Your opinion on Fallout: New Vegas VS. Fallout 3

[Not G. Ivingname]

Snip

Fallout 3 through away the shackles of the old series, and started fresh in a new location so far removed from the original games and series. It was original, interesting, keeping the feel of the old games without keeping it's flaws. The game was buggy and the characters were weird looking, but the vastness of the land with the huge amount of people, places, and things to do you can easily get involved. New Vegas had fixed some of the issues of Fallout 3, but being set in New Vegas it brought in the flood gate of all the old game's issues, while making new ones.

The graphic engine, which looked fine at the beginning of the current generation, has aged very badly. The stiff animation feels stiffer, the characters look creepier, and the desert looks way to much like the capital waste. Their are less interesting places and fewer completely out there ideas that marked Fallout 3. I wasn't immeresed into the setting, mostly I was just dragging myself around. The need of water and sleep didn't really add to the difficulty that much, since your still tripping over food, water, and supplies. I don't feel like I need to learn how to cook when I am packing five brahimin stakes i just looted. The factions and choices were less cut and dry, but I just couldn't find anybody I could honestly fully root for 100%. The NCR felt like it had a good cause, but all good works was getting stuck in the clogged up pipes. Ceasers legion didn't feel cool, like being a group of mad max raiders, I was given no reason to like them in the slightest. And the Brotherhood? Well... it had Veronica, I guess.

New Vegas I classify in the same group of sequels as I would Bioshock 2 and Modern Warfare 2. It tries to patch up some minor issues of the precceding game, but it loses the charm and all the interesting bits that just made me come back to the first game. It isn't horrible, it just is more of paint job then a proper sequel.

 

[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.

 

[Strain42]

I don't have one, because I never really played all that much of either game, and having an opinion about something I know so little about would just come off as pointless

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[No One Jones]

I was disappointed by both honestly. 90s pc gaming they were not. I'll never get back my golden decade(90s).

 

[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.