Fallout 3 > New Vegas
...at least to me.
I recently explained why 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.