I played Fallout 3 when it came out, and just got bored with it fairly quickly. It's got that Bethesda vibe where everything is great at first, but then you start to get further into the game and everything starts to seem copy+pasted to make the game artificially larger and longer. Is it like that at all? I see it mentioned as a great game all the time, but I also saw that about 3 when it came out.
Mechanically, its almost the same game. Maybe a few UI and movement tweaks. Lots of re-used assets, although there was a bit more attention to detail when putting everything together.
Where it shines is the writing & vibe of the game. It's got a lot of charm in the world that fallout 3 petered out on. The story (esp the DLC quests) is very hit-or-miss depending on your tastes, but generally held to be at least decent.
Yeah and what's funny is the next game by Obsidian Entertainment, called The Outer Worlds, is such a carbon copy of New Vegas, it's hilarious. Highly recommend the Outer Worlds for sure, takes place if we had a Space Age still with our capitalist system.
I've said it before but that game was weird as fuck, in that I had tons of fun playing it but it was also probably the most forgettable video game I've ever played.
It is weird how ever critic I followed couldn’t shut up about how cool they thought it was and then literally nobody talked about it ever again.
The first World and a half make a strong impression. It is when you get to the third world that it starts really falling apart.
And it falls apart bad. One of those games I had to force myself to finish.
Yeah I thought it was telling that every glowing review I read mentioned like the same 3-5 story beats and nobody seemed to mention any late game stuff.
Seemed like the game had a good opening but anyone who bothered to play it till the end was unimpressed. Telling cuz New Vegas also has a pretty “meh” main quest ending.
New Vegas at least has some interesting stuff after the first two settlements. Outer Worlds is one of my most disappointing games in a while, it just keeps getting worse as you go.
Yeah I don’t know anything about the world the game is set in so idk how it goes downhill. New Vegas has interesting shit in almost every corner of the game world.
The gameplay can be janky and it’s buggy as hell.
But it has some of the best writing in video games ever and building a cool character who’s specialized in certain skills is fun as fuck, making it a really good RPG. You can make a smooth talking scientist who’s good with computers, laser guns and wooing ladies, or a cannibalistic psycho woman who’s obsessed with explosives. Your choice.
Edit: Thought I'd expand on this a little.
Cons:
Buggy as fuck
The combat is not very fluid, it's real-time but has an almost turn-based logic, a lot of encounters are really just about gauging you ability to handle them and running away if you can't
The level design of interiors sucks, there are certain big interior levels that are a nightmare to navigate and make certain quests hard
Some of the more interesting quests have weird triggers, to the point that certain content almost requires you to look shit up to realize how to trigger it
Some of the more interesting solutions to quests have bizarro logic to them that's hard to figure out without hints from looking shit up online
Pros:
Dense as fuck, there's a lot of shit to do in the game world, you can either follow the main plot or just fuck around, either will yield good content
Some of the best writing in video games ever, both in terms of characters and in world building, really solid story telling
Building characters is really fun, there's a lot of different builds, and non-combat skills do actually have a lot of uses (but you will need at least some combat skills if you want to actually beat the main quest line)
Despite being overall janky, combat can be fun if only because there's lots of different ways to go about it and even some straight up goofy weapons and skills
There are certain quests that require insanely high levels of skill and gear to complete, much past even the main story, so there's a good motivation to keep boosting your character
Good art direction, they don't really change to much of the general "Fallout" theme, but they do cool things with it
It's a game that requires some patience but you can get really hooked up making a badass character who can best all the crazy tasks put before them
There is a 2 hour long video telling you why New Vegas is better than Fallout 3. To sum it up: Seems so, cause your decisions matter and also the world was created rationally.
The world building is so much better in NV. You literally just have to ask the game basic questions like “how did they come to settle here?” or “where and how do they get their food from, and how do they protect themselves from outside threats?” Ask that about any settlement in NV and you can get pretty solid answers. Fallout 3? How does megaton survive? There’s no water nearby they can drink, there’s only one Brahmin in the whole settlement, and they don’t really make anything to trade. It’s paper thin world building in three, whereas some thought actually went in to NV.
I got super bored with fallout 3 when it first came out. Then someone suggested playing New Vegas as a brawler, as I just ignored it when it came out. So I tried it, and shit, the game and story is so much better than fallout 3 and 4. It has lots of depth and a really interesting world. I definitely say give it a try.
Fallout 3 is, in many ways, a modernized retelling of Fallout 1 with slight tweaks to make it feel more original than it is (and I say this as someone who loves 3). However, New Vegas is stronger in that it does what 1 and 2 did well: give perspective on a post-apocalyptic America 200 years after the bombs fell. The Capital Wasteland felt insanely empty and uninhabited for being a major region 200 years after the war whereas the Mojave wasteland felt far more lived in with more lore and character development.
Fallout 3 is to the classic games what The Force Awakens is to the Original Trilogy.
I mean that with all the praise and criticisms that go along with it.
I absolutely love 3 though. I just wish that Bethesda had learned some lessons from New Vegas rather than doubling down on the worst aspects of their older games for 4. There's some good developments but stuff like the distinct lack of side content and such really hurts the game.
Also, damage resistance sucks. Damage threshold is such an easy to understand system and I have no clue why Bethesda insists on using flat percentage decreases of damage because it just doesn't allow for good mechanics like armour piercing.
Also they should hire someone who knows how guns work because I'm not a gun nut or anything but even I get pissed off at the way their guns look. And also bring back ammo types instead of tying it to magic weapons that convert .45 into an explosive rounds.
I have more hours put into New Vegas then Fallout 3 and 4 put together. The writing is better like every one is saying If you have played fallout 1/2 it has a lot more of that really weird yet charming vibe those two games had. Also perhaps most importantly your choices actually matter, you don't get three different options to say yes and one to say ill come back later.
I've never played 3 but liked New Vegas a lot. Didn't seem repetitive to me at all. It's worth noting that the two games were made by different developers; Fallout 3 marked the point where Bethesda took over development from Obsidian Entertainment. Despite not being a Bethesda-developed game, it's still buggy as hell and the combat is super clunky. But there's some really cool RPG mechanics going on underneath all that
Bethesda took over from Interplay (Black Isle), Obsidian had a lot of interplay/fallout people on staff.
They only had 18 months to make the game. sigh.
