Bingo! Give that man a prize!

*bob barker voice* You've won a new Minigun!

I like both, but I think I enjoyed exploring more. My favorite thing so far has been exploring the DC metro system, I really liked how you had to use them to reach areas in the DC ruins that otherwise couldn't be reached.

And battling hoards of ghouls while you are at it :biggrin:

I loved the atmosphere in the ruined stations and I really missed them in NV.

Exploring. Quite a lot of quests make you explore anyways. Plus in exploring, you can make up your own quests. e.g. reading all of the terminals in a vault to try and figure out what the hell happened

Could someone please explain what's so fun about exploring? I... It... I can't grasp it seriously, everyone talks about exploring? It's only fun once isn't it? Most quest have diffrent solutions and outcomes depending on how you do 'em making sure you could do each atleast twice... Please explain to me :vaultboy:

i agree its only fun the first time the rest are just dumb

Yeah it's interesting the first time to find the places/people/towns/events/items.
The second time it's basically just checking through the area to make sure you didn't miss something.
Third time is basically the same as the second time only quicker.
And after that there's little to explore really.

Exploration is great the first time you find places and stuff.
So what I did was this: I did not explore the entire map on the first playthrough because of just that reason.
I left a lot of places/people/factions and events untouched so I had something to look forward to on the next playthroughs.
The exploration aspect quickly dies down since once you've seen the capitol SM vs Talon fight there's nothing new there the second time around.

Now with quests on the other hand, if there are lots of outcomes and lots of ways to deal with the quests to define the character you've written.
Then it'll be far more rewarding then exploring the same-y wastes over and over.

Hey welcome to the forum

thank you

Actually, there is - if you want to do the quests as well. My first play through I ignored the main quest and went for a wander. I ended up breaking a large portion of the quests because I was doing stuff in the 'wrong' order. I had 3 raiders heads in my inventory for weeks, and when I finally happened across the guy who wanted them his dialogue tree had gone wonky. I went to Hidden Valley with Veronica before her quest had triggered, so I screwed that up as well. It all got a bit confusing seeing dialogue referring to stuff I hadn't been told about before.

Exploration wise, I miss all the little details found in F3. The terminals replaced the books in TES. Some are funny, some are poignant. You get a sense of history and the world before the war from them. There's only a few working terminals in F:NV, and they're short and not a very involving read.

Not very involvning? Check out black mountin and H&H company

I didn't have either of these problems. I took Veronica to Hidden Valley before I got her side quest and had no problems doing her side quest later on, and this was before any of the major patches. :shrug:

I wish I'd done that. My first playthrough of NV, I went out of my way to explore thoroughly before hitting Vegas, as I was trying to ignore the MQ. So once I did begin the second act of the MQ, I found myself being sent repeatedly to people/places I'd already visited before, and it rapidly became a joyless trudge all the way to Hoover Dam.

Second playthrough, it was straight to the Strip for me.

I only focus on one playthrough. I make a lot of saves so I can try quests in different ways. So saying that quests having multiple paths makes them better than exploring is meaningless to me. I don't get the thrill of exploring an area full of enemies from doing quests where all I get to do is talk to people. I still get flashbacks of being in Grayditch at level 3, with 20 rounds in my hunting rifle, scared out of my wit. But not when i'm walking from one part of Freeside to another 20 times in the same quest.

yah i like doing this also. Its pretty interesting to see what dumb thing they did in that Vault to get them all killed. Im always hoping when i go into a vault that the place isnt compleatly dead. So when i went into Vault 34 i almost [censored] myself seeing how destroyed it was.