Fallout 3 has a different quest structure than Oblivion. Actually, it has the same structure for some quests, but different structures for others. Oblivion had quest chains, where you talked to someone, they gave you something to do, you did it and went back to them, then they said, "Come talk to me again when you want something else to do."
When you had a quest, it showed up in your quest journal. You might have subtasks to do on the way to the main task, and those would show up too. That way, if you put the game down and came back after awhile (or just got sidetracked with some other quest chain), you could check your journal and pick up on a quest at any point. If you finished a quest it would disappear from your "Active Quests" page and go to the "Completed Quests" page, and if you didn't want your active page cluttered up with tons of things, you could not take the next quest from the quest giver until you were ready. This gives players a satisfying To-do list at all times, and a feeling of accomplishment as things were checked off. You could even look back through your completed quests to see all the things you had done and get a further sense your progression in the game.
Fallout 3 has quests and quest chains, it has a journal where your To-do list is kept, and it keeps track of your progress in the main quests. It also has many, many things to see and do that aren't listed in any quest chain. It has random encounters that may lead to other discoveries, it has buildings that tell stories, and many of the things you do change the world, just a little bit. It even has real moral choices, but I'll get to that later.
The largest quest I've done doesn't appear on a quest chain. It isn't contained inside a building (in fact, it takes place over most of the capital wasteland). It doesn't appear on any of the strategy guides or FAQs, and I'm not even sure the designers ever intended to make it a quest.
It starts, fittingly, on Memorial Day, while I was over at my friend Joe's house for a cookout. We got to talking about Fallout 3, which he had played, but abandoned because it was a lot of the same thing over and over. He hadn't progressed very far on the main story, he had just been wandering the wasteland killing people and taking their stuff. We ended up at his computer, so he could show me his character build. Basically he could hit just about anything with his sledgehammer and it would explode. He cursed another friend who told him to take the Bloody Mess perk, because he ended up having to scour the landscape looking for bits of his victims in order to take their stuff. In the low scrub covering most of the wasteland, it was a pain in the ass.
He showed me. He happened to be inside a factory full of zombies. He walked up to one as it shot him with an assault rifle, hit it with his sledge, and boom, it was pulp. Other zombies spotted him and started screaming things... in Chinese.
"Is that Chinese?"
"I guess so."
"So these are Chinese zombies?"
"Yeah, this whole factory is full of them."
"Huh."
I didn't think anything more about it. There are a whole lot of weird things out there in the wasteland, and Joe had found a factory full of Chinese zombies. But that day started my quest, even though I didn't know it at the time.
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