You have two choices.
Do you prefer the whole post apocalyptic, grey and dark gloomy feel FO3 brings or do you prefer the unforgiving yet growing desert that FONV gives? Personally, I prefer the FO3 scene. It's great how we and the first sight is that harsh grey and gloomy look with the Capital Building (I THINK THAT'S WHAT IT IS CALLED) in the background with no tree's or plants or any signs of life except for yourself. A puddle of irradiated water with a child's 200 year old bike laying within. Cars dotted around as to tell a story of people who tried to escape the explosions. The floor is just a grey wasteland with little life growing, and often a gust of wind blows with dirt flying through the air with the odd wastelander wandering around and that is simply nothing compared to when you actually explore the wasteland or the DC ruins.
Forget about the storyline, the factions and the character you play; Just look at the scenery and environment. Which do you prefer?

Considering Fallout 3's gameworld was incoherent and just plain illogical I'd say I prefer New Vegas waaaaaaaaaaay more.

Definitely the FO3 Wasteland, New Vegas had to many depressed NCR troops around it but did have a handful of good locations altho FO3 had much more Dungeon crawling liked that a lot

New Vegas, Fallout 3's wasteland just didn't make sense and wasn't Fallouty in the least.

Overall Fallout 3 had seemed to have more grand set-pieces, though seeing as DC is filled with historical monuments that's rather easier to do.
I however abhor what you seem to find great about it. The completely bland bleakness and lifelessness really svck out any variety and gets boring fast.

Thankfully New Vegas had some more life to it's wasteland.

I like both, so I don't know my answer. New Vegas makes more sense. F3 was too dead to be 200 years old wasteland, without anything growing, what do people eat? They hunt? What do the animals they hunt eat? Do they both eat pre-war food that oddly enough still exist in places that should already be looted (given they are full of raiders)? Seriously, Fallout 3 could at least have some damn farms in every settlement, and give us a feeling that the inhabitants do something else than sitting at home 24/7.

But I like both wastelands, but F3's wasteland doesn't look too Fallout-y. Compare to F1, F2, FT and FNV - they are all more like deserts with sunshine and F3 feels like there was a war of biological weapons of mass destruction rather, the air itself look toxic. It's green and constantly cloudy.

Well I liked Fallout 3's the best even though it didn't make much sense it was still cool.

New Vegas, just take a look at Goodsprings or what's left of it. I liked the whole war that's played in Vegas.

I preferred Fallout 3's wasteland, there was alot more going on and the random encounters were good compared to New Vegas' lack of

Why didnt F3's wasteland not make sense

New Vegas for me. It felt more consistent and believable in the setting.

New Vegas by a mile. Felt a lot more like a Fallout game.

This

Super mutants being there for one.
Brotherhood of Steel for second.
Places aren't fully looted even after 200 years for third.
The incredibly tightly packed enemies made trade highly improbable for fourth.
That there are more raiders than things to raid for fifth.
That there is no sign of production to support the amount of people living there for sixth.

Should I go on?

It mostly has to do with the fact that in 200 years nothing seems to have changed. The CW looks like the War just happened, not that two centuries have past since the bombs dropped. Like some people here have said there are no farms, no means of sustaining a large population in any of the major cities. And a lot of people are irked with the seemingly eternal presence of radiation.
Personally, while I do find the lack of self sustenance in the major towns odd, I don't think that the fact that the CW hasn't advanced to be poor writing by Beth (which is what a lot of people say when the subject is brought up). With the constant SM (which is a whole other plot hole discussion in and of itself) and slaver/raider danger, I think that civilization has been stooped from moving forward. What I mean is whenever a settlement springs up, the SMs and Raiders destroy it.
On the subject of radiation, while I am by no means an expert on such things, I think that radiation does tend to cling to areas, just look at Chernobyl. Even if that is not the case, Beth probably just used what pop culture in the 50s thought radiation would do (cling to areas for hundreds of years). So the fact that something like Project Purity was needed to filter the radiation out of water makes sense in the Fallout Universe. We see how the Fallout Universe has already altered the properties of radiation in the creation Ghouls.

You based your argument on what he said not to. So the Super Mutants and BoS are irrelevant.
Places aren't 100% looted because, well, what stuff was there worth steal that wasn't behind a locked door or container? NV has the same failing. Simply because the game would be boring without finding something cool that no one else thought to touch.


Fair enough.

People saying there is no farms etc, isn't there a Brahmin farm in Arefu, Paradise Falls, Megaton, Republic of Dave and there may be a few other places that hold Brahmin in pens and actually have them roasting on barbies but I can't remember off the top of my head. So that to me seems like a valid for of food production, though I see no crop farms but vegi's aren't the 1st things you want since they can take months to grow. There is a pretty large population of cannibals roaming the CW, Andale, The Hunters and the Vampire group living near Arefu could be classed as minor cannibals.

Radiation can stay resonant for many years. Here is the breakdown of the half-lives of the most common nucleotides.
Half-lives
Radionuclide Half-Life Products of Fission Half-Life
Uranium-233 158,000 yrs Iodine-131 8 days
Uranium-235 704 Million yrs Krypton-85 10.8 yrs
Uranium-238 4.47 Billion yrs Tritium 12.3 yrs
Thorium-232 14 Billion yrs Strontium-90 28 yrs
Plutonium-239 24,400 yrs

Found that when looking for how long radiation can last, I have no idea what they used in the Fallout bombs but if anything came from that left column then the radiation levels are justifiable. But really I don't know much about it :shrug:
Radiation never seemed like a major thing in F3 so I don't see the big fuss over it when you have the places, Jack Rabbit Springs, Black Mountain, the place near Nipton RestStop, the Old Test site and a few other ooze radiation.

EDIT: Made the right column yellow to make them clearer

Super Mutants and BOS' presence affects the overall atmosphere so I don't care if he said not to include them.
Super mutants gave Fallout 3 a touch shove of that super mutants have overrun the place and generally through their stupid evil to create an atmosphere of anarchistic fear.
So I'm going to comment on them as much as I damn please. Not my fault they are ridiculous.
The atmosphere is part of the scenery for me.

And it's been 200 years!
Say a nuclear war happens and you and a couple of hundred others survive, now, you need food, what do you do? You raid the convenient stores and super markets.
Now let's take coca cola, it's one of the worlds most liked soft drinks if not the most, now picture yourself the closest place you yourself can buy cola from, how long would it take for it to actually run out at that store?
I'd say less than a year really.
Now, it's been 200 years. Not 200 days, not 200 months, but 200 freaking years... And there's still food in convenient stores, pre-war food at that, lined up in the shelves!

Should the game reward your exploration by giving you something nice? Of course, if there's no reward then it's not worth the bother.
So I'm not saying that there shouldn't be zilch around the wasteland, just that it needs to be cut down and that each and every location needs to be designed around the lines of "It's been 200 years, does this make sense?"
So having some skeleton with a combat helmet, a rifle and a last testament is ridiculous.
It's been 200 years and not a single sentient being has seen this rifle?
And how come the note hasn't decomposed? It's hardly like it's been preserved in something like a chest or anything, it's been lying out in the open for 200 years and nothing has trashed it? Not even the rain? What? Did the soldier have the note laminated in the last few seconds before he died or something?

That's my problem with illogical loot.
Items that are placed in locations and situations where it doesn't make a damn lick of sense.

"But what if it becomes too empty?"
Good, it's suppose to be a wasteland, not a lootapalooza.

In NV, the stuff you can loot is generally either guarded by powerful prewar technology (RepConn, Sierra Madre, Big Empty), surrounded by hostile critters (ie Silver Peak mine), or already looted.

...Or already occupied by another faction who'd restocked everything with their own stuff, ala the Legion at Cottonwood cove or NCR at McCarran.



In the original Fallout there was still stuff to loot, but it made sense. It was plausible that, say, the Toxic Caves went unlooted, seeing as how it was a golden gecko nest, had lots of radioactive waste everywhere, and had a locked door that needs an electronic lockpick to open. (And has a security robot with minigun and missiles down there to kill anyone who makes it through the geckos and and radiation.) The Sierra Army Depot was sealed up and also guarded by minigun turrets and armed robots.

The Glow still had a plasma rifle to loot because it was dangerously radioactive and had robots guarding it. It made sense for these sites to be unlooted.

Compare FO3, where there's guns and armor just lying around for the taking. Lots of guns and armor. Two hundred years after the bombs fell, there's still guns and armor that have rested right where their owner fell.



A handful of Brahmin isn't exactly enough to feed everyone in the capital wasteland. Particularly all those raider bands. Doubly so when the entire plot revolves around how there's no clean water.

It's not just farms either. There's a lack of any sort of industry. Where does Talon Company get their snazzy black combat armor and military-grade weaponry (including artillery!?) Where does the Brotherhood get so much obsolete power armor? Where do Overlords get their gatling lasers and tribeams?

All of this is just a symptom of the real problem though. FO3's worldbuilding simply isn't that good. They made a place that's fun to explore, but which makes no sense. Take Talon Company as an example. We know almost nothing about them. Why do mercenaries randomly hunt down people who give water to beggars? Where do they get prewar guns? Why are mercs automatically hostile to everyone they see, even though they're axing potential customers? Now, you can come up with plenty of fan-theories to explain their behavior (my personal favorite is that they're backed by the Enclave), but it's terrible worldbuilding to have not even a hint of the why of things in your setting.

The raiders are another issue. There's just so many of them, everywhere. Where does their food come from? There's not much trade between the various settlements in the Mojave. Where do their guns and bullets come from? The Pitt? What do they trade to get that gear? How do these people get enough water to survive when the entire plot revolves around how there's no clean water?

Muties have the same problems with food and water, but they also have a problem with motivation. In FO1 the muties had a reason to do everything they did - they had the Master telling them to. (We also see here that mutants are developed characters in their own right rather than being mindless killing machines.) In FO3, there's no mutant leader. It's like they just do things for lulz. It's poor worldbuilding to put all these factions in the game but not give them any motivations.

And this isn't even getting into lulzy things like the Rube Goldberg machine in the grocery store, the Dunwich building, or the teddy bear that spawns a mutie behemoth.

I think uranium-235 is the isotope used for nuclear weapons. It is used because of the efficiency of the fission reaction. Uranium splits in halfish and the products are unstable so they split in half and those are unstable as well so they split in half. The majority of the radioactive elements at the end of the explosion will have a half life less than 10 years. After at least 20 half-lives that means around 1/104876 of the original unstable isotopes remains. The scientists knew how long the radiation would be around even though did not know what effects it would have on organic creatures. Ghouls and giant animals are in line with that kind of thinking. The perpetually irradiated fresh water isn't.

Personally, I'm of the opinion it's the Vault 87 reactor leaking a constant supply of new rads into the river that makes it radioactive. Sorta like why the sharecropper farms in NV are struggling (Vault 34 reactor leak is poisoning the local water supply.) This is totally fanon though, and it is an example of poor worldbuilding if fans have to invent explanations like this out of nothing.

Speaking of which, another problem with Beth's worldbuilding is how the people who get turned into muties survive the trip through that 1000/sec radiation field.

I would prefer a new feel to F4, I would really like for them to have a war torn (Post-Apocalyptic War), ruined feel.

But out of the two F3 had a more entertaining feel, NV more realistic.

Two of the bigger population centres have no food production (Megaton and Tenpenny Tower) and the one that does (Riven City) seems to be doing that only recently and not in very big numbers.
There are a few Brahmin farms with the number of Brahmin at each being countable on one hand. Also what do these beast eat in this dead wasteland. The brown grass, would explain why they can only hold small numbers. Still their numbers would be hard pressed to sustain the low number of inhabitants of this wasteland.
Secondly even a cannibal can't survive on human flesh alone (heck they must moderate intake because of disease). Where are the greens?
And if they've been eating the 200 year food, why is there so much of that stuff to be found all over the place.


Half-lives aren't the primary mitigating factor in radiation. It's dispersion, diffusion and settling.
As rain, wind sweeps the land, radioactive materials get carried away until it's mostly divided over such an area that though they might not be at their half-life yet, their numbers are too low to contribute the same radiation.
In other words the concentration is also a factor and that changes before half-lives are reached.

Also doting the dangerous wasteland are villages composed of insufficient numbers to not be overrun by raiders and super-mutants and the only one that seems to suffer that is being put down to lack of enough competence.

Fallout 3 had an environment that was fun to interact with and was interesting to explore, but it didn't make the least bit of sense. The fact that the whole environment made no sense took away from the game, and almost made the "fun" factor of the environment irrelevant. I often found myself saying, "Why the hell is this here?" or "Do I really have to fight another one of these?"

So to me, New Vegas had the better environment because it made sense and wasn't overloaded with random enemies. Fallout 3 had an environment that was more fun to explore, but it still didn't make sense imo.

Nope I doubt radiation would stick around for 200 years. First off Fallout is a dusty thing which nothing really absorbs so that would disperse after a while, and other radiation wears off too. There would have to be a huge concentration of radiation for it to stick around.

For example take Chernobyl, we all know how that ended it, the worst nuclear power plant disaster. I was watching a show about it, and they had built a model to show the inside of the plant and it looks horrible greem blobs all over the place and stuff like that, that is the example of it sticking around in huge concentrations. The area outside of it right? Literally withing a mile, the plants mainly are the most radioactive thing there. You can also be authorize to walk around just on the path, so in 25 years loads of radiation has cleared out, in 200 years I imagine that only the plant would have radiation left in it.

Not to argue the point, but radiation from Fissable material (Uranium 235 and Plutonium 239 are the two most common in nuclear bombs and nuclear fission) and radiation from nuclear fallout are two different things. Nuclear Fission reactors (not to be confused with Fusion reactors that are supposed to power the majority of Fallout tech of 2050) produce radioactive material that emits radiation for several thousand years. Nuclear fallout is a compilation of many different elements but will, theoretically, only last around a hundred years or so. As you said, both of these would be subject to the elements (though in the Fallout universe radiation is contagious so it might be more persistant), but fallout from the bombs would already have become radioactivly dead about a century before the Lone Wanderer set out.

Back on topic: I think the CW felt more like a wasteland (A dead husk of a powerful civilization) but New Vegas felt more realistic. In a perfect world I'd like to see a New Veags enviroment outside a CW world. The CW would be mostly empty, unable to support life becuase there's no room for crops or animal rearing, yet still full of valuable goodies and dungeon crawling. That's just me though.

Just sort of backing it up. In theory Fallout could last 100 years, but really only last a few weeks or a month or two due to nature constantly moving it.