Fallout 3 is the best example of uncanny valley phenomenon.<p>In original Fallout you enter a city which spans across four screens, repetetively uses the same set of limited sprites and is inhabited by some random moving pixels acting as citizens of which several have some interesting dialog lines.<p>The Fallout 3 seems similar at first, only employing a major leap in technological advancement - the city spans in every direction, there are animated and voice acted characters, and everyone is presented in cutting edge 3D technology.<p>But it all falls flat upon closer inspection. Every building is exactly the same. Dialogs are mundane and everyone has some sort of hiking accident where they took an arrow to the knee and even though the city has only 8 buildings its easy to get lost.<p>The reason is simple - in the original the story takes place mainly in your head, it's a mind's eye theatre, the game only gives you a broad outlines of the world and you are forced to fill out the blanks yourself. The game doesn't try to be realistic and leaves you a lot of space.<p>Once you start animating and voice acting your characters you quickly realize it's an endless money pit. The more lines you add, the cost grows exponentially, because you have to account for all localisation scenarios.<p>This is summed up very well (forgive me for not looking up reference and quoting from memory) by Bioshock lead who said in interview:<p>"At work if I have an idea we need to assemble a team - including programmers, modellers, scripters - and just to get a basic prototype that would give us the gist of what we were thinking it takes a month or more. Meanwhile, at home, I can relax after work, and in one evening session create a whole Doom campaign."