isn't (yet) available for it, only 360 and PC.
 

Sorry to hear you're having problems. It is easily in my top 5 games of all time (but I really like fps/rpg hybrids and I love the Fallout setting). I've done an entire play through and am halfway through my second and quite literally have not had the game crash even once.

If the problem seems to be specific to the GOAT, you can talk your way out of taking it...just tell the teacher you can't be bothered or some such thing. Worth a try..
 

Hmm, I haven't played it yet, but I've got a few friends that are playing it (on the PC) -- no complaints whatsoever. But then, if it's an audio problem, they've all got Creative hardware, so... *shrug*

@Demiath: "...only malfunction I ever had with Fallout 3 (during roughly 25 hours playing it on my Xbox 360) was that the "Fun_Gameplay" subroutine seemed to have been disabled..." Oh you didn't know? Actually, in most XB360 games, there are a some built-in functions that get automatically called before the game starts:

FunGamePlay* pFun;
findAll(pFun);
deleteAll(pFun);
 

Well, I managed to get a little past that part now. Got about 10 minutes further, to be exact, after turning off all HDR and Bloom features, all antialiasing and filtering, and running it in windowed mode. Didn't seem to make much difference.

I didn't see options for audio other than volume - I don't know how many more potential culprits there could be.

My drivers for my video card are also a little out of date (I had a really bad experience with an update of video drivers a year or so ago, so I'm wary of unnecessary updates now), so I'm updating them now to see if that changes things.

The crashes seem to come pretty regularly in 5 - 10 minute intervals.
 

Wow. With a lot of fiddling, I managed to go a whole 20-30 minutes before crashing this time. Strange that this should feel like some kind of victory. I was actually beginning to enjoy myself when the game died on me again. Fortunately, it was right after I'd saved.
 

I had the same problems, and believe me or not the only way it worked, it was moving it to a 64bit system (Vista 64 Ultimate - I have three different partitions on the same machine). Since there are different processes working on at the same time, Fallout 3 conflicts with them. (Mine was FFDShow related). I suspect that since in a 64bit enviroment, 32bit executables run in a simulated mode (please correct me if I am wrong), the Fallout 3 executable runs pretty much, without any other 32bit programmes running on the backround. (But that's a suspicion I have.Correct me if I am wrong). Since then Ihad 3 0r 4 hours marathons without any problems. And the game is very good. Not in the Fallout 1&2 category but definetelly in the Deus EX.