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

[Soviet Heavy]

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.

Did you ever listen to Valve's dev commentaries on Portal? They said that playtesters were finding ways to manipulate their velocity system with portals to beat puzzles other than the intended way. Valve made their puzzles with single methods in mind, but the fact that people found ways around them isn't incompetence on their part. They left them in for intrepid players to find new solutions that they hadn't thought of.

That's not true, however. There are several ways to get around New Vegas, and declaring "THIS IS THE ONLY WAY YOU ARE ALLOWED TO GO NO IFS ANDS OR BUTS" is just ludicrous. I can make a high stealth character sneak through the deathclaw quarry using a stealthboy and high perception. If Obsidian truly wanted you to only go southeast, then they might as well have made any alternative route just instakill you like if you leave the map in Halo.

The game was designed to have a normal route to go on for most players, but that is not the only route and never was. You can skip past entire sections, and the game still works. Want to follow the highway? Go ahead. Want to hit scorpion gulch or the Primm Pass? You can do that too, just be careful. Suggesting that the southeast passage is the only route you are allowed to take is grasping at straws.

 

[Mr Companion]

I agree, its the sense of exploration and desolation that I liked about 3.

New Vegas is great and all but its focus is on NPC interaction which the Bethesda engine is not comfortable with at all. Even worse when I try to play by Vegas's ideas about making my own story and roleplaying I find the game is very flimsy and tends to fall apart whenever I try something clever. The game is also far more empty of things to explore and everything tries to redirect you towards the main plot because there really isn't anything else to see or do.

 

[Adultism]

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

Or maybe you are bad at New Vegas, I managed to blast my way up north and survived without a high level. It just takes thinking and some logic.

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.

Or you can go right, ignore the quest line and just fight and kill stuff. There are side quests on the way up to Vegas and you don't even have to do the quests leading up you can just go right then straight north to NV. This war needs to stop

But hell, War never changes.

 

[cerebus23]

It takes a REALLY long time to open up the whole sandbox in NV

Says the person who never took on the Cazador swarm with dynamite, or used a stealthboy to sneak past the Deathclaw quarry.

Or just used a ton of quicksave/reload going east and south past the mountains crossing over to vegas,
early out of the gate. Thats what i did my first play through. Took a butt load of reloads to get past the mutants and deathclaws, trying different routes to avoid them, and then finally seeing vegas across that open deathclaw free desert, in the darkness of night.

Only thing i scof in general at is people saying that fo3 did not railroad you along, that was the thing turned me off the worst was the big chunks of dead city, the twisty sewer/subway routes not being able to go 3 blocks without needing to find a tunnel rather than just walk down the streets, or going through buildings.

Mods took care of most of the walls in new vegas, just like oblivion. But out of the gate i hated the fake walling and cliped off mountains and etc in both games.

 

[Puzzlenaut]

Yet there are multiple paths throughout the game. I can reach Nipton in a variety of ways and if I choose to explore a bit I can even skip over the quest for Manny and find the information about where the Khans are at. Hell, I can skip straight through the deathclaw beef gate and head straight into New Vegas, granted this requires a level of knowledge about the game you wouldn't have just starting out but there you go, it can be done without exploiting the system. You mistake the gentle nudges for first-time players as evidence of an on-rails story.

Or just used a ton of quicksave/reload going east and south past the mountains crossing over to vegas,
early out of the gate. Thats what i did my first play through. Took a butt load of reloads to get past the mutants and deathclaws, trying different routes to avoid them, and then finally seeing vegas across that open deathclaw free desert, in the darkness of night.

Only thing i scof in general at is people saying that fo3 did not railroad you along, that was the thing turned me off the worst was the big chunks of dead city, the twisty sewer/subway routes not being able to go 3 blocks without needing to find a tunnel rather than just walk down the streets, or going through buildings.

Mods took care of most of the walls in new vegas, just like oblivion. But out of the gate i hated the fake walling and cliped off mountains and etc in both games.

Nobody is saying it is totally impossible to get past the Deathclaws (though it is impossible to get past the mountains in the exact centre of the map), but you have to admit that it is obviously the will of the developer that you don't. Invisible walls + ridiculously high levelled monsters very near the starting area mean that in NV unless you play in a very counter-intuitive way, you are rail-roaded around the map in a big loop before you get to Vegas:
From Goodsprings to Primm to the NCR Outpost to Nipton to Novac and then possibly a few detours but probably NV itself.

Spoiler

If you look at the layout of the map it is very obvious the player is rail-roaded this way in order to stretch out the time before you get to vegas so that the map seems a lot bigger than it is. This has the unforeseen consequence of, once you get to Vegas and feel like you have an actual free run of the place, there's nothing much left: very large areas of the map, much larger than any in FO3, are essentially impassable mountains (or impassable hillocks; Obsidian do love their invisible walls).

Alternatively, upon emerged from Vault 101 in FO3, you pretty much have free run of the place. There are no impassable walls of monsters: there are plenty of enemies far too powerful to ever properly face, but generally you can find ways around them or wait for them to pass. I didn't even see Megaton, the obvious 'first town' you are supposed to go to, until a few hours in. There is no clear route through the wasteland that the developers try to force you to go through.

--

Onto some more general comments about the games:

Lots of people complain that Fallout 3's towns were dull an forgettable. This is something I don't understand at all. Even nonsensical and dull towns like Big Town have far more character than, say, Nipton or Novac from NV. Megaton has ten times the character of Goodsprings. New Vegas basically just has Vegas and nothing else of interest. The various faction-headquarters, like Caesar's camp and the Great Khans' camp just felt like the places where you went to go to the factions' leader, rather than places worth exploring in their own right.

In terms of atmosphere, Fallout 3 was much more compelling to me as tredding on the ashes of ruined America, seeing all the monuments haunted and decayed, was more affecting than just endless desert. The grim palette of a grey-scale wasteland of dead suburbia in FO3 was more haunting than the the brighter, wackier Mojave. A lot of NV fans have said that the feel of the Mojave is more in tune with FO1 and 2 as Fallout is about post-post-apocalypse, not just post-apocalypse; about rebuilding and the return of civilisation. I guess that's fair enough, but for me, if this is how Fallout 3 strayed from the prophetically revered RPGs that are FO1+2, then good on it as too few games successfully get across a truly grim atmosphere (even NV does it far better than most).

Player motivation was a stickler for me in New Vegas. In Fallout 3, you are kicked out of your home, forever, (so you think). Where do you go, what do you do? The urge to explore as a motivator on its own makes a lot more sense in FO3, when you are newbie to the wasteland, than in NV, where you have lived there for years. Selective amnesia is a terrible plot device. The outward-urge aside, finding your father, who has previously been established as a person you care for and who cares for you in what I consider to be the second-greatest opening sequence of a game ever (second only to Bioshock, as I see it), is a simple motivation that you can understand and get behind. Familial ties are the simplest and yet the most post powerful and affecting motivations for characters in media: from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones, familial obligations drive even the most complex characters into the conflicts that form impressive narratives.
My point is that a search for your father and parental abandonment is a theme, oft-trodden in media, that many of us can understand and get behind.
In Fallout New Vegas, however, our motivation is... what? Find Benny. But why? Revenge as a motivator makes so little sense when we are playing an, essentially, silent protagonist with no prior history with Benny besides this one, random and non-personal act of violence. Unless you are given very, very good reasons to hate a character, like Joffrey in GoT or Shepherd in Modern Warfare 2, rooting for a character motivated by revenge is difficult, and playing as that character, especially in an RPG that is supposed to be open-ended in your motivation, is even more jarring.

 

[Smeatza]

Fallout 3 was an Elder Scrolls game doing it's best to look like a Fallout game.
Fallout: New Vegas was an actual Fallout game with proper RPG elements, real choices and real consequences.

 

[scorptatious]

In Fallout New Vegas, however, our motivation is... what? Find Benny. But why? Revenge as a motivator makes so little sense when we are playing an, essentially, silent protagonist with no prior history with Benny besides this one, random and non-personal act of violence. Unless you are given very, very good reasons to hate a character, like Joffrey in GoT or Shepherd in Modern Warfare 2, rooting for a character motivated by revenge is difficult, and playing as that character, especially in an RPG that is supposed to be open-ended in your motivation, is even more jarring.

He didn't just commit an act of violence, he shot you twice in the head and left you for dead. All for a chip. Frankly, I would be a tad bit curious as to why a man in a checkered outfit would go to so much trouble for a chip.

That's one of the things I liked about New Vegas and to an extent, 1 and 2. You're essentially a blank slate, and you can pretty much determine what kind of character you are and what your motivations and morals are. You can go after Benny solely for revenge, but you could also go after him in order to find out why he attacked you and why the chip he took from you is so important.

And of course, once you do find out what's going on, you as the player can decide what you feel is best (or worst if you're playing an evil and anarchic character) for the Mojave.

Not that there's anything wrong with 3's approach to this kind of thing, it all comes down to preference in the end.

 

[Suncatcher]

3 definitely did feel more apocalyptic. The problem in my mind is that in order to get that feel they threw any sort of logic to the curb. If it were 30-40 years after the bombs fell, that kind of devastation would make sense. Very few people, nothing grows, more people die every day and those who live do so by scavenging what they can from the civilization that used to be, in the unkempt ruins of what was a great city. But two hundred years later, it really just doesn't work. Everything that could be scavenged would have been. The rate at which I personally killed bandits could never have been sustained by the birth rate we saw, and it's heavily implied that each of those bandits had killed multiple wastelanders. 99% of the population were psychopaths with no constructive skills. Robots constantly explode and are never built. Food is constantly eaten and never produced. Hell, bullets are constantly expended and nobody can make more outside of the Pitt. The entire system survives only because of the magical reset button that fills empty containers and replaces dead bandits every three days. If the Capital operated on logic, either everybody would have died out long ago or things would have been cleaned up and redeveloped to, well, the state they were in New Vegas. Because people can't just live in Post-Apocalypse for two bloody centuries; at some point either they die or the get over it, and that takes a lot less time than the full history of the United States.

I realize that I'm over thinking, and most people don't care about the sustainability or logic of their wasteland setting. But the game punishes you for thinking about it too much, and I have difficulty not thinking about things. If they'd set F3 back in time, maybe alongside the first game but on the other side of the country, it might work. If there had been some fresh disaster, or a reason for massive immigration to the Capital, or a few farms or factories included in the (many, large) empty spaces in the map, maybe I'd have been able to enjoy it more. But an open world game with a blank slate protagonist only really works when you can immerse yourself in it.

New Vegas felt like a world that I could play in, with almost real people and enemies that made sense and an actual sense of accomplishment to some of the things I did. The Capital Wasteland felt like a cluster of (very soft, poorly thought out) sci-fi stories for me to follow or ignore one by one, peppered with faceless mooks to inconvenience me every step along the way.

 

[ImmortalDrifter]

Fallout 3's devastation and lifelessness was actually rather neatly explained by the fact that due to the conflict being with China, most defenses would be on the West Coast, F3 did take place in the Capital (making it the most nuked area in the nation), there was no control vault in the immediate area, and the biggun: No player character had existed there yet! This is of course a crapshoot, but I would hazard that the East (especially D.C.) would receive five nukes for every one in the West. Fewer would survive the impacts, there would be more radiation, and there would be more time for things to rot and deteriorate before humans could reclaim the landscape. Also the increased anarchy (super mutants, raiders, slavers) reduced the onset of "power players" (EG: The Brotherhood.) that would bring stability to the wasteland. Also Also, it's a matter of tech limitations. (Models on screen etc)

That being said, I do like F: NV more. The mechanics were vastly improved, there was more variety in weapons and armor, and of course Frank Sinatra. Oh and WEAPON REPAIR KITS!!!

 

[Drakovicz]

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.

- You can get through either Death-claws or Cazadores by using terrain, sneak, timing and a bit of luck. Admittedly due to wonkyness of Gamebryo, this could be considered an exploit if you widen the definition enough

-You can get through Death-claws or Cazadores by using stealth-boys. In-fact one stealth-boy is all you need to bypass the death-claw territory, regardless of your build or level. There is ALWAYS one stealth-boy in Goodsprings schoolhouse, a location where you are sent as a part of tutorial, and you obtain the stealth-boy as a part of hacking/lock-picking tutorial.

-Even on level 2-3 and abysmal explosives stats you are able to kill Cazadores using basic sticks to dynamite, because Cazadores have crippling weakness against explosives or anything else that does high damage to body parts. You can easily obtain HUGE amount of dynamite at the beginning the game thanks to Powder Gangers.

- Both Mr. House and Benny react differently (and allow you to have different conversation options as well) if you meet them without completing all the previous parts of main quest. In fact there are countless changes in dialogue all around if you go from Goodsprings right to New Vegas like NPCs commenting about the Powder Gangers overtaking Primm or there being no news from Nipton or Novac having a ghoul problems... Or the fact that if you bypass the whole thing, meet Benny and then return to Goodsprings and go the usual route, your dialogue changes to reflect that you are no longer looking for the man that shot you....

But go on, Its amusing to hear you talk about how Obsidian totally didnt meant that player gets around some monster wall.

 

[A-D.]

Snip.

I really hate when people break up quotes.

It's a serious imaginative stretch to take what you see and hear of him being a nice, caring, even-handed father and get to an extreme, hate-worthy negative. Overprotective and coddling is a lot closer to the starting point you're given, but (and maybe this is just my childhood of neglect talking) that's hardly hate-worthy to my mind. Actual hate. Not, pissy about not being in-the-loop of dad's business. Which, by the by, when you find him, you can tell him you're not interested in traveling with him back to Purity and having a hissy fit if you really care to, not that you won't end up there eventually anyway, helping, if you want to finish the main story anyway (if I recall correctly, it's been some time).

The fallout (no pun intended) of what he did by leaving was not a known-known for him as he left. The radroaches and some other issues came to a simultaneous head and the Overseer was a lot more ready to jump to violence than maybe could have been anticipated. There's a communication he leaves with Jonas (I think that's the name) you can recover that basically says he thinks you, as an adult accepted member of the vault in your own right now, will probably face some anger but will eventually be able to smooth things over by keeping in line with the rules in time.

I tended to blame the Overseer and the apathy of the Vault population in the face of his tyrannical dictatorship way more than Dad for leaving that behind. I mean, if I really gave it a lot of thought, maybe I could go the way you seem to, which is towards the resentment of the set-up and then abandonment thing, but I might end up going pretty far the other way too - I mean, the man must have been going insane with frustration in that Vault the whole time he was raising me up and mortality and old age was knocking on his mind to get away from the mindless vault and back into the world to do some good, being one of the few folks capable of good on such a scale. With a plan and everything.

Oh sure, but that robot is going to be in the towns on the path you're supposed to take (and directly North is deathclaw land, not really a viable "path" anywhere until you have a seriously beefy combat ability). I mean - you can say screw it to Dad for just as long as you can say screw it to going to Vegas to find Benny/meet House.

I'll totally grant that NV's main plot is more complex and choice based than FO3's - hands down. It's more elaborate, responsive, sensitive to order of your operations and all you're saying here. Of course, the nature of the plot (who will control NV?) calls for that. FO3's main plot is more basic and linear.

The first game was much closer to the nuclear event. There are lots of kinds of bombs, but I see your point. That's the explanation the game gives anyway, and the White House is... really really really (go there and you will die soon) irradiated above ground when you if you bother to do the convoluted tunnel crap to peek in there. The "I'm making up a theory right now" response to that from me would be, I guess, maybe the research facility turned into goo because of a combination of what was being researched there and the bomb? Usually goo pits are not the result of atomic bombs - I don't think.

I don't think Fallout is real strong on the science of nuclear apocalypse. Not the real science anyway. You make good points, but they all tag into the "realism" category, which has never been that strong a priority in the series as far as I've ever been able to tell. There are a lot of ghouls in the area though, the ladies in the Museum talk about how many there were right after the bombs and how so many eventually went feral over the decades and centuries.

Mainly I think the problem is the groundwater and aquifers being irradiated and thus not supporting normal life/plants/etc. in the area - a problem around which the main plot revolves. Lots more parts of D.C. are radiation areas than I saw in NV too. You certainly don't see much "normal" vegetation or really any non-mutated wildlife in the D.C. area, other than some dogs etc. There are no major verdant areas.

I don't know. I know it's a major sticking point for a lot of people, but it's never been a big bother to me - but the more I think about it, maybe it's because FO3 was my first Fallout game I played myself, rather than watched someone else play or simply read about.

I like both games a lot and I think they have different strong points. I totally agree with the OP about the grim atmosphere of D.C. being attention gripping for me. Every little artifact that gives a clue of how things went so wrong or what life was like before the bombs was always interesting to me - in both settings - but seemed particularly poignant in D.C. where society has clearly not yet recovered and hope is meager, rather than in NV where the current society seems more vibrant and present than the long gone people of the past.

Actually, its not as much a stretch as it is a problem of what we are and are not told. We get 3 glimpses, one where we are literally one year old, one where we are 10 and another at 16. That is the extent of what the game shows us of our childhood, he may be a relatively nice dad, but that doesnt mean he does not have problems, he could be a alcoholic, a really nasty one even who beat you around half the vault when he had a couple too many drinks. Does the game say so? No it does not, but the thing is that the game shows you parts of where you grow up, but you are left to fill in the blanks, i.e. you have to make up a reason why you want to find your Dad, not that he ever told you where he went, or why he went there. Think about it, the only real reason we leave the vault is NOT to find our dad, but rather because the overseer went crazy and we simply had to. How nice our Dad is or how important his quest is, we either do not care directly or do not even know about it. And the only reason the overseer went crazy is cause of lazy writing, bethesda had to give you a reason to get out of the vault, there is no actual choice involved in any way.

However, lets assume the overseer has a chip on his shoulder which is shown to us several times, so we can logically explain why he goes ballistic on us because dad left. First it has to show us and show that the guy is serious, which means that our dad would know that the overseer is unhinged already and that leaving might just set him off. From what i know your dad actually DOES know about it, as when you return later you can find bits and pieces of how him and your dad did not get along. Is that reason he should worry about the overseer going after you? Perhaps not, but should he not on paternal instinct alone make sure just in case? Which means he either is neglectful, or forgetful, which isnt exactly a great trait for a parent when it comes to their own children. So if he had planned his eventual escape and it was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision, he left out a large part of his plan, i.e. you being left behind, and if that is the case, he is a colossal ass.

But to get to the point of Victor. Yes he does follow you, its part of his design, he was intended, by Mr. House to monitor your arrival in goodsprings since you were carrying the chip. Then you got shot by Benny, which by the way is explained in the game, he had a hacked securitron calculate where you'd most likely show up cause he wanted that chip. Mr. House also states that the reason for not interfering, as wierd as it is, had to do with one lone securitron being up against several people when he could not control it sufficiently enough to actually make use of the securitron, in RPG terms, Victor was debuffed due to being way outside of range and had Mr. House acted, Benny would know and act much quicker, which could be pretty bad for Vegas as well. However, you can go north, i have done it without cheating while being level 2. And i didnt have the stealth-boy from the goodsprings school either, avoiding cazadors is hard, avoiding deathclaws and exploiting the terrain though is not. So when you do that, you can skip that whole ring-around entirely and go north, screw victor and everything. And once you go to vegas proper? The only thing you actually have to do, to advance the plot, is confront benny. You dont have to see Mr. House, you dont even have to kill Benny, you just need to show up and talk to him to set the events into motion to continue the mainquest, but even that you arent forced to do, you arent railroaded into it.

And once you follow the mainplot, you get choices, you arent instantly made a "good guy" and sided with the brotherhood, you can fight for house, or the NCR, or the legion, or for yourself. The latter being a failsafe in case you kill "important people" such as house, caesar or piss off the ncr enough. No single NPC is set as essential in this game, you can literally kill everyone. Course you also instantly fail all their quests.

The radiation is another thing, even 80 years after the war, it has subsided enough that places like Los Angeles, a major staging ground for the US armed forces in-universe-lore are inhabited, which means it is a high priority target. DC may have been the capital, but it wasnt the most important strategic target. Given that all the US was nuked, or most of it anyway, even if DC wasnt hit, the USA was finished, there was no infrastructure left, so essentially it is just "good measure" to even target it. The same goes for Vegas actually. And it gives you a number of how many bombs actually did drop, if i recall it was a double digit number, with most actually shot down by House's laser defenses, which also ties into the platinum chip, had he recieved it just a day earlier, Fallout may never have happened.

And i never said anything about goo. I spoke of the Glow, or West-Tek, which was a research installation with 6 sublevels, everything above ground was gone and there was just a giant crater left, which went 3 levels deep as well. Even in the lowest level the radiation of the place is capable of killing you, in fact just going there can give you radiation poisoning within a minute, that being above ground right at the impact crater. West-Tek also developed the FEV just for added bonus, which was why it made people immune to it for the most part and a perfect sample had to be used, which ties into the plot of Fallout 2.

The point is however, that DC should either be a glass-house, if as many nukes dropped there as it would take to literally irradiate the place for that long, or it should have cleared up by now, enough to support live on a grand-scale. Both are made impossible because DC is still intact for the most part, granted there's lots of rubble, but there are also no thriving communities there. Another factor is, the Enclave arrived in DC before the brotherhood did, so why didnt they rebuild anything? Simply because they are just re-hashed to be there as the big bogeyman, which also ties into the lack of choice, you cant side with them nor are you given any kind of input on whether they might just be the good guys. They are vilified because the plot demands them to be and the only reason that they are "evil" is because of Eden anyway, he is the only one who wants to use the FEV. Colonel Autumn just wants the purifier to rebuild and civilize the capital wasteland.

Course there are way more logical and lore-inconsistencies, such as the presence of super mutants. Why is there FEV in DC? FEV-Research was done by West-Tek and later moved to Mariposa, a military base. Why would the US, the Enclave or anyone give Vault-Tec, a private corporation that was NOT a defense contractor or any kind of military-relevant corporation, access to one of the "big superweapons" the USA were developing? The FEV was intended to create super soldiers, why is it in a Vault? What does it do there? It doesnt belong there, for no logical reason on anyones part. The Vaults were tests, societal tests, in part to see how humanity would deal with problems such as complete isolation and other various tests to that nature, such as subliminal messaging, cloning, overcrowding, ultimate authority figures, massive difference in gender spectrum and so forth, somehow super soldiers dont really factor into that.

Another factor is, Fort Constantine for example. Why do they have nukes lying around? In fact, the idea of Fallout was always just what nukes are capable of doing. Megaton Bomb for example, you can blow it up, why? Because its a really big explosion, that is all. In the first two installments, nukes were used as a last resort, they were literally the game-enders for a reason. In DC we have a couple military outposts with those things lying around everywhere, plus every car is a mini-bomb that somehow didnt detonate? Its alot of suspension of disbelief involved there.

In short, the game should either be set much earlier than it is, or there should be some massive changes to make clear that civilization has restored to a point to symbolize how long ago it was. There is no reasoning, in-universe or outside of it, that DC is such a shithole, radiation or water, wouldnt account for it. Most of the plot was just integrated so Bethesda could go and say "Look! We have the Brotherhood. Those are from Fallout, right? And the Enclave, the big bad guys, relevant right? Look at us! Look how we stick to Fallout lore!" and it just ends up a inconsistent, dumb mess. They should have just done a proper reboot for the east coast. Set it 30-40 years after the bombs and it would be a good game, you dont need mutants, or the enclave for it, just make up some new good and bad guys.

 

[NeutralGray]

New Vegas' world was just boring compared to Fallout 3's. It was an empty desert that completely lacked any interesting places to explore. Also there were too many invisible walls everywhere and half the map was completely unused.

Fallout 3 has huge sections of map cut off by debris (in and around the city) or by hills and mountains. Most of the buildings aren't even explorable. If you're going by terrain alone, New Vegas has substantially more area to explore than F3.

No... No it really didn't. I've played both of them again and again. The world of New Vegas is just smaller.

 

[Alhazred]

You hit the nail on the head, OP. No matter how much I recognise that New Vegas has superior writing and gameplay, all it takes is walking along the Potomac river with 'Way Back Home' or 'Happy Times' playing on the Pip-boy for me to declare Fallout 3 the better game.

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

New Vegas' world was just boring compared to Fallout 3's. It was an empty desert that completely lacked any interesting places to explore. Also there were too many invisible walls everywhere and half the map was completely unused.

Fallout 3 has huge sections of map cut off by debris (in and around the city) or by hills and mountains. Most of the buildings aren't even explorable. If you're going by terrain alone, New Vegas has substantially more area to explore than F3.

No... No it really didn't. I've played both of them again and again. The world of New Vegas is just smaller.

Geographically, the map in Fallout 3 is bigger than the map in New Vegas. However, F3 only has 221 points of interest, while NV has close to 350 POI if you include the DLC areas.

I guess I should have been more clear -- I was referring to explorable sites in relation to land mass.

 

[Mylinkay Asdara]

Snip.

I really hate when people break up quotes.

Snip.

Actually, its not as much a stretch as it is a problem of what we are and are not told. We get 3 glimpses, one where we are literally one year old, one where we are 10 and another at 16. That is the extent of what the game shows us of our childhood, he may be a relatively nice dad, but that doesnt mean he does not have problems, he could be a alcoholic, a really nasty one even who beat you around half the vault when he had a couple too many drinks. Does the game say so? No it does not, but the thing is that the game shows you parts of where you grow up, but you are left to fill in the blanks, i.e. you have to make up a reason why you want to find your Dad, not that he ever told you where he went, or why he went there. Think about it, the only real reason we leave the vault is NOT to find our dad, but rather because the overseer went crazy and we simply had to. How nice our Dad is or how important his quest is, we either do not care directly or do not even know about it. And the only reason the overseer went crazy is cause of lazy writing, bethesda had to give you a reason to get out of the vault, there is no actual choice involved in any way.

However, lets assume the overseer has a chip on his shoulder which is shown to us several times, so we can logically explain why he goes ballistic on us because dad left. First it has to show us and show that the guy is serious, which means that our dad would know that the overseer is unhinged already and that leaving might just set him off. From what i know your dad actually DOES know about it, as when you return later you can find bits and pieces of how him and your dad did not get along. Is that reason he should worry about the overseer going after you? Perhaps not, but should he not on paternal instinct alone make sure just in case? Which means he either is neglectful, or forgetful, which isnt exactly a great trait for a parent when it comes to their own children. So if he had planned his eventual escape and it was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision, he left out a large part of his plan, i.e. you being left behind, and if that is the case, he is a colossal ass.

But to get to the point of Victor. Yes he does follow you, its part of his design, he was intended, by Mr. House to monitor your arrival in goodsprings since you were carrying the chip. Then you got shot by Benny, which by the way is explained in the game, he had a hacked securitron calculate where you'd most likely show up cause he wanted that chip. Mr. House also states that the reason for not interfering, as wierd as it is, had to do with one lone securitron being up against several people when he could not control it sufficiently enough to actually make use of the securitron, in RPG terms, Victor was debuffed due to being way outside of range and had Mr. House acted, Benny would know and act much quicker, which could be pretty bad for Vegas as well. However, you can go north, i have done it without cheating while being level 2. And i didnt have the stealth-boy from the goodsprings school either, avoiding cazadors is hard, avoiding deathclaws and exploiting the terrain though is not. So when you do that, you can skip that whole ring-around entirely and go north, screw victor and everything. And once you go to vegas proper? The only thing you actually have to do, to advance the plot, is confront benny. You dont have to see Mr. House, you dont even have to kill Benny, you just need to show up and talk to him to set the events into motion to continue the mainquest, but even that you arent forced to do, you arent railroaded into it.

And once you follow the mainplot, you get choices, you arent instantly made a "good guy" and sided with the brotherhood, you can fight for house, or the NCR, or the legion, or for yourself. The latter being a failsafe in case you kill "important people" such as house, caesar or piss off the ncr enough. No single NPC is set as essential in this game, you can literally kill everyone. Course you also instantly fail all their quests.

The radiation is another thing, even 80 years after the war, it has subsided enough that places like Los Angeles, a major staging ground for the US armed forces in-universe-lore are inhabited, which means it is a high priority target. DC may have been the capital, but it wasnt the most important strategic target. Given that all the US was nuked, or most of it anyway, even if DC wasnt hit, the USA was finished, there was no infrastructure left, so essentially it is just "good measure" to even target it. The same goes for Vegas actually. And it gives you a number of how many bombs actually did drop, if i recall it was a double digit number, with most actually shot down by House's laser defenses, which also ties into the platinum chip, had he recieved it just a day earlier, Fallout may never have happened.

And i never said anything about goo. I spoke of the Glow, or West-Tek, which was a research installation with 6 sublevels, everything above ground was gone and there was just a giant crater left, which went 3 levels deep as well. Even in the lowest level the radiation of the place is capable of killing you, in fact just going there can give you radiation poisoning within a minute, that being above ground right at the impact crater. West-Tek also developed the FEV just for added bonus, which was why it made people immune to it for the most part and a perfect sample had to be used, which ties into the plot of Fallout 2.

The point is however, that DC should either be a glass-house, if as many nukes dropped there as it would take to literally irradiate the place for that long, or it should have cleared up by now, enough to support live on a grand-scale. Both are made impossible because DC is still intact for the most part, granted there's lots of rubble, but there are also no thriving communities there. Another factor is, the Enclave arrived in DC before the brotherhood did, so why didnt they rebuild anything? Simply because they are just re-hashed to be there as the big bogeyman, which also ties into the lack of choice, you cant side with them nor are you given any kind of input on whether they might just be the good guys. They are vilified because the plot demands them to be and the only reason that they are "evil" is because of Eden anyway, he is the only one who wants to use the FEV. Colonel Autumn just wants the purifier to rebuild and civilize the capital wasteland.

Course there are way more logical and lore-inconsistencies, such as the presence of super mutants. Why is there FEV in DC? FEV-Research was done by West-Tek and later moved to Mariposa, a military base. Why would the US, the Enclave or anyone give Vault-Tec, a private corporation that was NOT a defense contractor or any kind of military-relevant corporation, access to one of the "big superweapons" the USA were developing? The FEV was intended to create super soldiers, why is it in a Vault? What does it do there? It doesnt belong there, for no logical reason on anyones part. The Vaults were tests, societal tests, in part to see how humanity would deal with problems such as complete isolation and other various tests to that nature, such as subliminal messaging, cloning, overcrowding, ultimate authority figures, massive difference in gender spectrum and so forth, somehow super soldiers dont really factor into that.

Another factor is, Fort Constantine for example. Why do they have nukes lying around? In fact, the idea of Fallout was always just what nukes are capable of doing. Megaton Bomb for example, you can blow it up, why? Because its a really big explosion, that is all. In the first two installments, nukes were used as a last resort, they were literally the game-enders for a reason. In DC we have a couple military outposts with those things lying around everywhere, plus every car is a mini-bomb that somehow didnt detonate? Its alot of suspension of disbelief involved there.

In short, the game should either be set much earlier than it is, or there should be some massive changes to make clear that civilization has restored to a point to symbolize how long ago it was. There is no reasoning, in-universe or outside of it, that DC is such a shithole, radiation or water, wouldnt account for it. Most of the plot was just integrated so Bethesda could go and say "Look! We have the Brotherhood. Those are from Fallout, right? And the Enclave, the big bad guys, relevant right? Look at us! Look how we stick to Fallout lore!" and it just ends up a inconsistent, dumb mess. They should have just done a proper reboot for the east coast. Set it 30-40 years after the bombs and it would be a good game, you dont need mutants, or the enclave for it, just make up some new good and bad guys.

Sorry, didn't know your personal preference. I like broken quotes because they allow a point for point w/o a wall of text, but to each their own.

I think it's reasonable for Dad to believe that the Overseer and he had friction because he was from outside and an adult and a thinker with experience of the outside world, which would make a man like the Overseer very uncomfortable and predisposed not to like him and that Dad might conclude that, having lived our whole recallable life in the Vault that attitude would not transfer to us. Additionally, we don't know about his reason for leaving or his quest and are under-informed probably to insulate us from that dislike above and beyond any other reason. Leaving us behind he probably arranged that Jonas (killed by the Overseer guy) would take us under his wing in the vault (plus, we're an "adult" at this point, remember, not 10, it's after our GOAT which is at 16 so probably 17/18 on age) and possibly fill in the blanks if/when things got uncomfortable in the Vault for us with the Overseer. That obviously didn't happen, but that was clearly intended (the letter/recording found on Jonas's body).

I personally think the Enclave didn't rebuild anything because they either didn't have the numbers and resources or because they scorn the non-pure human elements that D.C. seems relatively tolerant of. The Enclave, as I've seen it in 3 (not in other games, remember I didn't play them) wants to rebuild ideas and the American Way thinking and the residents of D.C. are... maybe a little too disillusioned to be fertile ground for that kind of rebuilding, without a purge. Col. Autumn shot people in cold blood because Dad wouldn't give up a password pretty quickly to be an okay guy to my thinking.

I think we've gotten a little farther off topic here than intended and I sense some anger in your post which I simply can't counter because I came into Fallout late and that apparently makes me something you don't like. Sorry about that too, I suppose. I'm going to just agree to disagree here and say I liked the game, but maybe that's just because ignorance is bliss. Happy hunting.

 

[Berny Marcus]

I want to know why some people prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas. I'm just curious though, what they like about it more.

I feel like Fallout 3 is just bare bones, and constricted then New Vegas.

In New Vegas, you can join a side or be on your own in the main campaign.

In Fallout 3, you're truly on your own, you only help one side plot wise. (Even if you do that evil decision near the end before Broken Steel begins, not spoiling it)

Theres like a shit ton to do in New Vegas, Fallout 3 feels like theres not so many sidequests to it. You can still alot of hit in Fallout 3.

More enemies, and weapons variety. I feel like the only enemies you can fight in Fallout 3 were Ghouls and Super Mutants (I had the animal lovers perk lol)

These are just some of my points as to why I think New Vegas is leagues better then Fallout 3. I already get the OP's reasons, but to those who prefer Fallout 3 more then New Vegas, why? I am just curious is all.