Ultratwinkie said:
Fr said:
anc[is]I personally liked the environments in FO3 better. Yes there were lots of subway tunnels, but to me NV seems... empty. There is just so much wasted space in NV. Compare Freeside to Megaton. Megaton is visually distinct and there is a lot there. Freeside is dull and boring and it really feels like they just went down the checklist and put the minimum requisite buildings in random places.
Actually freeside was meant to be bigger and better, but canned it because of time constraints and Bethesda's slow response to authorizations.
Originally:
- You could help the beggar ghoul become rich.
- There are more drunks and junkies.
- There was more NCR in freeside, and street wars.
- There were no walls, but had to add them since consoles couldn't handle it.
- Gamblers would actually hire bodyguards to go to the strip.
- You could team up with the NCR and gun down the kings.
- In the silver rush, the opening cut scene was longer, and humorous.
- ACTUAL PICKPOCKETS roamed the streets.
- The mormon fort was to be open, no loading screen between it and freeside.
- There was ambient sound effects of robberies, gunshots, and explosions to give the feel of an anarchistic ghetto.
All of this was still in the files too. There was just as much cut content in the strip.
That tends to happen a lot in nearly all of Obsidian's games, where half the content that would make the game all the more interesting gets cut due to them aiming much larger than they can handle. They gotta learn their limits and keep the experiences short, sweet, and memorable.
OT: Yes, like everyone has been saying, the Capitol Wasteland is
much better than the Mojave. The DC warzone was all kinds of awesome, and I missed the metro systems of tunnels to skulk around in.
One thing the Capitol Wasteland had that the Mojave didn't have is explorability. As soon as Vault 101 opened up, the whole of the Wasteland was open to you. Every location is carefully positioned equidistant to you at that point. The sky is the limit. I would find myself always going to Megaton first since it's right there and I need new items, but after that I'm completely free to do what I want. No constraints. No invisible walls. No angry mutant butterflies or deathclaws to ruin your day if you didn't want to go on the plot railroad.
I found every time I created a new character in New Vegas that I would do the same quests in the same order every time. Once I left Doc Mitchel's place, the only direction I could go was south to Primm, and since the only way I could go coincided with the main quest, I might as well do it as I go. So I would stop in Primm, which had escaped convicts which I always helped kill because I'm already there, so why not; I get good gear, reputation, and experience (all of which you
need if you want to survive beyond the low-level areas I'm constrained to); and I get to complete a quest, so might as well get it over with. Then you get to Nipton which you just
can't fucking ignore. Next comes Novac. Then Boulder City since you've done all the main quest plot hooks at this point, so why stop now? I don't even feel the ingame constraints
finally come off until you're near Freeside, and at that point, you might as well fucking go through to New Vegas!
It becomes the same thing every damn time I make a new character. Going straight to New Vegas is impossible without bypassing
every goddamn town, outpost, quest, and dungeon you come across while running on a cross-country trip. And New Vegas wasn't even all that interesting to me, but it was the same for anything that
was interesting. Red Rock Canyon, Jacobstown, Nellis Airforce Base--all of them are on the
otherside of the fucking map, blocked off by massive natural and invisible barriers and the threat of overpowered mutants. I wasn't allowed to just
explore the Mojave without feeling like I gave the game the middle finger and that I
severely crippled my lowlevel character by not doing those beginning quests.
Ultimately, all this left me with
one character that I actually gave a shit about, the rest being just throw aways since I would get bored doing the beginning area over again and was never able to make my way to the more interesting areas. This game was
not for me. It was fun for a lark, but after I completed everything with my one character, it had nothing left to offer me. Fallout 3 had me coming back all the time, because if I wanted to redo an interesting part of the game that my main had already done, I could create a new character, maybe try a different playstyle with different skills or something and just head straight there. No constraints. No plot railroad. My dad wasn't goin' anywhere! With the map laid out before me, I could do whatever I wanted.
Also, I hated how...
civilized the Mojave was. It didn't seem like people trying desperately to survive in an oppressive and cruel world. Everything was about survival in Fallout 3. That's another thing I loved. The people were desperate. There wasn't any need for a looming political war with different sides in conflict!
Surviving was the conflict. The Enclave only ever became a threat if you completed almost two-thirds of the main quest. They weren't the main focus of the game like the NCR and Legion were.
Everything about the Mojave came down to them. That's why I felt so compelled to just do the main quest every time I made a new character in New Vegas, since the entire fucking game
revolved around them! Everything I did came back to them and the war, there was no escaping it.
The Capitol Wasteland was it's
own entity, separate from the main quest with the Enclave and the Brotherhood, and because of that, the possibilities of what I could become in this cruel, barren land were endless.
All these things are what makes Fallout 3 a much more enjoyable experience to me. I don't get my panties in a twist over "lore inconsistencies", I latch onto whatever gives me a better experience overall, and Fallout 3 wins over that every time.
