If it wasn't misleading in the first place, how did it look worse when it was released? That would mean the trailer, by looking better than the actual release... was misleading. You're talking in circles.

I'm going to walk you through this really slowly. The graphics in the trailer were pretty much accurate to how they looked in game. However, the trailer is only a couple of minutes and carefully chosen shots. Once you play the game, you see the entirety of the game—not just the small section of the trailer. Do you see how only seeing a couple minutes of carefully chosen shots might not give us a complete idea about a game, taken as a whole, looks?

Because it never caused a serious issue to me before, and anything that did go wrong was easily fixed. I can tell you 100% that I've never been stopped in a Bethesda game because of a bug, but to the people who were,

Regardless of your personal experience, for most people Fallout 3 is a game riddled with bugs, and they are sometimes very serious and game breaking—especially on consoles. You may say "if you want a functional game, play on PC!" I would say that Bethesda has an obligation to deliver functional games to people who pay them money.

I say... that's videogames for you. Game-breaking bugs exist in games across the entire spectrum of gaming, and sure they suck, but I think you might want to be sending your complaints to the almighty programming Gods in that case, not Bethesda.

I am half-convinced I'm being trolled at this point. Seriously? "That's video games for you?" This subreddit is ridiculous when it comes to apologizing for Bethesda. They released very buggy, often unplayable games. Many other developers have managed to release great games that aren't as bad in terms of number or severity of bugs.

They do when they are good features which add to the game...

Regardless of how many sprinkles you put on a pile of dogshit, it's still dogshit. Not only did Fallout 3 have functional problems, but it had problems with the core of the game, as enumerated by plenty of critics outside the mainstream gaming press that heralded it as a masterpiece. Having a non-Shandified narrative, piss-poor writing, awful gunplay, etc. won't be fixed by tacking on settlement building or a voiced MC or NPCs saying your name.

I understand that you, like I, might have a very strong nostalgic tie to older games, but your fond feelings don't actually mean the game is better. Just like Zelda fans say Ocarina of Time is the greatest game ever, and just like RPG fans say FF7 is infallibly perfect... they just aren't. Rose-tinted glasses make everything a lot better than they objectively are.

Ah, and here we are. The Fallout 3 fanboy's inevitable trump card. So far, we've heard these classics:
* "It's not buggy for me!"
* "Making functional games is impossible!"
* "More features = a better game!"

Now we get to this. First of all, you are assuming that I have nostalgia for the original Fallouts, which I don't. Your call for objectivity is also hilarious given that you have reduced my arguments to nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses, when I have done nothing but appeal to objectivity. Notice that I kept my points strictly related to the games, and you are baselessly accusing me of being delusional from nostalgia? Who is the nonobjective one here?