You can be post Apocalyptic and not be a desert or a burned out city with no vegetation/life in it.

 

You can, but you can't be Fallout.

You can, but you can't be Fallout.

yes you can.  They have simply decided to go that route every time.

@Karkarov, seriously: Fallout is all about feel, and at least for me the parched wasteland thing with corrugated iron shacks among blasted ruins is very central to that feel. It wouldn't feel the same if it wasn't that. (In fact Honest Hearts which was set in a very pretty wilderness felt "wrong" for me for that reason.)

Objection! DA did not have good storytelling. 

 

Well, not much, anyway. 

 

The dwarven noble origin was good, I admit, as were a couple of the Orzammar quests. The rest was dullsville.

I said storytelling, not story. They tell the story (with that cinematic view and good voice acting, at least in my version) really well. Story was ok, imho, even if some other stories are much better. DA one smells too much of GoT.

Ah, right. Yeah, BioWare does do the cinematic thing well. That's the bit I liked most about the Mass Effects also. It's a shame their writing is so uneven.

 

 

The perks in Fallout were made over about a week (or was it a weekend?) and they were great. It doesnt take long to add this stuff.

And the vast majority of them are just simple +x of y type stuff.

 

You say that like its a bad thing.

 

They are fine for what they are, but they aren't particularly interesting or doing much for variety. You just choose what makes you better at what you were doing anyway.

It's all about gameplay. I find the Icewind Dale games more replayable than the Baldur's Gate games because there's so much variety in party creation and the combat is so consistently challenging. BG, once you know the world and plot, it's always the same thing, and the combat isn't as good (although Ascension has some very nice battles).