You do know that when measure by the distances of the originals FO3 took place in less then one grid square?

The title is some what apt. Since the Lone Wanderer was forced to leave Vault 101, that makes him homeless, so he is a wanderer. The problem is that he isn't alone. There is the option to have many companions. From my understanding. Fallout 3 wasn't going to have any companions and that they were added last minute to the game.

But I agree that the distance that he wanderers is nothing compaired to the Vault Dweller and Chosen One, but they had homes.

I disagree in some ways. The writing in NV was better than both FO1 and FO2 (even if FO1's main story was more compelling). There's nothing as good as Vault 11 or the Survivalist's diaries in the original FO's. Also, I like some of the Bethesda introduced mechanics, such as the limb damage and the crit damage/crit multiplier system. Most of the mechanical problems in NV could be fixed with number tweaking (lower level cap--it was fine without the DLC's, and making some of the SPECIAL stats more important).

I never thought it was relevant - just like I never thought the Imperial City in Cyrodiil contained only a few dozen people, I never thought it really took only half an hour to get from Megaton to Arefu. I kind of took it for granted that the distances shown in-game were abstractions, scaled down for game purposes. While, granted, the Capital Wasteland is still a lot smaller than California, it's not such a small place that the LW's moniker wouldn't be appropriate.

hey i know paladin cecil! old games > games of the last 5 years except for about 25 or so, and im not even a dinosaur. except i gotta say i didnt like FF series much until 5 onwards. the gameplay in four is boring. you level up thats it, you have no choice in how your characters level up. 5-10 are brilliant though.

simple

gameplay- good mix of stat based and skill based + many improvements.

1st person perspective- increased immersion, control & fun.

exploration- goes hand in hand with first person perspective- exploring the world and stuff like finding a secret area is far more rewarding in 1st person, and even small things like finding a stimpack under a bed.

story and NPCs i have no say in, since i did not complete FO1, but many have said new vegas stands up well to the old fallouts.

if you ask me fallout is the only series that has actually improved with the recent advances of the industry. turok, tomb raider, elder scrolls, duke nukem, tenchu, final fantasy, deus ex, system shock/bioshock and many more.......what happened?

Gameplay, nope, less skills and SPECIAL is near meaningless in FO3 and only slightly better in FONV.

FPP, nope, I don't care about "immersion" that gets tossed around the gaming scene way too often.

Exploration, if I wanted a sightseeing tour I'd play Saints Row, Just Cause, GTA or TES.

Story and NPC, yes, NV stands up well and is even improved in a lot of areas, but considering NV has to stand awkwardly next to FO3 it gets dragged down with it.

Improvements?
No.
Fallout didn't only take a step forward, it took a couple of steps to the side and dunkenly fell backwards a couple of steps. One step for FPP, another for exploration and combat heavy gameplay, then it took one step forward in graphics, but one step backwards because of the loss of a map node system, another step backwards due to the loss of several skills, another step backwards due to the streamlining of enemy compass and quest markers, another step backwards due to SPECIAL being dumbed down and another step backwards due to the horror that is Gamebryo and how the AI svcks in it.

So from my very crude count, 2 steps to the right, one step forward and 5 steps backward.

=

Did not improve the Fallout series.
Just cause it's changed in graphics, been turned into an FPS and has tons of meaningless exploration does not mean it evolved, simply that it changed, and for a lot of us it changed for the worse.



[edit]


Another couple of notes:

* Ghouls look like burn victims.
* Super Mutants (in NV) has way too clean skin and barely any of them have any cancerous growths.
* No fat people or little people.
* Old people looks like models if you take off their clothes.
* Lasers now turns people into ash instead of slicing them apart.
* Wattz series is completely gone despite having been reimplemented by modders in both FO3 and FNV.
* No Gamma Gulp Beer or Root Beer, just damn Nuka Cola variants all over the place.
* Radiation is ridiculously nerfed.
* Drug addictions are a joke.
* Too many perks and too many crap perks.
* Bullet sponge enemies.
* Bad combat balance.

None of these other things are improvements, removing, tweaking, streamlining and nerfing features is not an improvement.

1st person perspective- increased immersion, control & fun.

Subjective, I get more "Immersed" with interesting characters, and stories, and reasonable situations or what not then anything eyecandy wise. Going FP and having al lthe conflicting reasons and situations actually broke my "immersion" factor in FO3.

exploration- goes hand in hand with first person perspective- exploring the world and stuff like finding a secret area is far more rewarding in 1st person, and even small things like finding a stimpack under a bed.

Hey same thing was handled jus tas good in the originals. Look at finding a wrench in Vault city, or looking for the evidence of the death of the wright families kid in New Reno. Or finding or lots of other Misc items like Rose's romance book in the Den.

i didnt mention graphics. grumpy old dinosaur. new vegas is the best game of the past 5 years or so!
oh well we just have differing tastes, so this is a waste of time.

I didn't mean you meant that that was why it's become better.
I was just making a generalization.
And I'm not grumpy, I'm in quite a good mood now, here's a smiley to prove it:
And perhaps New Vegas is one of the best RPG's as of late, but it's not about how good New Vegas is in comparison to the newer releases.
it was about why we old timers found the older Fallouts to be far superior.

New Vegas is a good fantastic game and it's probably one of the best if not the best RPG in the last couple of years.
But as a Fallout game it's nowhere near as good as the older Fallouts as most things have been dumbed down, nerfed, removed or changed.
Only thing that I find superior in New Vegas to any other Fallout is the Reputation system and the main quest variety.



[edit]


Anyway, you wondered why we found the older Fallouts so good.

For me, the map node system was one of those things along with random encounters.
Another was the turnbased combat and the isometric view.
Then we had the brutal combat and unforgiving gameplay.
And SPECIAL, skills, traits and perks that could make or break a character and ultimately define them.

The newer Fallouts had none of this.

cmon these are rather minor. especially naked old people.... be serious

I am serious, I'm bloody dead serious. It might be minor things, but consider this, if someone pokes you in the back of your head you'd be annoyed right? Imagine sitting in a car for 5 hours and constantly having someone picking the back of your head.

That's what these things are like for me.
Constant minor annoyances, constant irritating changes to Fallout that keeps building up more and more and more until everything just becomes complete crap.

[edit]

So try to think about it from my point of view.
I've been a Fallout fan for 8 years when Fallout 3 came out (12 now) then all of the sudden here comes a barrage of minor changes.
Changes that I never wanted, changes that makes the newer Fallouts seem very alien to me.
Imagine how it feels like to have a franchise you've loved for almost a decade suddenly change completely.
It feels like being curbstomped and then urinated on.

ah this is better explanation.
the 1st two im glad they are gone, but the second two i agree with.
a SUPER hardcoe mode would have been good for new vegas, that made enemies super tough, pip boy is used in real time, a limiting s.p.e.c.i.a.l/skills system and no hand holding..... but there is a hardcoe mode, and that is better than nothing.

FO:NV FTW!

but i can understand all the little things that annoy you, no matter how minor (except naked old people )

but FP/RPG is my fave genre by a huge margin with games like deus ex 1, morrowind, system shock 2 and arx fatalis. so new vegas is perfect for me.

Well, at least you know some of the reasons why we prefer the older Fallouts.

yes. thank you for your replies.

I am not a Fallout veteran, but I think I can safely say that for many who are, the preference for the originals (or rather the distaste for the newer installments) simply stems from the fact that the series changed radically when Bethesda took over.

It's as if you met a girl (or guy), courted, fell madly in love, moved in together and then one day she/he came home with a completely new look and largely different personality, as if they had developed a bad case of bipolar disorder. People don't like radical change, especially when it comes to things they love or are attached to. Most everyone has experienced some kind of change they didn't like (I, as a lifelong fan, don't care for the direction the Final Fantasy franchise has taken, or what George Lucas has done to Star Wars, for example). But those are relatively minor changes compared to what Bethesda has done with Fallout, where the changes have been radical and sweeping.

The bottom line is this: you can bicker about the old hairstyle vs. the new, whether the old personality was better or how you feel about the tattoos that were removed (or added), but at the end of the day some people will never be okay with the changes because Fallout isn't the girl they fell in love with anymore.

Some games undergo evolution, but what Bethesda has done is to raze the Fallout franchise and rebuild it in their own image, leaving intact only what they had to (or maybe less, depending on your perspective). And I feel badly for those who were really attached to the original vision of Fallout, because that ship has sailed and she isn't coming back to port.

Actually, I sat myself through a decent 50hrs or so. Here's the thing though, NV was my first ever Fallout game(Bethesda game for that matter) I hated my first playthrough of about 15 hrs. Once I had more than an hour to play I gave it another shot, set it on hardcoe mode and set off on what would be and still is an amazing adventure.
I have 8 characters who all hit 75hrs easy, with my favorite 2 topping out at around 170hrs, but, iv still yet to finish the battle at Hoover Dam. I just never feel like the time is right.

So after I started to get burnt out from NV I was hearing that F3 was actually the better game, map size, enemies, story/plot, so naturally I picked it up, GOTY edition only ran me $15 or so.
My first impression was good, very good, even though I felt very "constricted" from the start. I created my favorite style char(high intelligence mostly) and immediately found the first encounter with the wasteland of DC meh, "different". I really liked the enclave robots flying around spamming their propaganda, it was little things like that which held my attention in the game. The over all feel of the game just seemed, oh idk how to even express it correctly, um "hollow"?

Now it's only fair to say my first impressions weren't as high due to the simple fact that I played NV first(it's hard to go backwards in series from Bethesda ) but still, the over all feel just didn't seem like an RPG, not at all. Oh and the DLC, I won't go too far on that topic but a post I read really explains how I felt about it, he said it was like doing pointless missions to unlock some coolish gear.

So yes I did play most of F3, and I rarely enjoyed my time in DC,
NV made me feel like I was actually RPing, it's just a solid game which made me happy to play it.
Even the dlc was something which stood above the rest, I rarely buy any dlc because of how short they usually are. A good example would be Dead Space 2s "Severed" dlc, it was good and added a decent amount of content(guns and armor) but it was very short, like no more than an hour and a half. Old World Blues was epic, so much thought went into it to give us a true gaming experience. It was as if it stood up to that old motto "for gamers, by gamers" (something BGS don't give a poop about, yea you heard me Bethesda.... YOU DON'T CARE!!) OWB had more of a plot than the whole of Skyrim.

Sorry for the rant but this is the Internet and I can do what I want

So things that Bethesda can do to salvage the Fallout name? I want them to start by bringing back more "number based" actions, like lockpicking requiring a certain skill check, not being able to pick a master lock while being a novice lock pick. The combat seems like it's staying as is so il ask they add some feature to make it a bit more role-playish(making AP more "valuable")

If BGS can some how make F4 at a higher quality than what they did to skyrim, il be happy.
For now I'm off to spread the word of the almighty Caeser! He ain't a half bad guy once you get to meet him.

no! the changes to final fantasy are rediculous when compared to the changes of fallout. even if you dont like the changes to the fallout series chances are you'll still enjoy and play, but the changes to final fantasy are too much. gameplay is terrible, story is terrible, music is terrible. so what are we left with? graphics as usual. bottom line- fallout NV is an excellent game regardless. FFXIII is just bad, plain bad.

Hasn't FF always been a flimsy fantasy setting?
Hasn't FF always had a turn-based form of combat?
Hasn't FF always had typical animé looking characters running around?
Hasn't FF always been story-focused instead of gameplay focused? (overall)

I mean, I only played FFX cause it was available for the PS2 (Least I think it was for the PS2) so I might not be the best to comment on it's series but it's changes might have been drastic if you look at the first FF and the last FF but how much did it change each title?
Cause the change from FO2 to FO3 was drastic and major whereas in FF from what little I know, the changes has been small to mildly moderate and over time changed into something else.

This is true, but there's more to it than that. Many Fallout fans had been waiting ten years for a proper Fallout sequel, and during that period Interplay slapped them in the face not once, not twice, but three times with Fallout Tactics, the cancellation of Black Isle's Fallout 3, and the release of Brotherhood of Steel. They wanted Fallout 3, they didn't want Fallout Tactics, and they didn't want Brotherhood of Steel which even on its own merits was a lousy game, a lousy game that Herve Caen favored over Fallout 3. Four years pass after the release of BoS, and Bethesda releases what can be summed up as TES with Guns, a simplification perhaps, but an accurate one, and not what most of the old guard wanted at all. I'm hardly surprised that many of the old fans are as annoyed as they are.


This is subjective, there's plenty of people who loved Final Fantasy XIII, and there's plenty of people who loved Fallout and hated Fallout 3.


Yeah, this situation isn't really similar. Final Fantasy fans haven't been waiting ten years for a new Final Fantasy sequel while getting fed crappy spin offs, only to receive a product that mangles the series beyond recognition, Final Fantasy has been receiving sequels and remakes with various modifications quite regularly since the original game came out in the 80s. Not to mention SquareEnix produces tons of Final Fantasy-like JRPGs on the side.

Yes, I think alot of longtime fans wanted a top down, turn based combat system. I would have liked that too, but it wouldn't have sold so many copies as 3 did.
But I loved New Vegas so much more than 3 .

FF had similar gameplay every installment, each release was very unique, but had the same design principles. then once square merged with enix every game from then only got worse. now the gameplay is incredibly simplistic with removal of attributes(like SPECIAL), auto battle system and you only control one character, completely linear game, uninteresting characters, the ledgendary nobou uematsu is not the music producer, no more world map and so on.....

imagine if all that happened to fallout- no special, combat plays out automatically, completely linear levels(hallway after hallway) NPCs are a rare sight and when they do appear you just wanna kill them, but cant. the music is embarrassing, and no more world to explore. you lot appreciate what bethesda have done, cos it could have been much, much worse.....

Or, in some peoples opinion, much, much better.

P.S. USE CAPITALS AT THE BEGINNING OF A SENTENCE! IT ISN'T HARD!

Fallout 1 + 2.....are.............AWESOME!!!!