pspman45 said:
Fallout 3 had a really great atmosphere, it combined the tunes from the various radio stations with the destroyed ruins of a once great civilization to present either a depressing or uppity feel. that, combined with the occasional silliness of the game (which could only be found if one searched for it) lead to a very enjoyable experience for me, one that no game to this very day has been able to achieve.
Fallout: New Vegas seems like it grabbed all of these aspects, but put it together wrong. just placing the things that made 3 great, thinking "WHAT made 3 great?" over "WHY did that make 3 great?"
the world honestly doesn't seem that destroyed when the Las Vegas strip still has power and staffed casinos! also the wasteland itself was just boring. brown desert all day. no "downtown DC" area to loot at lower levels despite the danger. and the invisible walls, my god, they're everywhere! I once tried sneaking past the deathclaw infested mine area as a shortcut to new vegas, only to discover that there was an invisible wall at the very end of it which prevented me from actually getting there! because heaven forbid I remember where to go and can shave off a few hours of the main story like I could in 3! If I know where the villain is, LET ME GO THERE WITHOUT MAKING ME HAVE TO FIND OUT AGAIN!
I also hold a terrible grudge against that game for being poorly optimized as fuck on release and bugging out constantly, such as the time on my very first character when I walked outside of the Doc's office and was instantly murdered by a deathclaw! Talk about bad first impressions!
why was that there??
why won't it leave, despite constant checkpoint reloads? ITS THE FIRST LEVEL DAMN IT!
all that fallout NV taught me was to save every 10 seconds because the game hates me
I could honestly go all day about why I feel that it is an inferior game to Fallout 3, but I'm just tired of being flamed because I think that.
Did you play Fallout 2 by any chance? I'll take it you jumped on board with FO3, because there was New Reno in FO2, which was full of fully staffed and lit casinos, along with the completely rebuilt Vault City, which was all high tech, and wasn't underground, and Califonia Republic, which was almost totally rebuilt, with proper police officers, laser grids, farms, and proper housing. And the "western" theme still was around, not the whole time, but it was there. I mean you're in Nevada, makes sense it's going to have that western desert vibe. FO3 just didn't feel like the same world that FO 1/2 were in.
It's been a long time since the bombs fell, people have had a chance to rebuild now. FNV felt much more like a Fallout game than FO3 did. The aesthetic and atmosphere just fits more. FO3 is set 200 years after the bombs fell, yet everyone's still picking around in the dirt, people would've been trying to rebuild by then. Nevermind the fact that the amount of radiation hanging around is ludicrous, Chynobal is fine now, as are Horishima and Nagasaki (well aside from the genetic problems, but in general the /area/ is fine.)
The world of Fallout /is/ a post apocalypse world, yes but it didn't just happen, it's set a long time after the bombs fell, and we can see that as the games progress, Fallout 1 is pretty dead and closest to the traditional PA setting, Fallout Tactics people were better off, and things were starting to be reorginized, and by FO2, society has started to rebuild to some degree, it's still a bit shit, but you can see the evolution, ignoring FO3 for a second, NV then is the next step of that. Fallout 1 they were better off than they were in Fo3, and FO1 happened only 80 years after the bombs fell.
Technology is obviously vastly different to our world as well. They never invented the transistor until 2070, and LCD was never invented. Instead invented compact nuclear fission, (such as the Fission battery) and nuclear power was the main source of power, even in the cars (which are actually based on a real concept car by ford, but was given up, given the obvious dangers of having a small nuclear reactor in your bonnet, and hence why they explode with mushroom clouds). Given the amount of nuclear arms in the Fallout Universe, it's entirely plausable for them to be powering places with it. And the Hoover Damn is providing power to Las Vegas as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
These exist in the real world and the FO universe, and are how they power things as well I would assume, given they are powered by radioactive /decay/ rather than just harnessing the nuclear power. A massive key point is the development of Nuclear FUSION, another fantastic energy source which we haven't developed yet.
Not only that, Las Vegas never really got hit by any bombs, as Mr House states that he used the anti air defenses on Las Vegas to shoot down 77 nukes. So the Mojave state is more natural and merely fallout induced(as in nuclear fallout), as opposed to being hit by nukes.
Check out this: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence
It's actually quite an interesting read on how different the Fallout Universe is to ours beyond the nuclear war.
