Why is Fallout New Vegas considered good?

[Lemming42]

Oblivion looks gorgeous to me, the visuals are virtually the only good thing about the game. You have to turn bloom off obviously or it looks insane. Generating better distant lands obviously helps a lot too, everything turning to blurry bullshit more than ten meters away from the player was a big problem with the game, but the same's true of MW.

You can tell the texture artists really cared about the game, the amount of different types of plants and flowers is amazing. I think Skyrim looks okay too for what it is, which is a shitty dull depressing grey wasteland.

Gamebryo's capable of good-looking visuals, it's not a problem with the engine. I think NV's problem is that the world itself is deliberately mundane, so it just looks like a shitty ugly rendition of the actual Mojave desert with crap 50s buildings, without the evocative fantasy landscapes of TES or the lavish weirdness of Fo3. It looks drab and unappealing because the setting itself is drab and unappealing, by design. Which isn't an excuse for it looking shit, but you get what I mean.

 

[Ash]

For me, Oblivion is fugly. The bloom and the character models, oh god. I still wouldn't give much a shit if the game were worth a damn. It does have occasional good vistas and scenes (I like the dungeons visually), but it also considerably lacks diversity. Morrowind has regions with notable aesthetic diversity. Even New Vegas has regions with at least some effort (desert areas, irradiated cottonwood cove even if it is just a filter, Jacobstown region, Red Rock Canyon, New Vegas itself). Oblivion all I recall is endless copy-paste grass, trees and lakes, endless copy-paste of the same four dungeon archetypes, but I have not seen all the map to be fair because the game is utter shit and I've not played it more than...40 hours cumulative from two playthrough attempts.

The only good thing about Oblivion is the music.

 

[Lemming42]

The map is varied into different biomes but it's less pronounced than MW or Skyrim. There's snowy mountains in the north bordering Skyrim, swampy areas in the southeast bordering Black Marsh, and mediterranean areas in the southwest bordering Hammerfell. The southwest in particular can look really nice, especially at sunset when all the dried out plants go all orange-y.

 

[Ash]

I remember the swamp area, but...it was the same bodies of water seen elsewhere, not new marshland ground textures, water textures. trees. I think I remember some unique flora at least, like Lilly pads. Compare to bitter coast region in morrowind where the entire thing looks unique and...like marshland. Also some gameplay changes based on region would have been ideal, like blight storms, Cottonwood's radiation, or rock-hopping & swimming in Telvanni areas. The entirety of Oblivion that I experienced is a just a bland empty copy-paste expanse. A mark of low standards to the individual that likes it!

 

[Bad Sector]

I think it looked far better than Oblivion.

Well, Oblivion wasn't exactly the apex of technology either :-P.

I do like Morrowind's visuals more myself too but that is mainly because of the art direction. While Oblvion's renderer adds a few things, in the grand scheme of things it is the art assets that make Oblivion look how it does and the main thing the renderer has that affects the look - sadly, negatively - is the atrocious HDR/Bloom (which also is there in Fallout 3 and New Vegas and forunately you can disable it).

If you check some assets converted from Morrowind to Oblivion (e.g. old Morroblivion shots) in Oblivion with HDR/Bloom disabled (...which is not only very hard to find but also hard to find original assets without the "artist" slapdashingly generating a normal map using the Morrowind texture as a bump map) you'll see that the Morrowind assets look pretty much the same in Oblivion. Which shows that it is basically Oblivion's art direction that makes it look worse (though i guess at the time with Lord of the Rings etc being popular having some huge generic fantasy land was in fashion).

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Seriously I don't get it.
Graphically, it's puke-inducing.
Gameplay-wise it's worse than any FPS in the genre. It's clunky, poorly-made and extremely badly designed and a complete disgrace for an FPS.
The AI is in shambles, literally.
The Factions are all rushed and expediated, Caesar's Legion(supposedly the beast from the East is a bunch of 30 dudes in football uniforms fighting with bat in an universe with guns??????) is a joke, Boomers faction is a joke, The Khans Faction is a joke. Enclave is a joke. Omerta is a Joke. The Strip, the casino is a place with roughly 10 dudes roaming around in the void.
The DLCs are all bad except Blood Money.
I feel like people like it for what it could have been rather than what it truly is: A shitty FPS with broken dialogues, broken quests, rushed storylines&Factions, A(bsent)I, blurry puke-inducing graphics, as well as an extremely buggy software.
And don't get me started with the open-world, it's a nothingburger, it is filled with nothing, and invisible walls to spice it up.

This thing is hailed as one of the best RPGs, this is madness.
Fallout 2 is hundredfold better than this piece of shit, there is no debate.

Grafix are for fags. Point disregarded.

Gameplay (AI is part of that) is valid.

No video game has good writing. The closest we get is PST, which reads like something the "lit kid" from your high school would have written before going to college, only to look back on it with embarrassment. New Vegas is among the best video game writing you'll see, so deal with it.

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

You walked from that white house at the top to the Prospector saloon down the street. This has to be one of the most tryhard posts I've ever seen here, genuinely impressed

I'm with Lyric Suite on this one, and I say this as someone who has hundreds of hours in New Vegas.
After playing better looking games, I just can't go back. And I don't mean modern games. Duke Nukem 3D (a great looking game on its own, make no mistake) is the fucking Sistine Chapel next to New Vegas.

NV has this inconsistent low quality mesh, low quality textures, janky animations, complete lack of shadows in what is otherwise meant to be a "realistic" looking game. It's so jarring and ugly. I share his sentiment of the game making him sick in his stomach because I sort of felt like it when trying to replay the game recently. Locations are so sparse, but not in a "this is a 90s game so of course 3D environments will be rather empty" sense. Rather, in a "we rushed this bad boy out the door as soon as we could" kind of sparsity. Disgusting.

The only good graphics whore is a dead one!

Visuals are important. Believing otherwise was always a cope.

What DOESN'T matter is tech as such, although that was an aspect of gaming i feel was also important in its own right.

Brightest minds here at the codex collectively using their astute brain power to discover that a 15 year old game has graphics that by 2024 standards look pretty bad and dated.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Oblivion's world is not ugly - the character models are, and that is what kills it. Actually, Oblivion is pretty comfy to explore, even if it's just western european forests instead of Fantasy Thailand like Morrowind, but the decision to use a face software meant for realistic characters ended up fucking the fantasy element of TES.

 

[Lemming42]

The character models are indefensibly bad but I do like how they at times look like actual people - chubby cheeks, wrinkles, asymmetric facial features, blemishes. They're still stylised and look downright bizarre, but they're different from the standard creepy plastic supermodels you get in most mid-2000s fantasy games, which is nice. Obviously it's all overriden by how laugh-out-loud shitty they look, but it is nice to see game characters who look older than 30 and are allowed to be a bit ugly. And it's preferable to whatever the fuck's going on with that "Oblivion Character Overhaul" mod that turns everyone into a waxwork replica of Jeffree Star.

I think the critical flaw is that the elves are just humans with ears tacked on. The game could probably have gotten away with the potato-y way Redguards, Imperials, Bretons and Nords looked if only the elves had looked a bit more exotic and alien. The Orcs, Argonians and Khajiits* look pretty good, I actually prefer Oblivion's big ugly Orcs to the MW and Skyrim versions.

*unless you look at them from the side...

 

[Jack Of Owls]

How come no one ever did a FO3/FO4/FNV mod recreating the original Fallout 1 (arguably the greatest RPG of all time)? You'd think they would. I can't even recall some half-assed modder with grandiose visions and a tendency to spam the internet with announcements of his ultimately abandoned project after completing a tech demo of only a single room or town corner attempting a FO1 mod in the gamebryo engines.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

The character models are indefensibly bad but I do like how they at times look like actual people - chubby cheeks, wrinkles, asymmetric facial features, blemishes. They're still stylised and look downright bizarre, but they're different from the standard creepy plastic supermodels you get in most mid-2000s fantasy games, which is nice. Obviously it's all overriden by how laugh-out-loud shitty they look, but it is nice to see game characters who look older than 30 and are allowed to be a bit ugly. And it's preferable to whatever the fuck's going on with that "Oblivion Character Overhaul" mod that turns everyone into a waxwork replica of Jeffree Star.

I think the critical flaw is that the elves are just humans with ears tacked on. The game could probably have gotten away with the potato-y way Redguards, Imperials, Bretons and Nords looked if only the elves had looked a bit more exotic and alien. The Orcs, Argonians and Khajiits* look pretty good, I actually prefer Oblivion's big ugly Orcs to the MW and Skyrim versions.

*unless you look at them from the side...

well yeah, the software they used as a basis for the character model's faces was one that was designed to create and recreate normal human features, which is why you get this effect most of the time. It's not a dealbreaker for me, but it is amusing a lot of the times. Oblivion does have some really weird moments, almost like TES on LSD. The thing I like about it it's that it doesn't feel like it took itself so fucking seriously like what happened with Morrowind and Skyrim. It's a bit closer to Fable in sense of humor which is fun.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

How come no one ever did a FO3/FO4/FNV mod recreating the original Fallout 1 (arguably the greatest RPG of all time)? You'd think they would. I can't even recall some half-assed modder with grandiose visions and a tendency to spam the internet with announcements of his ultimately abandoned project after completing a tech demo of only a single room or town corner attempting a FO1 mod in the gamebryo engines.

it's been done, i think? there was this FO1 in FO3 mod somewhere.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

How come no one ever did a FO3/FO4/FNV mod recreating the original Fallout 1 (arguably the greatest RPG of all time)? You'd think they would. I can't even recall some half-assed modder with grandiose visions and a tendency to spam the internet with announcements of his ultimately abandoned project after completing a tech demo of only a single room or town corner attempting a FO1 mod in the gamebryo engines.

it's been done, i think? there was this FO1 in FO3 mod somewhere.

Must have been real

Spoiler

since I never heard of it. (sorry, I wanted to find an excuse to use that GIF I downloaded from another topic here on the dex today)

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Regarding Oblivion; yeah, I succumbed to its beauty too and wanted to stay a while. I just thought it was the coolest thing that you could download mods for it that gave the illusion they were professionally done, like the time I was exploring one of those snowy biomes, expecting vanilla emptiness, and instead ran into a 30' yeti with 6 eyes that chased me all the way down the mountain to a town where it slaughtered EVERYONE. I'm sorry, but that's still kind of cool for me.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

The character models are indefensibly bad but I do like how they at times look like actual people - chubby cheeks, wrinkles, asymmetric facial features, blemishes.

This is true. I remember how Adoring Fan was the spit and image of an autistic guy that was my nephew's roommate when he was in his late teens. I had met the guy a dozen times and when I saw him at the drive-through at McDonalds taking orders, I said, "Hey, Paul! How's it going?" but he was so autistic he didn't recognize me.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

Why is Fallout New Vegas considered good?​

Because it combined Bethesda's mind-numbing mechanics with a slightly better script than Bethesda's.

Thank you for your attention.

 

[Sigourn]

Brightest minds here at the codex collectively using their astute brain power to discover that a 15 year old game has graphics that by 2000 standards look pretty bad and dated.

Fixed that for you.

 

[NecroLord]

The character models are indefensibly bad but I do like how they at times look like actual people - chubby cheeks, wrinkles, asymmetric facial features, blemishes. They're still stylised and look downright bizarre, but they're different from the standard creepy plastic supermodels you get in most mid-2000s fantasy games, which is nice. Obviously it's all overriden by how laugh-out-loud shitty they look, but it is nice to see game characters who look older than 30 and are allowed to be a bit ugly. And it's preferable to whatever the fuck's going on with that "Oblivion Character Overhaul" mod that turns everyone into a waxwork replica of Jeffree Star.

I think the critical flaw is that the elves are just humans with ears tacked on. The game could probably have gotten away with the potato-y way Redguards, Imperials, Bretons and Nords looked if only the elves had looked a bit more exotic and alien. The Orcs, Argonians and Khajiits* look pretty good, I actually prefer Oblivion's big ugly Orcs to the MW and Skyrim versions.

*unless you look at them from the side...

Bethesda games have kinda always been majestic looking from far away, but absolutely horrible looking from up close.
Arena and Daggerfall in their pixelated glory are exceptions to this rule.
Morrowind makes up for it due to its unique and colorful setting and rich lore.
Swamps, a volcano, ash storms, forests, islands...
Oblivion and Skyrim are especially guilty of this.
Bethesda overused the hell out of this engine...

 

[Lyric Suite]

You walked from that white house at the top to the Prospector saloon down the street. This has to be one of the most tryhard posts I've ever seen here, genuinely impressed

I'm with Lyric Suite on this one, and I say this as someone who has hundreds of hours in New Vegas.
After playing better looking games, I just can't go back. And I don't mean modern games. Duke Nukem 3D (a great looking game on its own, make no mistake) is the fucking Sistine Chapel next to New Vegas.

NV has this inconsistent low quality mesh, low quality textures, janky animations, complete lack of shadows in what is otherwise meant to be a "realistic" looking game. It's so jarring and ugly. I share his sentiment of the game making him sick in his stomach because I sort of felt like it when trying to replay the game recently. Locations are so sparse, but not in a "this is a 90s game so of course 3D environments will be rather empty" sense. Rather, in a "we rushed this bad boy out the door as soon as we could" kind of sparsity. Disgusting.

The only good graphics whore is a dead one!

Visuals are important. Believing otherwise was always a cope.

What DOESN'T matter is tech as such, although that was an aspect of gaming i feel was also important in its own right.

Brightest minds here at the codex collectively using their astute brain power to discover that a 15 year old game has graphics that by 2024 standards look pretty bad and dated.

Dude, it's not a date issue, it's an ugliness problem. The game looks like total shit not only by 2010 standards, but ANY standards you can think of. Same with Fallout 3 or Oblivion (and Skyrim, and Starfield). It's not even that the engine is too old, Bethesda's programming is just FUCKED, as fucked as their shitty game design or mind numbingly retarded writing.

It's like they somehow managed to replicate early 3D shittiness with a more advanced engine.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Bethesda games have kinda always been majestic looking from far away, but absolutely horrible looking from up close.

I think they look like shit from far away too.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Lmao, i was looking for footage to show what i mean and i randomly skipped through this. Check out that shit at 7:06:28, it's unreal just how fucking ugly this game is:



All the worst sins of 3D graphics in one single picture. Shitty textures, shitty color palette and filtering, shitting lighting, bloom, depth of field, shitty character model. It's like somebody set out to make the worst graphics possible on purpose.

 

[Sigourn]

It's Bethesda's graphics and game design that nauseates me.
I just got done uninstalling FO4 after just four hours of gameplay, but damn, it feels like four hours I will never recover. This idea that a proper open world is one where you can run around indiscriminately killing mooks and looting loads of containers for no real purpose other than making you stronger to kill more mooks and loot even more containers... ugh.

 

[Bad Sector]

but they're different from the standard creepy plastic supermodels you get in most mid-2000s fantasy games

Funny you make that comparison because Orcs in Oblivion look like plastic toys to me :-P

Also one thing that really bothers me with Oblivion faces is that their nostrils look closed - i get that they couldn't add geometry for the nostrils due to tech limits of the time but couldn't they at least make them darker so NPC faces do not like they have some sort of membrane over their noses?

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

You walked from that white house at the top to the Prospector saloon down the street. This has to be one of the most tryhard posts I've ever seen here, genuinely impressed

I'm with Lyric Suite on this one, and I say this as someone who has hundreds of hours in New Vegas.
After playing better looking games, I just can't go back. And I don't mean modern games. Duke Nukem 3D (a great looking game on its own, make no mistake) is the fucking Sistine Chapel next to New Vegas.

NV has this inconsistent low quality mesh, low quality textures, janky animations, complete lack of shadows in what is otherwise meant to be a "realistic" looking game. It's so jarring and ugly. I share his sentiment of the game making him sick in his stomach because I sort of felt like it when trying to replay the game recently. Locations are so sparse, but not in a "this is a 90s game so of course 3D environments will be rather empty" sense. Rather, in a "we rushed this bad boy out the door as soon as we could" kind of sparsity. Disgusting.

The only good graphics whore is a dead one!

Visuals are important. Believing otherwise was always a cope.

What DOESN'T matter is tech as such, although that was an aspect of gaming i feel was also important in its own right.

Brightest minds here at the codex collectively using their astute brain power to discover that a 15 year old game has graphics that by 2024 standards look pretty bad and dated.

Dude, it's not a date issue, it's an ugliness problem. The game looks like total shit not only by 2010 standards, but ANY standards you can think of. Same with Fallout 3 or Oblivion (and Skyrim, and Starfield). It's not even that the engine is too old, Bethesda's programming is just FUCKED, as fucked as their shitty game design or mind numbingly retarded writing.

It's like they somehow managed to replicate early 3D shittiness with a more advanced engine.

New Vegas looks pretty standard if you compare it to FPS games that released around the same time (Borderlands, ARMA 2, etc). Compared to other RPGs that came out around then (The Witcher and Demon's Souls for example) it's also fairly standard.

The reason you probably think otherwise is because around the early 2010s, mocap and other graphical/modeling techniques were starting to become more common, which created a weird contrast where some games (particularly the first two Mass Effects and L.A. Noire) looked very modern, while other games were still stuck using the older technology and methodology gaming used on the previous console era.

 

[Denim Destroyer]

New Vegas is the game which brought RPGs to my attention. Sure I had played through a few JRPGs beforehand but none of them resonated with me the way New Vegas did. I was seeing a decently sized world with plenty of quests to do. Quests which had multiple outcomes depending on choices I made which in turn was impacted by my character build. All of this wrapped into a FPS package. For someone with no prior experience in RPGs or FPS, New Vegas did enough to satiate my unrealized want for violence while still appearing as highbrow entertainment. My love for game has waned as after playing other RPGs and discovering where my interest lie. Exploration, level design, and character building. All present in New Vegas but lacking in weight when compared to other games such as Kingdom Come, Gothic, and Realms of Antiquity. The answer to "why is Fallout New Vegas considered good" is this: it is an excellent starting point into the genre.