Game: Fallout: New Vegas

[Ryllharu]

Well, it has been about a month now, and I think I have to say I enjoyed Fallout 3 more than New Vegas. The story and complexity is worlds better in NV, from Hardcore Mode to weapon mods, speech/barter challenges, ways to finish each quest that differ from the simple Good/Evil choices...but despite all that, what NV really suffers from is the Wasteland.

Aside from New Vegas itself and the two primary military bases (NCR and Nellis), there really isn't all that much to do. It seemed overwhelming my first time through, but I'm seeing more of it now. You go to a town like Novac and there are three sidequests, you go to the NCR Mojave Outpost are there are two. You start in Goodsprings and there is one. It really makes you appreciate having to go back to Moira in Megaton nine times to complete the Wasteland Survival Guide, or getting creepy stalker love letters sent from Mister Burke at the bar. They were small things, but it made Megaton still feel alive after you had moved on to the greater Capital Wasteland, not frozen in time like Goodsprings and Primm are.

It would be nice to have a reason to come back to these places once in a while besides dropping your loot off and going to the doctor.

But the biggest problem is that there is almost nothing to find in the Wasteland between these cities and towns. Ooo, I found another abandoned shack with a single stimpack and 12 9mm rounds. But this time there were molerats outside instead of Cazadors!

I found something new every time I randomly roamed the Wasteland in FO3. A few times I found entire new areas in the maze of sewers and metro stations. That has been happening to a limited extent in NV, but it isn't anywhere near as exciting. Despite the new freedom of finishing a quest 4 different ways, the game feels so more structured. There were dozens of unnamed quests in FO3 you pretty much wrote your own story for, in NV you find mostly bones and empty boxes.

The fact of the matter is there isn't really anything going on in the Mojave Wasteland. No huge battle between Supermutants and mercenaries, no lone Enclave guy taking potshots at radroaches, just the occasional NCR patrol getting ambushed by Nightstalkers and one disguised Legionnaire attacking some random guy.

Despite all the radscorpions and geckos that keep attacking me, the Mojave wasteland seems so...lifeless.


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And Boone is totally overpowered. He's so good the game isn't even fun. Cass is a bitch, I need how much speech or barter to get you up off your drunk mopey ass? That's despite you being critical to another quest line. Gannon is even worse, 75 speech!

[Genma]

Glad I'm not the only one who enjoyed FO3 more than New Vegas.

Don't get me wrong, NV is entertaining in its own right, but even now, 200 hours of playtime later, I still have more fun playing Fallout 3.

Saturday night I was over at a friend's house, and I'd given him my copy of Fallout 3 some time ago. He couldn't find GNR because he blew up Megaton before talking to Colin, so I was helping him out. Everything about the game seemed better, and I played for an hour, encountering a three-way battle between Raiders, Super Mutants and Outcasts, as well as discovering a brand new building I'd never seen despite playing the game for such a long time.

Naturally when I came home today I felt an urge to play some Fallout, so I popped in New Vegas. Just turned it off after about fifteen minutes.

Invisible walls above mountains and the inability to zoom all the way out in first person (360player) made me frustrated instantly. Why add those detrimental features? I don't get it.

I got bored pretty quickly after that, and I agree with pretty much all the points you've made Ryllharu. Only one I disagree with is the story; Fallout 3's blew hard. It was basically a rehash of Fallout 2, except instead of saving your village with the GECK, you were saving a city.

"I think the idea of having a protagonist on the east coast leave a vault to look for his dad (who happens to be Quai Gon-Jin, sweet) is better than some indian dude looking for a ridiculously unrealistic item." -- Excerpt from a blog post I wrote about a year before Fallout 3's release. Oh how little I knew. -_-

Anyways... I might give it another go in the future, but for now New Vegas will be collecting dust.

[Ryllharu]

I got bored pretty quickly after that, and I agree with pretty much all the points you've made Ryllharu. Only one I disagree with is the story; Fallout 3's blew hard. It was basically a rehash of Fallout 2, except instead of saving your village with the GECK, you were saving a city.

No, by all means the story in New Vegas is a ton better. I even said as much.

The story and complexity is worlds better in NV, ... ways to finish each quest that differ from the simple Good/Evil choices...but despite all that, what NV really suffers from is the Wasteland.

It's just that the exploration isn't really as much fun. That's really been the best part of the Fallouts for me. The main story in FO3 was silly, but the side stories were pretty good and the expansions were great, Point Lookout especially so. The main story in NV is a blast, and some of the side stories are fun, but not nearly as memorable (Return to Sender is good, and a few others).

I've slapped in a few more mods since that post (read: occasional fan-patch) and it's still fun, just not as fun as fooling around in the Wasteland of FO3.

[darkshadow]

The exploration isn't as fun....does that mean you can't skip things either?
Cause in all of my 80 hours in FO3, I've never set foot in GNR, I knew I had to go there, but I just got sidetracked wandering around doing other stuff.
And then suddenly I arrived at the boatcity somehow (=O) and just completed the GNR quest indirectly.....so yeah I never even met three-dog <,<.

[Ryllharu]

It's not like temporary invisible walls bad or "omg we'll clear this rockslide once we get the [mystical dynamite]" bad, but they do attempt to lock you into one direction at the beginning of the game. Some mountains near the edges of the map look climbable but do have invisible walls, that's a separate issue that FO3 had too.

In NV, you start in Goodsprings, halfway up the map and most of the the way West. They tell you to loop around by going South, East, and then back North to get to New Vegas. They enforce this by surrounding the area North of Goodsprings with huge masses of three of the deadliest enemy types in the game (Deathclaws on the Northern road, poisonous Cazadores to the NW of Goodsprings, and Giant Radscorpions due East of Goodsprings). One of the NPCs actually says that you'd have to be the biggest badass ever to get through the Deathclaws.

So it's not impossible to go straight North to New Vegas, but they make it really, really, hard on you at the single digit levels.

The high level critters scattered in all the shortcuts make it tough to explore at low levels. There is a slight charm to that too, making the Mojave feel quite deadly to the unprepared, but it's kind of a drag.

[darkshadow]

That's a shame, kinda like fallout 2 I guess.
FO3 only had creatures like yao guai in abundance when you reached a certain level, and in some specific areas, kind of weaksauce they put high level creatures around stuff as an artificial barrier in NV then ;[.

[Dark Dragon]

I think the placement of things in NV is also not as good as FO3. When i was playing FO3 i keep finding new quests or places to explore when i try to do the main quest. Just following the broken roads often lead you to places like the Nuka Cola plant.

In my time playing NV so far, i haven't really diverge from the main path and it seems like i have to purposely want to explore in order to find stuff. My favorite thing about FO3 was randomly finishing objectives or finding item for quests i didn't even know about.