Why is Fallout New Vegas considered good?

[Lyric Suite]

previous console era.

Right, consoles. Fallout 3 now that i think of it looks very much like a "console" game, especially that shit vomit green filter (which turned into piss yellow in New Vegas).

It's also curious that you decided to pick up a game that looked like a cartoon on purpose (Borderlands) and a simulator running on an old engine (Arma 2), while ignoring the elephant in the room (Metro 2033, also released in 2010). Arma 2, for the record, actually looks better than New Vegas, with it's natural lighting and realistic looking assets. It's not the best game graphically but the way everything comes toghether is not at all displeasing to the eye:

Hell, even the original Operation Flashpoint, despite the terribad graphics, had a certain elegance in how the picture came toghether:

(interestinly, the original Operation Flashpoint had the "best" faces out of all the Arma games, up to and including Arma 3, which shows graphics are only a part of it)

Now look at Fallout 3:

Like, fucking hell. I'm having a gag reaction just looking at that shit. And New Vegas, even in "ultra HD", still retains a lot of the same problems:

Now, out curiosity, let's check out Half Life 2, a 2002 game:

A game eight years older looking ten times better. Can anybody explain to me how that's even possible? Half Life 2 looks like a work of art by comparison:

 

[Nano]

HF2 is 2004. 2002 is obviously too early for those graphics

 

[Lyric Suite]

Right, but that doesn't change the argument.

Fallout 3 was 2008 and compared to Half Life 2 it looks like a kids drawing compared to Michelangelo.

 

[Butter]

Source seems to do lighting better than the Oblivion era Gamebryo, but I think the biggest part (aside from Valve artists just being more talented) is that everything in Half-Life 2 is deliberate and designed for its environment. It's not a sequence of pre-fab items being plunked down into the world editor like a Bethesda game is.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Didn't HL2 also got a graphics update along the way? It didn't looked like that at release

 

[Lyric Suite]

Didn't HL2 also got a graphics update along the way? It didn't looked like that at release

I played it a few years ago and it looked exactly like i remembered.

Possible i made a mistake and linked screenshots from a mod, kinda hard to avoid this shit.

I'm pretty sure this is the untouched game and looks several oders of magnitutes better than Fagout 3:

 

[Lyric Suite]

Source seems to do lighting better than the Oblivion era Gamebryo, but I think the biggest part (aside from Valve artists just being more talented) is that everything in Half-Life 2 is deliberate and designed for its environment. It's not a sequence of pre-fab items being plunked down into the world editor like a Bethesda game is.

There's just something about it that's incredibly off putting to me. Look at this INSANE mods (lmao) after which the game still looks like ass:

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

HL2 is much more linear and setpiece based than any Bethesda game, but yeah, Bethesda's 3d artists are probably the worst out of all the AAA landscape.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Don't forget the worst programmers and the worst writers as well.

 

[502]

NV is a thing specifically because it was built on top of FO3 and Gamebryo. It was either NV with these graphics or no NV so maybe you're doing yourself a disservice if you stopped playing it because of its bad graphics.

Each time I walk out of Doc Mitchel's all I think about is the choices and possibilities, not some... texture.

 

[Bad Sector]

Now, out curiosity, let's check out Half Life 2, a 2002 game [..] A game eight years older looking ten times better. Can anybody explain to me how that's even possible? Half Life 2 looks like a work of art by comparison:

Already mentioned that HL2 was released in 2004 but to expand a bit, Half-Life 2 had several engine updates since then with Episode 1 (2006) and Episode 2 (2007) making various lighting (e.g. adding HDR) and asset changes while the ports to Mac OS X and Linux later and switching to OpenGL also made some changes too (e.g. i'm not sure when exactly, but at some point your flashlight got real shadows - the original release didn't have anything other than blob and projected shadows). VtMB's lighting is actually a much better indicator of how HL2 looked in 2004 than HL2 today. Or the original Xbox version (ignoring the low resolution texturemaps, lighting is 99% the same as it was in the 2004 version of HL2).

However another thing HL2 has - and had it since the 2004 release - is the use of lightmaps: essentially all lighting in the static environment (which is everything aside from NPCs and minor props) has baked lighting and shadows, which allows lighting to be much more detailed than it could if done in realtime by calculating both direct and indirect lighting (global illumination) via radiosity. HL2 specifically also uses a somewhat advanced form of lightmapping by calculating three lightmaps per surface so that normalmaps in materials also contribute to proper lighting (most other engines that use lightmapping use a single lightmap and either ignore normalmaps, rely on directional ambient lighting - or just fudge the direction a bit). When later HL2 introduced HDR lighting, the game added HDR lightmaps too which improved lighting a lot.

The reason HL2 can do that but Bethesda's engine cannot has mainly to do with how HL2 is made: it is a series of small levels that while they give the impression of a large world, are largely linear and the time of day is static. The small size of each level means they have more disk space and RAM to work with and lightmaps tend to be humongous - especially if done like HL2 which calculates multiple lightmaps per surface.

Bethesda's engine on the other hand has an open mostly seamless world which is too big to calculate lightmaps like HL2, the time of day changes slowly constantly and the games have a lot of dynamic objects, so they do as much as they can with realtime lighting (which is much more primitive and basic than what it could be if it was static like in HL2). This isn't limited to Bethesda's engines, most engines with large worlds tend to use only realtime lighting with some doing some baking at broad strokes (e.g. on terrain and/or with very large voxels).

Of course Half-Life 2 also had more assets and more detailed art assets. This again is because the game was made out of small levels with a clearly defined path the player can have, so all effort - both in terms of human effort to make the assets and rendering effort to draw them on screen - is focused on where the player will go. Meanwhile in Bethesda's engine games the worlds are much larger so there is a lot more asset reuse and less time is spent on each asset, instead focusing on broader strokes - and since the player can go anywhere, they can't focus on a single part as much as the HL2 developers could (e.g. in that second HL2 screenshot where you stand inside the canal, the artist really had to focus on the canal itself and the area where you fall in from, but if a similar area was in a game like Fallout 3 or FNV, they'd also have to take into account that the player could go further from the canal, including the buildings that surround it - even if the building interior is a different area, the exteriors would still need to be more detailed than the simple boxes they are in HL2). In addition, from a tech perspective, HL2 takes advantage of the fact that levels are small with clearly defined paths the player can go and precalculates the potential visibility of items and world geometry from all areas the player can go (since there aren't as many of them) so the engine can ignore the large majority of the level when drawing it. On the other hand Bethesda's engine cannot do that because, again, the world is much larger and the player has more freedom where to go, so the most they can do is tell the engine that some large structures can block the visibility of objects behind them so they wont draw those - this in turn means that not only the engine has to render a much larger world, but it also cant be as precise as HL2's engine, so the artists and designers have less room for adding detail and unique objects in there (so again a lot of objects are reused and the worlds tend to be sparse). AFAICT the performance issues with Fallout 4 and -more blatantly- Starfield are because Bethesda tried to ignore that aspect of their engine.

 

[Sigourn]

Modern Fallout re-using assets so much is far more glaring than it was in classic Fallout because of the lack of abstraction.
You enter a random house near Vegas and it looks exactly like an empty version of Doc Mitchell's house. It's unreal.

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

previous console era.

Right, consoles. Fallout 3 now that i think of it looks very much like a "console" game, especially that shit vomit green filter (which turned into piss yellow in New Vegas).

It's also curious that you decided to pick up a game that looked like a cartoon on purpose (Borderlands) and a simulator running on an old engine (Arma 2), while ignoring the elephant in the room (Metro 2033, also released in 2010). Arma 2, for the record, actually looks better than New Vegas, with it's natural lighting and realistic looking assets. It's not the best game graphically but the way everything comes toghether is not at all displeasing to the eye:

Hell, even the original Operation Flashpoint, despite the terribad graphics, had a certain elegance in how the picture came toghether:

(interestinly, the original Operation Flashpoint had the "best" faces out of all the Arma games, up to and including Arma 3, which shows graphics are only a part of it)

Now look at Fallout 3:

Like, fucking hell. I'm having a gag reaction just looking at that shit. And New Vegas, even in "ultra HD", still retains a lot of the same problems:

Now, out curiosity, let's check out Half Life 2, a 2002 game:

A game eight years older looking ten times better. Can anybody explain to me how that's even possible? Half Life 2 looks like a work of art by comparison:

But again, the problem with your argument is you're comparing FNV to one of the most technically impressive games of the 2000s (Half-Life 2). Sure, if you're comparing it to the cream of the crop, FNV doesn't look as good. But for the baseline standards of gaming in the late 2000s/early 2010s, it looks pretty standard for its time.

Whether or not the art-style is good is completely subjective. I actually agree that Fallout 3 looks painfully ugly just due to the extremely mute color-pallette of browns and grays. But in terms of graphical fidelity, completely average for when they came out.

 

[Galdred]

NV is a thing specifically because it was built on top of FO3 and Gamebryo. It was either NV with these graphics or no NV so maybe you're doing yourself a disservice if you stopped playing it because of its bad graphics.

Each time I walk out of Doc Mitchel's all I think about is the choices and possibilities, not some... texture.

It also inherits the mediocre gunplay from FO3 (and the vault tech crit roll system doesn't really makes it any better), which is also a big issue.
I don't mind some RPG shooter hybrid, but to me, FO3 has been the weakest.

 

[Lyric Suite]

But again, the problem with your argument is you're comparing FNV to one of the most technically impressive games of the 2000s (Half-Life 2). Sure, if you're comparing it to the cream of the crop, FNV doesn't look as good. But for the baseline standards of gaming in the late 2000s/early 2010s, it looks pretty standard for its time.

The point of bringing up Half Life 2 was to debunk the idea New Vegas looks bad because it's an old game now. Somebody actually tried to argue that here. Now i had no idea the game was updated graphically, fair enough there, but even the untouched 2004 original still looks better to me. Hell, Half Life 1 looks better than this Bethesda shit.

Either way, the "cream of the crop" in the case of New Vegas would be Metro 2033, or whatever other big shooter was released in 2010, not a game from 2004, so it's extra embarassing that Half Life 2 looks better.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The reason HL2 can do that but Bethesda's engine cannot has mainly to do with how HL2 is made: it is a series of small levels that while they give the impression of a large world, are largely linear and the time of day is static. The small size of each level means they have more disk space and RAM to work with and lightmaps tend to be humongous - especially if done like HL2

No, that's a cope. Explain Stalker then:

The reason New Vegas looks bad is because it's based on Bethesda's shoddy work. Fallout 3 doesn't look like shit because it's an open world RPG and graphics can't be curated as well as in a shooter. There's some merit to that argument but it still doesn't apply here, because we all know the reason Fallout 3 looks like shit is that Bethesda are just that fucking inept. If Bethesda had any fucking clue Fallout 3 would look like that Stalker shot above.

I mean, look at Starfield, a game that uses every advanced or "cream of the crop" graphical technique available today, and yet it still looks underwhelming.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The point of bringing up Half Life 2 was to debunk the idea New Vegas looks bad because it's an old game now.

When the best thing you can come up with in response to why "New Vegas shouldn't be considered good" is the graphics, I think you've lost the plot. It's not the prettiest game as you've pointed out. It might even be considered average for it's time or even that the graphics didn't age well. Kenshi isn't the prettiest game released in the last five years either, but I'm not playing Kenshi to oggle the capabilities of my graphics card. Mount & Blade wasn't the best looking game when it came out. It wasn't even on par with Oblivion, but that didn't stop people from using it to mock Oblivion for touting having mounts without mounted combat. That's because the graphics were serviceable and the gameplay more than made up for it's lack of visual fidelity.

I could go on and on with great games that didn't have good graphics, but were still great games despite the fact. Either you get the point or you don't. New Vegas's use of the dialog system with skill checks alone makes it a fantastic game. It had numerous memorable and well designed locations, though I hate the plant vault. You know the one. I thought The Fiends were a bit silly, still do, but eventually came to accept them and enjoyed several of the quests involving them. The casino quests were fairly interesting and well written, and even gave the player a chance to use things other than combat skills. I enjoyed Boone's and Cassidy's quests. I even enjoyed The Enclave remnants stuff. It really was a proper sequel to Fallout 2, and surpasses Fallout 2 in terms of writing and world building, IMHO. In fact, I have a hard time figuring out if Fallout 2 or Fallout New Vegas is my second favorite Fallout game, and that has a lot to do with how Obsidian used the mechanics of the character system as well as the nonplayer character development.

 

[Lyric Suite]

When the best thing you can come up with in response to why "New Vegas shouldn't be considered good" is the graphics

I never said anything even remotely close to that.

All i said is that i launched the game once, walked around for 10 minutes, gagged at the visuals, and never touched it again.

Citing Mount & Blade is an interesting contrast because i was never bothered by the way the original game looked. My argument is not that New Vegas looks "dated", or low definition, either by today standards or for its time. I'm saying it looks downright repellent. I didn't have that problem with Morrowind BTW, as i already explained.

Bethesda is not unique in this. I have the same reaction to a lot of console games. I mentioned this but i remember trying the single player of Battlefield 4 once and i found the visuals unbearable, and this is a game that's supposed to be state of the art, as cream of the crop as it gets. The use of post-processing effects was ALL wrong, and on top of it the lighting was fucked and there was this perennial shit filtering everywhere which consoltards just seem to love for some reason. A lot of the Call of Duty games i've seen also make me puke, especially the ones from the older console generations. Everything is either piss yellow, vomit green or poop brown, not to mention bloomy and fuzzy. I remember trying the first Dirt Rally game once, the one by Codemasters, and i found the game unplayble until i set all the post-processing effects to a minimum.

Meanwhile, there's quite a few boomer shooters i also find unplayable because i find the visuals appalling. I have no issues of course with actual old school shooters. Doom looks beautiful as ever, and recently i tried the first Dark Forces game while i was fiddling around that eXoDOS shit. No issues with how the game looked, even in its original resolution.

Anyway, with all that said, i'll admit the puke inducing visuals is only part of the problem with New Vegas. My issue is that it's just maddening to me that Obsidian had to be stuck with the filth produced by Bethesda. Every time i think about trying the game my blood starts to boil and then decide against it.

 

[Lemming42]

Mount & Blade always looked pretty good IMO. Very low budget but they knew how to design picturesque scenes in the towns and villages. The only really unacceptable stuff in M&B was a couple of the battle maps where terrain-gen-insanity led to hills with like 90 degree faces and stretched textures.

 

[heightfax]

Mount & Blade always looked pretty good IMO. Very low budget but they knew how to design picturesque scenes in the towns and villages. The only really unacceptable stuff in M&B was a couple of the battle maps where terrain-gen-insanity led to hills with like 90 degree faces and stretched textures.

M&B defiantly looked better than Fire & Sword.

 

[Mauman]

Just read a synopsis of the tv show.

Did they just make every FUCKING THING we did in Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas completely pointless?!

Never mind the sheer stupidity of nearly every character.

What the fuck?!

 

[Butter]

Just read a synopsis of the tv show.

Did they just make every FUCKING THING we did in Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas completely pointless?!

Never mind the sheer stupidity of nearly every character.

What the fuck?!

The Force Awakens treatment.

 

[HappyDaddyWow!]

Did they just make every FUCKING THING we did in Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas completely pointless?!

No? The show makes it pretty clear that it's a self-contained storyline that doesn't have much connection to the storylines from the games.

The show still fucking sucks, but this complaint is pretty smooth-brained imo.

 

[Mauman]

Did they just make every FUCKING THING we did in Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas completely pointless?!

No? The show makes it pretty clear that it's a self-contained storyline that doesn't have much connection to the storylines from the games.

The show still fucking sucks, but this complaint is pretty smooth-brained imo.

The show destroyed the NCR and New Vegas. The literal settings those games are in, and then shows it. How the fuck can you call THAT self-contained?

The writers even stated that their destruction goes down pretty much right after New Vegas. Or at least NCR's destruction. New Vegas followed at some point.

Smooth-brained? Pot, kettle called.

 

[Lemming42]

No? The show makes it pretty clear that it's a self-contained storyline that doesn't have much connection to the storylines from the games.

Didn't the Toddster say it was "canon" and "basically Fallout 5" or some shit like that?