Fallout 3 does the world and exploration better. According to developer the game's maps are about the same size, but due to the mountain ranges, invisible walls and Deathclaw-enforced rotation direction it seems smaller. Also there is too little enemies, and too little places to explore.

Everything else NV does better. And i too snipe the legionaries with All-American while wearing the Chinese Stealth Suit shouting "Technology FTW, skirt-wearing luddites!".

If you want to slaughter Super Mutants, climb Black Mountain. It's got nothing on a Super Mutant Safari to Takoma Industrial, but, apart from the final mission, it's about the best this game can manage :shrug:

I miss random encounters. The occasional raider ambushes and shootouts are great in the beginning but once you've made a sweep of the map, you run out. In FO2 I would wander the wastes after main quest just to get different encounters. I finished a "leave no stone unturned" playthrough a few weeks ago and now I can't find anything to do with that character except wait for DLC's. Random encounters were the perfect remedy for that.

Start a Legion/NCR/House/Independence character?
Maybe roleplay a little? (Use only a pre-war suit, a nice hat and a revolver or pistol (Absolutely NO rifles, shotguns, energy weapons or explosives!))
Start a new character and try to kill every single NPC in the game. (Why? Cause you can!)

I said "that character" . I got an independent-energy weapons lady all set to go. Just have to live through the final exams next week :rolleyes:

Ah, sorry, wasn't paying enough attention. Pulled an all nighter and am feeling very broken right now.

Actually, Random Encounter doesn't do that in FO3, for me, at least.

Why?

Because they all happen in fixed location when you first get there.......so it is part of the "leave no stone unturned", really.

Shut your mouth! :stare: He can grind in WoW, keep 'em away from Diablo.

Fallout 3 has few locations across the wasteland where some events happen randomly, but the rest of the encounters and spawn points are fixed. However they still provide less homogeneous experience than New Vegas does, partially due to level scaled enemies.

BTW, New Vegas has level scaling too. I just visited Repconn facility at level 22, and there were more powerful enemies there than on level 6 when i usually go there. Still as i have higher skills and equipment, even Arwen's Realism Tweaks mod couldn't make it challenging :yawn: And now i have to haul my overencumbered ass all the way back to Lucky 38, if i get lucky the two molerats near Novac may have respawned. However will i survive? hmy:

To the OP, if you consider F3 superior to NV because of the points you made, then I am sorry, but you have a very poor taste in a RPG. It sounds like you are wanting something more in line with a grinding FPS that is as mindless as it is boring in my opinion. NV is the way a Fallout game is supposed to be. It sounds like what you are wanting some dark depressing post-apocalyptic game that doesn't have that Fallout flavor in it.

Nevah! :toughninja:

Personally though I liked the dark depressing post-apocalyptic feeling that Fallout 3 had...it made for a better post ap. atmosphere (in my opinion). New Vegas is bit more happy in some respects and so it sorta loses some of that atmosphere.

I wished they made the map larger and they didn't get rid of the random encounters.

Man, these threads breed like rabbits, don't they?

OP -- New Vegas was designed to provide a different type of experience than F3. Many will claim it's better or worse; it's just a different slant, really. F3 was an action game with story elements; New Vegas is a story-based game with action elements. The Capital Wasteland and the Mojave Wasteland are very different places.
Give the game some time. Once you learn the lay of the land it's pretty easy to play New Vegas as a more action-oriented game. You just have to know where to look.

Oh yeah -- the square mileage of the map is actually larger than F3 by a slight margin; the land is flatter and less densely populated so it appears that you can traverse it quicker. It's an illusion. The problem is that they put it in a rectangular border so it looks half-utilized. I like that without the square shape there's no need for 'you can not pass' type messages, though the invisible walls are regrettable and the barriers could have been implemented by art direction -- the quarry could have just had a big fence around it, you know?

I actually like NV's world a lot better. Everything is more connected, makes more sense, has more justification for existing, has more varied and interesting environments, etc. The only thing I thought FO3's world did better was quantity of non-quest-related content in the Wasteland.

I miss the random encounters from FO3, they made me chuckle.

In NV ANYONE can be your enemy, depending on who you are allied with. I'm doing a Legion playthrough right now and there are NCR soldiers and rangers EVERYWHERE for me to smite. Or, you can go onto the strip and open fire...or wipe out Novac. Except for child NPCs, everyone can be a target. It's all in how you want to play.

Level scaling, IN MAH NEW VEGAS, oh boy

I will admit, Fallout 3 did an amazing job on the exploration factor. It was the first game where I found myself actually wanting to go into random caves and buildings; before it, I'd always been the type of player who just stayed on track. I loved going into random places and finding a unique flamethrower or a weird-ass ghoul with a party hat or a boss-like crazy dude with a minigun and four turrents around him. Even stupid little things like a unique chess board, a room full of plungers or a really long broken highway with raiders bridging the gaps with old car parts and using the bridge as a home; even little stuff like that was fun to find. Heck, I LOVED landing in locations where it was a three-way battle between me, a band of Super Mutants and the Talon company.

Nevertheless, it's still fun to explore in New Vegas. There's not as much stuff, admittedly, but it would also feel weird if every location was packed with loot. New Vegas is far more advanced than the Capital Wasteland, with "prospecting" (looting) being a recognized profession. In the Capital Wasteland, you basically have Moira Brown suggesting that one should loot places to survive. That's it; other than that small suggestion, everyone sticks to their settlement like glue and the NPCs who do mention ever traveling are in the minority.

I would also argue that New Vegas has things to offer that the Capital Wasteland does not. The "towns" of the Capital Wasteland barely felt like towns at all: it was a barren place with very small, limited settlements that you would visit briefly before going out into the wasteland again. New Vegas on the other hand has towns that feel like towns. It offers a civilization where you can hang out, talk to people and do stuff: something that Fallout 3, in my opinion, was severely lacking in. Fallout 3 had ONE major town. In the corner of the map. In the middle of nowhere. With six merchants and a doctor.

more random encounters would be sweet

This was actually one of my only few complaints, especially since they blocked off a third of the map on the west and some on the eastern borders, and everything is concentrated in the middle third of the map for the most part... you can call that whining if you want, but frankly if you're going to put land in the game then use it, stretch out everything so it's all a bit more spread out. But don't just block it off so I still get to enjoy it eating up memory/ram by the fact it's part of the landscape, while otherwise being useless.

It's a present to people creating MODs, who want a wide area to add their own towns and the like. A desert needs to feel barren. This was supposed to encompass, what, parts of 3 states?

Personally I don't think either game was much bigger than the other, but if FO3 felt bigger it was because there was a little more distance between things.
That goes doubly so considering that, as someone else already mentioned, about half the buildings cluttering up everthing are just boarded up scenery that is otherwise completely useless. And I think I'm being generous with that figure.

FYI Some good great mods to add heaps of replay time;

"Increased wasteland spawns" with three flavours of intensity adding just what it advertises,

then the phenomenal "World of Pain" mod which adds plenty of pro-made, well placed dungeons with some reasonable custom weapon variants.

:twirl:

Common sense -wise New Vegas' wasteland is more consistent, but gameplay-wise i have to say Fallout 3's is better. I guess New Vegas focuses more on the people and the new nations that have arised since the old ones blew each other away, than the "post apocalypse" premise. That's all well and good, but maybe a sandbox game isn't the best medium for such setting. Atleast this sand box has too few toys and too much sand

Ha, I'd love to see the TS play the original Fallouts...
I don't feel like explaining myself except for one part:

Not enough action? MASS GENOCIDE.

TS?

The Map is Big.

but the lack of random encounters, and the fact that most places contained ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, was discouraging.

Overall the game was better then 3 in enough ways to make up for it.

Maybe in the next game they will find the right balance.

I found it's not that it contains nothing at all.

Rather it has plenty, you just wish it had even more due to wanting to get in and see the places as if they were real.
Dig through all the trash and speak to everyone, spend hours just in one settlement doing nothing but chatting to bit players.
That may just be me though.