Just figured out why I like Fallout 3 more than New Vegas

[SajuukKhar]

But it seems like you just want another Capital Wasteland to play around in, rather than a rebuilding world. Just because Avellone might personally want to bring things back to square one doesn't mean that it is the absolute only way to go forward with the series. But you seem to want it that way when Bethesda gets back into it. Destroy everything people other enjoyed for another DC that you like.

Actually the reason why I would like a Capital wasteland style area is because it IS a rebuilding world.

The NCR and Legion, and by extension the Mojave, aren't rebuilding worlds, they are rebuilt worlds expanding.

That's the very reason Avellone wants then nuked, the NCR and Legion have already devloped to the point that they have moved past the entire point of Fallout, and any future game featuring them can only move the series further away from the point of Fallout, which is to show humanity trying to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic world.

by nuking everything, and resetting the world back to square one, we can actually have a rebuilding world, ala Fallout 1-3, instead of a rebuilt world bicking with itself, ala New Vegas.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

But it seems like you just want another Capital Wasteland to play around in, rather than a rebuilding world. Just because Avellone might personally want to bring things back to square one doesn't mean that it is the absolute only way to go forward with the series. But you seem to want it that way when Bethesda gets back into it. Destroy everything people other enjoyed for another DC that you like.

Actually the reason why I would like a Captial wasteland style area is becuase it IS a rebuilding world.

The NCr and Legion, and by extension the Mojave, aren't rebuilding worlds, they are rebuilt worlds expanding.

Thats the very reason Avellone wants then uked, the NCr and Legion have already moved past the entire point of Fallout, and any game featuring them can only move the seires further away from the point of Fallout.

A setting can progress, you realize. Perhaps war never changes, but people do. If the point of fallout is its tagline, that's one thing, but a rebuilt civilization isn't against the spirit of fallout. Even without nuking everything into oblivion, the NCR and Legion are doomed, as you said. Caesar is going to die, and the power vacuum will tear Colorado apart. The NCR is already falling apart because of it's mass military spending and weak infrastructure. You don't need a damn nuke to completely wipe the slate clean.

I just feel that nuking both sides is a copout. If a sequel to New vegas was set in California during the collapse of the NCR, I would play the hell out of it. But the nuke removes all ambiguity or complexity by whittling down all the possibilities of such a setting to "they all died." The nuke is a boring way to go, since it takes out everything. There is nothing to tell after such an event happens, unless you want to take another 200 year time jump.

EDIT
To respond to your edit, that's exactly what I'm saying about a setting needing to change. The world has rebuilt, now it's time to see if they can avoid the mistakes of the past. reducing everything to square one is just a rehash, and if they did that, we might as well just stick with the games we have. Otherwise, it will just be derivative of the first games.

 

[SajuukKhar]

A setting can progress, you realize. Perhaps war never changes, but people do.

No, they don't. That's a fundamental fact of not only the real world, but also of Fallout's, that humans will make the same mistakes of the past over and over, and be destroyed by them each time.

See the wars between the BoS, the NCR, The Enclave, The Legion, all are just mimicries of the wars of the past. Mankind cannot change, and just like them, neither can war. The NCR and Legion, upon taking upon themselves the mantles of the past, doomed themselves to the same destruction the previous mantle holders suffered.

If the point of fallout is its tagline, that's one thing, but a rebuilt civilization isn't against the spirit of fallout. Even without nuking everything into oblivion, the NCR and Legion are doomed, as you said. Caesar is going to die, and the power vacuum will tear Colorado apart. The NCR is already falling apart because of it's mass military spending and weak infrastructure. You don't need a damn nuke to completely wipe the slate clean.

You don't NEED one, but its already presented, and would create far more interesting gameplay elements them just a normal societal collapse.

It would be interesting to see how much more mutated an already mutated, but stabilized, animal can be warped after getting nuked again.

I just feel that nuking both sides is a copout. If a sequel to New vegas was set in California during the collapse of the NCR, I would play the hell out of it. But the nuke removes all ambiguity or complexity by whittling down all the possibilities of such a setting to "they all died." The nuke is a boring way to go, since it takes out everything. There is nothing to tell after such an event happens, unless you want to take another 200 year time jump.

That implies that Fallout ever had ambiguity or complexity, it did not.

Fallout has done nothing but repeat the same tired and overused "social commentaries" that every other wanna be "smart" piece of media, be it games, movies, or TV, shows has done, and falls apart in the same way those other pieces of media did, when you realize that all of the questions are artificially deigned to be unanswerable. Fallout is a lot like the ending to Inception, it's only deep because there is nothing there.

And really, you wouldn't need a 200 year time jump, you could go like 40 years, right after the radiation levels go low enough that people could go outside, and have an even more hellish and deadly wasteland then the C.W. has.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Nope.... I'm complaining about the absurd amount of invisible walls everywhere.

So you're not complaining that New Vegas doesn't allow you to sequence break, but it really sucks that they don't allow you to sequence break???

Whats with all the talk of sequence breaking? My issue is that New Vegas is an open world game yet you can't explore a good chuck of it due to invisible walls being everywhere. It seems like instead of properly mapping out the terrain the devs just got lazy and put invisible walls everywhere to compensate.

 

[white_wolf]

Which is the problem sure the chip became important later as more of an after thought. You can reason whatever you like as to why your guy or gal is going to get it back but the plot doesn't and that's an issue its simply I got shot now I need to get it player fill in why its important not the game. To me its seems coincidental the chip is useful otherwise the developers wouldn't have had you chase it down but they could've handled it alot better.

I don't know how you can look at the object that dominates the first half of the game's story and conclude that it was an afterthought. It may be a MacGuffin, but it's a MacGuffin whose fate determines the entire course of the game. I don't think it's fair to regard something with that level of importance to the plot as simply an afterthought.

It could've been nearly anything and the story wouldn't have changed much.

For instance if the hero just got beaten and robbed and their motive is to get the chip make the delivery so he/she and their sister can get into their equivalent of Ten Penny Tower so they can live safely and eat well then we've got a reason to go get the chip that the plot can explain but also give a relateable reason why my hero then isn't some twisted freak who can't take the idea that a bullet to the head is a very good stay the heck away warning sign not to go get the guy who shot them.

The game provides in-game reasons for why you might be pursuing them, but ignore that for a second and consider that tracking down the chip is totally optional. You're free to pursue the game's extensive list of secondary and unmarked quests with wanton abandon while ignoring the main quest entirely. [/quote]

You also find reasons not to undertake getting the item too like the other carriers who died delivering things to that client as well. It's implied the same man who shot you also killed them. But at some point you have to do the main quest or else you never end the game. Like I said I find FO3's plot more believable then FO4's.

 

[SajuukKhar]

You're free to pursue the game's extensive list of secondary and unmarked quests with wanton abandon while ignoring the main quest entirely.

Except your really not.

New Vegas's extensive use of invisible walls, and monster walls, forces you down a path that essentially makes you have to do the first half of the game's narrative as you go down the entirely linear gameworld presented before you.

 

[w00tage]

FO3 takes place two hundred years after the apocalypse, and yet humanity has yet to make any kind of semblance of recovery in the Capital Wasteland. The water is still apparently irradiated two centuries on, people are still salvaging food out of tins that are two centuries old, people are still fashioning hovels out of corrugated tin that's been rusting for two hundred years. It just doesn't make sense.
The atmosphere in FO3 would make sense if it was just a few decades after the bombs, but two hundred years?

Spoiler

QFT. That got me too. I thought so many times "why isn't this set 20 years after the war? Everything would make SO much more sense!"

Disclaimer - I have never played FO:NV, and probably never will. I wanted to play the post-apocalyptic recovery and beginning of the climb upward. I modded the crap out of FO3 to make it a more realistic adventure game, yet never got rid of the persistent aimbugs / other bugs nor managed to overcome the "look at all the stuff for just YOU to scavenge and YOU to succeed at! Don't you feel SPECIAL??" thing that Bethesda does with all its games now. (They are on record as saying "we want the player to feel like they're AWESOME!!" so it's not all me on this.)

So while I can't give an opine on the best game, I can support the description of the parts of the game that eventually got the better of my game experience and made me quit it.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

A setting can progress, you realize. Perhaps war never changes, but people do.

No, they don't. That's a fundamental fact of not only the real world, but also of Fallout's, that humans will make the same mistakes of the past over and over, and be destroyed by them each time.

(rubs temples exasperatedly) That's not what I meant. My god do you love to split hairs. Yes, humans will make the same mistakes. That said, if the humans of Fallout were making the same mistakes as the ones from the Great War, then more people than just Ulysses and Tenpenny would be hunting for free nukes to toss around. The humans of Fallout understand the destructive power of the nukes more than those of the past. Because they're living in a nuclear devastated world. If the nuke was the end all of human ingenuity, and the only thing that could drive the series forward, we might as well forget everything that humans have done since the Great War and just make the next game a treasure hunt for the bomb.

My point is that nuking everything back to square one isn't only irrational on the part of the characters in universe, but also from the perspective of the developers. If you have spent over a decade and several games showing the recovery of humanity after the apocalypse, doesn't it seem the least bit shortsighted to throw all that potential away just to do the same damn thing with a new coat of paint? I'd like to think that the devs from Obsidian and Bethesda are more self aware than that.

 

[Adultism]

I always loved games where it is pure anarchy, fallout 3 made me feel like civilization was ending and I was the last hope, NV made me feel like a greedy madman who wanted to rule New Vegas and thought House was an ass. (kill him every game)

 

[SajuukKhar]

(rubs temples exasperatedly) That's not what I meant. My god do you love to split hairs. Yes, humans will make the same mistakes. That said, if the humans of Fallout were making the same mistakes as the ones from the Great War, then more people than just Ulysses and Tenpenny would be hunting for free nukes to toss around. The humans of Fallout understand the destructive power of the nukes more than those of the past. Because they're living in a nuclear devastated world. If the nuke was the end all of human ingenuity, and the only thing that could drive the series forward, we might as well forget everything that humans have done since the Great War and just make the next game a treasure hunt for the bomb.

If you want to say something then say it, don't hide behind double speak.

And no, more people would not be hunting down nukes, as the nuclear war was caused by a small handful of people, not a mass collective. The pre-war people knew of the dangerous powers of nuclear weapons, and yet, as inevitability always does, one person ended up destroying the world for everyone. The first great war was not the result of collective action, where everyone decided to do it, and it most certainly wouldn't be that post-war. The fate of the world is almost always decided by a few.

My point is that nuking everything back to square one isn't only irrational on the part of the characters in universe, but also from the perspective of the developers. If you have spent over a decade and several games showing the recovery of humanity after the apocalypse, doesn't it seem the least bit shortsighted to throw all that potential away just to do the same damn thing with a new coat of paint? I'd like to think that the devs from Obsidian and Bethesda are more self aware than that.

Actually it would be entirely rational given the motto of the series is "war, war never changes".

It makes perfect sense with literally everything shown in the games thus far that eventually the new world would suffer the same fate as the old, nuclear Armageddon. It would make everything that happened in the series thus far essentially one giant mimicry of human existence up until the point of the great war, but in a smaller scale. The inevitable nuclear annihilation would be nothing more then completing the circle set in stone by the first words of Fallout 1's opening, and indeed would further the main point of Fallout by showing humanity trying to do it all over again, just as we did with the fall of every major empire of the past, and just as we did after the great war, so shall we do again, only to, one day, have to start all over.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Minus the fact that the moment you leave the Doctor's home you're free to go anywhere, in fact it's entirely possible to move right past the Deathclaws to the north straight into New Vegas. Nothing prevents you from skipping the narrative and moving straight to Nipton either. But you're right, such a terrible and linear gameworld. *rolls eyes*

Being able to exploit your way around the monster wall doesn't negate the purpose of the monster wall, or the design behind it, it only shows the implementation was flawed.

And going to Nipton would still be following the linear game path.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Is using mechanics as they were intended to be used really an exploit?

If moving from point A to point B is evidence of a linear gameworld then there is no such thing as a non-linear world.

>Implying that you were meant to get around the monster wall.

>Implying that point A and B separated from each other by a single straight line is the same as A and B being separated by a multitudes of lines that twist and turn and loop back around on each other.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Whats with all the talk of sequence breaking? My issue is that New Vegas is an open world game yet you can't explore a good chuck of it due to invisible walls being everywhere. It seems like instead of properly mapping out the terrain the devs just got lazy and put invisible walls everywhere to compensate.

It has nothing to do with laziness and everything with a flaw in the Gamebryo engine, regardless of how much care you put into it people will find a way to jump around most obstacles. Since obstacles are the things that give games challenge, that means allowing them to do such is essentially sequence breaking. I know people don't like it, and people switching from Fallout 3 to New Vegas hated it especially, but tough. That's the price you pay for narrative.

What flaw was this? I don't see Fallout 3 suffering from the same issue of every small hill in the game being unclimbable due to invisible walls three feet up.

And how is that the price to pay for narrative? I'm pretty sure the narrative could be done just fine without such obstacles.

I'm entirely certain the issue was more a case of Obsidian just being incompetent. Not a surprise considering their track record

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Being able to exploit your way around the monster wall doesn't negate the purpose of the monster wall, or the design behind it, it only shows the implementation was flawed.

So the fact that you can get around a difficult area designed to influencee player's early path is incompetence on teh developer's part? I must tell Valve how much they fucked up when I used their game mechanics to solve a puzzle in Portal a different way than they intended.

 

[SajuukKhar]

The existence of a game past said monster wall is enough to demonstrate that, yes, the developers did not hastily erect an arbitrary obstacle to prevent you from seeing that they never actually finished New Vegas.

If that's the sole criteria between linear and nonlinear then, again, there is no such thing as a non-linear world.

Incorrect on every level. The existence of a game world past the monster wall is only proof that the developers intended you to eventually reach the other side by going the long way, and then, using the skills you gained from going the long way, eventually remove the monster wall, thus allowing for faster backtracking.

I think you are purposefully warping the meaning of linear and nonlinear, or you simply don't know the difference between them.

Fallout 3 is non linear, overworld wise, because it lets you go through many different paths to reach your objective. New Vegas on the other hand is linear, overworld wise, because it only give your one path to reach you objective.

1 path = linear
>1 path = non linear

 

[SajuukKhar]

So the fact that you can get around a difficult area designed to influencee player's early path is incompetence on teh developer's part? I must tell Valve how much they fucked up when I used their game mechanics to solve a puzzle in Portal a different way than they intended.

Blatant false equivalence.

Portal's puzzles were not designed to have only one way to beat them, Fallout New Vegas's gameworld however was designed to only have one path for you to take.

That you could even suggest they are remotely the same is shocking.