It's not really much of a challenge at all, a Courier can be a sound option or reason to travel into the wild region known as the Mojave, delivering packages, getting payment, beginning again from your old past. Hell I even managed to make a great backstory of a Military Heavy Trooper trying to get away from his demons, only to eventually come back and face them finally in the Mojave. Overall it's just a small speed bump in comparison to Skyrim.

Plus you don't have to live in the local area to be a Courier. Couriers back in the day got packages from the local region they're in,saddle up, trek across states to finally enter another region, deliver it, and from there, acquire a package from the local Courier system, and continue from there. A Courier that stays in one place is usually either a Courier doing bad business, doesn't care about the big money....or is dead.

It really is, I had trouble finding a group until I found out my one friend was super into DnD. I joined with him and his family and had my first taste, luckily a few people moved in who were also pretty big Tabletop gamers/wanted to get into it so now I have a group of around six people. I usually end up DMing just because I have a background in writing and theater; but for those first few years I know that feel.
You know, with the internet there are ways to play DnD over Skype. In fact, before my laptop decided it was too beautiful for this world and hoped on the first train to deathsville I used to a lot of DnD over Skype with folks from all over. Could be fun to put a FO forums group together.

On topic: For me, New Vegas is a better RPG than Skyrim because it provides pretty clear boundaries on what you can and can't do. If I am a lock-picker I can't attempt to hack--just like I wouldn't attempt to hack irl--without the knowledge to do so. It also provides options for this role, which outside of a few bribe/intimidate options just wasn't there in Skyrim.

Outside of guilds I had a nearly identical experience playing Sword and Board as I did playing Two-Handed Beserker. Archery was really the only play-style I felt had actual variety. (Seriously, for all its faults Skyrim had some real nice archery).

Do you happen to live in Northern Virginia? I'm guessing no due to your location saying Mormonville U.S.A., so I'm guessing you're in Utah probably near Salt Lake city.

But im in the state below ya

Move?

Anyway back on topic before the mods come

How about unique dialog options and mini-quests opening up with the requisite skill levels? That was more of a reward for me than being able to do more damage and whatnot.

I think Bethesda put similar things in FO3 and Skyrim, but not remotely close to the level Obsidian went. Or am I even wrong about that?

while I consider both rpgs, I feel fonv has much better rpg mechanics. In skyrim I felt u did most of the roleplaying in ur head and the gane world never reconized it because of lack of stats, options, and defined class for the coding to reconize and respond to. Whereas in fonv with all the stats and many many different options and the game reconizing ur actions/charecter and actually responding to that in the game world.
Skyrim had a beautiful game world for u to explore and roleplay in ur head whereas fonv had an okay game world to explore but reacted and reconized ur roleplay thru ur choices thru quests and stats that u chose.
Plus the writting of the story and the charecters. Skyrim dropped the ball on that one as well.

I think some reason why New Vegas feels better is because it is a massive step up from Fallout 3 (Not in the terms of world exploration) but in RPG mechanics.

Skyrim is compared to Oblivion, a fantastic game who, while it was fairly linear, was a massive open world with great quest lines such as the Dark Brotherhood quest. Which still remains one of my favorite mission series in any game ever.

Ill agree that oblivion had better quests imo. The guild quests were done better and the flow as well. Id dare say even the side quests like going inside a drawing are better than skyrims as well. Skyrim did quite a few things better than oblivion but I dare say the quests barring the main quest was done better in oblivion than skyrim.

Skyrim guilds lack:

-Pacing (this above all)

-Coherent plots (Looking at you, College and Thieves' Guild)

-Choice and Consequence (Case and point: being a werewolf or Nightingale, two choices people would LOVE to have but couldn't)

-Rewards (This is a problem with the entire game though, since crafted gear = always superior)

-Diversity (same quests over and over)

-Length

What's even stranger is that technically EVERY guild questline has a two-sided conflict, but not one of them allows you to actually pick a side in that conflict. They all railroad you onto the same path, and you have to wonder why no one ever considered giving the player options. Like ok, Bethesda seems to have the attitude of "we'll make TES whatever we like" even if that means making it a racing game, but you'd THINK having had RPG roots, someone would say "hey maybe we should let the player choose NOT to become a werewolf/expand lycanthropy to the entire faction."

They ised to have writers who would write design the quests with choices but sadly those writers majority of them left after morrowind and more left after oblivion. The ones who were left must have heavily watched game of thrones during the writing session or had it on in the background bc it seemed they grabed heavily from that as far as the mood and EVERY GUILD leader dying lol

Also, slightly off-topic?

I will never understand why people praise the writing of Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood quest over the Thieves' Guild.

Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion had good quest design, not story. The quests offered choice and multiple outcomes and consequences. The story was very very basic.

Oblivion's Thieves guild was the one that I found to be the best written. The foreshadowing, the build-up, the player curiousity as to "why" and the climix were all set perfectly in place.

Unfortunately, the guy who wrote the Dark Brotherhood for Oblivion was basically promoted to lead writer for Bethesda, and I have no idea who wrote the thieves' guild, what became of him or if he still works for Bethesda.

Whoever wrote the Thieves' Guild for Skyrim though should either be fired immediately or forbidden from touching a keyboard again.

While the Thieves Guild quest had a better story the Dark Brotherhood kept me engaged longer.

I also don't understand how the Thieves Guild went from Robin Hood and his merry men to common street thugs. They used to be admirable, but then they were stupid. Similar to the Dark Brotherhood, in Oblivion they were cool but in Skyrim they were all like

"Look how creepy we are ooooh, look at this vampire girl, oooooh"

Right but it's important to understand WHY it kept you engaged. The Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion was good clean fun because it gave you multiple ways to kill targets, multiple reactivity to how you killed the target (AKA friends commiting suicide or the like), and a great reward on every single mission, if completed properly.

If they'd've taken the Thieves' Guild storyline with the DB's reactivity, it would've been a winner. Instead, in Skyrim, both the storyline of the TG and the reactivity of the DB are completely missing, likely because people were promoted for all the wrong reasons and to all the wrong positions.

And I was complaining more about the sheer amount of fridge logic within Skyrim's Thieves' Guild. If you actually sit down and think about it's storyline, it makes NO coherent sense whatsoever and it's filled to the brim with plotholes.

I am a bit confused on why some don't like the idea of Obsidian requiring every character to be a courier. How else would you have preferred them to tell their story? The main quest evolves because of the role the character plays in delivering the chip. I understand that this requirement doesn't allow you to be everything and anything but that isn't what an RPG is supposed to be about. You, the player, play a certain role within the parameters of a story. You still have complete control on how that character grows but you don't have, nor do you really deserve to be able to make whatever choice you want. Its not your story. You are a player within the story. So yes, you may want to be a cook, which you still can be, but you still have to play a role that's centered on being a courier as well. It doesn't work without it. Sometimes I feel folks here complain just to complain rather than think through the issue at hand and then apply their RPG experiences accordingly.

Ah I see and agree. The progression of both the TG and DB makes no sense, hell at the end of Oblivion both were powerful.

Oh yeah because Oblivion was 200 [censored] years before Skyrim. Talk about unnecessary.

The Courier part isn't what was the worst, the Lonesome road made it hard. Your character went from making one job to having a career of it. It was unnecessary and IMHO bad writing.

I haven't really played much of Oblivion (should I?), but the end of the Dark Brotherhood Quest ruined Skyrim for me. My character was an assassin because that's what she was good at. She was a clean, efficient killer who took no joy in making people suffer. So at the end of the quest, when we relocate to the new base, and I was promoted to be their leader I took a look around me. We had torture dungeons. What. No. I don't want those. I don't want to torture people. My character doesn't want to torture people. Okay, I'll just ignore it and do all the cool stuff that a leader can do... Which is boss around NPCs that have less personality than a cardboard cut-out. My character left out of disgust. I wandered around for a while and I realized something... how empty and awful and fake Skyrim becomes after you complete the story quests. After you do a quest for a character, they suddenly cease doing anything interesting. They become lifeless dolls, and it pissed me off. So-called "radiant quests" are a joke and actually make things worse.

I sold Skyrim very soon after that.

I don't even remember the Thieves' Guild storyline.

I totally agree with you. Skyrim is overhyped in many ways.

It's not even fun after the first playthrough. New Vegas though, I can play it till I die without getting bored.

I thought this site is a great anolysis of the problems with the Skyrim Thieves Guild questline - http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422

I was thinking about buying Fallout NV because I never been but I was thinking would playing the beautiful Skyrim ruin NVs lesser graphics or any other outdated functions?

Fallout New Vegas doesn't look "that" bad so unless you have an excessive standard for graphics it shouldn't be a problem, as to outdated functions, I don't think it's outdated, at least no when put into context with Skyrim as they both use the same engine. (Creation is just a slightly improved Gamebryo IIRC)

Thank you

Just to update you guys I'm not dead, I've recently got Mount & Blade: Warband and man is it addicting. Its quite possibly the best RPG RTS ever.

Yeah, skyrim is "beautiful", but its environment makes no sense due to its inconsistency with this "war" that has been going on in it.

I forgot that the Empire had a tank infaltry unit