Hats off to the FO:NV team. Just beat the game for the first time, and, having time to wipe my eyes (okay so the follower endings made me cry, sue me), I have to say, absolutely magnificent.


FO3 was an amazing fallout experience for a lot of reasons, and it remains among my favorite games of all time. gamesas has brought the hardcoe full-world immersive RPG to the pinnacle of the artform.

But I always felt that FO3 just, well it was a very technically accomplished RPG, it had an epic storyline, it had a world that was as deep as anything else ever made. But to me it didn't feel much like Fallout. Gone was the advlt-oriented plotlines and side events, the darker side of fallout, gone was the variety of ammo and technical choices both in armament and character build. Gone was the setting I'd come to love, worship and occasionally fear over the course of playing two of the best games I'd ever enjoyed in all their isometric glory.


So it was with some trepidation I plunked down the 50 bucks for FO:NV. In fact as is befitting I wouldn't have bought it at all on release day but I'd been to a wedding at an Indian casino up north and I won 50 bucks on the blackjack tables. I considered it fate telling me to buy the game. Cashed out to color up as it were.

I was absolutely blown away.

The egde is back, the darker side of fallout, the interweaving plotlines. Good and evil are back in a big way, reputations are back too. Ammo types! Traits! Oh my lord... everything that made Fallout 2 the definitive RPG of its era (okay, excluding Planescape: Torment, hey those Blackisle boys and girls knew they business) is back and in full effect.

The ending is even done in the same style.

So there's bugs, so what? It's a technical marvel of a game with scripting so complex that I feel sorry for their scripter. FO2 had bugs too, that's not a sign of bad design it's a sign of being so ambitious you push it right up to the edge.

I enjoyed FO3 for what it was, and I disliked it in ways for what it wasn't. Even with those caveats it remains one of my favorite games in history, easily top 5 among giants such as Deus Ex, Fallout 2 and System Shock. But New Vegas easily took the best of FO3 and took it further, back into a familiar setting, back to the roots of the series while still moving forward into the new decade.

Absolutely brilliant game, as I've come to expect from the most consistent series in gaming history.

I have to agree :foodndrink: . NV Is remarkable. I do tend to mod the crap out of Bethesda games, and I have already begun modding the crap out of NV. So for me it's really hard to say which one is over all better. What F3 was missing, I headed over to the Nexus and fixed the problem lol.

Bethesda is my favorate game company period. Every game they make/produce seems to out do the one before it.

Ok, back gaming..... bliviongate:

NV is really awesome, after i thought i would not buy this game coz of steam i ended up playing this game in my friends house and i ordered the game on the net this morning . Great work making me buy the game even though i hate steam from the very bottom of my heart :flamethrower:

Have to agree.

I loved F3, so I bought the originals, and loved them. And now NV is basically Fallout 3 with more of everything (bugs included , though I've been lucky so far).

Just the fact that I have so many different weapons that I have no idea which ones to choose, so end up being constantly over encumbered makes this game great. And thats before all the weapon mods make their way to the Mojave. More loot is always welcome

The only thing that bothers me so far is the large number of stock NPCs, especially in all the NCR bases that seem to be pointless with no one to talk to in them. I guess on my next playthrough it'll be different when I'm not sided with them, so its not too bad.

In fact the only other complaint I have is that there are too many quests that I have, and I'm getting confused about what I'm supposed to be doing :/

In all, its a great game, and Obsidian have really taken everything that made F3 great, added a dash of F1 and 2, and produced a really solid game.

My only complaint is that unlike Fallout 3, New Vegas's companions are all so damn likeable, and they expect me to pick only two! (and one of 'em has to be a robot)

Other than that... it's amazing.

I'll admit, Bethesda does sandbox worldbuilding better, but Obsidian's writing and character creation skills are second to none, and they actually know a thing or two about making an old-school RPG using modern tech! (I'm looking at you, Bioware!)

yep.

I have to ask, why are you against Steam?

I've found it to be a gamer's biggest boon. Online digital delivery, easy, quick.

Plus I never have to worry about losing a CD key and being unable to play a game I paid for (like happened with my poor copy of Tribes 3) or scratching a disk and being forced to rebuy the game from a digital distributor (like happened to my Evil Genius CD). I've lost way too many games to CD or CD-key mishaps. It's a comfort to know as long as I have my Steam account password I'll have my game. Not to mention the fact a lot of companies bundle extras with their Steam games (like the free DLC I got when I bought Mass Effect)

I used to use my Steam account like an XBLA account: to buy cheap arcade games they deeply discounted, but after positive experiences buying Borderlands and Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 on Steam I'm not sure I'll ever go anywhere else.


oh, and @jara: I consider gamesas-style RPGs and Bioware RPGs as the logical extensions of the two different types of RPG.

Bioware is the master of the "Action-RPG" The spiritual descendants of Legend of Zelda, that focus on run-and-gun first and deep interaction second.

gamesas and co. are masters of the "deep RPG" spiritual descendants of full-featured RPGs like Final Fantasy, with lots of twiddly exploration and interaction that gets in the way of a pure-action RPG experience but also leads to an amazingly immersive world you can actually, you know, RP in.


I consider them different in fundamental ways but neither is really inferior, it's all about what you prefer. Mass Effect was a triumph of the action-RPG genre but didn't give nearly the depth of a gamesas RPG, despite having perhaps the best-realized hard sci/fi setting in gaming history.