Your mistake is that you assume that Fallout 3 is being targeted at Fallout fans, when the developers disdain for Fallout fans has been made repeatedly apparent. The game is not targeted at Fallout fans. That is why they hate it so much. It's targeted at Oblivion fans. The millions and millions of Oblivion fans, who will all by it without thinking.
You make the mistake of assuming that's what I meant. I am saying it never mattered because once everyone found out that the Fallout franchise was changing hands it was doomed; once that news dropped everyone started foaming at the mouth and going into fits and seizures and thus the hate machine started rolling.
Bethesda gives fans some good reasons to doubt, and hate, what they are doing with the franchise, but in all honesty it could have been handed off to a team of perfect, game creating angels and the fans would still shit down their throat for it.
Actually, the fans were shitting down Interplay's throats since Tactics came out, and they thought that was the worst it could get... Then Brotherhood of Steel came out. Most fans would have been ecstatic if Troika had gotten the licence, but they were poor, so they didn't even bid. Then they went out of business and Bethesda didn't even try to hire any of them. I think they actually turned away Leonard Boyarski. Sure there was rage over Bethesda getting the license, but it's constantly grown and progressed as development has gone on and more information has become available. Fallout 3 was being developed at Interplay under the code name Van Buren before they went bankrupt, and it looked like it was finally going to be a true sequel, there's even a tech demo out on the internet that shows how they managed to keep the same look and feel as 1 and 2 while upgrading the graphics.
And you're still acting like Fallout fans are the only target audience for this game when they are in fact not a target audience for this game. Like I said, they're the millions of Oblivion fans, who will buy it regardless of whether or not it's true to the series simply because it's from the same developer that made Oblivion. There's no reasonable doubt that Fallout 3 will be a huge success just like it's predecessor.
@Leo, Just so it's clear they aren't removing kids from any version of Fallout 3. They're just unkillable in all versions. What's funny is, they completely ignored their excuses for excluding kids from Morrowind and Oblivion when they added them to Fallout 3.