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

[Spaceman Spiff]

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.

From my experience in Bethesda's forums the most common reasons are-

People like exploring the landscape, and finding unique and real locations in FO3.
They like the "bombs just fell" feel in FO3.
They don't like that they can't go north at the start without difficulty in NV.
They don't like having to make tough choices in NV.
They don't like that all NV factions have bad sides to them.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

[HEADING=3]TL;DR[/HEADING]

Spoiler

Apart from Fallout 3 the rest of the Fallout franchise has been set in and feels a part of a post post-apocalyptic world.

While Bethesda's effort is set in the same continuity as the rest of the franchise, but really feels more like it should've been set way back in the timeline in the months and years immediately after the bombs dropped and the United States died in nuclear fire.

Now I wouldn't be at all surprised if the creative team behind the game started off with the intention of detailing the events that occurred in Washington D.C in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear bombardment, but had to abandon that plan and tack on a whole bunch of unnecessary gear from the original two games due to executive interference. Which is a damn shame because while I love Fallout, Fallout 2 and New Vegas, Fallout 3 is at it's best when it is out there doing its own damn thing and it did a pretty piss poor effort at integrating the rest of the Fallout franchise.

So while I get what you're saying, I think what makes the game great in your eyes also breaks it for me, despite the fact that I fully acknowledge that the great thing you like is still pretty fucking neat.

 

[endtherapture]

I don't see why people are saying the linear opening of New Vegas is bad?

Maybe it's not supposed to be an open world game? Maybe they were intending to write a linear opening which then opens into the wide world?

Either way, it's better than the boring stuck-in-a-vault opening of FO3.

 

[Altorin]

The whole point of the Fallout series is to chart humanity's (or at the very least, America's) slow, gradual recovery after the nuclear apocalypse. The second game started you out not as a vault dweller, but as a tribesman from an established tribe for goodness sakes. The whole idea is that after the initial apocalypse bit, humanity is very slowly starting to get back on its feet, and human civilisation is going in some very new and creative directions.

That's what Fallout: New Vegas did so well that Fallout 3 didn't. 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. New Vegas actually made the effort to show you a setting two centuries after the bombs, with the various factions all fighting to lead America in a different direction. You've got a society which has embraced a more primitive lifestyle in order to be able to brutally adapt to and conquer the wasteland. You've got a society trying its best to rebuild the sort of structure that existed before the nuclear war. You've got an entire city built around the ideas of an all-watching patriarch. And you've got the various other tribes, clans and outsiders who've formed their own style of living in the wasteland.

The atmosphere in FO3 would make sense if it was just a few decades after the bombs, but two hundred years? We went from horse-and-carts to landing on the damn moon in that time period. Are you seriously suggesting in that same length of time, no-one in the Capital Wasteland has yet worked out how to not live life like a hobo?

Fallout 3 appeals to the popular, tropey idea of a post-apocalypse, with all its inconsistencies. New Vegas actually makes an effort to show what humanity would do after (ie, post) the apocalypse. For me, that creates a far more interesting setting than one which is merely an amalgamation of pre-conceived ideas.

Also, because this is essentially a FO3 vs New Vegas thread, I can't help but post this:

Spoiler: giant image

The Capitol Wasteland is probably the most wastelandy place in the world of Fallout. I don't think it's particularly incongruous for the capital wasteland to be in such a state after 200 years, although perhaps it's possible a GECK could have been secured to restore it in all that time, the only known GECK in the area was in a very bad vault in terms of viability of the test.

The Mojave was largely spared the absolute destruction of the apocalypse by Mr House. If it weren't for machinations, New Vegas wouldn't even be a thing, and the Mojave and dam probably would be destroyed husks hardly worth rebuilding, like the capitol wasteland was in Fallout 3.

The truth is Washington DC was nuked so badly that it wasn't really worth restoring at all, so that's why even 200 years later, it's still a wasteland.

All of that apologetics aside, New Vegas is probably the better game - there's a lot more in it like your pictures show. For me where Fallout 3 shines is in it's simplicity and the ability to basically do everything in one game. New Vegas begged to be played multiple times, whereas Fallout 3 was basically content with you making only a few key choices and letting the rest of the side quests just fall into your Pip-boy.

New Vegas you constantly had to make choices that had lasting impact in terms of how you were going to deal with teh various factions. That makes it better I think, but my OCD certainly likes Fallout 3's way of doing things.

I'm pretty sure a lot of this post is redundant. I'm running on little sleep.

 

[J Tyran]

For anyone that prefers the mechanics of Fallout: New Vegas but likes the Capitol Wasteland better its well worth checking out the Tale of Two Wastelands [http://www.taleoftwowastelands.com/content/faq] mod, it essentially imports Fallout 3 into New Vegas.

You need to own Fallout 3 and all the DLC for it to work though, you start off in DC with the start of Fallout 3 and later travel to the Mojave but you can import an existing New Vegas character and travel to DC if you want it just needs a bit of extra faffle. There are mods that can transport you and you need to use the console to activate/complete the initial Vault 101 quests to start the DC story off, if you just start off in Vault 101 there is a train you can use to travel between the Mojave and DC any time you want.

 

[PrimitiveJudge]

I like fallout 3 better. Here is my list of reasons why:
Deathclaw Gauntlet
MIRV
a town dedicated to deathclaws
no cazadors
Mutant Behemoths (those guys are fun)
The option to nuke megaton.
That town you get to build up after rescuing some people from a police station
Deathclaw Gauntlet
Liberty Prime
The Metro system

Don't get me wrong NV had some badass things about it that fallout didn't have like.
Large variety factions to join
much larger gun selection
AMR (seriosly I have to have it in every game)
Ammo types to choose from
there was no town made up of pure children.

NV is far larger then fallout 3 but fallout 3 didn't overwhelm me with a billion things to do right off the bat.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

Oh, and the GECK isn't a magical device to fix whole cities. Its only a small survival kit meant for small settlements. Its mostly textbooks, a small generator, a pen light, stuff like that.

If anyone is interested the contents of a pre-Bethesda Garden Of Creation Kit were detailed by Chris Avellone in the Fallout Bible 6. It's a little more than just textbooks, a small generator, a pen light and stuff.

The GECK isn't really a replicator. It contains a fertilizer system, with a variety of food seeds, soil supplements, and chemicals that could fertilize arid wasteland (and possibly selected sections of the moon's surface pre-conditioned to accept the GECK) into supporting farming. The GECK is intended to be "disassembled" over the course of its use to help build communities (for example, the cold fusion power source is intended to be used for main city power production), and so on. Anything else people needed, they could simply consult the How-To Books/Library of Congress/Encyclopedias in the GECK holodisk library for more knowledge. The pen flashlight was just a bonus.

The GECK also contained some basic force field schematics as well as info on how to make adobe-type buildings from the landscape (or contain chemicals that can create "sand-crete" walls).

As for clothing, the GECK contained codes that allowed the Vault to create more varieties of jumpsuits (and weatherproof gear) from their dispensers, which they could do anyway before the GECK. It's possible the GECK contained other codes that could unlock more functionality within the Vault computers that weren't initially available because they would jeopardize the survival of the Vault if they were used or scavenged (or else they would interfere with the Grand Experiment).

Also, the GECKs tell the Vault inhabitants how to disassemble sections of their Vault (or take extraneous systems from the Vault) to create new homes and defensive structures on the surface.

 

[michael87cn]

Fans of New Vegas always take this stuff way too far, when it's really very simple. Especially that shandification video posted on the first page.

FO3 Looks the most similar to the old games, it's that simple. In Fallout 1 and 2 you had toxic waste. You had mutants. You had towns that made no sense, were full of nothing but junkies who had no apparent (graphically) source for their endless drugs, no food/water sources, etc. It was 'stupid' fun, it didn't have to make sense. Indeed, the old fallout games never took themselves seriously, and that's the problem with New Vegas. It tries SO hard to be this super serious, 'pro' recreation/continuation of the Fallout 'story' that it just falls flat. It's boring. It's bland. It's like a MEME, it's only fun if you're already invested/interested in the 'Lore'. Its frustrating, its unrewarding and its at times unplayable for console users who cannot/have not seen much in the way of patches.

Fallout 3, for me, and I believe for BethesdaSoftworks, was a fun love letter to the old games. It was made at a time when no one even knew if a new Fallout game would be a success. No one knew if anyone would remember the old games or care. Ignoring the fact that when you work on something that did not originate from the minds of YOUR staff, you run into difficulties. Even New Vegas had barely any of the old Fallout crew. Barely any.

Fallout 3 might have gotten 'too easy' (subjective as not everyone needs to feel challenged to have fun) late game. It might have had a green hue (subjective, I liked it). It might have not had *gasp* crops growing outside of towns so you could go "ohhh that's what these lines of cod-- real people eat!" but it was damn fun when I got it and played it.

I could post many MANY more paragraphs on why I simply think it was better, but I'll just infuriate biased individuals who think NV is so great because it had like 2 people from the original casts of a broken/defunct/no longer existent crew that worked on the old games, and apparently those 2 were the only ones who contributed anything, meaning of course NV is the greatest game of all time and a perfect recreation of what Fallout 3 should have been, because like 2 people from the old days worked on it. FANDOM LOGIC.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Talking about the GECK

That's a full GECK. Most of them seem to be either partial remains or selective applications. In modern Fallout, the GECK is much like a Standard Template Construct from Warhammer 40000. A full STC chart was meant to colonize entire planets, with technological blueprints for everything from utensils to planet busting weaponry. Only fragments remain.

 

[endtherapture]

FO3 Looks the most similar to the old games, it's that simple. In Fallout 1 and 2 you had toxic waste. You had mutants. You had towns that made no sense, were full of nothing but junkies who had no apparent (graphically) source for their endless drugs, no food/water sources, etc. It was 'stupid' fun, it didn't have to make sense. Indeed, the old fallout games never took themselves seriously, and that's the problem with New Vegas. It tries SO hard to be this super serious, 'pro' recreation/continuation of the Fallout 'story' that it just falls flat. It's boring. It's bland. It's like a MEME, it's only fun if you're already invested/interested in the 'Lore'. Its frustrating, its unrewarding and its at times unplayable for console users who cannot/have not seen much in the way of patches.

Simply not true, I enjoyed NV way more than FO3 and I'd never played a FO game before any of them.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

Talking about the GECK

That's a full GECK. Most of them seem to be either partial remains or selective applications. In modern Fallout, the GECK is much like a Standard Template Construct from Warhammer 40000. A full STC chart was meant to colonize entire planets, with technological blueprints for everything from utensils to planet busting weaponry. Only fragments remain.

You're absolutely right in at least so far as Bethesda now owns the Fallout IP that a GECK is officially whatever they want it to be, but personally I'd rather go by anything Chris Avellone has written about the setting over what was set down by the creative team that produced flawed, schizophrenic but still immensely playable FO3.

 

[scorptatious]

FO3 Looks the most similar to the old games, it's that simple. In Fallout 1 and 2 you had toxic waste. You had mutants. You had towns that made no sense, were full of nothing but junkies who had no apparent (graphically) source for their endless drugs, no food/water sources, etc. It was 'stupid' fun, it didn't have to make sense.

Pretty much all the towns in the old games had a source of food. Shady Sands in particular had crops and were raising Brahmin. Same with Junktown, the Hub, heck, even Necropolis had a water pump. So yeah, they did in fact have food/water sources.

Also in 2, the junkies were getting Jet from the Mordinos in New Reno, and the drugs themselves were made by Myron, who goes into pretty deep detail over how he made it.

What I'm getting at is, that pretty much all, or at least most of the settlements in the old Fallout games explained how the people were able to survive. So it's incorrect to say that they didn't make sense or had any food/water sources.

Indeed, the old fallout games never took themselves seriously, and that's the problem with New Vegas. It tries SO hard to be this super serious, 'pro' recreation/continuation of the Fallout 'story' that it just falls flat. It's boring. It's bland. It's like a MEME, it's only fun if you're already invested/interested in the 'Lore'. Its frustrating, its unrewarding and its at times unplayable for console users who cannot/have not seen much in the way of patches.

I never really understood the whole "Fallout doesn't take itself too seriously" thing. In both 1 and 2, you're set on a journey to retrieve something that is crucial to the survival of your people. You go around in a desolate wasteland filled with raiders, mutant monsters, ect. And the games tackle some pretty big issues such as racism, (towards ghouls and super mutants) slavery, fighting over precious resources, genocide, ect. Sure, you had the Monty Python references sprinkled about in 2, but those are just random encounters.


That's not to say it's all doom and gloom. New Vegas had a robot with a cowboy accent following you around, a gang of Elvis impersonators, a super mutant grandma, and the entirety of Old World Blues. So yeah, I say the game takes itself about as seriously as Fallout 1 and 2 did.

I could post many MANY more paragraphs on why I simply think it was better, but I'll just infuriate biased individuals who think NV is so great because it had like 2 people from the original casts of a broken/defunct/no longer existent crew that worked on the old games, and apparently those 2 were the only ones who contributed anything, meaning of course NV is the greatest game of all time and a perfect recreation of what Fallout 3 should have been, because like 2 people from the old days worked on it. FANDOM LOGIC.

I'm not sure exactly how many people who worked on the original Fallouts worked on New Vegas, but it seems like it was enough to make the games feel more like the old games.

It's not perfect by any means, and I can see why people would prefer 3, but for me, I still prefer New Vegas over 3.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

Actually the bible isn't canon anymore. They are going by what the original manual said about the GECK, which the only real difference is that it did have a replicator. It was a bit more high tech than the bible version.

There is a roughly zero percent chance that I'm going to let whichever company that has most recently bought the intellectual property rights of a fictional universe dictate to me what is and isn't quote unquote official canon. So that might be true, but what is also true is I simply don't give a fuck what Bethesda's latest press release claims.

 

[pierre666lol]

I personally love both games, however, I prefer Fallout 3. "Grinning Cat" made the good point that it is a bad fallout game, but an good post-apocalyptic one. The savage nature of the life throughout the capital wasteland does take me back sometimes. As Mayor MacCready of Little Lamplight said - "its fucking anarchy", I think it's rare to create that type of atmosphere in any game.

Admittedly the morality is fairly clear-cut in Fallout 3. If you want good morality, Fallout:New Vegas is great. However what I adore the most about take morally good actions is; They almost seem to have no effect.

It generates a wonderful sense of hopelessness, knowing full well that whatever I did was never enough for the people of the wasteland - horrible creatures were roaming everywhere, no real semblance of true order, food still a major concern, sadistic raiders everywhere - The capital wasteland will need a lot more then clean water...

I felt truly helpless against the tide, even if I was "The last best hope of humanity". That's what made it special for me.

 

[Dosbilliam]

I do like my tits and beer, but I have 60+ hours on tits and beer and 300+ on the well-crafted ride...that also has tits and beer.

I've been away for a couple pages, but I'm just popping to say I've got 250ish hours with the T&B ride and a little over 850 in the full-frontal female nudity and high-class wine ride.