Uh, have you used the ironsights at all? It makes it more accurate, but not super incredibly accurate, "fake" ironsights just look different to make them easier to use. The game needs ironsights because it decided to be a fps/rpg hybrid. If they didn't want you to shoot outside of vats, they would have made it that way. Ironsights just make the fps aspect work better. It doesn't undermine VATs in any way, if you svck at aiming ironsights are not going to help.

You still need Guns because otherwise shooting outside your skill range becomes very in-accurate despite the lack of wobble. Really now, do you ever use guns outside of VATs?

Sure. but I prefer VATS as they designed the game where the crosshair points at the ground when not in first person. (FPP and TPP are basically the same thing when peeking over the shoulder, but I usually play with the camera panned back about 80 feet. ~see the 3rd clip in my sig)

I mean, go ahead and use VATS or 3rd person or whatever, I don't mind, you can play however you like. But I like ironsights because they enhance my experience, and to list them as a Con when you don't even care or use them is kind of ignorant. I don't care for VATS but I'm glad it's still in the game, because I am not everyone and different people like different things.

I list it as a con for the reasons stated. (I could list FPP mode itself as a con for that matter, but as the topic is FO:NV compared to FO3, I won't, but Ironsights were not in FO3, and they are in FO:NV ~and I see them as a con :shrug:).

Traditionally in the series attacks of any kind cost AP's, and aimed attacks cost additional AP's (AP's equate to time spent doing something).

VATS was derived from the aimed option in the series, but bears little similarity beyond the act of aiming. Its not supposed to be cheating (in theory), but the way it was done [in FO3] pretty much makes it so IMO.

**VATS did not exist in the series before FO3 (though it was a place you could visit in Fallout 1... as in The Vats. )

You should give VATS a try this time around. Obsidian fixed it so you can end up taking massive damage and even die if you use it stupidly, unlike Fallout 3, where engaging VATS could save you from anything, even a mini-nuke blast.

The thing I miss (and something I consider a con ) is that FO3 & NV seem to calculate VATS hit percentages by proximity instead of size... Meaning the head can be easier to hit than the leg. Before, targeted strikes had non-cosmetic benefits at a cost, and at a linear (increasing) risk; when you committed your AP's you were discarding other options (and this could get you killed). In FO:NV (and FO3), AP's don't mean anything, and come a dime a dozen. I use VATS to aim, but the thrill of the aimed shot is gone from the series entirely IMO.

If you have a PC, download the mod that disables the compass (other than for use as a real compass). All of a sudden exploration is a huge factor. I spent hours trying to find a very specific spot that I had discovered in a previous playthough (so I knew the general area but not specifically where it was). I discovered so many places I hadn't been to, and while some may have had little content, many had 30 - 45 minutes worth of content. It was a blast. The compass ruins it because you know where enemies are, and you know where locations are. If you take that away, there is a lot of fear and wonder to exploring.

I played all of the Fallouts, the First fallout was a ground setter then next one really made the series sparkle.

Now I really liked Fallout 3, but new Vegas seemed to hit the mark more on Skills and weapons that Fallout didn't seem to breach.
If you were male or female in Fallout 3 it didnt seem to matter much, in Fallout new vegas there are many advantages and disavantages. This adds great replay value making me the player want to try it with both. (It also adds depth on how a woman or man would survive in a post appocoloyptic world)

Fallout 3 definately had a more stable game with small technical problems and things ran more smoothly. Fallout vegas definately made the game better by adding hardcoe mode and custimizing weapons. Plus implants.

I like Fallout Vegas because it has a great touch to many small details, but on the large scale fallout 3 was definately a larger and more elaborate story. Vegas felt a little short to start to finish, and I'm sure there will be DLC but it wont make the game as full as fallout 3 was.


Anoying part about fallout 3 was the stupid underground crap, I hated that stupid tunnel system in dc Im glad vegas didnt have that. However Vegas has a lot of crappy noted spots on the map that are nothing more then a dead group of people. I was hoping for more lively surroundings like Fallout 2 had, very busy and happening towns . Vegas was the only real hotspot on the map, I wish the vaults had people still in them... like crazy people with their own little setup going. Fallout 3 had many different little communities but not enough cool towns, vegas has one cool big town and some little spots here and there.


Its hard to say which one is better because they both have great things about them, Fallout had a great Story everywhere but vegas felt more Gritty and was nice, but not enough meat on it.


I just hope in the creation of Fallout 4 they combine the best aspects of these two games and make one legendary one. I like the factions in vegas, its stupid to think that you have to be one sided. Perhaps in the future you can join raiders or be a ghoul or a mutant. It would be a great touch to fallout if you could have a different origin depending on your race. Plus the whole game to be shifted around your race and gender. Maybe a little pvssyr amoung your chosen companions.. its what made dragon age and Kotor or mass effect great games.


I have been a fan of fallout since the start, and when many doubted fallout's greatness in first person I thought it would turn out great like GTA series did.

Maybe someday they will be able to implement cars in fallout , if anyone has seen the preview for "Rage" it looks like they are trying to compete with fallout with a Borderlands/Fallout mock up... It looks fantastic, but not sure if it will be rpgish or just a grind first person shooter.

( I know im tired of seeing enclave planes and motorcycles that dont work. )

The only thing I miss from Fallout 3 is all the random encounters you had.

New Vegas pretty much blows fallout 3 out of the water.

NV compared to F3... Better in every aspect. Better NPCs, better storyline, better quests, more consistent and believable setting, more interesting factions and interaction with them, in short better overall writing, improved gameplay and RPG mechanics.

NV cons:

Base gamplay not improved enough (combatskills are still not quite as impacting as they should, the soft requirements for weapons pack no real punch).

The "one big open map" design still feels tired and lacks variety - the design relies too much on random exploring (which is fun in small doses, but gets tiring and repetitive really quick); and thus most of the map feels useless. It requires something fill the vast expanses, but there are not enough incentives (quests, for example) to go for them. This is a con in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas - F3 relied too much on them at the expense in other, more meaningful aspects, making the whole game almost feel like one big random location, or a repetitive themepark; and F:NV doesn't rely on them nearly as much, which is a good thing as the focus is on things that matter, but it leaves majority of the map as a mere statistic, needless empty spaces. All in all, a better way to craft these games would be to move on from the "one map" design to what Fallout used to be, with bigger nodes to add the exploration people are so fond of and more varying and concentrated content. IMO.

Ugh, I'm usually all for "respecting one's opinion," but your childish banter makes me want to reconsider that thought.

In any case, I absolutely love NV due to the fact that it feels closer to the original Fallout games in terms of atmosphere and storyline. It's something that Fallout 3 sorely lacked. While I enjoyed Fo3 for the amount of places to explore and things to do compared to NV, it is, like a previous poster said, a matter of quantity over quality.

As for the similar gameplay boring people, I didn't mind it. Having played the [censored] out of Fallout 1, moving over to Fallout 2 (which had almost the exact same feel and graphics) didn't seem that hard for me. I came to accept the game for what it was and enjoyed it.

Pro's

Animals much harder to kill in FNV

All the stats are much more balanced including Charisma, Speech, Barter.....but although survival is a great idea it missed the boat as it really isn't a "need" stat.

NPC's are cooler in FNV. ED-E is a great fun addition.

Some of the quests (e.g. the BoS quest line) are long playing and interesting.

Weapon repair is awesome with several routes to maintaining your guns.

Many battles are fought against 6 bad guys and that never happened in FO3. I love those big skirmishes.

The ammo choices and hand load

A lot more quests (a lot more bugs)

The guns in the game are awesome. So many to pick from and each has a good reason to use. The upgrades for standard weapons was a great idea.

I enjoy all of the different groups in this game whether raiders or traders and there are so many it makes for a much better game.


Cons

Humans are easy (way too easy) to kill in both games. This was a chance for Beth to make the game more challenging and they failed.

FO3 was better for getting ambushed because of factions. In FNV, you will get ambushed if you kill a Legionaire but as soon as you hit the strip, you go back to nuetral again. Ambushes are cool! I miss the Talons!

FO3 better for dungeons and for exploration and had many random events. FNV is a "set up" game board so you will actually memorize where the packs are. If Fallout players wanted predictablilty and repeatablility we'd be playing WoW.

Too many of the locations are totally useless. If a picnic table is going to be a location, at least set up an ambush or leave a carton of smokes and a bottle of whiskey. In FNV it is like the developers were getting paid by location not for quality of location.

The silliness whereby you can attack the legion camp, kill Ceasar and loot the entire place is so cheesy it pains me to think about it. You can do alone what the entire NCR group can't do together, doh

A real lousy job of debugging the engine and the game before release. FO3 wasn't flawless and still isn't but they did a better job than FNV. In fact, I doubt a worse job could have been done.

Not many armor choices. I loved the Riley Ranger quest in FO3.



Tie

In both games technical support is (to put it nicely), absent.

Would have been nice to have more user hot keys in FNV, especially since you lose one to ammo

The economy is better in FNV with a greater difficulty in getting caps until you learn that you can get unlimited caps gambling. Gambling should be very hard and favor the house or the whole economy thing unbalances your challenge. I save before I gamble but not because I'm afraid I'll lose but because I know I'll hit a jackpot and get 16000 caps. I want an economy to be very "tough". In FNV, you take a luck of 7, go hit jackpot, then go to Gunrunners and buy everything they got at level 2. I do enjoy sitting down and playing the slots after a rough day of killing giant radscorps

Developers had another chance to get the NPC's right but failed. The various settings they have seem to have very little affect on their behaviour. Whether you have ED-E on aggressive or passive doesn't seem to make much difference. It would have been nice if some developer time would have been spent improving the management of our comrades.

Well the originals set the definitive look and feel of the series.

And yes that does make fallout 3 less of a fallout game. In fact some people go as far as to say it was Fallout-in-name-only. They needlessly changed aspects of backstory that we saw directly in prior games for no apparent reason. Minor things and major things both. Honestly I'm not sure how they can consider Fallout: Tactics as non-canon and consider Fallout 3 as canon, because so much of it is nonsensical in context.


On to the main topic. FO3 had some high points, FO:NV has some clear high points as well.

I agree I'm disappointed there are like, half the locations in NV as compared to FO3, and the locations are smaller. There's less rare loot, less to find, less to see. One of the cool things about FO3 was all the little locations on the side that had their own little story. FO:NV felt really flat, it was way too obvious that dungeons were dungeons, it didn't feel like they were a prewar installation. In FO3 there were so many little locations on the side, perfect example is Andale: Creepy little town with a dark secret and a short unmarked quest. You stumbled upon so many locations like that it was staggering. Made the world feel real.

FO:NV though takes much more the approach of the classic fallouts, more depth than breadth, the NPCs seem more real to me, the writing seems better and it seems to give you more of a reason to care.

Plus I think it hangs together better. FO3 had a lot of little cool locations sure, but some made absolutely no sense at all in the context of the game universe. Megaton and its bomb for example, it was "oh wow cool" but it was also a total fridge logic moment when you realized that it meant that both the BoS and Enclave were aware of a live nuclear bomb and never really did anything about it.

Negligible? Are you and I playing the same game? Haha.

Regardless of my own play experience with the game, I'm not sure if an official 28+ page thread (spread across several actual threads and growing daily), every review of the game I've seen flat-out proclaiming NV was an extremely buggy game and the most viewed thread on the game on these forums being directly related to said bugs really qualifies as negligible. NV is without a doubt the buggiest game I've played in the last 10 years and that includes FO3 and Oblivion.

I mean, if you don't care whatsoever about immersion and play exclusively for the story, more power to you. Out-of-the-box it has some nice features compared to FO3 but the mod community had implemented most of those features (many even better than Obsidian implemented them) quite awhile ago into FO3. I'm about 40 hours into NV now and it has yet to grab me. Fallout 3, on the other hand, grabbed me more or less immediately and stayed that way with a few bumps along the way.

Only thing I agree with is the comment about The Strip.

The Strip REALLY disappointed me. To get from the Mojave to the NCR section of The Strip it takes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 loading screens....FIVE! Its not like this is a large distance to cover either, its load into Freeside (north gate is the quickest), run straight, load into the 2nd section of Freeside (btw, this zone split makes the freeside quests incredibly annoying), then zone into the strip, then zone twice more inside the strip.

All that loading, and The Strip is still pretty darn empty feeling most of the time.

I guess its an engine limitation, but wow does it really make The Strip about 100 times less interesting than it should have been.

Also, I don't get 1 major thing.

If the "Mall" of DC could be done as 1 constant area with no loading screens, why couldn't The Strip have been done in the same way?

Are you and I playing the same game?

The bugs on my ps3 version were actually better than a fully patched FO3.


The story AND exploration were so much better done in this game than FO3. FO3 felt like a damn Post Apacalyptic Arcade game; none of it was in any way realistic. How in the hell can radiation stay in the water for TWO-HUNDRED years!?!?! Fallout New Vegas is amazingly realistic and the story grabbed me in. Hell, I played Oblivion for over 200 hours and I am still not bored. After about 100 with F03, I am now bored. FNV should keep me going, with multiple playthroughs, about 200 hours.

Exploration better in New Vegas? Where do people get that from? It's just not true.

Also, radiation isn't easily disappated for no reason and looking for realism in a Fallout game is just wrong.

Exploration in FNV hooked me in immediently. Everything (Almost that is) had a back-story. FO3 was WAY too obvious and where you could explore. FNV had those exploration parts really well hidden, which made me EXPLORE to find those places to explore.

I want at least SOME realism, I know that Fallout should not have over the top realism, but the way that you are saying things, everyone should be a pink rabbit? Yeah, thats right. If you dop not want realism, than fine.

One could, of course, claim that since the exploration is more often quest driven, it is more rewarding more often than random roaming and thus better - even if lesser in physical amount.

You're not the only one. When I hear people say that NV is a failure compared to FO3 I honestly get really confused, because to me NV is much better than FO3 in pretty much every way. Now, I did like FO3, but I compared to NV I found the setting to be over-done and a little cheesy, the world to be a lot less believable, the economies didn't make me care about loot or money, the characters and factions to be two dimensional, and I could go on.

In Fallout 3 you either do the main quest, do one of the larger side-quests or explore around and find little unrelated islands of content. New Vegas has me finding a bunch of little stories about the local places and factions that add a lot of depth and have me running all over the map. The world is more believable in that the characters and factions are aware of each other and have stories that interact, there are more consequences to my decisions and actions, and I generally feel more like a person living in the game world. Fallout 3 reminded me I was playing a video game a lot more often.

In my eyes the one thing Fallout 3 did better was in having a ton of random locations to find. The downside to that, though, was that it made the world feel too full of stuff, and a lot of that stuff didn't make any sense. Why would there be so much unscavenged pre-war tech and supplies sitting around 200+ years after the war? Why do people living a hop/skip/jump away from some major resource or goings-on seem to be unaware of what's going on down the street? Why isn't the Republic of Dave making an attempt to trade with any neighboring settlements (just as an example)? Where does Tenpenny Tower get their food? How do caravaneers travel around without guards? Where do they sleep?

Anyway, rather than feeling like a real place it felt like a bunch of little islands of content with very little continuity or explanation. The only purpose for most of the locations was to be a theme park ride for the player. In NV I'm keenly aware that I'm crossing through Fiends territory, for example, and I can see the firefights between the NCR and the Fiends going on as well has getting related quests, talk to people about it, etc.


I don't know what it means for exploration to be "better." There was more stuff to find in FO3, yes, but I didn't find most of it fun or engaging, really. Some of it was great, don't get me wrong, but it didn't svck me in or immerse me at all. I was finding I needed to remind myself to suspend disbelief because it's a video game. In that way the exploration in NV is "better." I don't find more stuff to necessarily make something better...especially when it's not clicking as having any continuity with the rest of the world for me.


Erm...looking for realism in any video game is wrong because realism isn't always fun. However, there's a difference between realism and believability. Believability is important for immersion, whether it be a game, a movie, a book, etc. I found Fallout 3's world to be much less believable than NV's. That's not to say Fallout 3's world was bad...I just found it to be a LOT less immersive personally.

I'm still not following you. What are you talking about? Any one of the few interesting locations in New Vegas are there for a quest, or more than one quest. The locations I've mainly found have been unremarkable, boarded up gas stations, trailers, or just plain, empty fields. I can't find dungeons, I can't find backstories, I can't find loot. There just isn't much of remark in New Vegas. What are the names of these locations you've found? I really must know because the explorer and scavenger in me is dying for something, right now, and I must know where I can't find something. Even just a simple, nothing fancy dungeon would suffice. That's not to say I don't LOVE New Vegas, but exploration is that one thing Fallout 3 just does leaps and bounds above New Vegas.

No, but we have purple carnival freaks, instead.

I can agree with you there. Most of the locations are indeed boarded up shacks and crap like that. I laughed for a good tem minutes when I found the Makeshift Great Khan Camp!

There are several caves; like the Cistern in New Vegas. Just explore a little harder.

What humor did Fallout 3 have? I mean, sure, it had some pretty juvenile humor like a skeleton and a toaster in a bathtub or cherry bombs in toilets, but that's not particularly intelligent or witty humor.

Compare that to No-Bark or Tabitha.



Excuse me? The followers comment frequently on things if you talk to them. I've had all of them have varying opinions on what I did to House, what I did to Caesar (Boone even had a fully fledged conversation tree for that), varying solutions to quests, and even about the location I was in.

Hell, The followers in this game even react to your actions - Boone complaining about you pointing a gun at his head or taking his beret. Veronica when you give her any sort of dress (and if you give her a really nice dress, she'll even teach you an unarmed move). Etc etc.



This is the first valid point you've made.



Many of the sidequests impact the ending. Also, many of the sidequests will have people comment on them in the game world. Example: Helping Forlorn Hope will have people comment.



Why? This way perks are valuable things you can't just spam. You have to actually *think* about what perks you choose, since you only get fifteen of them.



Cooking maybe, but ammo crafting is pretty important, given how much more effective handcrafted ammo is compared to normal stuff.



For many of us, immersion comes from a good story and a well constructed world; something that Fallout 3 lacked and which New Vegas has in spades. Yes, "there's less random stuff to find" is true, but all the stuff in NV makes sense. It was put there for a reason, and one that ties in to the larger game world. There aren't any random lulz locations like that one super market with the Rube Goldberg mini-nuke machine. The kind of things that seem interesting at first glance until you wonder what in The Master's name they're doing there.

I don't know about you, but my immersion in FO3 broke when I started wondering why all these prewar supplies were still there after fifty years, much less two hundred. In contrast, I haven't had any sort of immersion break like that in New Vegas.

Blah blah blah, i'm tired of saying the same thing though i feel compelled to say it. And i'll be brief.

I liked FO3 more than FNV too and the main reason is exploration, vastness, worthwhile locations and dungeons. Felt FNV was linear compared to it. I don't want to listen about c/p dungeons - personaly i enjoyed them very much and they are still better than nothing.