Then quite simply, they shouldn't be added as locations.

Lamplight had huge impact on a sub-quest. Getting in to it, gaining the trust of the children and then getting through it to get to Vault 87. In addition to which it was tied into Big Town and Paradise Falls, all intricately weaved together. Did you take the time to escort the children back or indeed escort the older child to Big Town? I don't think you did if you cast it as aside as having nothing to dowith the grand scheme of things.

Again however you are cherry picking. Have you no opinion on Cottonwood Cove? Can you see the picture I paint of how it should be or could have been if the development team had indeed put more than a passing glance to alternatives or 'reality'?

I don't think you and I played the same Fallout 3, to be honest. I did enjoy the Republic of Dave and a few others, but for the most part I found the places, even the ones with quests associated, to feel plastic and unrewarding. Freeside alone has more interesting things to do than most of the discoverable places in Fallout 3's map combined. No offense, but I think you're "cherry picking" places to use as examples of stuff to do in Fallout 3 as much as anybody else here is. Outside of places like Republic of Dave, Tenpenny Tower, Oasis, and Canterbury Commons a lot of the discoverable places with quests and stories from Fallout 3 are no better than those in NV. If anything I'm finding that the places with stuff going on in NV are more fleshed-out and most of the people and major places in the Mojave Wasteland actually have reasons to exist rather than being generic raider camps, blatant loot caches, etc. Too many of the places in Fallout 3 either lacked explanation or flat-out didn't make a lot of sense to me. It's one thing to create a micro-story in a discoverable location...it's another thing to present that in a way that feels like it has continuity with the rest of the world.

IMO I'm picking up on a lot more genuine conveyance of emotion from NV than Fallout 3. There were times in Fallout 3 that I felt as though I was being led to feel a certain way rather than being presented with a situation and allowed to interpret it myself. I see where you're going with the emotional aspects, but I personally prefer the "here's a situation for you to interpret" approach over the more heavy-handed, "here's a situation...it is sad...you should feel sad" approach, if that makes any sense. My character may or may not give a crap. I should decide what emotions my character is feeling, no?

I could tell and appreciated what Bethesda was trying to do, but for me a lot of their locations fell just short of feeling complete to me. NV is full of areas with factions that actually interact rather than being islands of content.

I will agree that Bethesda did a great job with some of their random locations, and they did manage to hide their invisible walls with rubble and such (something I wish Obsidian would have done better), but at the end of the day the Capital Wasteland didn't do as much to make me believe it as the Mojave does. More isn't always better, although I would have like to see more of the random sandbox stuff in NV than there is. Anyway, I think this is largely going to come back to preference. Bethesda certainly captured the sandbox feeling better than Obsidian did. It's just that after the cool-factor of the initial impression wore off there wasn't a lot of depth to many of the areas.

What do you mean?

One of my favorite things concerning "dungeons" in New Vegas is the vaults. I get so excited when i find a new one. FO3 had the metros which I found repetitive, but still fun.

Have you checked out the sewer system in NV? It's not as extensive as the metros, but if you're looking for some subterranean action it hits the spot.

Actually, the children would be fine because Deathclaw and Enclave scared of them and Ted(?) would have been better of without me around because he would be alive that way.....so as Slave from the Church(?).

Sniper's nest actually have a few stories behind it, but NO~~ since it doesn't have loot cattle so it shouldn't be a location.

Cottonwood Cove was there because running across no men's land between two army is stupid, unlike a locked vault entrance with no reason.

If there any emotion as to what I can described FO3, fear isn't the one emotion during my time of playing. Heck, the better word for it is "annoyed" to "indifferent" to "glad its over kind" of feeling in many parts of the game. There hardly any tension that gave that feel from any NPC. The Pitt tried to "dramatically" put "emotion" in the whole quest line but too many illogical factors make it hard to believe and insulted my understanding of quest as a whole, which lead me to either avoided that quest entirely or kill everyone because of the said reason. In the worst case, FO3 felt like Disneyland.

Bingo. Obviously all locations in a game like this are placed there for the player to discover and interact with. The trick is you don't want the player to feel like that's the only reason they exist. Too many locations in FO3 felt that way...they didn't make sense in any other context.

Oh we probably did I just possibly saw it in a different perspective than you




This is the point - every location in FO3 had a reason to be there. In NV every little shack is marked as a location of significant interest - it's not.



Erm - no. They interact with you. They don't interact as such with each other. I haven't seen too many Talon company / BOS / OutCast / Enclave random encounters type scenarios with each other never mind my character to place faith in that. Sorry. I do agree however that many of the places do have a point; Helios 1, RepConn, Novac, etc but there are also many many more that just plain dont and for no reason - Animal Husbandry farm, Abandoned Farmstead etc etc. These are merely idle locations.



Not so much preference as expectation. This wasn't marked as the most anticipated game of 2010 for no reason. I sooooo wanted it to man-up, tackle all the ideas that had been festering in the minds of Obsidian since they acquired the title and produce a gosh darn titan of a game. They have had all the chance in the world to do it with such an excellent modding tool that the Fallout engine gave them. They just didn't put those little details into practice.

Of course. Perspective is everything, and we all have a different one. :foodndrink:


They had a reason to be there for the player, but many didn't have a reason to be there in the context of the game world. Like I said, I would have like to see more random stuff in NV as well, but at the same time it makes more sense for most of these abandoned locations to have already been looted. Why would a shack in the middle of the wasteland still be full of pre-war supplies and weapons over 200 years after the war? Prospectors are everywhere.


I think this was the point I was making. The factions in NV interact with one-another in more believable ways than they did in FO3. Not to mention the little things like some factions being in need of certain supplies and need help making trade agreements with others, caravans that move on believable schedules and have armed guards, organized trade networks, regimented conflicts that you can see going on and interact with, etc.


I agree, but I see this as being more realistic. Like I said, it depends on whether your looking at it from a "this makes sense in the game world" perspective or a "this is adding cool content for the player to absorb" perspective. I'm all for cool content, but Bethesda could have done a better job making some of it make sense.


What's the difference in this context, really? Whether you expected a huge sandbox or prefer a huge sandbox, NV isn't going to satisfy your expectation or preference for a huge sandbox like FO3 did. The difference is that I don't see Fallout as a sandbox series like TES is. I see Fallout as a story-driven series (specifically, an interactive story rather than a static one), and in that way NV delivers more than FO3 does IMO. FO3 has a lot of content to discover and a lot of it is great. NV has perhaps less breadth of content, but the details of what is there are more fleshed-out and lifelike to me...everything has more depth behind it. I think Obsidian delivered on the little details in spades, they just focused on different types of details.

When I say it's a matter of preference I mean that people are going to prioritize the two games' strengths differently. For me, the type of depth present in NV is what I prefer. I like to sink my teeth into the characters and factions more than I like to explore and find random little places everywhere. I realize that others prioritize differently. There are perfectly good reasons to like both games. For my tastes, though, NV is the better game. It's a matter of preference, and while I like both games, NV is more of a stand-out effort to me than FO3 is.

I have, but I need to do some more exploring. I went down there for a quest and have been meaning to go back. Well, I know what I'm doing when I get back to school!

I don't think they do or at least I haven't found many examples of such. A lot of this is due to the scripting errors (I mentioned it above), that have been coded badly.

I just haven't seen the attention to detail as such that I expected. In any software project at least 1/2 of the time goes into the engine of the game. With Obsidian having had all that work done for them by Bethesda they should have had more than enough time (2 years?) to make a better more polished platform and story. They didn't. They didn't it seems place their emotion into it and as such it shows with little details missing. The lack of dungeons; the lack of thought in 'prospecting'; the deviousness of booby traps; the landscape in and around certain key places (not a single NCR anywhere near Cottonwood Cove - if I was in that army certain heads would roll, literally). The thought which went into making side quests or adventuring or dungeoneering which should have been learnt from FO3, isn't there.

I want to feel the fear of a big dark cave with strange noises, (literally with regard to dungeons and metaphorically with the game as a whole). In general, I just don't get that.

[edit]

Vaults notwithstanding - some of them have been superb.

Yeah, again, they focused on details and depth in areas other than random exploration and dungeon-diving. If that's what you're looking for and you don't care as much for the other types of depth and detail I understand your disappointment. IMO Obsidian added detail and depth (big time) in areas where Bethesda did not. They had different design goals in mind. Both games succeeded in ways that the other did not. I prefer the faction and character focus of NV over the random location/dungeon focus of FO3, but I know not everyone does.

Not that this is terribly relevant, but I really doubt Bethesda spent half of their time working on their engine. For one, they had Oblivion's engine to build on. Not only that, the content creators and engine programmers are completely different teams. Since FO3's assets are created in a way that's so similar to Oblivion's it's pretty likely that their content creators were able to start working almost from the get-go in parallel with the engine programmers. Obsidian had less than 2 years to create their content, while Bethesda had at the very least 3 years if not more to create theirs...not to mention their familiarity with the tools from their past projects.

Then here is hoping their add-ons or indeed next game will feature more of these areas in which they are lacking.



Engines are important they would have been silly not to . . and if it was so polished that they did not need to they should have paid more attention to that which was missing

Again - I hope they add that which we have highlighted. I'm looking forward to deviousness in dungeoneering and hidden trips, mines, etc and hopefully taking on board the example of how not to do it in the outside computer shack in Helios 1. Gosh that was dire . .

This is what I have been missing as well. I really enjoyed the way random dungeons in Fallout 3 had stories to read and wish they did more this in New Vegas. The only place so far that has reminded me of this was the H&H Tool factory.

Yup. You and I are on the same wavelength. I was so incensed when I saw the Lamplight kids in Paradise Falls that I rained holy vengeance and massacred every slaver there with righteous fury. I felt the same anger in Evergreen Mills, to the same conclusion - and that last one was the result of just exploring that area of the map.

Exploration, man. That's why I play RPGs. If all I come across are destinations that NOT INTERACTIVE (boarded up / empty / key-locked ), then I might as well play an adventure game. It's disconcerting to walk in a world that is just decor, to walk up to a huge Cattle Ranch and have, literally, nothing to do once you get there - like a point-and-click Sierra game or, indeed, a pure shooter.

There was a thread started a day or so ago where the poster asked for our "wow moments" and I could only really think of one. I mean something that *really* wowed me the way Dupont Circle did, or The Mall, or raining nuclear fire from the satellite dish, or the eerie Doc Braun Vault, or following a signal, a trail of debris, a deep furrow and finding the crashed alien ship (perfect comparison is the Wild Wasteland redux of same: the ship is just hanging there with a couple grey men standing around.)

Granted that Obsidian bit off more than they could chew (lots and lots of scripting gremlins and/or poor design decisions that operate, for all intent, like bugs) AND it is a faithful continuation of that game world i.e. it will be harder to impress with reused elements but at the end of the day, it's just undercooked. Your Cottonwood Cove is a good example, indeed my meeting with Caesar left me with one single thought: "you had the chip, you had me in your tent stripped of my weapons, I told you to go svck an egg and you let me walk out of here? The "big bad" of the game, that's you? Fail."

In fact, the only part of NEW VEGAS with the gritty horror, danger and sense of "holy crap how is this going to conclude?" I craved when I launched this new game was the Black Mountain "Crazy" quest. That is my one "wow" moment in over 80+ hrs of gaming.

NEW VEGAS is not *bad* by any means. Let's not get confused: I'd rather play another 100 hours of NEW VEGAS than almost any game on the shelves right now (or in the pipeline for that matter) but for me - speaking just for me - I'd rather play FALLOUT3. I get to Bonnie Springs and think: "Now what would Beth have done with this perfectly placed and terrific looking location? They would have stuffed it to the gills, much like they did in Minefield (where we experienced a crazy NPC, loot, interior cells, cars that go boom! right beside you [note that Obsidian repeated this in the Boomer Quest] and a chest locked with a key that will take more exploration to find) Keys that will open a lock somewhere that could be anywhere in the game world? That's old school, baby!

Mine is not some frivolous whim: fighting my way through HORDES of Deathclaws at the Quarry to find *nothing* - no logs, no messages, no interesting remains, no backstory: indeed no building to explore - well, underwhelming is the only term I can think of.

Are some of the players here just bored with FALLOUT? Is that why they defend it with "less is more"?

"I didn't like having lots of things to do and places to explore in DC!" is just plain the strangest defense I've yet heard from people calling themselves "old school CRPG fans". It's just bizarre: "Please don't give me too much, I might just have to invest some time!"

The knee-jerk response that NEW VEGAS has better content is swiftly debunked by looking at the assets: it's the same Vault textures, the same burned cars, destroyed buildings, lockers, computer terminals, school desks, vendors. Heck, it's often the very same maps! (Republic of Dave and lots copy/paste caves)

The quest scripting - when it works correctly! - IS better this time around, no doubt of that. But to arrive at a destination in VEGAS and have nothing to do except spin a 180 is not "improvement" in gameplay. That's all I'm asking for: lots of gameplay.

One more time for the peanut gallery: QUESTING does count for gameplay. I've extolled FO:NV's virtues just above and in plenty other posts. I praise Obsidian for it. It's the rest I have nagging issues with.

Perhaps my sights are set too high, having recently invested many, many hours into NEHRIM. I was expecting a comparable level of "we don't have to worry about creating the tech and we'll reuse lots of assets, now let's concentrate on stuffing this thing to the gills with content!"

I had never heard of Nehrim. I'm always looking for Oblivion mods that can stand up to the quality of The Lost Spires. This sounds like what I'm looking for, only far larger than I could have ever imagined a mod could be! I'm all over this.

One of my points exactly and glad to know someone has the twist of imagination to see the Cove for what it could/should have been . .

One consolation though with regard to your point above - 2 words.

Brahmin Steak

:) made it slightly more worthwhile

NEHRIM blows LOST SPIRES out of the water like a torpedo to a helium-filled submarine. And personally OUBLIETTE, IVELLON and WINDFALL were all more satisfying than SPIRES.

Check your PM.

/thread derail

FO3 had great exploration, but for me no replay value.... FO NV all of those "markers with no purpose" actually do have a purpose for quests and stuff, but because they don't force feed you that content the "explorer" who just wants to shoot things will probably never see it. FO3 had a lot of surface content meaning you see the purpose of the area immediately, but there is nothing interactive about it other than discovering the area and shooting its inhabitants. Bethesda makes the areas large and detailed to give the area some sense of satisfaction for trudging through it, but once you make a new character most areas have no purpose other than grinding XP or caps. In FO NV the "map markers" usually have quests tied to them that can be approached from different angles and are used as plot tools.... you can go to them on different characters and have different experiences rather than just the experience of discovery. FO3 did exploration and discovery very well.... but for some players that is not enough of a reason to venture through the areas more than once and constitutes more of an FPS feel of "Been there. Done that." FO NV makes me wonder, "How will my decisions effect the context of the area and how will that change my experience of it." I guess it is a matter of preference, but that is part of the reason why I call FO3 an FPS with RPG elements v. an RPG with FPS elements.

I guess I must also explain that the original fallout games did not follow the "follow the yellow brick road" approach to RPGs and gave very different experiences at marked locations based on how the area is discovered and how the player develops their character. Now there are exceptions to this where loot caches and reward areas were just small shacks and caves that had some loot and that is all.... and these are the points you are picking out to show as examples of NV "locations." There is a purpose for them, but unlike FO 1&2 you can discover them at any time instead of unlocking them through adventures in the major areas. I guess that drastically effects the game experience and perhaps all of those areas should be "locked" until the proper conditions are met for "opening" them. Then people would argue that NV has tons of "locked" areas that I can not explore....

I tend to get sidetracked. What I mean to say is that FO3 and FO NV are both games of exploration, but the method of exploring is vastly different and as such they are 2 different sub-genres. This is apparent after reading all of the arguments on the forums.

Little Lamplight was quirky, but made absolutely NO sense in the context of FO3...

How the hell do children fend off the colony of super mutants next door for 200 years... It is part of the reoccurring contradictions in the game where some areas are time scaled to just after the bombs dropped, and others are centuries of history evolving the location between the war and the present. It totally broke my experience and being part of the main quest chain signaled the end of quality effort put into the game. Everything from that point on was utter trash. Following a giant robot around was OK, but was really a cut-scene that you get to watch. I know my perception of the events is unique to myself, but that is my 2 caps worth on that topic.

My dear lord.

I try NOT to insult other's preceptive, but this is too far.
I really doubt you have explored every spot in NV like you did in FO3. I am still working on it in NV, but I have explored every single place in FO3, and you know what: I couldn't have guess there is more enemies there :rolleyes:

My experience of FO3 is a killing spree of poor ghouls, super mutant and enclaves who doesn't have a place call home.

And spare me about how awesome Littlelamp light is: if you actually poke around, you will find Littlelampe light have a HUGE space; but I am sorry, there is nothing to do there. How is that better than Cottonwood Cove? Cottonwood Cove serve it purpose as a transition stop...it is like saying why is there so few Paladins guarding the Washington monument.

Using the example of LampLight is merely that, an example with regards to locations having significant and salient features with regard to exploring and questing. Many many of the locations within NV are listed as locations with absoloutely no discernible use or context. That is the point.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_places#Capital_Wasteland
Take a look. Plenty of insignificant nor salient features.

I'm sorry to have to say this but you are simply trolling now. Also I don't think you have a point. The point I and others were making is that every place designated as a location in FO3 had a purpose - something to do at that location. NV is not the same. Do you understand?