Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

[SionIV]

Fallout 3 setting and New Vegas gameplay and writing, dream combination.

I might be in the minority here, but I actually prefer the city landscape setting of Fallout 3 to the desert that is New Vegas. Yes I've played the original fallout games and they are in my top 15, and they are all in the desert, so I'm not saying that New Vegas does something wrong, I just prefer the location of Fallout 3 more.

 

[Volrath]

 

[Lemming42]

Urban environments are fine but the setting of Fallout 3 is pretty much worthless given that nothing in it is explained or connected. The Mojave in New Vegas, on the other hand, is believable and fully realized.

 

[Kazuki]

Fallout 3 Setting is suck, plain and simple.

 

[SionIV]

Urban environments are fine but the setting of Fallout 3 is pretty much worthless given that nothing in it is explained or connected. The Mojave in New Vegas, on the other hand, is believable and fully realized.

Which is the reason I wish that Obsidian had made Fallout 3. Obsidian writing, Obsidian Story, Gameplay of New Vegas, but happening in an Urban Environment.

 

[Gord]

Agreed, urban setting is fine, but if done well, which FO3 failed at.

 

[SionIV]

I've spent over 800 hours with New Vegas, and I adore it. I just wish it didn't have so much desert, the highlights for me when it comes to atmosphere would be Dead Money and Honest Hearts. I've tried to look into mods that implement the Hardcore mode into Fallout 3. Fallout Wanderers Edition seems like a good option, but I feel that it changes too many things.

 

[Endemic]

Urban environments are fine but the setting of Fallout 3 is pretty much worthless given that nothing in it is explained or connected. The Mojave in New Vegas, on the other hand, is believable and fully realized.

That's because it's a scaled down version of the real Mojave, down to the saloon in Goodsprings being near-identical. Sawyer did a tour of the region while making the game.

 

[Ash]

Pretty much everything about NV is superior to FO3. However, the relevance of Tardout 3 as a base for NV is often overlooked I think.
As for NV's setting, I hate when it is generalized as a "bland desert" or some such. There's a ridiculous, at times unreal amount of variety to the locations, which is good. Examples being Red Rock Canyon (Khans), the green, vegetated land to the north of that, Vegas itself, the dungeons have decent variety, and so on. The game is only about 35% desert in reality. FO3 still had some variety, but there was a hell of a lot of copy-paste and the snot filter didn't help matters.

New Vegas...I adore it.

Very much so.

 

[SionIV]

You haven't heard of Tales of Two Wastelands? It is undisputedly the best way to play Fallout 3 (excluding not playing it at all), the NV engine is just far more stable and Obsidian implemented most of the FWE additions anyways, except properly. A few features from Project Nevada is enough to complement it.

Thank you, I haven't heard anything about Tales of Two Wastelands. Do you know if it's stable? And is it completed or in development?

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

It's not the setting so much, but the exploration on the whole. Bethesda is obviously better at making hiking simulators. Way too much of FO:NV's landscape felt too flat and empty.

 

[anus_pounder]

It's not the setting so much, but the exploration on the whole. Bethesda is obviously better at making hiking simulators. Way too much of FO:NV's landscape felt too flat and empty.

'sup drog

 

[SionIV]

100% playable, super stable. There have been big community efforts to convert the best F3 mods to get working in TTW so you won't miss anything. Pretty much every new feature in NV will be added to F3 content; Dialogue checks have thresholds rather than % to success, there is permanent Faction reputation, weapons get iron sights properly added to them and so on (some of these are optional I tink, and are not included in the main modules). Be sure to read through install instructions properly, and use Mod Organizer if you didn't already (NOT NEXUS MODMANAGER, IT IS INFERIOR).

Is there any place where I can read what other mods are compatible? I can't play Fallout 3 / New Vegas without an XP reducing mod, and the one they have just isn't 'harsh' enough. I run with 66% less xp (Braindead) and 10% from gifted when I play New Vegas. Also thank you for instructions and information!

 

[SionIV]

np. Stuff like initial XP-gain settings will get overwritten if another mod change the same thing. TTW doesn't change that, so you are safe. Generally all NV mods will be insta-compatible with TTW (even if some features might not carry over). If you are looking for F3 mods or NV mods made with full TTW usability, check the forums for convertions or unique releases. The community is generally really good at pointing out what their mods work and doesn't work with, and provide patches for mods that might otherwise be incompatible with theirs'. It might be a bit overwhelming and searching for specific mods on the TTW forums isn't as convenient as browsing Nexusmods. Again, use Mod Organizer and here is a weather mod I strongly recommend for TTW.

Can't thank you enough, going to install this now!

 

[Akratus]

Ban this sick filth.

 

[Xeon]

Yea, Fallout 3's ruined city looked pretty good, there is a tower IIRC that you can go up with an elevator that showed almost the entire city, it looked good. the wasteland outside areas not so much tho, I prefer FNV's wasteland areas to it but the city itself was pretty good.

Exploration itself in FO3 really sucks tho, monsters scale and they become like a sponge with very high HP, with mods its kinda good, very hard and very good survival game I guess. Don't think there is any hardcore mods like the Wanderer Edition in FNV, only thing I think makes it harder is JSawyer mod and Project Nevada which adds some stuff from the Wanderer Edition. Granted a lot of the stuff that were terrible in FO3 were fixed or changed in FNV but yea.

 

[Doktor Best]

From a purely artistical view the enviroment of Fallout 3 had one advantage over New Vegas: It had a vertical dimension to it. A desert is flat, and there is not so much in it that can rise into the sky. Fallout 3 had a worn down city full with high built architecture and even some skyscrapers afair. Those buildings make really interesting objects to let the decay and the reconquest of nature take place in, as they are so artificial in itself that they create a nice contrast to it.
Ofcourse Fallout3 didnt really benefit gameplay wise from that advantage as you never really experienced that verticality. Take a look at last of us for example. Yes its an on rail shooter but the enviroments looked VERY interesting and were simply fun to traverse.

 

[Endemic]

I do agree that NV had some lost potential. The Strip itself was underdeveloped, and the Vegas suburbs could have used some more buildings, but they had enough trouble getting the existing content working on consoles. The PS3 in particular crashed a lot which is why the strip (and Freeside) is divided up into gated segments. The NPC density was originally much higher as well, for example there were Powder Gangers deleted from Primm due to performance issues. Obsidian tend to overestimate what they can accomplish with the resources available, and the complexity of quests\unique NPCs tied to them can be a source of more bugs.

 

[pippin]

Exploration wasn't the point of NV, it was interaction. FO1 was about exploring, while FO2 was about discovering how and why factions and places were connected to each other. At least for me. NV is more like 2 in this sense.

 

[Zer0Morph]

Fallout 3 setting and New Vegas gameplay and writing, dream combination.

I might be in the minority here, but I actually prefer the city landscape setting of Fallout 3 to the desert that is New Vegas.

I agree with this statement and feel the same way.

 

[Mastermind]

Urban environments are fine but the setting of Fallout 3 is pretty much worthless given that nothing in it is explained or connected. The Mojave in New Vegas, on the other hand, is believable and fully realized.

Nothing says believable like a "city" with a dozen buildings.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

It's not the setting so much, but the exploration on the whole. Bethesda is obviously better at making hiking simulators. Way too much of FO:NV's landscape felt too flat and empty.

Disagree. New Vegas had an alive, healthy wasteland filled with plants and of course, reactive quests. I'd call that a better hiking sim than Bethesda's toxic green wasteland in Fallout 3.

 

[Lemming42]

Nothing says believable like a "city" with a dozen buildings.

Nothing says believable like the prolific Megaton turning out to be about six shacks stacked on top of each other in the middle of a field.

New Vegas is believable in the way everything is there for a reason, which is always given to you in game through dialogue or other means. All the settlements exist for a reason, it's clear how they trade, where they get food, how they came into existence and perhaps most importantly how they interact with other settlements and factions. Compare with Fallout 3, where places like that town on top of the highway and the Nuka Cola lady's town exist in the middle of hostile radioactive environments for absolutely no reason and with no apparent resources or anything. It's not fair at all to discredit New Vegas's superb world building just because Gamebryo can't handle more than a dozen buildings at once. The city of New Vegas is referred to in dialogue and text as being flashy and big, it's not hard to use your imagination to fill in the blanks left by the engine.

And, in the interests of fairness, Megaton is obviously intended to be fairly sprawling too, so it doesn't matter that it's actually about the size of a school playground in-game.

 

[Mastermind]

Megaton is not a surviving city from the pre-apocalypse, it's a put-together piece of shit by a handful of survivors, so it can be as big or as small as the developers wanted. A better comparison is between DC and New Vegas. bethesda did an excellent job of making DC labyrinthine enough that you can't tell it's much smaller than a real city. Lots of rubble blocking the way, interconnected subways to confuse the player and make moving around difficult and time consuming. It also has lots of areas to explore. More importantly, it's placed at the edge of the map so they can credibly claim it's bigger than what is available for you to play. Conversely, Obsidian plastered all of New Vegas in the middle of the Mojave Desert, except it's obvious it's not a real city (especially once you actually get in). This is where a few districts full of generic dungeons and placing the city at the edge of a map (so it could expand endlessly in our imagination) would have helped massively with both the lack of dungeon crawling and the lack of credibility.

Even better, what they should have done is have the entire map consist of nothing but Las Vegas. It's been 200 years, most of the city would have been claimed by the desert, so you can still have semi-wilderness inbetween towering derelict casions and apartment buildings with House maybe controlling one heavily fortified neighborhood that is still being maintained to pre-war standards. All the factions would still fit in and they could have had them fighting over the ruins instead of a dam (or just put a functioning powerplant in the city). Lots of missed opportunities just so they can add a couple of canyons to the landscape.

 

[Lemming42]

Megaton is not a surviving city from the pre-apocalypse, it's a put-together piece of shit by a handful of survivors, so it can be as big or as small as the developers wanted. A better comparison is between DC and New Vegas. bethesda did an excellent job of making DC labyrinthine enough that you can't tell it's much smaller than a real city. Lots of rubble blocking the way, interconnected subways to confuse the player and make moving around difficult and time consuming. It also has lots of areas to explore. More importantly, it's placed at the edge of the map so they can credibly claim it's bigger than what is available for you to play. Conversely, Obsidian plastered all of New Vegas in the middle of the Mojave Desert, except it's obvious it's not a real city (especially once you actually get in). This is where a few districts full of generic dungeons and placing the city at the edge of a map (so it could expand endlessly in our imagination) would have helped massively with both the lack of dungeon crawling and the lack of credibility.

DC is the best part of the game and a genuinely impressive piece of world design, but it's not a city so much as a collection of connected dungeons so the comparison to Vegas doesn't stand up, given that they're meant to do totally different things. DC is there to show you what Fo3 does best - dungeon crawling - while Vegas is there as part of the story and to act as home to several factions and NPCs.

I'm not sure if a city-themed dungeon park just outside the Strip would have helped the credibility of New Vegas. There were plenty of ruined buildings occupied by scavengers and such outside the Vegas walls, along with Westside and South Vegas, it seemed clear enough what the game was trying to represent.

Even better, what they should have done is have the entire map consist of nothing but Las Vegas. It's been 200 years, most of the city would have been claimed by the desert, so you can still have semi-wilderness inbetween towering derelict casions and apartment buildings with House maybe controlling one heavily fortified neighborhood that is still being maintained to pre-war standards. All the factions would still fit in and they could have had them fighting over the ruins instead of a dam (or just put a functioning powerplant in the city). Lots of missed opportunities just so they can add a couple of canyons to the landscape.

The independent towns like Goodsprings and Novac are too important to the game's plot to get rid of. The story mentions a lot how decisions made in one town or city impact another town or city, an element which would be lost if the setting focused in entirely on Vegas.