That's understandable. Fallout 3 was, basically, about killing random things in random locations.

I did find plenty of combat in New Vegas eventually, though, at least plenty enough from my perspective. The scope of available opponents is just limited initially due to the way the story is handled (you make your enemies rather than having them all set by default -- which I found refreshing as not too many games allow that).

My first post, and I'll dive in with this:

Why is it so great to have enemies constantly spawning in places you've been just so you can go back there and kill endless spawns? It's supposed to be an RPG, not a FPS where you're constantly killing everything in sight. .

Personally, I find constantly killing stuff gets boring and there's a gazillion other games where all you do is shoot stuff. My favourite DLC is OWB, but the one thing that irritates me about it is I can't walk 100 yards out of the sink without having to kill waves pf lobotomites, nightstalkers and cyberdogs. Sometimes it's nice to walk down the road and take in the gameworld without fighting off endless waves of bad guys put there solely to keep your attention.

Don't get me wrong, I love F3 and have played it for many, many hours. It's a suberb game. But NV has so much more coherence - it's a lot more like a fictional world you can imagine could exist. In F3, by the time you hit level 20 the wasteland is crawling with endless sentrybots and deathclaws or whatever that have no reason for being there whatsoever (except so you can shoot them over and over again). Nobody but the Lone Wanderer with his godlike powers and armoury of unique weapons could consider going anywhere. At least black mountain has a reason for being there. It's not one of a bunch of locations randomly dotted around that have supermutants there for no other reason than they're something for you to kill.

F3 relied on plonking loactions around without any thought as to why they should be there. Tenpenny tower was just there in some ramdom spot and we have no idea where the hell the supplies come from to maintain that affluent lifestyle.

Also, though NV does have plenty of random shacks of puposelessness, there are a number of locations that need to be there for the massive array of quests - like Cannibal Johnson's cave is pointless until you trigger the associated quest.

Given the short development time, I'd say Obsidian came up with a remarkably compex and absorbing gameworld. Particularly when you factor in how cleverly the DLCs linked with each other and the main game It would have been easy to have a bunch of locations containing the hypo-ultra-kill-blaster and some skill books guarded by a bunch of bullet sponges that respawn again and again and again.

I'd agree NV can seem a bit too empty at times - a bit more legion/caravan/NCR/raider action on the highways would have been good, but I think endlessly fighting albino radscorpions with your unique plasma rifle gets repetitive.

Also, if people like the interplay of different factions, it's inevitable you can't just have here's the good guys - you go kill bad guys. If you want endless fighting, pledge allegiance to Caesar, don your legion armour and go purge the Mojave of NCR. You have a choice as to how confrontational you want the gameworld to be. I once, for a laugh, tried a playthrough with a character that I decided had been brain damaged by being shot in the head and attacked EVERYBODY they encountered. You can do that if you just want to fight.

Merv, it's like you're in my mind. :clap:

This looks like a cleverly disguised Fallout 3 vs Fallout New Vegas thread.....

Don't they all? :hubbahubba:

exploration, combat, encounters etc are what drive a bethesda game and thats a pretty fun formula...ESV and FO4 here we come !!!

True enough... that's what drives a Bethesda game, but it's not (necessarily) what should drive an RPG.
Bethesda do what they do do well, but Obsidian make RPGs.

I'm pumped for Skyrim. I'm hoping that Beth have learned from Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) a little. Things like having each location having a unique story, rather than just generic dungeon x.

Remember that Avellone and Sawyer worked on the original Fallouts (I don't know how how many more Black Isle guys made it over to Obsidian, but there's probably a few). They'd already laid the groundwork.

Not really... I mean, they used a few of the factions that they had planned for 'the real' Fallout 3, but the plot is completely unrelated.
And the actual 'game' part of the game is infinitely different from what they had planned.

I'm not talking about the plot but the world building. A lot of stuff in NV was lifted from the stuff they mapped out for Van Buren (Caesar's Legion, the Divide, the Burned Man, etc) . And of course there's the backstory for F1 and F2 as well. The vast majority of the lore never made it into the game (like a good novel, there's a ton of research and material that the reader never sees directly), but you can definitely feel the Fallout stamp everywhere.

Oh, gotchya. Too true.
And there obviously were a lot of art/world assets from FO3 for them too.