This is why I prefer New Vegas. Why or why dont you?

Niner1209

First time out of the vault
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I just feel like New Vegas had more depth to it and made me care about the Mojave Wasteland.
 
New Vegas is swell until you hit the wall and realize the game is over. There are only so many combinations, so many outcomes, and like F3, there are plenty of broken and dead-ending quests, pointless story arcs that have fudged endings, and ultimately the big elephant in the room:

Invisible walls preventing you from exploring a world you just know is incredibly large. A world you cannot touch. A world the NPCs harp on about but never allow you to see. A burgeoning nation-state here, a tribal empire there, but you just can't touch it. You find much more coherent and intriguing lore in New Vegas, but by the end of the day, whether you're staring across the naval yard from Rivet City, or out across the desert landscape from the farthest Boomer lookout tower at Nellis, you know in the back of your mind that there is simply nothing rendered there. No meaning. No sense. At once a blank slate, ripe for creation, and a truly barren wasteland without a shred of potential. How depressing is it to follow rail lines to broken bridges, even though the lore claims that there are trains pulling NCR reinforcements up? How pitiful that you can see highway overpasses that you cannot touch, power lines stretching to nowhere, the occasional road that bends around a hill and stops, or that highway leading out of Mojave Outpost that disappears in plain view behind an arbitrarily locked gate?

Earlier Fallouts felt like good ol' RPGs to me. These games made me want to explore, and left me hanging.

That leaves you with one option: Invest in the location. But you simply cannot. Your character, no matter how omnipotent, stat-bloated, plot-armored and lucky, can't so much as pitch a tent, build a wall, start a family, raise an army, build a country. The lore and NPCs claim that they are, and yet all you see are sun-baked roads, random fauna, and inaccessible buildings which may as well be giant cubes dotting the landscape. For a game supposedly allowing people to live out post-apocalyptic fantasies of freedom and creativity, it really doesn't leave much to work with. And the more I attempt to tweak it with mods and the console, the less real it gets.
 
It's safe to say that's ONE of the reasons I prefer it. But simply dwarfing FO3's number of quests, both marked and unmarked, side quest or main quest, DLC or vanilla, is just one aspect among many. There's heaps more content, but it wouldn't make any difference if it weren't any good. For instance, if FOBOS was 1000% the size, it still wouldn't be any good, cause it would just be 10x as much of the same crap. But FONV offers more GOOD things. The quests are varied and interesting. The dialog is well-written. The characters are interesting and believable. It's like FO2 all over again: way, way bigger, and better on top of it.

In very few words, I'd say that's why I prefer New Vegas. =)
 
New Vegas is swell until you hit the wall and realize the game is over. Invisible walls preventing you from exploring a world you just know is incredibly large. A world you cannot touch. A world the NPCs harp on about but never allow you to see. A burgeoning nation-state here, a tribal empire there, but you just can't touch it. You find much more coherent and intriguing lore in New Vegas, but by the end of the day, whether you're staring across the naval yard from Rivet City, or out across the desert landscape from the farthest Boomer lookout tower at Nellis, you know in the back of your mind that there is simply nothing rendered there. No meaning. No sense. At once a blank slate, ripe for creation, and a truly barren wasteland without a shred of potential. How depressing is it to follow rail lines to broken bridges, even though the lore claims that there are trains pulling NCR reinforcements up? How pitiful that you can see highway overpasses that you cannot touch, power lines stretching to nowhere, the occasional road that bends around a hill and stops, or that highway leading out of Mojave Outpost that disappears in plain view behind an arbitrarily locked gate?
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I have never understood how these were ever an issue for anyone; but they clearly are; I see them on Bethsoft all the time... These are not things that I would ever fault a designer or their game for. Did you also have this issue with Dishonored?

The only invisible walls [in NV] that I didn't like, were the ones under the banisters... the open air that would accept darts and spears to be stuck into them; and even preventing the PC from shooting targets through them. The only time I had a problem with NV's invisible walls was when they were not diligent to ensure that the player could not accidentally wander through a gap in one. The walls being invisible made it virtually impossible to find one's way back through the invisible gap, and impossible to break back into the game world unless you did find an invisible gap to slip through.

I generally prefer a game without a completely unstructured open world (and often consider it far more believable); one that puts the PC into an finite area with a purpose, one where the studio focuses all of their effort into designing that area. This by is far preferred [to me] than a thinly stretched open world; or (in the impossible case of an extremely detailed open world) it's not nearly as headache inducing at the thought of having to slog through all of that just to achieve the PC's goals. "No-Man's Sky" is not likely a title that I will even try out a free demo of. Games that handle the gameworld like Witcher and Dishonored are just better game design as far as I am concerned... and/or if for only the same reasons that film & TV directors rarely show a protagonist's daily commute in realtime (or first person). The in between is usually tangential and boring as hell. I would never care to suffer through the mundane travels of Gerralt on the way to Vizema... nor would I accept that was nothing mundane about Geralt's trip... It's just inherently better to know that he had a trip and not give a damn; it happened, and the game resumes in the outskirts of Vizema... where the events actually matter.

I would have that FO3 and FO:NV behave not just the same way as Witcher and Dishonored... but as the rest of the Fallout series did ~and as they should.
 
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Yeah, I don't get how a game ending is a bad thing, you want to roam the wasteland? uhmmm open a previous save file and do it :shrug:? Also I think New Vegas has more permutations and combinations in it's endings than any other game out there and for 60 dollars on release and like 30 dollars now with all the DLCs included so, why are you even holding that against them¿ Game can't be infinite...
 
Invisible walls preventing you from exploring a world you just know is incredibly large. A world you cannot touch.

All gameworlds are finite; the map has to end somewhere. Show me a game without invisible walls. Are the edges of the map in New Vegas arbitrary? Certainly, but all edges are arbitrary; they exist because the action of the game's story is confined to a specific location. You might as well complain that the original Fallout doesn't let you travel to Oregon or Canada.

You find much more coherent and intriguing lore in New Vegas, but by the end of the day, whether you're staring across the naval yard from Rivet City, or out across the desert landscape from the farthest Boomer lookout tower at Nellis, you know in the back of your mind that there is simply nothing rendered there. No meaning. No sense.

This could be said of any game. I think New Vegas allows you considerable latitude in creating your own meaning and sense in the game world, certainly a lot more than Fallout 3. I would rank it on par with FO1 and FO2 in terms of choices and consequences.

That leaves you with one option: Invest in the location. But you simply cannot. Your character, no matter how omnipotent, stat-bloated, plot-armored and lucky, can't so much as pitch a tent, build a wall, start a family, raise an army, build a country.

Arguably, the last two activities you mentioned are exactly what you are doing in completing the main quest in NV. I have no problem investing in the location, and the game allows me to do so in any number of ways, by presenting me with multiple endings, multiple ways of getting there, and over a dozen different factions with whom I can interact in many different ways.

While the engine in NV certainly leaves much to be desired, I think the expectations you have are unreasonable for the genre. If you were to apply these criteria to the original Fallouts, they wouldn't pass muster, either. You can't "pitch a tent, build a wall, start a family, raise an army, build a country" in FO1 or FO2 any more than you can in New Vegas (unless you count the shotgun wedding in Modoc).
 
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Invisible walls preventing you from exploring a world you just know is incredibly large. A world you cannot touch.

All gameworlds are finite; the map has to end somewhere. Show me a game without invisible walls. Are the edges of the map in New Vegas arbitrary? Certainly, but all edges are arbitrary; they exist because the action of the game's story is confined to a specific location. You might as well complain that the original Fallout doesn't let you travel to Oregon or Canada.
New Vegas' invisible walls themselves aren't really the problem, but rather how irritating they can be. On a couple occasions I walked along the top of steep cliffs and identified a perfectly good place to continue my path without dropping down and turning my pleasant hike into a chore, but ran into an invisible wall despite there being no reason for it not to be a few meters further back. Of course, given the contents of Warhawk's post, he probably didn't have this in mind, but hey.

As for being limited to just the Mojave, I am in complete agreement, however I did really wish I could maybe venture out into Legion territory or even California a bit. Maybe even take a look at what House had done after pushing out the NCR and the Courier disbanded Caesar's legion. Of course, though, the absence of those were due to time constraints, which I am understanding of, but the outrageous schedule given is still infuriating and did limit New Vegas' size so no matter how little fault Obsidian carried there, it's a flaw and an irritating one at that. So I believe Warhawk is just still upset by the absence of Legion content and that's influencing him there. So the expectations aren't exactly unreasonable for the genre and certainly not Obsidian, but they totally are for that schedule.
 
I drop a metaphysical argument about a game that provides too much scope and is incapable of delivering, and I get broken hitboxes and "the multiple endings" which you only see as as slideshow. Whatever, it's not as if Fallout was built to specs like "open-world wasteland survival" anyway.
 
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I just feel like New Vegas had more depth to it and made me care about the Mojave Wasteland.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/2egcyu/whati_dont_even/
F3 quests are generally longer and can be divided to make few smaller quests, while in NV there is a lot of fetch quests and simple quests that are ended after one speech check. "The House Has Gone Bust" and few others can hardly be even called quests - they are just notifications.
But it's true, NV has more content anyway, and what's even more important - it's just better. I'd take any of NV's fetch quests over something as horrible as "Power of Atom".

Complaining that NV has finite world (yeah, like no other game has it) and that it's not SimCity is just ridiculous.
 
Did you really created a topic to say that gold worth more than crap ? What would you want us to say ?

No Man >
Thanks for posting that pictures.
I saw it a thousand time of Facebook, but it was always too smal to be read.
 
The only thing that makes F3 quests long is the walking and the "bring me x thing from this building across the map for no reason" shit they love to do in TES so much.
 
Which IMO is bad design, as there are too dependant on the FT. They brag about distance, but they make it not matter at all.
 
The only thing that makes F3 quests long is the walking and the "bring me x thing from this building across the map for no reason" shit they love to do in TES so much.

They also do alot of that in New Vegas too. Most of the time I don't mind because I like to go around the wasteland and I'm like, "I'm going there anyway, I might as well do while I'm there". But the "Come fly with me" quest just pisses me off, the entirety of that quest was more or less a "mega fetch quest", in a building with a complicated layout no less.

But still, most of the time I don't notice unless it's blandfully obvious.
 
I prefer NV to Fallout 3 and many ways: Better Main Quest, choices that actually have consequences, etc. I could on, but I do not feel the need to type a whole paragraph of why I think one game is better than the other.
 
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I just feel like New Vegas had more depth to it and made me care about the Mojave Wasteland.
I agree with the notion of this post (I also easily prefer NV, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece by any means), but here's a better representation of the same concept shown in the pic:
http://i.imgur.com/JMb9i.jpg

In addition to that, at least on a theoretical level, it's obvious some effort was made in NV to make the RPG aspects of the game actually matter even though they fell short in the long run (they laid a good starting foundation mechanically, but the game itself still suffered from too many bad decisions carried over from FO3).

Conversely, for all practical purposes, FO3 would've played exactly the same had they taken all the RPG-elements out (including the character building system as a whole, everything non-combat-related, the karma system, loot system/in-game economy, etc.) and just made it a straight up FPS isntead.

Overall, NV's final product is really what the first beta release for FO3 should've been.
 
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I prefer NV to Fallout 3 and many ways: Better Main Quest, choices that actually have consequences, etc.
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FO3's main quest is a [practically] plagiarized mishmash of the main quests of Fallout and Fallout 2. Obviously they own Fallout 1 & 2, but still... :irked:

The choices comment... I don't understand... what consequences? Bethesd goes to great lengths to ensure that the player doesn't have to live with any consequences from their actions... One can even shoot the BoS paladin in the face at the gates of the Citadel in view of the others, and still come back and join the BoS.

One can shoot an entire box of BB's at the dad's face; making him bloody, and all he says is 'stop screwing around'; he will even give you another box of BB's if asked, to be able to shoot him in the face again.
 
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I prefer NV to Fallout 3 and many ways: Better Main Quest, choices that actually have consequences, etc.
?

FO3's main quest is a [practically] plagiarized mishmash of the main quests of Fallout and Fallout 2. Obviously they own Fallout 1 & 2, but still... :irked:

The choices comment... I don't understand... what consequences? Bethesd goes to great lengths to ensure that the player doesn't have to live with any consequences from their actions... One can even shoot the BoS paladin in the face at the gates of the Citadel in view of the others, and still come back and join the BoS.

One can shoot an entire box of BB's at the dad's face; making him bloody, and all he says is 'stop screwing around'; he will even give you another box of BB's if asked, to be able to shoot him in the face again.

Obviously you don't understand, he's saying that those are the reasons he doesn't like FO3
 
Funny thing is FO3's main quest goes beyond just ripping from FO1 and FO2. Let me remind you:
1. You start by escaping an underground complex. You get to return to the complex during a sidequest.
2. You meet members of a knightly order near the begining of the game. You help them fight against some baddies, some of the order die and they aren't all that impressed with you. One of them will later on be a semi-important character in the MQ.
3. A father, who is kind of a leader of the good guys (and is voiced by a famous actor) dies due to the actions of the bad guys. His child later goes on to make a heroic sacrifice.
4. At the lowest point in the story, your group has to escape to the HQ of the knightly order from 2. After you get there, you are sent on a quest to recover the MacGuffin.
5. At the end there is an unexpected final battle. There is a giant guy, who cannot be killed, taking part in that battle. It ends with the chosen one making a heroic sacrifice.

Or to be more blunt:
Blades -> BOS
Uriel Septim -> James (Dad)
Mythic Dawn -> Enclave
Amulet of Kings -> GECK
Dragonfires -> Project Purity
Mehrunes Dagon -> Liberty Prime (not in the story, but pretty much in the gameplay)
Martin Septim -> Lone Wanderer
Jauffre -> Owyn Lyons
Baurus -> Sarah Lyons
Cloud Ruler Temple -> Citadel
The tunnels at the start -> Vault 101
 
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