Okay. So. Fallout 3.

This is an excellent game. It is my favorite game this year. And I cannot ever play it again.

Well, maybe I can in a few years time, when I've nearly forgotten the game altogether. I've been experiencing this same problem with Morrowind. When I originally played the game, I became totally immersed in it, like I was living another life. I approached Morrowind as I think I would if I was really there, really talking to the people and really exploring the island.

Er, I mean, of course, if I had the skills to fight hoards of enemies and run for miles carrying 200lbs of equipment without tiring.

Then I stopped playing. I had explored most of the island (though not nearly all of it) and gone through most of the main quest and I was just in the mood for something else. Shortly after, my mother uninstalled the game and deleted all the info for it in one of her crazy spring cleaning runs she does on the family PC. That's... that's a whole other story.

Anyway, I eventually ended up with an Xbox and enough money to buy the Game of the Year Edition for the console. Not as preferable as the PC version with the user mods, but by this time I'm at college and I don't have a PC anymore. I'm really looking forward to getting back into Vvardenfell and trying to play as a different class from my original character.

So I step off the boat that brings you into the island. Choose dark elf as my race and do a little custom class to mix up some weapon and spell usage. I play for a bit, begin to do some missions in Balmora. Soon enough, I take a break, and I never come back.

The problem was that I was already familiar with all the missions and characters. Sure, this time I joined the Fighters' Guild inside of the Thieves', choose the Long Blade instead of the Sneak skill, but the locations and the faces and dialogue was stuff that I already knew. A quest that had previously taken an hour of exploring to finish only took a few minutes, because I knew where everything was. A supplementary problem is that by spending less time exploring and fighting monsters, I wasn't getting any leveling done and was stuck without any cool abilities or strengths. Ultimately, I began to wish I could just pick up my old PC save file and start playing the expansion packs from there.

It's only natural that I'm having the same problem with Fallout 3, since both games are Bethesda. I'm having a more interesting problem this time, though. See, Fallout is great because there are literally thousands of different decisions you can make in the game, some minute, like giving a thirsty bum some water, and some grand, like blowing up an entire city. Whenever I go back to start a new game, however, I can only make the same decisions I made before!

This is really bizarre to me! It's also kind of pathetic. Do I take this fantasy world so seriously that I can't cap some guy in the brain without feeling bad about it?

Right now, I'm trying to play with a particular personality in mind. I'm a female character, and I wanted to play like this mercenary seductress, so naturally with the Black Widow perk enabled and only accepting missions that pay well. My problem is that as soon as I begin to play like this, Fallout 3 becomes just a game. There is no longer any motivation for me, because I, in reality, am not motivated by greed, nor am I a seductress. I become detached from the world, an outsider looking in, a kid with a toy -- rather than what I want to be: a character in the story.

I have this problem with all open-world games, really. KOTOR, Fable, etc. These are games that I have to extract every once of enjoyment out of the first time through because, unless I forget everything about the games, I'll never be able to play them the way I want to again.