How Did This Get Game of the Year?

• Crashed Autosaves: Nothing says "Goodbye two hours of my life" like the game deciding it's going to lock-up halfway through a loading screen, thus corrupting your auto-save. Take my advice, if you're playing this game, save manually and save often.
• Getting Stuck in Place: So I was just minding my own business fighting some fire ants when suddenly, while trying to creep along a wall, I was stuck in place and unable to move. This has happened to me numerous other times, but that one was the most memorable because I was already pissed off being knee-deep in that shit-hole fire-ants lair.
• Flying Deathclaws: This one scared the hell out of me. I'm crawling around the wasteland looking for some supplies when I notice a Deathclaw. I ready my weapon and prepare to tangle with the most vicious beast in Post-Apocalyptia, when all of a sudden the mother fucker just vertically leaps a few hundred feat in the air in a second. Out of curiosity, I pulled out Vats and took a few shots, and he fell back down like nothing ever happened. Only it happened a second time. That time I just let him ascend to wherever it was he apparently needed to go.
• The Vault Door That Should Remain Closed: So there's a story mission where you have to go into a vault whose front door has been sealed off by terrible levels of radiation. You have to find a back-door in Little Lamp-Light. While crawling through said vault, I found it's front door from the inside, and out of curiosity, I opened it. Now, I'm pretty sure that this door was supposed to remain shut, and I'm so sure because on the other end was gray. That kind of empty gray that anybody whose ever used a no-clip cheat will be familiar with. I stepped through the doorway and magically popped through a random wall about halfway through the vault. This seems like something that would have been easily fixed, and should never have been encountered.
• VATS Crashes: I don't know what it is about Point Lookout, but that DLC will take any excuse it can to crash on me about once an hour. One such situation included me trying to pull into VATS and the game locking up. But a bigger pain in the ass crash goes back to when I was running the end-game content and pulled into VATS to take out some foes. However, it never pulled out. Even after the enemies were destroyed at the over-eager hands of Fawkes, I just stood there in blurry slow-mo, with nothing better to do apparently.

How Did This Get Game of the Year?

• Crashed Autosaves: Nothing says "Goodbye two hours of my life" like the game deciding it's going to lock-up halfway through a loading screen, thus corrupting your auto-save. Take my advice, if you're playing this game, save manually and save often.
• Getting Stuck in Place: So I was just minding my own business fighting some fire ants when suddenly, while trying to creep along a wall, I was stuck in place and unable to move. This has happened to me numerous other times, but that one was the most memorable because I was already pissed off being knee-deep in that shit-hole fire-ants lair.
• Flying Deathclaws: This one scared the hell out of me. I'm crawling around the wasteland looking for some supplies when I notice a Deathclaw. I ready my weapon and prepare to tangle with the most vicious beast in Post-Apocalyptia, when all of a sudden the mother fucker just vertically leaps a few hundred feat in the air in a second. Out of curiosity, I pulled out Vats and took a few shots, and he fell back down like nothing ever happened. Only it happened a second time. That time I just let him ascend to wherever it was he apparently needed to go.
• The Vault Door That Should Remain Closed: So there's a story mission where you have to go into a vault whose front door has been sealed off by terrible levels of radiation. You have to find a back-door in Little Lamp-Light. While crawling through said vault, I found it's front door from the inside, and out of curiosity, I opened it. Now, I'm pretty sure that this door was supposed to remain shut, and I'm so sure because on the other end was gray. That kind of empty gray that anybody whose ever used a no-clip cheat will be familiar with. I stepped through the doorway and magically popped through a random wall about halfway through the vault. This seems like something that would have been easily fixed, and should never have been encountered.
• VATS Crashes: I don't know what it is about Point Lookout, but that DLC will take any excuse it can to crash on me about once an hour. One such situation included me trying to pull into VATS and the game locking up. But a bigger pain in the ass crash goes back to when I was running the end-game content and pulled into VATS to take out some foes. However, it never pulled out. Even after the enemies were destroyed at the over-eager hands of Fawkes, I just stood there in blurry slow-mo, with nothing better to do apparently.

May I ask what you're playing it on?

I've literally experienced none of those things even once. >_>

Your problem: You are probably not playing it on the PC, and if you are your PC is the problem.

I've played both and had more glitches and crashes than the 360 version. But the 360 version seems to be suffering from bad frame rate now, it was fine before the DLC's though. :/

Flying Deathclaws for the win.

Also, you can't use the phrase "janky as it gets" in reference to a video game until you've played Too Human.

Guess it just comes down to luck. On the xbox360 (the console itself it only a few months old which may play into it) I'm currently about 80 hours into the game and I've had 2 crashes.

One of which happened after downloading Point Lookout, but I'm sure it's coincidence.

I play Fallout 3 on the PS3, and have none of the downloadable content yet. I've still experienced a number of crashes and freezes, however. Some of the freezes fix themselves after a minute or two but some of them I give up on after waiting for five minutes. It's a shame that this game has these problems, because apart from these crashes and freezes I've had a great time gathering all the trophies and going through the game several times with different character builds and karma paths. I've been blessed with not having my autosaves corrupt, but since the game has frozen and not unfrozen for long enough for me to reset the console I've obviously lost progress now and then.

I'm looking forward to getting the DLC, hoping they won't make the game play worse.

Well Bethesda isn't exactly known for polished games.

It has it rough edges alright. I found a chair in an underground bunker in Point Lookout that if you sit on it, you fall through and out of the world.

It's to be expected from a Bethesda, I had some issues just like you but it's still one of my favorite games and my personal GOTY 2008. I haven't got the DLC yet, waiting for the GOTY edition of the game for that, get everything at once and play through it again.

Working at a game studio, I tend to agree with the OP. But I do give a little lee-way to Bethesda due to the huge scope of the game. When making a game with this massive of an open world it is impossible to find every single texture / geo problem in the game. In the end though, the sheer volume of non art related bugs is inexcusable. Bethesda is notorious for releasing buggy games, which is a shame since the games they release have alot of potential, and are usually pretty fun.

The game has its glitches but is worth it.

It has all the same bugs that Oblivion does, which is saying something. Oddly I loved both.

I played it on PC and I never encountered any of those glitches.

Hrm, I had my share of problems, but since it autosaves every time you go through a door it was almost never a problem for me. The first lockup I had was on the way to Rivet City, and other than that I had glitches and a freeze once or twice, but rarely had problems and it was far from a deal breaker. 

I also never encountered any of your bullet-pointed glitches. I have, however, fallen victim to many, many crashes. A lot of them are attributed to Asus' terrible soundcard drivers (seriously, don't try to game on a Xonar), but there are the occasional more random ones. Everything seems to be made worse the more DLC you've downloaded. I guess that's understandable (though not entirely acceptable), since they obviously don't go back and check every little spot on the map of their original areas and coding conflicts for bugs.

Also, yeah, there are points where you can see through terrain into the void of "noclip land." Rubbing against rock cliffs nets you that oversight the most. I also know what door you are talking about in the lamplight quest, but that door is totally unreachable without giving yourself god mode, because the radiation levels will kill you in seconds. Obviously, radiation is not triggering if you are able to do that.

My advice would be to do a full re-install of the game, patch it completely, then add in any DLC last. None of those bugs seem normal, so the only thing I can think of is a corrupt install, or some conflicts in user mods, if you're using any.

Edit: oh, and the falling through the world thing is a huge bug for Bethesda, apparently. If you think it's bad in Fallout 3 (has only happened to me once in that game, personally), try Morrowind. You fall through the floor so often in that game that I'm actually a little afraid to make any unnecessary movements. It's so jarring to be walking around as normal and then suddenly be falling into this flickering void, only to be placed back in the game world seeming at random when you reach the bottom.

Yup. Especially the PS3 version. Great ideas, poor execution.

Problem with Nintendo games that aren't buggy, and indeed any type of game that isn't buggy, is that that doesn't necessarily are fun, engrossing, or well designed from a gameplay perspective. Take Phantom Hourglass for example. Visiting the same temple 5 times in a row, having the do the same rooms and then some each time on an unnecessary timer while avoiding invincible enemies that kill you in one hit, while not quite glitchy, is not good design either.

Ive only frozen once on my 360, my 360's router got taken out by lighting so its an unpatched fallout 3. I dont get very many problems at all.