So FNV isnt just copy and paste Caves/Mines, Shacks with one room, etc? Fallout 3 blows FNV out of the water when it comes to exploration. Markers are irrelevant and simply counting and comparing is an ignorant comparison.

Exploration made up 70% of fallout 3 game and i totally loved it... The random events,the caves,tunnels pre-war computers telling how people lived in their end days. Fallout 3 blows Fallout-NV out when it comes to exploration and post apocalyptic feel. Fallout NV is far better when it comes to Quest lines and story telling. Its just two kinds of gamers, one kind who likes tons of Quests and does not really care about exploring and the other who likes endless exploration and surprises which fallout 3 satisfies...

Personally fallout 3 atmosphere is a lot better than New Vegas, there is no urge to survive no struggle, no suffering nut New Vegas is a beautiful game on its own when it comes to characters and story depth...

The only thing i can see here is people taking things too personally and trying to insult on other people's opinions.

I thought FNV was better in every ways possible, as you mentioned in your post i really love what theyve done to the npcs in this game. They actually make you feel stupid when you ask them "dumb" questions.

Example: Minor questspoiler below. You have been warned.



Never experiencd that in FO3, there everyone was über friendly and one could ask them anything.

Ok, this is just plain being nasty. I'll give you that Bethesda didn't click with the story. I feel more drawn into FONV's story myself. However it WAS touches like the two skeletons embraced in bed with a couple of empty syringes on the nightstand, or the protectron sitting on a toilet with a chunk of scrap metal in the bowl, or a skeleton of a child in his bed with a pair of crutches in the corner that added something to the game. Something you did NOT have to create a story for. In your post you mentioned RPG then trashed someone for "creating their own story while playing pretend". Isn't that the essence of roleplaying? I don't know about you but I am an old TT rp'er. I have had DMs that would actually describe similar scenes like that but not tell us what it was about. We could see in our heads what happened. The best part was after the session, sitting around discussing some of those little touches he added and our interpretations. I am glad Bethesda put things like that into the game, it does add atmosphere. Hell, even Obsidian did it. Have you not run across the skeleton in the tub yet with a couple of empty whiskey bottles and a switchblade on the floor right under it's hand?

The story line might be lazily written but the game is beautifully made, the map is awesome ,dungeons,caves,tunnels how you end up finding a story behind what happened where ever you go, that's also what a game is all about this is a lot more than "nice touches"



Different people play in different manner, Respect the way others play instead of steaming heat of your ears......

Good quests and story is nice and all, but a game is also but creating an environment a map and visuals that really touch you.. Fallout 3 did exactly that.. in short Fallout New Vegas failed where falllout 3 succeeded and fallout 3 succeeded where New Vegas failed...

I greatly prefer New Vegas to New Vegas, for numerous reasons already cited. However attempting to prove "objectively" that another person's opinion and perception of each game is wrong is childish and fruitless. Likewise for comparing the storyline, atmosphere and exploration potential for each game.

I'm sorry, but it's impossible to quantify subjective elements of a game's quality. Agree to disagree.

I think FO:NV manages to pretty much strike the perfect balance between an exploration and story-driven game. Also, the refurbished gameplay elements and hardcoe mode are greatly appreciated.

But I still think the story is pretty meh. Get shot, get revenge, play courier (lol) for a faction of your choosing, fight at the Dam, The End. I also don't think the writing & voice acting is so spectacularly better than FO3. The companions are much better developed, but I'm not sure if I prefer any of them over Fawkes from FO3.

If the plot focused more on the 'get revenge' part instead of factions that I don't give a hoot about, the game would be clearly superior to FO3 in my book.

Its an OPEN WORLD RPG. Exploration is a big part of anything that falls under that.

Dunwich had a story, interesting loot and quests.
RobCo had a story, interesting loot and quests.
Nuka Cola Plant had a story, interesting loot and quests.

Way to fail. You even acknowledge that F3 is better with your first point by trying to defend it then contradict yourself in the second point by questioning it. In FNV all there is to explore are caves/mines and a random shack with 1 room and 2 ammo boxes.

I thought New Vegas is more improved than Fallout 3. New Vegas has a bit of what Fallout purists want, hardcoe mode where you have to eat, drink, sleep, and ammo has weight. It's the realistic challenge that Fallout 1 and 2 ppl want. New Vegas also has multiple endings.

The only thing that Fallout 3 was better, was the desolate feeling of the place. It really felt like a lawless land, where only the strong survive. The lack of advanced places confirmed it. When you finally reached.... that ship place, Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave, you know those are the safest places from raiders.
All water has radiation, and there was this wish that water is drinkable by people.

Fallout 3 nailed the desolate-ness of a post-nuclear world. But that's about it.

It was too desolate, that land couldn't sustain even a tenth of the (actually fairly small) population. The Mojave is desolate, but not so much that it merits an epic facepalm-of-shattered-suspension-of-disbelief.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this point, I suppose. I much prefer the points of interest in New Vegas and find them far more worth exploring... on occasion you actually find something interesting other than ghouls and super mutants. The Sunset Sarsaparilla plant, for example, is actually interesting and amusing. In Fallout 3 instead of the one interesting plant, you'd have three, larger ones without the same personality of Festus and the sassy cleaning robot. Boring, boring stuff. I don't understand the need people have for exploring buildings that all have nothing inside them, that's something any modder could make an add-on to indulge. I'd rather have the programmers use their resources to give the game locations that are actually worth visiting.

Perfectly said. Treat it like a BioWare game instead of a Bethesda game, focus is on the story, quests and characters, not the world.

The few caves and buildings that aren't quest related are very small and have little interesing loot (the ones i've seen so far, atleast), even the Sealed Sewers part of the underground New Vegas left a distinct feeling of "that's it? :swear:".

This thread was a great read.Having said that im a little bit sad that theres this big competition between the two games.Fallout 3 was my first Fallout game, and will go down as time well spent in my gaming history.I still talk about FFVII to this day, and will continue to talk about Fallout 3.

Fallout NV is taking over my waking hours, I absolutely love it.Its clear what the improvements are, and its also clear what could be better.One of the only things I miss is the random encounters which meant you got to use your favorite gun more often.Im 90 hours in on New Vegas and feel theres not enough combat.I can play for six hours and not get to use my weapons.Some of you might like that, I for one do not.

At this time I prefer NV to F3.Until I see everything the game has to offer I will refrain from arguing about it.I do think theres members here who feel they have to pick one game and hate the other...which is a little immature in my opinion.Anyone who reads and posts in this NV section often cannot deny they are hooked on the game.

The beauty of the situation is this....get ready for it...If you prefer F3 and hate NV, you can still play the former, and leave the rest of us alone to play our new game.What an amazing world it is, when you can post in the F3 forum if you love that, and post here if you love NV.

Treat it like Obsidian game instead of Bethesda game, more like. "Boyware" is not as good a storyteller and concentrates too much on efforts of getting the bi-sixual main character laid with companions in embarrassing softporm scenes.

Lets not play what game? You give a weak argument and I point it out? Ok. I would rather not deal with someone who posts contradictions.

If you are actually going to claim that having less areas to explore makes FNV a better game then I would honestly laugh in your face given the chance. Fallout 3 had many areas to explore that had something interesting going on in the way of loot, quests or something else.

EDIT: Oh and lol at claiming FNV isnt an open world RPG.

I volunteer at an RPG soup kitchen.Anyone who isnt happy with NV can send their copy to me, and ill make sure it goes to someone who appreciates it.

Well since according to the OP, it's not a matter of opinion, I'm not sure what exactly the point of this thread is other than for all the Fallout 3 haters to come in here and pat each other on the back.

Without saying anything negative about Fallout: New Vegas, because I am highly enjoying my time with it right now, I can honestly say that at this point I feel that Fallout 3 is the better game.

But apparently I'm "wrong" and "out of my mind" for having that opinion... oh wait I forgot it's not an opinion.

My favourite low inteligence line is, "Robot! Let me pass!"

That kids, is how you don't get into the strip.

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I do agree with all of your points. The only two I don't feel so strongly about was the bobbleheads (Gotta love 'em), and the amount of people.
I DO think they could of added a couple more people, but in what lacks, there's quality. I find they're doing more realistic things than simply wandering around and occasionally saying things like, "At least there are some good people left in the world." I acctually PREFER people saying to me, "Sorry. I don't really want to be seen with you."

*Needless to say I do love Fallout 3 just as much. They are both great games, I just wouldn't return to it at this point. But that can be blamed on my excesive hours playing it.

You forgot the ugly underwear! :hehe: But this is my first Obsidian game, so i have nothing else to compare it to.

One thing I do like better in FONV than FO3 is this; way too often in FO3 I could sit at range with a hunting or sniper rifle and shoot the (insert enemy, raider, talon, etc here) and the guy standing next to him would.... remain standing next to him like nothing ever happen. So I'd pick them off too. Not so in FONV, I actually have to plan an attack on CL or gang groups. I notice right away if I shot an enemy at range, his friends would react, either going to find cover, or start searching for me, anything but standing around waiting to see who I'd drop next. I've even had gang members try and outflank me by sending a person or two around a building to get behind me while the main group tried to keep me busy in front. Also when I come upon groups, both "enemies" and "friendlies", they actually look like they're doing something. Be it hunting, scaving, camping, anything but just standing around waiting to be shot at. I'll admit that FONV AI combat does have flaws, but I think its much better in terms of how groups of people react when they get shot at.

He's claiming that more mostly empty places to explore isn't what makes a great game.

Putting aside a lot of the condescending or pretentious comments about why NV is "obviously" better, I will address a few points and discuss my opinion on why I have enjoyed NV less than Fallout 3. That is not to say I haven't enjoyed it, I am 60 hours in. I think there is a misconception that if you don't like NV more you are some kind of drooling [censored]. First I will respond to some OP points and add my own two cents about why some people prefer one over the other.



You're comparing apples to oranges. The Strip is suppose to be an area of bustling activity and development. Vegas wasn't hit by nuclear missiles and isn't the same desolate place as the Capitol Wasteland. They are living in a city furnished and funded by Mr. House, with access to a lot of amenities that would be a luxury in a place like Rivet City. If you're expecting every location to be packed with people and have neon signs and presidential suites in every settlement, you will be disappointed.

The look of the strip is "nice". Aesthetically, you can tell Obsidian put a lot of time into making such areas large, detailed and colourful. And this is why the strip was a disappointment. When I first arrived I was expecting an area jam packed with people. It felt like there were 4-5 drunks staggering about in the open areas, with a hoker here and there. When you entered a casino, there was maybe two people playing roulette. It didn't feel impressive or vegas-y at all, rather that Obsidian had bitten off way more than they could chew. Whether it was their decision to keep the population sparse or a limitation of the engine, it was their design choice to make so many large, vapid areas. I played about 20 hours before I even hit the Strip and I expected it to be the high point of the game, but it came across as empty and uninteresting. Rivet City at least met expectations of it being a rust bucket.



I can mostly agree with this (though I could name more than a few exceptions), Obsidian put a great deal of effort into adding dialogue and personality into a wider range of NPCs. The deliverance of the dialogue is also helped by having a voice cast several times larger than F3. I actually enjoyed quite a few of the characters from Fallout 3. Many people found Moira annoying for instance, I found her amusing. New Vegas added more character depth and a larger selection of NPCs that would converse with you, but Fallout 3 wasn't that bad. This, like many things, comes down to personal opinion.



At the start of New Vegas I had the feeling the dialogue was better, but as I progressed through the game it felt less like the dialogue was "better" than the fact there was "more". A lot more. At times, too much. There were plenty of characters of course who delivered some memorable lines, like Benny, Yes Man and Chief Hanlon. But in a way, the expansion of the dialogue and the extent to which it was expanded encounters the same problem as a lot of the level design in NV. For every great set of dialogue, I seemed to encounter a side quest where the dialogue referred to things that had/hadn't already happened, didn't match the text or was just poorly/awkwardly worded. Example: when I completed the "I put a spell on you" quest at Camp McCarran, one of the dialogue paths went "When you find out who it is, I'll have him arrested. So when you know who it is, I'll have him arrested". Or something along those lines. A sign that there wasn't enough time to polish/refine a lot of the dialogue sequences because they were so focused on adding more dialogue.

I've never understood the need to nitpick the reality of things like food supply. Such additions are there for ambiance and not realism. Having small patches of corn and a herd of brahmin that graze wide expanses of dirt isn't an ironclad explanation for supplying food to an entire city and we don't need one. Most people can make the connection that "some how they are eating" without needing an explanation for it. If we got down to brass tacks about realism, most of the things in New Vegas (and Fallout 3) wouldn't make a lick of sense from a realism stand point.

That being said, it makes more sense for a game involving large, organized groups of people to point to some grand source of food/resource supply. This is another case of "apples to oranges" because you can't compare rag-tag places like Rivet City and Megaton to groups like NCR and Caesar's Legion. That's like comparing the United States to the poorest part of Africa then asking why they don't have food and industry raining from the sky.



I agree and places like Rivet City could have benefited from having some kind of card game in the dingy bar of the lower decks. Having said that, I was actually expecting more than just roulette, slots and black jack (black jack being the only thing worth playing). If they had added a poker game I'd have spent more time in the casino.



There was some level of moral ambiguity but it didn't seem hard to tell who was evil and who wasn't. It was less "morally ambiguous" than "this is the reason we're doing what we're doing" which let you make your own judgment call. Point in NV's favour? Probably and there wasn't a lot of that ambiguity in F3 until "The Pitt" add-on. Before that most things were pretty black and white.



I enjoyed collecting bobbleheads and getting a reward for finding them was satisfying. This is personal preference. I thought collecting snowglobes was lame and outside the achievement and some caps you could have won more easily at a casino, there wasn't much point to them.



Fallout 3 had over 160 locations: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_places

So maybe New Vegas has more or less than that, probably not by much. I think the problem people can't articulate is that there is nothing to them. I can't tell you how many times I picked the lock on a door or entered into a house to find... nothing. A bed with a ruined book and not so much as 5 caps and a nuka-cola. A good example of this would be the cashier area of the strip casinos. You would think for a place that handles all of the cash exchange and requires a stealth boy to enter, you'd find something of more interest than 50 caps, a few stimpaks and some scrap metal. Even the various luxury rooms in these places seem to contain nothing. There's no reason to enter them.

From the get go New Vegas seems very much against the "get out there and explore" idea of playing the game and prefers to be almost entirely quest driven. This was apparent very early on, when walking off the beaten path lead you almost immediately into rad scorpions or some other equally difficult/needlessly high DT opponent very close to the starting area. Once you were actually able to explore you would often encounter areas that simply seemed to be "there" and could not be entered or contained nothing of value. Couple this with invisible walls that seem to prevent jumping/climbing even the shortest of rocky outcroppings. It seems like they built an "open world" but only in the confines of the arbitrary game world rules they have in place.



NV's story is better, it's more coherent and world involving than Fallout 3's. Oblivion/Fallout 3 didn't wholly emphasize the main quest at all times. While NV's story makes more sense and seems to involve the world as a whole to make it seem "more important", I can't say that I feel any more engaged by it. Oblivion/Fallout 3 are compartmentalized and separated into bite size chunks of side quests and stories, while New Vegas is something that is intertwined to the main plot in almost every way. It's a difference in preference.



Most of it is opinion. You can't express your opinion and then say it isn't a matter of opinion. If what you like in a game is writing and having lots of dialogue/options, well that's why you like New Vegas more than Fallout 3, because there is more emphasis on such things. It's easy to smoke a pipe and put on a monocle then furrow your brow at people as if you're right about an x > y equation that comes down to preference and personal enjoyment.



Why would Caesar send me down to "destroy" House's robots and then not check to see if I'd actually done it?



Why are there hardly any kids at all in the game?



Why can't I just destroy Caesar with Helios?

The answer to many such questions is because it is a video game. A video game. Why anyone gets you to do a quest ever doesn't make any sense either. Why NCR would give secure radio codes to a complete stranger and have them deliver that information to important outposts doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense why they would even believe you are who you say you are. New radio codes? Ok sure, you look trustworthy. Similarly the real reason the Enclave didn't blow up the Brotherhood with an orbital strike is because it didn't exist until the expansion and then that choice was made available for the player rather than it being something that was arbitrarily decided. If you're looking for plot holes, you'll find plenty in just about every game ever made.

This response is already tl;dr but I'll post an actual explanation of why myself and probably others liked Fallout 3 more later. There are actual, explainable reasons some people didn't like NV as much. I keep saying it, but it's opinion and personal preference/enjoyment. NV isn't a bad game, it's a good game. But not everyone will like it more simply because it is a sequel. This is kind of like an F1/F2 debate, some people actually like F1 more than F2, even though they are the same but different in so many ways.

You'll be shocked to discover that I love Fallout 3. It had some really serious flaws, but overall the experience was excellent and if I could go back in time I'd tell myself to play it. The point of my post is to counter the popular bashing of New Vegas recently, and ridicule the people claiming Fallout 3 was superior. New Vegas is like Fallout 3 minus the huge, glaring flaws that Fallout 3 had. Despite the flaws, I'd still consider Fallout 3 an amazing game. An amazing game that desperately needed better writing.

I don't think you're out of your mind for thinking Fallout 3 is a better game, I just think that the view is entirely indefensible. I find the "It's just a matter of opinion" argument annoying in any context, and don't think the people who use that argument really believe it themselves. If you came across someone who espoused the notion that Batman and Robin the best movie in the Batman franchise, I doubt the opinion argument would let them save any face, because by any objective standard it just isn't. The same holds true in the case of Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

Memorable? Hardly. They felt terribly one-dimensional, like straight from ye olde' typical fantasy ala TES. The only interesting character I could probably remember was the nutcase Moira Brown. And that was just a humour reference too.

Cass, Mr. House or even No-Bark > All of 'em

Also, companions have FINALLY some sort of interaction with the gameworld.
I mean, no one even remotely cared about the supermutant tagging along me in F3.