I actually wish there was no exploration at all and that there was only map nodes.
I don't like exploration, but I love to do quests.
Y'know why I'm starting to wear on New Vegas though?
Because in order to do those quests I have to walk across the long ass map, which I do not like.
Ugh, I know I can fast-travel, but I can only do that once I've found the location.

So do I miss exploring?
No, I hate it.

Do I wish there was more exploration?
[censored] no, it's horrible IMO.

It was, well, maybe on BELIEVABILITY, which Fallout 3 lacked. And, I write five papers a month, five pages each, and the best way of convincing people is finding a quote which matches your point. Nobody yet has crafted a convincing argument denying my point, so it is still valid, and sound.

That quote is only one other person's opinion. Thats all it is and will ever be
I could probably do some research and find quotes the exact opposite to yours.......but that would be kinda sad, eh?

Fine then, if you want, lemme post my own [censored] opinion.

I THINK that while Fallout 3's exploration was fun, it was awful in terms of belivevability. All you could do is kill, loot, and find guns and trash, thats it. Almost every dungeon was copy pasted, it was not believable in any way, and all it was just killing random mutants and a generic raider at every corner.

Boring.

In all fairness though, it can be confusing because a lot of the dungeon crawlers refer to that as exploring. It's gotten to the point where when a Fallout 3 fan mentions exploring, I'm not sure whether they're talking about finding stuff like terminals, or dungeon crawling (the appropriate terminology for going into optional dungeons to run, gun and find loot) because exploring seems to be the terminology used for both cases.

As for exploration in Fallout 3, I grew up on adventure games which generally handled exploration much better than Bethesda games (that's the prime focus of adventure games after all), so I wasn't particularly impressed by anything I stumbled across in Fallout 3 (including the Georgetown Residence). This is not to say that Fallout 3's exploration is bad, but I guess games like King's Quest and Myst have spoiled me as far as exploration is concerned. As a result, I don't mind the lack of Fallout 3 level exploration in New Vegas.

Pretty much every major location has a back story. Its just some people can't get their minds around the consept of talking to the chracters in the game. If you only play chracters that kill anything that moves you arn't going to get much enjoyment out of the game or any RPG.

Fallout 3 has way less back story. The world makes no sense at all. How are the people still alive in a radioactive mud hole? How are they feeding themselves and so on. Why are they even there?

Only places that have back story are Magaton and there are few real quests there. Rivet City has a back story and Canterbury Commons, which is so dumb. A man that sells junk! "WoW the same junk I can find everywhere, but no I am going to pay you for it" :facepalm:

Agreed, Styles, Talonfire. there's way more "Exploration" in NV that makes much more sense in the game world then the "theme park" style that you see in FO3 where you have lots of places that are basically "islands" for all the association they have with the rest of the game world.

LOL What are you trying to say? That i just run around the map killing things, ignoring the dialogue? How do you know this sherlock??
FO3 had loads more little back story's and interesting buildings to explore. I loved searching these buildings reading terminals and holotapes learning the history of the building and its inhabitants. That is nothing to do with KILLING! NV seriously lacks interesting places and back storys

Well not the backstory of how the current settlements got there and such, I could honestly care less about that ( i agree Fallout 3 didn't do such a great job in that respect). :tongue:

"backstory" in Fallout 3's context, meaning locations like LOB, Dunwich, various terminals that give info about the war, takoma park shops, some houses which have indications about what happened before/during the war, and the various skeletons and the environment around them that allow us explorers to piece together what life was like for people before the war, how some of them lived and died, and what the world felt like before the bombs.

That's what we mean by backstory.



Settle down scad, its not helping our argument if you engage in personal attacks or don't recognize the oppossing point of view.

Just calmy refute what you think is incorrect and debate it politely. Thats how you advance an argument.

But the thing is, Fallout 1 and 2's towns had immense backstories, and we miss that heavily. Fallout New Vegas brought back the great lore in the towns and amazing faction backstories.

We like our detail to be in the towns and factions, not in the little terminal or skeleton here and there.

That's probably the single biggest difference between the two games for me, in NV I get so little sense of the pre-war world, and that's kinda the story I'm most interested in. I can always hang around the Lucky 38 chatting to House I suppose.



Wouldn't it be grand to have both?

why would that stuff even still be around? after 200 years of scavengers? most people in the Fallout world don't really care what happened before the war, they are trying to survive the hear and now. that's was one of the things that broke the games worlds continuity for me. If places still had power, or working old world tech in the Originals it would have been scaved or reposed right away and you'd see nothing left of the old world users. they set the world up like it was only maybe decades or a few years after the bombs. Everyone is still wearing pre war clothing, and knows something about prewar history it seems.

It was much better the way the originals handled it, if you find pre war stuff, that was untouched since the bombs it was hidden away or forgotten, Many times you'd have to repair the power systems to find out about the stuff.

And I think thats where part of the problem is.

I liked in Fallout 3 where I could build my own details based on what I found in the world around me, heck I bet I could write a fan-fiction on a skeleton I found in a metro, and I found I couldn't do that in New Vegas, as the (great) story was directly told to me, rather than me forming it myself.

Don't get me wrong, I like towns to have stories behind them and such, and I find great fault with Fallout 3's storyline, but as you can see, the relative lack of those things didn't bother me when I played 3 to the extent that it did others, and I sorely missed the atmosphere that Fallout 3 exploration brought to me, and its part of the reason why I will likely never get as much out of NV as I did 3.




I never looked into that "200 year old factor" as much. Fallout 3's setting was logical enough for my tastes (and I think many F3'ers would agree with me on that), but I recognize that it cleary wasn't enough for others.

Its a matter of preference really.

Seems like you are making the case for "exploration" then for Background. Yes the Topic is on Exploring but finding holotapes and letters is not background. Its interesting yes but New Vegas has it as well. New Vegas also had less people working on it and way less time to do it then Fallout 3 had, and what we got in New Vegas kicks Fallout 3's butt to the moon and back IMO. I can only imagine how much greater New Vegas could have been if they just had six more months.

Background is the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How of a location. Who runs it, founded it? Where did the people/items come from? When was it built when did the events happen? Why is it there? why are they there? How do they maintain it, feed themselves, trade and get power?

That is background and the Who, What, Where, When, Why and Hows are answered far more in New Vegas then in Fallout 3. This could be because when learning to write the five Ws and H are the keys to setting up a story/plot and Bethesda has very bad writers, IMO.

Well, I don't see why we can't have one and not the other. In New Vegas' case I don't think a lot of pre-war backstories would have worked though; it's been 200 years, and the Mojave has been mostly picked clean. Most of the buildings aren't going to have skeletons, holotapes about the pre-war world would have been looted, and terminals would have been looted or destroyed. The Sierra Madre in Dead Money has some of that pre-war backstory the explorers love, but that makes sense because the Sierra Madre had remained almost completely undisturbed for over 200 years due to its unique circumstances.

what it comes down to is this, lets say you live in a hovel with no power, thats barely standing up from a bombed out neighborhood. The house next to you is fairly intact, has power, and is full of food and pre war tech. It is abandoned. Do you or anyone else in 200 years not move in and make it there own?

you're absolutely right (course I would argue that New Vegas has a bit of that too, there's some perfectly good but un-used buildings sitting around :tongue: ) but again, thinking about that didn't really bother me in Fallout 3, I can't explain why, but it just didn't.

I think that was actually one of Fo3's flaws. Relying too much on stuff like that. A skeleton in a bathtub or a bed can only interest and pique imagination for so much.
The way I see it, Fallout 3 relied too much on its random exploring and gave too little with any sort of point or reason (and the reliance to the random exploring shows in other aspects of the game, some of which feel nigh neglected because creating the world appeared to be so high in priority).

To me New Vegas did the exploring better by giving and incentive and a reason with quests that had multiple solutions. It may have lacked some of the randomness or curiositiness (though, to be honest, I did find a fair share of skeletons in beds, and terminals with interesting stories) Fallout 3 had, but I think it patches that well up with other aspects.

Me neither. I know it really irritated some people, but I can't say that it bothered me at all. If a bit less plausibility means more in-game reading material then that's a price I'm happy to pay.

exactly. it is a game after all

I laughed so hard, the neighbors came to check on me, no offence.

"Its a game, bla bla." That is such a weak excuse. Games ARE ART my friend, and just making a game have horrid writing just because it is a game is such anti-art.

I agree with Styles. I prefer that most of the detail and lore go into the world, towns, and factions. Me, I strongly dislike random exploring, but I like it when its rewarding. FO3 rarely gave me that feeling, but sometimes I had it. FNV gave me the feeling quite a bit more.

The biggest beef I had with FO3 is its implausibility. There is still food lying in view, and electricity is in open view. I could not wrap my head around how the people survive. Almost every place was full of mutants and random raiders, and you looted them. What a great reward.

For an example on rewarding exploration in my mind, look at the Glow in Fallout 1. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/West_Tek_Research_Facility

To be fair, electricity isn't ABUNDANT per se, it's more sporadicly placed, some places, namely government buildings, have power in most of the building, but other locations have the occassional light flickering on. So it isn't as flowing as it is in Vegas,



I hate you. I just mentally saw 'You have recieved a large dose of radiation' flash in my mind a million times e_e

Edit:typo

:rofl: :bolt:

So, the New Vegas equivalent of F3's exploring (according to some people here) is talking to people at locations. Ok. That's all well and good. But insanely more boring and repetitive than dungeons. In a dungeon, you can't tell what's around the corner, you're scared, but also determined to loot/kill/explore/whatever. When I'm in a town full of people who have no intention of killing me, sure I'll talk to them, learn some new stuff, but there's just no excitement, no pull factors. Information in Fallout 3 was harder to get as terminals/notes/objectives were at the end of buildings full of enemies. Clearing out a building gave you some form of a reward, a little info on the location, or loot. I can definitely see why some people don't miss this stuff at all, but I can't imagine why they consider a few more lines of dialogue to be a satisfactory replacement.

And anyone arguing realism and believability really ought to stop playing video games.

No, no, no, dialogue itself is not a replacement, its the detail in the world and the factions. People are still playing FO1 and 2 because of this. The writing supports replayability, there are so many great quests, and the places are detailed to the extreme.

The problem with FO3 is that they went for quantity not quality. Everything was copy pasted and filled with generic enemies. In Fallout 1 and 2, every place was unique.

"And anyone arguing realism and believability really ought to stop playing video games."

What the [censored]? That is complete and utter nonsense. One reason I like Red Dead Redemption is because its writing made the characters seem real. In Grand Theft Auto 4, Liberty City felt so realistic, almost like I could live there.