Your opinion on Fallout: New Vegas VS. Fallout 3

[Shoggoth2588]

I played the hell out of Fallout 3, beating it a couple of times before laying it to rest in the steel lunchbox it came in. When New Vegas came out, I played through it until it crashed late in the story. I started a new game, found a way to max my character's level, beat the game, hunted down all but one achievement then went back to Fallout 3, playing 2 new profiles and finishing off the DLC I forgot I had downloaded.

Short answer: Fallout 3

 

[HellenicWarrior]

For me Fallout 3 presented a far more interesting premise and location then New Vegas. Shot in the head, no history and no character, vs a character with a defined history and family. I found the latter more immersive, yet from a roleplaying perspective New Vegas has a slight edge. Although, like I said, New Vegas was just so... Bland. Desert, cactus, desert, cactus, a couple of towns, and new vegas itself. Nothing much else. And also, the fact New Vegas was rushed and used the exact same engine that was STILL bugridden (and clipping of clothing was so damn infuriating) just aggravated me... Those promo shots they released were disgraceful.

 

[Psycho Cat Industries]

I prefer New Vegas and I only need to justify it by saying @#$% the Brotherhood.Veronica is cool,but I don't want to side with them.Hated the Brotherhood and its grab all ways.The Paladin died after an hour and from ants at that.

 

[Spencer Petersen]

FO3 isn't very fallout-y as a game, but New Vegas I would consider the real Fallout 3
It didn't address the common themes that the Fallout Universe was known for, the struggle of survival, the murky nature of morality, the prejudice and bigotry of humans, the struggle of pragmatism versus idealism with a little bit of comedy to lighten the mood. FO3 was a good game, but it didn't feel very much like a real world, it seemed like a playground to jump around on that stopped working when you weren't around. New Vegas was more linear, but it also had a much more tremendous depth than Fallout 3 both in combat and in interactions. Allow me to list my reasons:

Spoiler

SPECIAL
SPECIAL skills in FO3 never mattered much as they mainly affected skills, plus with the Almost Perfect perk you never had to really sacrifice anything, In NV you had much more stats based on your special skills and you were limited by the lack of Almost Perfect, providing more options to play and making you sacrifice a lot of money to beef up your stats
Skills
Fallout 3 never had any use for a lot of the skills past their one defined purpose. But in New Vegas speech checks of all types come up, plus the threshold system works much better than the percentages system in FO3. FO3 never had a use for barter, science, medicine, explosives or repair past their primary uses, but New Vegas lets you use them much more in both combat and dialogue. Skill threshold for weapons made investing in combat necessary, and the crafting system was fully fleshed out compared to FO3's skeletonized system.
Combat
FO3 made great use of the VATS system, but it soon became overbearing. You were so ridiculously overpowered in VATS that non-VATS became a crutch. New Vegas softens this with ironsights but there was still many ways to tackle combat besides VATS. The melee system is beefed up with multiple moves and attacks, and the knockout system let you handle combat non-violently if you so wish.
Narrative
Frankly, the FO3 storyline was weak and the companions didn't have personalities of their own. In New Vegas the storyline is rich with serious choices with abandon to the notion of good/evil. The characters are well written and seriously impacted by your interactions with them, and their stories make you feel like a part of the world. The antagonist is not defined by the game, but rather by you and how you see the world around you, with many ties to real world situations.

That's all I'm willing to rant on now, but to be clear, I love Fallout 3. I would consider it the main reason I got so interested in games, but compared to New Vegas it falls apart.

 

[Feylynn]

sigh.

Again, Its a desert. There are few towns, and straying off the highways is just a way to die pretty damn quick. The east coast doesn't have that problem because it has vegetation. I swear when it comes to geography this thread fails.

I don' think geography of the real world should ever be an excuse for an uninteresting game world.
Just the same as real life expense and saftey precautions should never be the reason cited for not having Jetpacks in a game.

This may be why FolkLore is one of my favorite games of recent memory.

But back to the question at hand:
I liked 3 for it's story, the protagonists father, and the slightly more interesting location.

I liked Vegas for it's gameplay refinements like Hardcore mode, gun balancing, stat altering, and iron-sights. The mod community also made more of an impact in Vegas for me.
Vegas did have one advantage in it's being void of story though: I have a lot of fun filling in blanks.

Spoiler: I played a technological super genius with an unnatural charisma.

I played a technological super genius with an unnatural charisma.
This lead to me befriending every faction in the world save the Powder Gangers who I found beneath my master plan, and had already ticked off by the time I got my bearing in the world.
But that's besides the point, I went for the neutral end, ignored their little riff at the end and wrote in my own ending because I know for a fact my character was smarter than House and in this for domination, not free Vegas.

So yeah, really fun as a sandbox.

Edit: I should point out by story I mean 'main' narrative that carries you through the game, Vegas has much more world story built into it with the factions.

 

[acosn]

As if it wasn't clear earlier in this thread, spoilers abound.

New Vegas is better in just about every way. Playing it really tells me that they get what made Fallout 1 and 2 worth the effort back in the day, and how they were written. Probably helps that these same people who worked on New Vegas were the ones that were behind the original games.

Fallout 3 has it's moments, and it's a great game, but its a bit disjointed from what makes Fallout...well, Fallout. The folks at Bethesda, for all their great works, still operate on the "killing grandma is hilarious" level of writing. Fallout's wit is a bit more subtle, and a bit less direct. Yes, there's unapologetic gore, but that's a footnote to a greater overarching plot line.

Which brings me to my first point; Fallout 3's choices are shallow and overdone where as New Vegas's actually carry some weight and meaning. Fallout 3 can be boiled down to, "Do I want to kill everyone, or save everyone?" The ultimate plot can't be changed; you have to die, or you're an asshole. Never mind that you can actually have someone as a follower who's utterly immune to what kills you.

New Vegas? Four primary endings, each with it's own philosophy. Do you want the cruel but effective government, old world democracy, a pragmatic scientocracy, or self-rule? It's not about good and evil- everyone knows they're doing the right thing and everyone else is either a massive risk to that, or just a monster. Unless you're utterly detached from the story and the game you're going to find that some of the plot lines are difficult to go through with. There's more than one reason I wasn't excited about having to clear out a brotherhood of steel bunker.

The updated follower system is nice as well. Everyone is good provided you're willing to either take the easy way out, or simply invest in people. Characters also carry a bit more depth of personality and you're going to find yourself caring a lot more about the guy who had to kill his own wife over that one brotherhood of steel paladin who did....something? Someone probably figured out that if there was a faction that was generally just unlikeable that it'd detract from the story a bit.

There's a fair lack of homegrown weapons in the Mohave but ultimately you gotta ask yourself how much that really matters. For me it was basically nil since almost every gun had mods, and specialized ammo. I might not have a sword that automatically coats itself in gasoline and lights itself on fire, but I don't really miss it either when I can fire .50 caliber rifle rounds that decapitate their targets, and then light them on fire for good measure.

If there's one thing that Fallout 3 has going for it, its that it has slightly more epic moments. Even if the ending is just plain stupid, running around the streets of Washington DC with a giant robot that fires mini-nukes and shoots lasers out of its eyes is a hell of a lot more epic than storming across Hoover Dam.


That and a supposed lack of bugs compared to NV. I had little trouble with either game so I can't really comment.

 

[Feylynn]

sigh.

Again, Its a desert. There are few towns, and straying off the highways is just a way to die pretty damn quick. The east coast doesn't have that problem because it has vegetation. I swear when it comes to geography this thread fails.

I don' think geography of the real world should ever be an excuse for an uninteresting game world.
Just the same as real life expense and saftey precautions should never be the reason cited for not having Jetpacks in a game.

This may be why FolkLore is one of my favorite games of recent memory.

But back to the question at hand:
I liked 3 for it's story, the protagonists father, and the slightly more interesting location.

I liked Vegas for it's gameplay refinements like Hardcore mode, gun balancing, stat altering, and iron-sights. The mod community also made more of an impact in Vegas for me.
Vegas did have one advantage in it's being void of story though: I have a lot of fun filling in blanks.

Spoiler: I played a technological super genius with an unnatural charisma.

I played a technological super genius with an unnatural charisma.
This lead to me befriending every faction in the world save the Powder Gangers who I found beneath my master plan, and had already ticked off by the time I got my bearing in the world.
But that's besides the point, I went for the neutral end, ignored their little riff at the end and wrote in my own ending because I know for a fact my character was smarter than House and in this for domination, not free Vegas.

So yeah, really fun as a sandbox.

Edit: I should point out by story I mean 'main' narrative that carries you through the game, Vegas has much more world story built into it with the factions.

Yet the locations would have been quickly looted of all interesting locations within a short time. If the towns on roads are the only safe places, they would have been looted first. The zombie supermarket paradox.

Sorry that's not what I meant, I'm fine with the central road thing in the desert, that's a way to give flow to their game, force you to see some towns and get a feel for the place before you show up in the Strip, so unlike Dragon Age 2 when you arrive there this crazy city is actually important compared to other areas.

I was commenting on the large lack of interesting geography, and that's not to say there is none, it's just much of it lacks a third dimension. Megaton for example was a very complex city and I enjoyed how much personality it won itself with layout alone. It was poorly textured, had little lighting of note, and no color worth mentioning yet that use of space made it memorable.

Little Lamplight may be another example of this though with different merits, I can't recall anywhere in Vegas with that kind of intrigue, especially when you consider the multiplier of the child and adult societies that big town brings to the picture.

 

[squid5580]

i liked both but i spent about 10 times longer playing 3, and i didn't even bother finding every place in new vegas so i guess Fallout 3 would be better. If new vegas wasn't so linear at the beginning and wasn't littered with caza-whatevers i would have playn through alot more of it, that and it needed more places, in Fallout 3 there was literally a place on every square, and nearly all of them had something unique to offer... looking at my post it appears that i actually found alot of ways that Fallout 3 is better (in my opinion) although i think new vegas had more potential.

You DO realize the west coast is low density areas right? "The lack of places" IS the real West coast. Did you honestly expect a huge metropolis in a fucking desert? Where states continually fight over the legal right to water?

from a post I made on another forum:

I've been playing New Vegas a lot and now have 2 and a half playthroughs done, about 100 hours in total. After this short amount of time, I feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer. Most map markers are hugely disappointing, consisting of shacks with nothing but an empty bottle, a campfire on a hill, an airport terminal with nothing but two cases of caps and some radscorpions, a few caves with not a single piece of loot or backstory in them... it feel so empty compared to the Capital Wasteland which had something new, unique and interesting over every hill.
There are sweet fuck all large, dungeon like areas to explore.

There are no huge, detailed interiors like Nuka Cola Plant, Capital Building, Red Racer Factory, Springvale Elementary, Roosevelt Academy, The museums of History and Tech, National Archives, LOB Industries, Hubris comics... this was my favorite part of fallout 3 and all we have in New Vegas are a few vaults, 4 Casinos, Repcomm and an empty sewer. Very disappointing.

The dialogue and writing are much better in NV and sure, there are more quests but most of them just involve 'travel to point A talk to 'x', watch long loading screen, travel back'. F3 had less quests but the ones it had were amazing and much longer... Reily's Rangers, Tranquility Lane, Oasis, Take It Back, The Superhuman Gambit, Wasteland Survival Guide, Stealing Independance, Trouble On The Homefont... all great. New Vegas had the Vault quests which were fantastic but none of the others were (to me) as memorable.

Doing the Camp McCarran and Freeside quests is horrible because of the excruciating load times. So much going in and out of areas and they don't even give us travel points inside the Strip and McCarran which is just bizarre. The load times are twice as long as they were in F3 too.

And then there's the atmosphere... Fallout 3 was haunting, beautiful and soulful. Standing on a ruined flyover watching the sun set over the burnt out forests and ruined Washington monument was just sublime. Nothing in Vegas gave me that same feeling or immersed me in its atmosphere like f3 did at any given moment. Just sand, sand, red rocks and more sand.

Now don't get me wrong... I still love New Vegas more than 99% of games and there are areas it improves over F3. Better combat, better dialogue, better sound, better characters and story. But to me it falls short of its big brother in many areas. I went back to the Capital Wasteland this week and was surprised how much better it looked, felt and played.

Look up.

Them choosing the wrong location to host a Fallout game is not a very good excuse. It doesn't make the game any better or the complaints less valid because "they went with realism derp".

How is it wrong? Ever? Because they chose to be realistic in their world? Where time ravages the landscape?

Fallout 3, by far, everything was better, dialogue, the radio stations by far, the cities (NV cities were dull empty and consisted of just a bunch of unnamed NPCs), the wasteland is much more interesting, some "locations" in NV consisted simply of an abandoned shack and a never inhabited bed (this made up about 1/3 of the locations), the quests and characters were much more memorable (really pretty much every quest in NV was boring, FO3 had you assassinating people for an old man, blowing up towns, murdering an entire skyscraper worth of people, going back to your vault and solving the problems, etc. I can't even remember a single quest in NV tbh...), the story was more original (you're near death and are on a trail of revenge, sooo original...), a better, grittier atmosphere, reputation is just awful and has many irritating flaws, karma in NV is broken (no karma loss for killing humans but you gain karma for killing ghouls...?), and not to mention the glitches, oh god, the glitches...

I can't really help but think the people who like NV better are just thinking it because of old Fallout and Obsidian nostalgia, as FO3 is really the better game in every respect.

Dialogue

Hahahah, NO.

You tell me straight to my face this is good dialogue. Come on, tell me this is not at all retarded.

EDIT:

See for me its the opposite, fallout new vegas was the shiity fallout game, there was very little atmosphere or the urge to explore like the originals had, plusa exploring was made very difficult by various factors, it had the colour but thats about it and it played more like an action game

There's that exploration thing again. I don't remember exploration being the main draw of Fallout 1 and 2. I thought it was talking to interesting characters and doing things in different ways with completely different characters. You know, ROLE-PLAYING? I promise you all of my life savings that if I made a hiking simulator, I would steal away ALL of Bethesda's fans.

cherry-picking one line of dialogue out of thousands does nothing to disprove my dialogue point, yet alone all my others...

Oh really? How about another?

PC: I AM LOOKING FOR MY FATHER, HE IS A MIDDLE AGED MAN.
Peron: Oh! he is at the bar.

Please tell me where the hell any intelligence is in this dialogue? Better radio stations? Fo3 had 3, 2 of which play crap and the other is plain annoying.

Karma doesn't mean shit in fallout. At all. No one cares about your inner soul just like the media doesn't care that a woman has "a good personality."

All the quests fin Fallout 3 were brain dead. Why blow up a town for an old man who wants to view NOTHING? In fact, where the fuck did he get his money? Where? Nothing makes sense in fallout 3.

It is wrong because his (and my) complaint is that it lacks real worthy locations to explore and mostly consists of empty shacks and caves. Your response was well that is how the area where it is set is. Low Density, not to many notable landmarks/locations. Hence they chose the wrong location when there is plenty of high density areas that could have been used. Or they could have populated the area they chose to use with stuff by using thier imagination. But of course would have had to sacrifice the realism portrayed in the Fallout series.

Again, time. Time ravages many locations. With the Legion, NCR, and prospectors a world with untouched locations doesn't make much sense. Hell, DC doesn't make any sense due to that simple fact.

Who said anything about untouched? I am saying still standing for crying out loud. None of the buildings in Fallout 3 were untouched. They were well used, ravaged by time and interesting + rewarding to explore. The only places really untouched were the vaults. The rest of the buildings were torn apart. You could tell they were used by people. And that gave then a lived in feeling that gave Fallout 3 a more immersive feel over NV which has 3 times as many shacks and dens and few actual OMG epic buildings.

Actually no. Those buildings where frozen in time despite being filled with super mutants (which should be extinct in DC). Skeletons stayed exactly the way they died in 2077. No one moved them, not even a damn radroach. In New Vegas the houses, and every thing was looted by prospectors or for the war effort. The only one left was HTH tools, only due to the fact traps where everywhere. In Fallout 3, even the most "looted" building was untouched with everything still there. DO you really expect a house in the middle of nowhere to have anything of value left? For 200 years? With no guards? That wouldn't last long. A lock rusts, Wood rots, and concrete crumbles. The only places with "loot" are raider camps, places where people live, created safe houses. Everything else is torn upside down for anything of value then creatures moved in.

Oh right we should expect realism in a game filled with super mutants, giant radioactive roaches and big ass flies? the laws of nature are sure gonna apply there. So we won't give the player some interesting places to explore and instead populate it with abandoned 1 room shacks with empty bottles and bottle caps for them to find. Because anything else they would have to suspend thier disbelief. Really??

And this is a shining example of why realism and video games should never mix. Not when having too much of 1 will take away from the other.

So suddenly when a fictional element is introduced all common sense goes out the window? Homefront is fictional, but it couldn't hide behind "its fictional" shield from the scathing reviews that it made no sense, and utterly contrived.

Exploring big buildings looking for interesting loot = fun
Encouraging exploration = fun

moving from 1 one room shack to the next picking up bottlecaps = not fun
discouraging exploration by putting nothing of interest = not fun

realism should not be put in at the expense of fun
any questions?

And homefront had a short garbage campaign that was not fun. Who cares about fiction or not. Not fun is not fun. NV took all the fun out of exploring random areas. Why am I gonna travel all over the map finding old racetracks with checkered flags and old gas stations? Oh I might find a cave with nothing of interest hooray for me. Not to say there wasn't improvements in other areas but what they improved on in one area came from the resources it takes to make exploring an interesting experience. So if you want to call it realism or whatever, you do that. But the end of the day I would rather explore DC because it is fun because it is interesting than explore the mainland that is boring and not fun. I can't make it any clearer than that.

Except your brand of fun isn't the same as others. DC was a bland world. Its rewards were the same, the same guns and the same 300 or so bottle caps. How is there anything interesting in DC? Its the same shit. Hell, DC is more like a cardboard box city than a treal believable world. Once I realized that there were no Police, Ambulances, or Firetrucks it was all over. If Bethesda was so incompetent they couldn't even cover the fucking basics of a city they couldn't do anything else. DC is contrived, still, and unbelievable.

Fallout 3 only led you to believe there is something over the hill, but at the end of the day its another dungeon with a combat shotgun for a reward. A WWII weapon found all over the wasteland, a Russian one no less. How does that make sense? A centuries old communist gun used by the future U.S. military? The leader of arms in the fallout world? It doesn't. Exploration is not all encompassing, there are other factors.

And we have a winner. You are right F3 led you to believe there was something over the next hill. Usually it was more of the same with the odd rare weapon here or there. Maybe you'd get lucky and find something fun like plunger guy. NV on the other hand tells you without a doubt the only thing you will find over the next hill is more sand and more of the same.

 

[Aprilgold]

New Vegas made me actual want to expand on my character, making him a pimp that once knew everyone in the strip, but then lost everything, so he picked up the job to be the caravaneer. And what I mean is I actually ROLE PLAYED! But in the gameplay aspect, I think it fell down a pit a couple of times, end of point, FO3 was a better gaming experience for me, but had no RPG aspects that I've come to love.

 

[Andrew_Mac]

I'm wanting a new game, does anyone recommend Fallout: new vegas? Cos i'm wanting to try an RPG style game. I am aware its bugged up the arse, but i'm still interested in it.
so my question unto you, is: Is it worth my money?

 

[ChupathingyX]

I'm wanting a new game, does anyone recommend Fallout: new vegas? Cos i'm wanting to try an RPG style game. I am aware its bugged up the arse, but i'm still interested in it.
so my question unto you, is: Is it worth my money?

If you ask me then yes.

I don't know what previous Fallout experience you have but New Vegs is a much better starting point than 3. It actually continues off from F2 and keeps to the lore much better.

 

[Andrew_Mac]

I'm wanting a new game, does anyone recommend Fallout: new vegas? Cos i'm wanting to try an RPG style game. I am aware its bugged up the arse, but i'm still interested in it.
so my question unto you, is: Is it worth my money?

If you ask me then yes.

I don't know what previous Fallout experience you have but New Vegs is a much better starting point than 3. It actually continues off from F2 and keeps to the lore much better.

I've never played any fallout game before. I'm wanting to get into the RPG style games, just for the hell of it. The only RPG i've played before was i think oblivion. I'm saying I think because I only had about half an hour of playing it.
I sort of enjoyed it, and i'm now wanting to see if it was a partial fling of if it could bloom into a romance with the genre. I've never played any fallouts before but i know what its about.

 

[5t3v0]

I'm wanting a new game, does anyone recommend Fallout: new vegas? Cos i'm wanting to try an RPG style game. I am aware its bugged up the arse, but i'm still interested in it.
so my question unto you, is: Is it worth my money?

If you ask me then yes.

I don't know what previous Fallout experience you have but New Vegs is a much better starting point than 3. It actually continues off from F2 and keeps to the lore much better.

I've never played any fallout game before. I'm wanting to get into the RPG style games, just for the hell of it. The only RPG i've played before was i think oblivion. I'm saying I think because I only had about half an hour of playing it.
I sort of enjoyed it, and i'm now wanting to see if it was a partial fling of if it could bloom into a romance with the genre. I've never played any fallouts before but i know what its about.

Because of the characters backstory isnt hand-held throughout, New Vegas is a lot more role playable. There are also a lot more options and there ARE multiple endings. However, because of its complexity, many have reported bugginess in some areas, while others have not. Though this was also the case with Fallout 3. The Gambryo Engine just sucks.

I get saddened by the fact that Extra credits (to whom I am a fan of) slagged New Vegas off so badly. They didn't realise that if they actually played through the Game properly, not merely giving it a quick "Oh, its Fallout 3 all over again. Ill pass... Also, I think this game has a cliched 'amnesia plotline'" analysis, they would have found:

Spoiler

- Homosexual characters, who are portrayed as intellegent and not offensive
- Didn't have an amnesia plotline
- Numerous ways of playing the game, such as the guy who managed to play New Vegas without killing a human being (need to check... but did he kill any animals?)
- Actually DIDNT have an amnesia plotline.
And a few other things they mentioned that I can't recall right now.

Fallout 3 on the other hand, had a MASSIVELY cliched story line. Your father leaves you on a Heroic journey, only to die saving you, and leaving the project in control of people who want to use it for evil.
It also had major conflicts in tone. It tried to hard to be a serious game when Fallout has always had subtle but present social commentary. Fallout 3 had you seeing your father kill himself, then you finding a bastardised version of mad max.
It also had problems gameplay wise that ended up on carrying into New Vegas. Becuase of Fallout 3, Power armour is somehow so plentiful that it can be bought off a store shelf for a small number of caps, but is also less useful than combat armour. The Lore behind power armour included the fact that T-51 replaced tanks in US military service.

In all, I loved Fallout 3, it was my first fallout. But after much research and Fallout wiki Freefalling I realised that bethesda didnt do as much research about the original Lore as they should have, and needed to talk to a few more sociologists on how the buildup would actually work.

 

[Johnson294]

i liked both but i spent about 10 times longer playing 3, and i didn't even bother finding every place in new vegas so i guess Fallout 3 would be better. If new vegas wasn't so linear at the beginning and wasn't littered with caza-whatevers i would have playn through alot more of it, that and it needed more places, in Fallout 3 there was literally a place on every square, and nearly all of them had something unique to offer... looking at my post it appears that i actually found alot of ways that Fallout 3 is better (in my opinion) although i think new vegas had more potential.

You DO realize the west coast is low density areas right? "The lack of places" IS the real West coast. Did you honestly expect a huge metropolis in a fucking desert? Where states continually fight over the legal right to water?

from a post I made on another forum:

I've been playing New Vegas a lot and now have 2 and a half playthroughs done, about 100 hours in total. After this short amount of time, I feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer. Most map markers are hugely disappointing, consisting of shacks with nothing but an empty bottle, a campfire on a hill, an airport terminal with nothing but two cases of caps and some radscorpions, a few caves with not a single piece of loot or backstory in them... it feel so empty compared to the Capital Wasteland which had something new, unique and interesting over every hill.
There are sweet fuck all large, dungeon like areas to explore.

There are no huge, detailed interiors like Nuka Cola Plant, Capital Building, Red Racer Factory, Springvale Elementary, Roosevelt Academy, The museums of History and Tech, National Archives, LOB Industries, Hubris comics... this was my favorite part of fallout 3 and all we have in New Vegas are a few vaults, 4 Casinos, Repcomm and an empty sewer. Very disappointing.

The dialogue and writing are much better in NV and sure, there are more quests but most of them just involve 'travel to point A talk to 'x', watch long loading screen, travel back'. F3 had less quests but the ones it had were amazing and much longer... Reily's Rangers, Tranquility Lane, Oasis, Take It Back, The Superhuman Gambit, Wasteland Survival Guide, Stealing Independance, Trouble On The Homefont... all great. New Vegas had the Vault quests which were fantastic but none of the others were (to me) as memorable.

Doing the Camp McCarran and Freeside quests is horrible because of the excruciating load times. So much going in and out of areas and they don't even give us travel points inside the Strip and McCarran which is just bizarre. The load times are twice as long as they were in F3 too.

And then there's the atmosphere... Fallout 3 was haunting, beautiful and soulful. Standing on a ruined flyover watching the sun set over the burnt out forests and ruined Washington monument was just sublime. Nothing in Vegas gave me that same feeling or immersed me in its atmosphere like f3 did at any given moment. Just sand, sand, red rocks and more sand.

Now don't get me wrong... I still love New Vegas more than 99% of games and there are areas it improves over F3. Better combat, better dialogue, better sound, better characters and story. But to me it falls short of its big brother in many areas. I went back to the Capital Wasteland this week and was surprised how much better it looked, felt and played.

Look up.

Them choosing the wrong location to host a Fallout game is not a very good excuse. It doesn't make the game any better or the complaints less valid because "they went with realism derp".

How is it wrong? Ever? Because they chose to be realistic in their world? Where time ravages the landscape?

Fallout 3, by far, everything was better, dialogue, the radio stations by far, the cities (NV cities were dull empty and consisted of just a bunch of unnamed NPCs), the wasteland is much more interesting, some "locations" in NV consisted simply of an abandoned shack and a never inhabited bed (this made up about 1/3 of the locations), the quests and characters were much more memorable (really pretty much every quest in NV was boring, FO3 had you assassinating people for an old man, blowing up towns, murdering an entire skyscraper worth of people, going back to your vault and solving the problems, etc. I can't even remember a single quest in NV tbh...), the story was more original (you're near death and are on a trail of revenge, sooo original...), a better, grittier atmosphere, reputation is just awful and has many irritating flaws, karma in NV is broken (no karma loss for killing humans but you gain karma for killing ghouls...?), and not to mention the glitches, oh god, the glitches...

I can't really help but think the people who like NV better are just thinking it because of old Fallout and Obsidian nostalgia, as FO3 is really the better game in every respect.

Dialogue

Hahahah, NO.

You tell me straight to my face this is good dialogue. Come on, tell me this is not at all retarded.

EDIT:

See for me its the opposite, fallout new vegas was the shiity fallout game, there was very little atmosphere or the urge to explore like the originals had, plusa exploring was made very difficult by various factors, it had the colour but thats about it and it played more like an action game

There's that exploration thing again. I don't remember exploration being the main draw of Fallout 1 and 2. I thought it was talking to interesting characters and doing things in different ways with completely different characters. You know, ROLE-PLAYING? I promise you all of my life savings that if I made a hiking simulator, I would steal away ALL of Bethesda's fans.

cherry-picking one line of dialogue out of thousands does nothing to disprove my dialogue point, yet alone all my others...

Oh really? How about another?

PC: I AM LOOKING FOR MY FATHER, HE IS A MIDDLE AGED MAN.
Peron: Oh! he is at the bar.

Please tell me where the hell any intelligence is in this dialogue? Better radio stations? Fo3 had 3, 2 of which play crap and the other is plain annoying.

Karma doesn't mean shit in fallout. At all. No one cares about your inner soul just like the media doesn't care that a woman has "a good personality."

All the quests fin Fallout 3 were brain dead. Why blow up a town for an old man who wants to view NOTHING? In fact, where the fuck did he get his money? Where? Nothing makes sense in fallout 3.

Those are only a few examples, many of the ones in Fallout New Vegas don't require the skill either... when I said dialogue I really wasn't talking about one or two examples where something required some intelligence when it really wasn't that intelligent.

I found that characters in FO3 had much better personalities, you had the douche bag, the pure evil guy, the quest givers, the weird guys, the people trying to make the best of everything, in New Vegas the characters just felt bland (perhaps it was because 9/10 of the characters were unnamed NPCs, one of the main reasons why the casinos were awful), also the responses in Fallout 3 are much more original, you can respond, politely rudely, somewhere in between, or just get information. In New Vegas I felt the responses lacked any emotion, they were imply vanilla "get more information choices."

I don't know about you, but I (and many others who even liked Fallout New Vegas otherwise better) preferred FO3's stations by far. GNR was one of the best stations in a game; the music was some of the best and the other skits and things were humorous. It's the apocalypse, you think you'd want a sort of relaxed DJ who is humorous to help you take your mind off it. Again, New Vegas' radio stations were bland, I don't remember any of the names, as all they did was just play music, which also was not nearly as good IMO.

Karma might not have much bearing but it still does affect things. Hell, for some choices in New Vegas, I really, really wanted to do them, but they required low karma. I somehow had high karma, though I had killed and robbed tons of people. If they were going to screw karma up so bad, they might as well have just scrapped it all together, rather than make it mandatory for some paths.

I found the quests much more memorable, the only decent quest in NV was beyond the beef, which I didn't like, as there was no way to redo the speech challenge so I had to take a completely different, much worse path. In Fallout 3, your actions determine your path, not your skill in dialogue. I remember it from somewhere but forget where, but I believe Tenpenny found the tower abandoned and sold the rooms out which is how he's wealthy. This is a quote from the wikia page on Tenpenny: "An 80-year-old Englishman[1] turned American entrepreneur, the man who discovered the tower saw it as an opportunity to provide residents with a standard of living enjoyed by the affluent in the days before nuclear Armageddon."

This is not even addressing the terrible rep and bugs of NV.

 

[squid5580]

i liked both but i spent about 10 times longer playing 3, and i didn't even bother finding every place in new vegas so i guess Fallout 3 would be better. If new vegas wasn't so linear at the beginning and wasn't littered with caza-whatevers i would have playn through alot more of it, that and it needed more places, in Fallout 3 there was literally a place on every square, and nearly all of them had something unique to offer... looking at my post it appears that i actually found alot of ways that Fallout 3 is better (in my opinion) although i think new vegas had more potential.

You DO realize the west coast is low density areas right? "The lack of places" IS the real West coast. Did you honestly expect a huge metropolis in a fucking desert? Where states continually fight over the legal right to water?

from a post I made on another forum:

I've been playing New Vegas a lot and now have 2 and a half playthroughs done, about 100 hours in total. After this short amount of time, I feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer. Most map markers are hugely disappointing, consisting of shacks with nothing but an empty bottle, a campfire on a hill, an airport terminal with nothing but two cases of caps and some radscorpions, a few caves with not a single piece of loot or backstory in them... it feel so empty compared to the Capital Wasteland which had something new, unique and interesting over every hill.
There are sweet fuck all large, dungeon like areas to explore.

There are no huge, detailed interiors like Nuka Cola Plant, Capital Building, Red Racer Factory, Springvale Elementary, Roosevelt Academy, The museums of History and Tech, National Archives, LOB Industries, Hubris comics... this was my favorite part of fallout 3 and all we have in New Vegas are a few vaults, 4 Casinos, Repcomm and an empty sewer. Very disappointing.

The dialogue and writing are much better in NV and sure, there are more quests but most of them just involve 'travel to point A talk to 'x', watch long loading screen, travel back'. F3 had less quests but the ones it had were amazing and much longer... Reily's Rangers, Tranquility Lane, Oasis, Take It Back, The Superhuman Gambit, Wasteland Survival Guide, Stealing Independance, Trouble On The Homefont... all great. New Vegas had the Vault quests which were fantastic but none of the others were (to me) as memorable.

Doing the Camp McCarran and Freeside quests is horrible because of the excruciating load times. So much going in and out of areas and they don't even give us travel points inside the Strip and McCarran which is just bizarre. The load times are twice as long as they were in F3 too.

And then there's the atmosphere... Fallout 3 was haunting, beautiful and soulful. Standing on a ruined flyover watching the sun set over the burnt out forests and ruined Washington monument was just sublime. Nothing in Vegas gave me that same feeling or immersed me in its atmosphere like f3 did at any given moment. Just sand, sand, red rocks and more sand.

Now don't get me wrong... I still love New Vegas more than 99% of games and there are areas it improves over F3. Better combat, better dialogue, better sound, better characters and story. But to me it falls short of its big brother in many areas. I went back to the Capital Wasteland this week and was surprised how much better it looked, felt and played.

Look up.

Them choosing the wrong location to host a Fallout game is not a very good excuse. It doesn't make the game any better or the complaints less valid because "they went with realism derp".

How is it wrong? Ever? Because they chose to be realistic in their world? Where time ravages the landscape?

Fallout 3, by far, everything was better, dialogue, the radio stations by far, the cities (NV cities were dull empty and consisted of just a bunch of unnamed NPCs), the wasteland is much more interesting, some "locations" in NV consisted simply of an abandoned shack and a never inhabited bed (this made up about 1/3 of the locations), the quests and characters were much more memorable (really pretty much every quest in NV was boring, FO3 had you assassinating people for an old man, blowing up towns, murdering an entire skyscraper worth of people, going back to your vault and solving the problems, etc. I can't even remember a single quest in NV tbh...), the story was more original (you're near death and are on a trail of revenge, sooo original...), a better, grittier atmosphere, reputation is just awful and has many irritating flaws, karma in NV is broken (no karma loss for killing humans but you gain karma for killing ghouls...?), and not to mention the glitches, oh god, the glitches...

I can't really help but think the people who like NV better are just thinking it because of old Fallout and Obsidian nostalgia, as FO3 is really the better game in every respect.

Dialogue

Hahahah, NO.

You tell me straight to my face this is good dialogue. Come on, tell me this is not at all retarded.

EDIT:

See for me its the opposite, fallout new vegas was the shiity fallout game, there was very little atmosphere or the urge to explore like the originals had, plusa exploring was made very difficult by various factors, it had the colour but thats about it and it played more like an action game

There's that exploration thing again. I don't remember exploration being the main draw of Fallout 1 and 2. I thought it was talking to interesting characters and doing things in different ways with completely different characters. You know, ROLE-PLAYING? I promise you all of my life savings that if I made a hiking simulator, I would steal away ALL of Bethesda's fans.

cherry-picking one line of dialogue out of thousands does nothing to disprove my dialogue point, yet alone all my others...

Oh really? How about another?

PC: I AM LOOKING FOR MY FATHER, HE IS A MIDDLE AGED MAN.
Peron: Oh! he is at the bar.

Please tell me where the hell any intelligence is in this dialogue? Better radio stations? Fo3 had 3, 2 of which play crap and the other is plain annoying.

Karma doesn't mean shit in fallout. At all. No one cares about your inner soul just like the media doesn't care that a woman has "a good personality."

All the quests fin Fallout 3 were brain dead. Why blow up a town for an old man who wants to view NOTHING? In fact, where the fuck did he get his money? Where? Nothing makes sense in fallout 3.

It is wrong because his (and my) complaint is that it lacks real worthy locations to explore and mostly consists of empty shacks and caves. Your response was well that is how the area where it is set is. Low Density, not to many notable landmarks/locations. Hence they chose the wrong location when there is plenty of high density areas that could have been used. Or they could have populated the area they chose to use with stuff by using thier imagination. But of course would have had to sacrifice the realism portrayed in the Fallout series.

Again, time. Time ravages many locations. With the Legion, NCR, and prospectors a world with untouched locations doesn't make much sense. Hell, DC doesn't make any sense due to that simple fact.

Who said anything about untouched? I am saying still standing for crying out loud. None of the buildings in Fallout 3 were untouched. They were well used, ravaged by time and interesting + rewarding to explore. The only places really untouched were the vaults. The rest of the buildings were torn apart. You could tell they were used by people. And that gave then a lived in feeling that gave Fallout 3 a more immersive feel over NV which has 3 times as many shacks and dens and few actual OMG epic buildings.

Actually no. Those buildings where frozen in time despite being filled with super mutants (which should be extinct in DC). Skeletons stayed exactly the way they died in 2077. No one moved them, not even a damn radroach. In New Vegas the houses, and every thing was looted by prospectors or for the war effort. The only one left was HTH tools, only due to the fact traps where everywhere. In Fallout 3, even the most "looted" building was untouched with everything still there. DO you really expect a house in the middle of nowhere to have anything of value left? For 200 years? With no guards? That wouldn't last long. A lock rusts, Wood rots, and concrete crumbles. The only places with "loot" are raider camps, places where people live, created safe houses. Everything else is torn upside down for anything of value then creatures moved in.

Oh right we should expect realism in a game filled with super mutants, giant radioactive roaches and big ass flies? the laws of nature are sure gonna apply there. So we won't give the player some interesting places to explore and instead populate it with abandoned 1 room shacks with empty bottles and bottle caps for them to find. Because anything else they would have to suspend thier disbelief. Really??

And this is a shining example of why realism and video games should never mix. Not when having too much of 1 will take away from the other.

So suddenly when a fictional element is introduced all common sense goes out the window? Homefront is fictional, but it couldn't hide behind "its fictional" shield from the scathing reviews that it made no sense, and utterly contrived.

Exploring big buildings looking for interesting loot = fun
Encouraging exploration = fun

moving from 1 one room shack to the next picking up bottlecaps = not fun
discouraging exploration by putting nothing of interest = not fun

realism should not be put in at the expense of fun
any questions?

And homefront had a short garbage campaign that was not fun. Who cares about fiction or not. Not fun is not fun. NV took all the fun out of exploring random areas. Why am I gonna travel all over the map finding old racetracks with checkered flags and old gas stations? Oh I might find a cave with nothing of interest hooray for me. Not to say there wasn't improvements in other areas but what they improved on in one area came from the resources it takes to make exploring an interesting experience. So if you want to call it realism or whatever, you do that. But the end of the day I would rather explore DC because it is fun because it is interesting than explore the mainland that is boring and not fun. I can't make it any clearer than that.

Except your brand of fun isn't the same as others. DC was a bland world. Its rewards were the same, the same guns and the same 300 or so bottle caps. How is there anything interesting in DC? Its the same shit. Hell, DC is more like a cardboard box city than a treal believable world. Once I realized that there were no Police, Ambulances, or Firetrucks it was all over. If Bethesda was so incompetent they couldn't even cover the fucking basics of a city they couldn't do anything else. DC is contrived, still, and unbelievable.

Fallout 3 only led you to believe there is something over the hill, but at the end of the day its another dungeon with a combat shotgun for a reward. A WWII weapon found all over the wasteland, a Russian one no less. How does that make sense? A centuries old communist gun used by the future U.S. military? The leader of arms in the fallout world? It doesn't. Exploration is not all encompassing, there are other factors.

And we have a winner. You are right F3 led you to believe there was something over the next hill. Usually it was more of the same with the odd rare weapon here or there. Maybe you'd get lucky and find something fun like plunger guy. NV on the other hand tells you without a doubt the only thing you will find over the next hill is more sand and more of the same.

Exactly. It doesn't straight up lie to you that something is over the horizon. A game doesn't need to shroud mechanics to be good.

Fallout 3 did have good things though. Just not in terms of items or enemies. It had scenes instead. Things that made you imagine what might have happened like the afore mentioned plunger man. Little scenes that told a story. So far in NV the only thing I have found is journals that straight up tell the story (IE rad man or buddy in the test site). Sure the stories were fine and humorous but they took me out of the game to enjoy them. Instead of keeping the immersion and telling them.

 

[Zydrate]

They're both sort of equal but I feel there more to do in NV so I haven't gone back to FO3 since. More varied areas, more RP viability.
With NV, the first 10 levels are usually the same. (Usually just loot gathering to trade for a reliable supply of ammo before I start questing). But with FO3, despite any of my character concepts, I find myself doing pretty much the same thing.

NV gives me more RP-ability with various concepts.

 

[Nexus4]

I enjoyed NV, but I just myself to stop caring for anything in it after a while and went back to FO3. I think I liked the DC setting better than Nevada, it felt a little more like an active warzone between than NV and I always felt like I was going to run into a crossfire between several factions. This does happen in NV, just too little outside of missions for it to leave a lasting impression on me. I also hated the New Vegas Strip, for the amount of effort to get in there, it is rather lackluster.

Edit: and on the whole radio station argument, I think it depends on what kinda music you like. I was personally turned off the whole country style that went with NV, so I liked GNR the best.

 

[squid5580]

i liked both but i spent about 10 times longer playing 3, and i didn't even bother finding every place in new vegas so i guess Fallout 3 would be better. If new vegas wasn't so linear at the beginning and wasn't littered with caza-whatevers i would have playn through alot more of it, that and it needed more places, in Fallout 3 there was literally a place on every square, and nearly all of them had something unique to offer... looking at my post it appears that i actually found alot of ways that Fallout 3 is better (in my opinion) although i think new vegas had more potential.

You DO realize the west coast is low density areas right? "The lack of places" IS the real West coast. Did you honestly expect a huge metropolis in a fucking desert? Where states continually fight over the legal right to water?

from a post I made on another forum:

I've been playing New Vegas a lot and now have 2 and a half playthroughs done, about 100 hours in total. After this short amount of time, I feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer. Most map markers are hugely disappointing, consisting of shacks with nothing but an empty bottle, a campfire on a hill, an airport terminal with nothing but two cases of caps and some radscorpions, a few caves with not a single piece of loot or backstory in them... it feel so empty compared to the Capital Wasteland which had something new, unique and interesting over every hill.
There are sweet fuck all large, dungeon like areas to explore.

There are no huge, detailed interiors like Nuka Cola Plant, Capital Building, Red Racer Factory, Springvale Elementary, Roosevelt Academy, The museums of History and Tech, National Archives, LOB Industries, Hubris comics... this was my favorite part of fallout 3 and all we have in New Vegas are a few vaults, 4 Casinos, Repcomm and an empty sewer. Very disappointing.

The dialogue and writing are much better in NV and sure, there are more quests but most of them just involve 'travel to point A talk to 'x', watch long loading screen, travel back'. F3 had less quests but the ones it had were amazing and much longer... Reily's Rangers, Tranquility Lane, Oasis, Take It Back, The Superhuman Gambit, Wasteland Survival Guide, Stealing Independance, Trouble On The Homefont... all great. New Vegas had the Vault quests which were fantastic but none of the others were (to me) as memorable.

Doing the Camp McCarran and Freeside quests is horrible because of the excruciating load times. So much going in and out of areas and they don't even give us travel points inside the Strip and McCarran which is just bizarre. The load times are twice as long as they were in F3 too.

And then there's the atmosphere... Fallout 3 was haunting, beautiful and soulful. Standing on a ruined flyover watching the sun set over the burnt out forests and ruined Washington monument was just sublime. Nothing in Vegas gave me that same feeling or immersed me in its atmosphere like f3 did at any given moment. Just sand, sand, red rocks and more sand.

Now don't get me wrong... I still love New Vegas more than 99% of games and there are areas it improves over F3. Better combat, better dialogue, better sound, better characters and story. But to me it falls short of its big brother in many areas. I went back to the Capital Wasteland this week and was surprised how much better it looked, felt and played.

Look up.

Them choosing the wrong location to host a Fallout game is not a very good excuse. It doesn't make the game any better or the complaints less valid because "they went with realism derp".

How is it wrong? Ever? Because they chose to be realistic in their world? Where time ravages the landscape?

Fallout 3, by far, everything was better, dialogue, the radio stations by far, the cities (NV cities were dull empty and consisted of just a bunch of unnamed NPCs), the wasteland is much more interesting, some "locations" in NV consisted simply of an abandoned shack and a never inhabited bed (this made up about 1/3 of the locations), the quests and characters were much more memorable (really pretty much every quest in NV was boring, FO3 had you assassinating people for an old man, blowing up towns, murdering an entire skyscraper worth of people, going back to your vault and solving the problems, etc. I can't even remember a single quest in NV tbh...), the story was more original (you're near death and are on a trail of revenge, sooo original...), a better, grittier atmosphere, reputation is just awful and has many irritating flaws, karma in NV is broken (no karma loss for killing humans but you gain karma for killing ghouls...?), and not to mention the glitches, oh god, the glitches...

I can't really help but think the people who like NV better are just thinking it because of old Fallout and Obsidian nostalgia, as FO3 is really the better game in every respect.

Dialogue

Hahahah, NO.

You tell me straight to my face this is good dialogue. Come on, tell me this is not at all retarded.

EDIT:

See for me its the opposite, fallout new vegas was the shiity fallout game, there was very little atmosphere or the urge to explore like the originals had, plusa exploring was made very difficult by various factors, it had the colour but thats about it and it played more like an action game

There's that exploration thing again. I don't remember exploration being the main draw of Fallout 1 and 2. I thought it was talking to interesting characters and doing things in different ways with completely different characters. You know, ROLE-PLAYING? I promise you all of my life savings that if I made a hiking simulator, I would steal away ALL of Bethesda's fans.

cherry-picking one line of dialogue out of thousands does nothing to disprove my dialogue point, yet alone all my others...

Oh really? How about another?

PC: I AM LOOKING FOR MY FATHER, HE IS A MIDDLE AGED MAN.
Peron: Oh! he is at the bar.

Please tell me where the hell any intelligence is in this dialogue? Better radio stations? Fo3 had 3, 2 of which play crap and the other is plain annoying.

Karma doesn't mean shit in fallout. At all. No one cares about your inner soul just like the media doesn't care that a woman has "a good personality."

All the quests fin Fallout 3 were brain dead. Why blow up a town for an old man who wants to view NOTHING? In fact, where the fuck did he get his money? Where? Nothing makes sense in fallout 3.

Those are only a few examples, many of the ones in Fallout New Vegas don't require the skill either... when I said dialogue I really wasn't talking about one or two examples where something required some intelligence when it really wasn't that intelligent.

I found that characters in FO3 had much better personalities, you had the douche bag, the pure evil guy, the quest givers, the weird guys, the people trying to make the best of everything, in New Vegas the characters just felt bland (perhaps it was because 9/10 of the characters were unnamed NPCs, one of the main reasons why the casinos were awful), also the responses in Fallout 3 are much more original, you can respond, politely rudely, somewhere in between, or just get information. In New Vegas I felt the responses lacked any emotion, they were imply vanilla "get more information choices."

I don't know about you, but I (and many others who even liked Fallout New Vegas otherwise better) preferred FO3's stations by far. GNR was one of the best stations in a game; the music was some of the best and the other skits and things were humorous. It's the apocalypse, you think you'd want a sort of relaxed DJ who is humorous to help you take your mind off it. Again, New Vegas' radio stations were bland, I don't remember any of the names, as all they did was just play music, which also was not nearly as good IMO.

Karma might not have much bearing but it still does affect things. Hell, for some choices in New Vegas, I really, really wanted to do them, but they required low karma. I somehow had high karma, though I had killed and robbed tons of people. If they were going to screw karma up so bad, they might as well have just scrapped it all together, rather than make it mandatory for some paths.

I found the quests much more memorable, the only decent quest in NV was beyond the beef, which I didn't like, as there was no way to redo the speech challenge so I had to take a completely different, much worse path. In Fallout 3, your actions determine your path, not your skill in dialogue. I remember it from somewhere but forget where, but I believe Tenpenny found the tower abandoned and sold the rooms out which is how he's wealthy. This is a quote from the wikia page on Tenpenny: "An 80-year-old Englishman[1] turned American entrepreneur, the man who discovered the tower saw it as an opportunity to provide residents with a standard of living enjoyed by the affluent in the days before nuclear Armageddon."

This is not even addressing the terrible rep and bugs of NV.

1. Quests only involved shooting something, or killing.

2. GNR is annoying, playing 4 songs.

3. Karma restrictions are Fallout 3. I had high Karma and could do anything I wanted.

4. Tenpenny has no money, nor do his residence. There is no fucking economy. How did he get the cash to restore a tower? In fact how the hell did he get to America in the first place? Europe has been destroyed far before the Great War.

5. Radios are supposed to play music. One of them was dedicated to that exact function. The humor is from black mountain, and for news you have Mr. New Vegas. The AI.

6. Fallout 3's characters were trying to "styrange" for strange sake. Most of the time they lacked any human qualities such as common fucking sense. You can kill someone's daughter and he would only thank you for it.

7. None of the dialogue made sense. it was horrible.

i liked both but i spent about 10 times longer playing 3, and i didn't even bother finding every place in new vegas so i guess Fallout 3 would be better. If new vegas wasn't so linear at the beginning and wasn't littered with caza-whatevers i would have playn through alot more of it, that and it needed more places, in Fallout 3 there was literally a place on every square, and nearly all of them had something unique to offer... looking at my post it appears that i actually found alot of ways that Fallout 3 is better (in my opinion) although i think new vegas had more potential.

You DO realize the west coast is low density areas right? "The lack of places" IS the real West coast. Did you honestly expect a huge metropolis in a fucking desert? Where states continually fight over the legal right to water?

from a post I made on another forum:

I've been playing New Vegas a lot and now have 2 and a half playthroughs done, about 100 hours in total. After this short amount of time, I feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer. Most map markers are hugely disappointing, consisting of shacks with nothing but an empty bottle, a campfire on a hill, an airport terminal with nothing but two cases of caps and some radscorpions, a few caves with not a single piece of loot or backstory in them... it feel so empty compared to the Capital Wasteland which had something new, unique and interesting over every hill.
There are sweet fuck all large, dungeon like areas to explore.

There are no huge, detailed interiors like Nuka Cola Plant, Capital Building, Red Racer Factory, Springvale Elementary, Roosevelt Academy, The museums of History and Tech, National Archives, LOB Industries, Hubris comics... this was my favorite part of fallout 3 and all we have in New Vegas are a few vaults, 4 Casinos, Repcomm and an empty sewer. Very disappointing.

The dialogue and writing are much better in NV and sure, there are more quests but most of them just involve 'travel to point A talk to 'x', watch long loading screen, travel back'. F3 had less quests but the ones it had were amazing and much longer... Reily's Rangers, Tranquility Lane, Oasis, Take It Back, The Superhuman Gambit, Wasteland Survival Guide, Stealing Independance, Trouble On The Homefont... all great. New Vegas had the Vault quests which were fantastic but none of the others were (to me) as memorable.

Doing the Camp McCarran and Freeside quests is horrible because of the excruciating load times. So much going in and out of areas and they don't even give us travel points inside the Strip and McCarran which is just bizarre. The load times are twice as long as they were in F3 too.

And then there's the atmosphere... Fallout 3 was haunting, beautiful and soulful. Standing on a ruined flyover watching the sun set over the burnt out forests and ruined Washington monument was just sublime. Nothing in Vegas gave me that same feeling or immersed me in its atmosphere like f3 did at any given moment. Just sand, sand, red rocks and more sand.

Now don't get me wrong... I still love New Vegas more than 99% of games and there are areas it improves over F3. Better combat, better dialogue, better sound, better characters and story. But to me it falls short of its big brother in many areas. I went back to the Capital Wasteland this week and was surprised how much better it looked, felt and played.

Look up.

Them choosing the wrong location to host a Fallout game is not a very good excuse. It doesn't make the game any better or the complaints less valid because "they went with realism derp".

How is it wrong? Ever? Because they chose to be realistic in their world? Where time ravages the landscape?

Fallout 3, by far, everything was better, dialogue, the radio stations by far, the cities (NV cities were dull empty and consisted of just a bunch of unnamed NPCs), the wasteland is much more interesting, some "locations" in NV consisted simply of an abandoned shack and a never inhabited bed (this made up about 1/3 of the locations), the quests and characters were much more memorable (really pretty much every quest in NV was boring, FO3 had you assassinating people for an old man, blowing up towns, murdering an entire skyscraper worth of people, going back to your vault and solving the problems, etc. I can't even remember a single quest in NV tbh...), the story was more original (you're near death and are on a trail of revenge, sooo original...), a better, grittier atmosphere, reputation is just awful and has many irritating flaws, karma in NV is broken (no karma loss for killing humans but you gain karma for killing ghouls...?), and not to mention the glitches, oh god, the glitches...

I can't really help but think the people who like NV better are just thinking it because of old Fallout and Obsidian nostalgia, as FO3 is really the better game in every respect.

Dialogue

Hahahah, NO.

You tell me straight to my face this is good dialogue. Come on, tell me this is not at all retarded.

EDIT:

See for me its the opposite, fallout new vegas was the shiity fallout game, there was very little atmosphere or the urge to explore like the originals had, plusa exploring was made very difficult by various factors, it had the colour but thats about it and it played more like an action game

There's that exploration thing again. I don't remember exploration being the main draw of Fallout 1 and 2. I thought it was talking to interesting characters and doing things in different ways with completely different characters. You know, ROLE-PLAYING? I promise you all of my life savings that if I made a hiking simulator, I would steal away ALL of Bethesda's fans.

cherry-picking one line of dialogue out of thousands does nothing to disprove my dialogue point, yet alone all my others...

Oh really? How about another?

PC: I AM LOOKING FOR MY FATHER, HE IS A MIDDLE AGED MAN.
Peron: Oh! he is at the bar.

Please tell me where the hell any intelligence is in this dialogue? Better radio stations? Fo3 had 3, 2 of which play crap and the other is plain annoying.

Karma doesn't mean shit in fallout. At all. No one cares about your inner soul just like the media doesn't care that a woman has "a good personality."

All the quests fin Fallout 3 were brain dead. Why blow up a town for an old man who wants to view NOTHING? In fact, where the fuck did he get his money? Where? Nothing makes sense in fallout 3.

It is wrong because his (and my) complaint is that it lacks real worthy locations to explore and mostly consists of empty shacks and caves. Your response was well that is how the area where it is set is. Low Density, not to many notable landmarks/locations. Hence they chose the wrong location when there is plenty of high density areas that could have been used. Or they could have populated the area they chose to use with stuff by using thier imagination. But of course would have had to sacrifice the realism portrayed in the Fallout series.

Again, time. Time ravages many locations. With the Legion, NCR, and prospectors a world with untouched locations doesn't make much sense. Hell, DC doesn't make any sense due to that simple fact.

Who said anything about untouched? I am saying still standing for crying out loud. None of the buildings in Fallout 3 were untouched. They were well used, ravaged by time and interesting + rewarding to explore. The only places really untouched were the vaults. The rest of the buildings were torn apart. You could tell they were used by people. And that gave then a lived in feeling that gave Fallout 3 a more immersive feel over NV which has 3 times as many shacks and dens and few actual OMG epic buildings.

Actually no. Those buildings where frozen in time despite being filled with super mutants (which should be extinct in DC). Skeletons stayed exactly the way they died in 2077. No one moved them, not even a damn radroach. In New Vegas the houses, and every thing was looted by prospectors or for the war effort. The only one left was HTH tools, only due to the fact traps where everywhere. In Fallout 3, even the most "looted" building was untouched with everything still there. DO you really expect a house in the middle of nowhere to have anything of value left? For 200 years? With no guards? That wouldn't last long. A lock rusts, Wood rots, and concrete crumbles. The only places with "loot" are raider camps, places where people live, created safe houses. Everything else is torn upside down for anything of value then creatures moved in.

Oh right we should expect realism in a game filled with super mutants, giant radioactive roaches and big ass flies? the laws of nature are sure gonna apply there. So we won't give the player some interesting places to explore and instead populate it with abandoned 1 room shacks with empty bottles and bottle caps for them to find. Because anything else they would have to suspend thier disbelief. Really??

And this is a shining example of why realism and video games should never mix. Not when having too much of 1 will take away from the other.

So suddenly when a fictional element is introduced all common sense goes out the window? Homefront is fictional, but it couldn't hide behind "its fictional" shield from the scathing reviews that it made no sense, and utterly contrived.

Exploring big buildings looking for interesting loot = fun
Encouraging exploration = fun

moving from 1 one room shack to the next picking up bottlecaps = not fun
discouraging exploration by putting nothing of interest = not fun

realism should not be put in at the expense of fun
any questions?

And homefront had a short garbage campaign that was not fun. Who cares about fiction or not. Not fun is not fun. NV took all the fun out of exploring random areas. Why am I gonna travel all over the map finding old racetracks with checkered flags and old gas stations? Oh I might find a cave with nothing of interest hooray for me. Not to say there wasn't improvements in other areas but what they improved on in one area came from the resources it takes to make exploring an interesting experience. So if you want to call it realism or whatever, you do that. But the end of the day I would rather explore DC because it is fun because it is interesting than explore the mainland that is boring and not fun. I can't make it any clearer than that.

Except your brand of fun isn't the same as others. DC was a bland world. Its rewards were the same, the same guns and the same 300 or so bottle caps. How is there anything interesting in DC? Its the same shit. Hell, DC is more like a cardboard box city than a treal believable world. Once I realized that there were no Police, Ambulances, or Firetrucks it was all over. If Bethesda was so incompetent they couldn't even cover the fucking basics of a city they couldn't do anything else. DC is contrived, still, and unbelievable.

Fallout 3 only led you to believe there is something over the hill, but at the end of the day its another dungeon with a combat shotgun for a reward. A WWII weapon found all over the wasteland, a Russian one no less. How does that make sense? A centuries old communist gun used by the future U.S. military? The leader of arms in the fallout world? It doesn't. Exploration is not all encompassing, there are other factors.

And we have a winner. You are right F3 led you to believe there was something over the next hill. Usually it was more of the same with the odd rare weapon here or there. Maybe you'd get lucky and find something fun like plunger guy. NV on the other hand tells you without a doubt the only thing you will find over the next hill is more sand and more of the same.

Exactly. It doesn't straight up lie to you that something is over the horizon. A game doesn't need to shroud mechanics to be good.

Fallout 3 did have good things though. Just not in terms of items or enemies. It had scenes instead. Things that made you imagine what might have happened like the afore mentioned plunger man. Little scenes that told a story. So far in NV the only thing I have found is journals that straight up tell the story (IE rad man or buddy in the test site). Sure the stories were fine and humorous but they took me out of the game to enjoy them. Instead of keeping the immersion and telling them.

1. Rad man's journal is his story using common sense. You don't need a room or flashback dedicated to his story when reading his journal does the same. You don't need a room to tell a story or to show it in game.

2. Reading a journal of a dumb ass is non immersion? For one, they didn't take you out of the game to tell the fucking story. Its a damn book. The world has journals and books. Are we breaking life's immersions because we read books? Hell no. Reading a book or looking at evidence is not meta-gaming. Its being smart about telling stories that happened in the past. The only evidence of an event happening in the past is written text. Any historian can tell you that because it hasn't happened before our eyes. Just making over the top and strange rooms is not telling a story, its weak level design from someone who can't craft a story worth shit. Placing plungers and blood and the walls is not a story, its a just a damn gimmick.

Pulling the player out of the world to read a bunch of text is breakin the immersion (even moreso when the "journal" comes up as the same text as everything else). Relying on that is lazy since it is easy. A player picking a lock and finding a scene (not a flashback just a scene) of a skeleton and a bunch of plungers placed (not strewn about) everywhere that leaves it up to the imagination of the player to figure out what really went down is the height of immersion. It shows a real sense of creativity that NV is truly lacking.

 

[Ladette]

The only thing I thought Fallout 3 did better was the music, I very prefer swing and big band to country. FO3 also had Liberty Prime, which New Vegas didn't have.

Aside from that there was nothing in FO3 that New Vegas didn't do better or make more fun for me.

 

[Pandabearparade]

Fallout 3 is a great game, but New Vegas is better.

The arguments I've seen that suggest Fallout 3 is better boil down to:
-Better atmosphere building.
-More to explore.

I won't argue the first point, because it's entirely taste based... and I agree, honestly. The music in Fallout 3 is just amazing. New Vegas did a good job, Fallout 3 did a -perfect- job.

Regarding exploration, I play on a PC. If you don't, this won't apply to you, but I'd much rather have a big studio put time into things that a modder can't. A modder can't (in almost all cases) add in substantial amounts of story and dialogue, and certainly not easily. Quality voice acting using studio quality equipment just isn't something most Joe-Mod-Makers can do. A modder -can- easily add in a huge amount of mindless dungeons to explore, and they have.

With a couple of the more popular dungeon mods, New Vegas can have five times as much to explore as Fallout 3. What mods can make the main story in Fallout 3 make sense? None, you can't fix that problem with a mod.