I'm a little weirded out by how many people in the Fallout: New Vegas forum disliked Fallout 3's writing. I put F3 as my #1 game of all time, the story being my favorite part of the game. (keeping this as spoiler-free as possible) Everything from the chasing down your father main plot arc, to the identity of the humanoid android, to the B&W virtual reality, to the suicidal tree, to the had me more interested than I've ever been in any game's plot.

That's not to say I'm not enjoying New Vegas - the plot is certainly weaving some interesting yarns at 20 hours in. It's definitely more 'grounded' and similar to the original Fallout. The identity of the cowboy robot and his involvement with the overarching story has my interest piqued. It just doesn't grip me quite as well as F3 did 20 hours in.

So... opinions?

Im not too far in but I gotta say Im liking the more personal plot rather than, the one for humanity in FO3 and daddy this daddy that... :disguise:

I thought the story in FO3 was a good story, but it didn't make for a good game story, because it railroaded you along to each next stop with no real decisions to be made. It would have been much better as a movie or novel.

For instance, consider this, you only have 1 truly meaningful choice to make in the main storyline of FO3:


That is it. The rest of the main story is the same every single time without fail.

In New Vegas there are 4 "critical paths" each of which can remain separate or intersect and weave in and out of each other, depending on your decisions. That right there is 4 replays worth of story. Not to mention that there is massive variation and replayability within missions themselves. In fact, some critical path quests in NV can branch out the story in another direction because you FAIL them. The critical path the quest was on doesn't end, you don't have to load and retry the mission. The game adapts to your failure and you get NEW story for screwing up.

New Vegas is a much better GAME story, because it is all about your choices. You truly determine everything that happens in the story. No Daddy NPC is giving you stepping orders constantly. You want to do something, you can do it. Don't like what your quest-giver is asking you to do? Don't do it, or tell them you'll do it and betray them, or trick them into thinking you've done it and continue on working for them, etc.

In FO3, the Enclave was always the enemy. Even if you sided with President Eden in the end, the Enclave remained your enemy. In New Vegas, I'm on my second playthrough (I was eager to try out different story paths and other builds after putting in 50 hours and went ahead and finished the game with my first character). The major enemies for my first few hours in my first game, are now my main friends with their own quests and storyline, on my second playthrough. All because of different choices made on my part.

That equals better storyline in my book.

I loved fallout3, Just way more choices and thinking for New vegas. i loved both, id say New Vegas tho.

i liked Fallout 3's story mostly because it was a pretty personal tale of ambition and family. the writing wasn't all that good and a lot of it didn't really get across as well as it could have but the basic idea of both of your parents dying for the sake of helping a bunch of other people and ultimately ending with YOU dying to bring that dream to fruition was really neat. i didn't care about the brotherhood or the enclave - all i cared about was project purity and getting it up and running, and everyone else was just a means to an end. i never liked how Broken Steel turned it into OH YOU WERE IN A COMA.

i liked New Vegas's story up until

New Vegas's writing is stronger but honestly i'm not that big on the completely open-ended reactive storyline past the initial reaction of "oh the storyline's completely open-ended and reactive and it's not even 1998, that's super-duper neato", especially since whichever path i do go in, New Vegas seems like a pretty important place in the future of the southwest and the NCR and any future games set in the southwest will either have to a) pick a canon pathway, which could potentially render whatever decisions i make null and void (which is something that bothers me about Fallout in general (i'm cool with this stuff honestly but not in a series that's completely chronological and set in more or less the same area each time)), or b) bypass/ignore the issue altogether, which would be really weird considering how vested everybody is in gaining control of the region (IN 2281 A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WENT TO THE MOJAVE AND FOUGHT A BIT BUT WERE NEVER HEARD FROM AGAIN.). handwaving doesn't work in politics unless there's dragons breaking every which way. (that was a really long sentence.)

so for the RIGHT NOW the story is neat i guess and by that virtue it's a better story in the context of a game and i wish more RPGs would do [censored] like this i don't get why they don't it isn't HARD but taking history into account and thinking about where it will eventually go kind of ruins it for me. i mean if this were a 100% standalone game and this setting was never mentioned ever again i'd think much more highly of it than i do knowing that it will be mentioned again and most of what i've done won't count for [censored].

A good portion of Fallout 3's story was basically lifted and edited from Fallout 2 () with the new addition of Lyon's Pride, the bleeding-heart branch of the Brotherhood of Steel.

Daddy, James, whatever you want to call him had a completely one-track mind and didn't even seem to care about his own son/daughter in comparison to his goal of saving the wasteland.

Not to mention the fact that building a giant purifier made absolutely no sense. Why didn't the wastelanders just build small-scale purification factories all across the land? It's obvious that purification was already possible before Daddy's dream came to fruition.

In short, Fallout 3's story was rather lazy, re-hashed, and made no sense. The writers at Bethesda don't know how to write properly.

New Vegas is a vast improvement. Hats off to Obsidian.

Yeah. That's my major problem with the whole Fallout 3 plot, in fact. It's inconsistent as all get out.

Take James. One minute, he will do everything to turn on the purifier, even sending his son or daughter, his last link to his beloved wife, into a facility infested with mutants whose defining trait is "treats power-armored soldiers as canned meat on the hoof" just to turn it on. That's fine, I can buy a character being utterly obsessed by this project, so much that they'd sacrifice even their own children for it. There's good storytelling potential here.

Then an hour later, James is sabotaging the project and killing himself to prevent the Enclave from taking it... When their stated goal is turning the damn thing on. Even if he knew the Enclave was evil, the fact that he was willing to sacrifice his only child should prove that he's so far gone that he wouldn't care.

To compare, NV has well-realized, consistent, excellent characters.

NV maybe physically smaller but the overarching main story and convo to convo dialogue are much more potent and better scripted IMO

It would be kinda cool if they let a few guys from the obsidian writing team help script 4

It would be even cooler if Obsidian were contracted to make all future Fallout games, because it's obvious that they actually care about the roots of the series and are much more capable of handling it than Bethesda ever was.

I wonder why Bethesda bothered to buy the rights to Fallout?

Harold, the G.E.C.K, numbered vaults weren't what Fallout was all about, not to me anyway.

NV has a really grand RPG story - a Fallout story. Fallout 3 had... some clichéd Hollywood post-apoc action plot with stuff in it that was called like things from the previous games. Folks might prefer one or the other. Which one I do, well, you can guess.

I think they're both phenomenal stories. Idek how far in the future NV is from 3 but in my head my character is the daughter of my Best Hope For Humanity in FO3. She even looks like her. I haven't even reached Vegas proper in NV and I am LOVING the factions and the political intrigue. Playing my girl as a peacemaker type but she steals like a [censored] so she stays neutral.

The Story in NV is more open, many paths to choose. and even in those paths theres even more paths! you would have to make so many game files for all the choices lol, while fallout 3 was so amazing, the story was so one track.. only part u could really change is more near the ending.. and the same thing still ended up happening lol..

Actually, the Lyon's Pride reminded me a lot of the BoS offshoot in the original Fallout Tactics. Just saying.

Havent beat FONV yet but honestly I think the FO3 story is the better of the two.

Like I said - F3 story = Rehash of F1 & F2

Save the world (oe Vault 13, Tribe) with GECK
Find your daddy (or Tribal family members)
Destroy the eeeeevil president Eden (or Richardson) and stop him from FEV'ing America
Big guys in black armor hostile towards you(Enclave)

Seriously, I find New Vegas' storyline and dialogue ASTRONOMICALLY better than F3. Everything beats the [Inteligence] response to 3-dog.

Now the Run'n'Gun Dungeon Crawl, Loot-Explore grinding gets some good writing too!

I like both stories, however in terms of length, although NV has more quests, I beat it in 19 hours, and that includes many side quests. Fallout 3 took me 24 hours with only one or 2 side quests.

Ill stop there before I start a review of both games... I have a lot to say about NV XD

The MQ was the letdown in FO3 for me. Like Killian Darkwater and Cpl. Facehugger it was hosed by the Dad (which starts as a chase then finish his grand plan thing) and inconsistencies with it. I loved the game, but mostly for the side quests, Grady's Package was just hilarious. But for me, I saw everything one time and that was it for me. If there was some variation with groups of something I might have played again, and if I had it on PC and not PS3.

Now With NV it's a story that starts extremely vague when compared to FO3, couple that with the fact you are make a decision about a faction within the first 30 minutes and you see it's a whole different beast. I consider my answers in conversation, snot just try and hurry things along. This might sound stupid, but I went and did another quest while I thought about who to instill as sheriff in Primm. Why, because I had to think about what could the potential outcome of my actions be. In FO3 it would have been some amount of karma change.

I've definetly enjoyed New Vegas's story more than Fallout 3's.

Fallout 3's main story seemed more put in the game just because video games are supposed to have a main story. Some stuff didn't make sense. For instance, James killing himself because the Enclave show up even though we're never so much as even given a HINT at how he could possibly know who they were let alone know they had bad intentions. Or the Enclave all wanting to kill you even though you just did exactly what their president asked you to do, let alone the fact that you're not given any option to tell the Enclave that you'll work for them before hand, However, since Fallout 3 was my introduction into the Fallout universe and it was bought on a whim without any knowledge to what Fallout actually was, I thought that the Super Mutants and Enclave were some clever idea cooked up by Bethesda. Now I know that instead they just plucked out the protagonists of the last games. That makes it seem even more like the story was just put there because it was required to have a story.

New Vegas on the other hand has an excellent story. The beginning feels very railroaded admittedly, but even then you're given quite a few choices with what you can do. Once you hit Vegas though it really opens up and you're pretty much free to explore any of the branches of the main story however you please. As of right now I've already completed the main quest twice by making Vegas Independant the first time and giving it to the NCR the second. I really look forward to seeing how Caesar's Legion's branch of the main quest will play through, though I think I already know the gist of what Mr. House is going to want me to do.

Honestly, I think it would be a smart move on Bethesda's part to contract all Fallout games at this point on to Obsidian (with some help with bugs and maybe stopping them from making a few bad decisions such as the invisble walls) or atleast let Obsidian do all future writing for the Fallout games.

I absolutely love New Vegas' story because of how open-ended it is. Fallout 3's is completely linear and you have little to no choices. And even then, those choices mean nothing. In New Vegas, once you reach the Strip, so many opportunities open up to you, and the main quest is completely open ended from there on.

Also, House>Any NPC/character in Fallout 3.

I like the way the main story in New Vegas unfolds in multiple paths more than the linear main story in Fallout 3. However, I found several of the side quests in Fallout 3 more interesting and imaginative than the many fetch quests in New Vegas.

I’ve played FO3 for hundreds of hours. It’s definitely in my top ten favorite games of all time. I’ll always be grateful to FO3 for reviving the Fallout franchise and bringing it into the third dimension…

Still, I have to admit, the game never felt like Fallout. And as much as I like the game, in my heart I never really believed it was a part of the Fallout world.

New Vegas… It feels like Fallout. It has the right, hard, dark edge to it. It has the right, sometimes black, sometimes silly comedy in it. It’s full of moral ambiguity and unintended consequences. The courier lives in the same world as the vault dweller and the chosen one…

It’s not a world that contains the kid from vault 101 or the Bleeding Hearts of Steel.