RPG's and Fallout 3

I'm officially sick of Fallout 3, but I'm not going to stop playing until it is finished. So obviously, I still like it, but there are a couple of aspects that are starting to bum me out.

The first is that you stop gaining levels at 20, which we hit a week ago. I should have known there was a level cap, but for some reason I thought it was 30, so when I hit 20 and that was it, I was especially dissapointed. I suppose it would have been a little better if I had expected it to end at 20, but even if I had, I think I would have been disappointed because we were only about half way through the game when we hit that level. And we were just playing through normally, not trying especially hard to get extra experience points. Granted, we were trying to solve most of the quests, but even so, maxing out when you are only half way through the game seems broken.

Anyway, so one important aspect of RPG's your character growing more powerful, mostly went away about a week ago. Yes, we can still find bobble heads and books that give some bonuses, but we also didn't realize that skills maxed out at 100 either, so many of ours have already been at 100 for over a week too. I think they should have balanced this better as maxing out has taken a big chunk of fun out of the game. The same thing happened to me when I played Baldur's Gate years ago; I was really enjoying the game, so much so that I was trying to get the most out of it by doing all the side quests and dungeon crawls, but then I hit the level cap right before entering the final city area (forget what it was called). I tried to keep playing to finish the game, but I just lost interest and never wrapped it up. Kinda sad.

The second aspect of the game that is bumming me out is the amount of time it is taking to finish the quests, largely because they have a lot of back and forth elements to them, where you travel to this location, then back, then back to that last location, then back. This is a problem with a lot of RPG's for me, and comparably Fallout 3 does a good job of keeping the quests interesting, with lots of story threads going at once which give the world a feeling of depth, but I guess I'm just looking at the amount of time spent on the game so far and feeling like it's too much. Honestly, I would have been happier if the game was about half as long.

Combine the time sink aspect with the level cap, and it feels like I'm putting a lot of time into the game still, but no longer progressing, which takes much of the fun out of it. At this point, I'm playing simply to finish the game and get the remaining achievements. That said, it's still a VERY good game that I would strongly recommend to anyone who is a fan of RPG's or who has wondered what it might be like to live in a post nuclear holocaust Washingon D.C.