Right now? Probably. I've only played for 25 hours according to Steam though, so I can't speak for the long term.

Oh yay, bring on the cross game bashing. Personally, I liked them all, and all these threads about "I HATE X GAME! Y GAME WAS BETTER!" is soooooooooo months old.

Hate it? Good for you, play something else. I'm going to continue playing it, and enjoy the crap out of FO3, FONV, Skyrim, Morrowind, Daggerfall, and Oblivion. svck it!

I personally feel IHRA Drag Racing is better than all three.

I miss Morrowind, Skyrim isn't like Morrowind. (Repeats the same garbage complaint over and over and over and over and over and......)

But I agree with you. I enjoy them all. Some more than others. I play Morrowind if I want that good old Morrowind feel, I don't complain how Skyrim should be like Morrowind.

Heirarchy of quality imo:

New Vegas
.
.
.
Fallout 3 = Morrowind (both are well done, but too different in certain aspects to rank one above the other. Where Morrowind has better storytelling and more content, FO3 has more dialog options and weapon balancing)
.
.
.
Oblivion
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Skyrim



I'd add a bigger gap between Oblivion and Skyrim but I dun wanna stretch the page.

New Vegas was a godsend. It has the most lines of dialogue in any game ever created. Something like 65,000 lines of dialogue.

I would be greatly amused by Obsidian making an Elder Scrolls game, and then having Bethesda make it non canon out of anger and jealousy like what happened with Kotor2.

One thing I don't understand and find quite odd....

Look at the quality of voice actors in New Vegas compared to the quality of voice actors in Skyrim. Is it just me, or are the New Vegas ones x1000 times better? Still bumps of course, but overall better. This is especially odd considering many of the voice actors are actually the exact same people. Who directs the voice actors for Skyrim?

The same people apparently who wrote duplicate lines, for entirely different people.

That continues to baffle me.

The worst I have seen is one of the children saying, "In all my years, I have never seen such a thing" when killing a dragon.

Well everyone does that. (Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for more lines among anonymous NPCs)
The delivery of the lines though from, say, Boone to Sven? (yes same voice actor) That's a pretty big drop in quality.

Well yes, that and in New Vegas it was mostly exclusive to nameless npcs. In Skyrim we have actual named characters doing it along with anonymous npcs.

Both Obsidian and Bethesda do this and I never understand. I get it is easier to voice act the exact same lines so you can stick them all to one topic in the CS/GECK/CK, but if you're going to have different voice actors saying something then you might as well put in the effort to make the lines a little varied. It only takes a few minutes. Otherwise it just looks too scripted, as if everyone in the NCR has heard the 'Patrolling the Mojave' line and thought it was the single greatest one liner in the world.

Same for combat taunts in Oblivion. Was there a gathering of bandits at some point, where bandits of all races and genders came together to learn a standard set of combat taunts? 'Repeat after me: 'I fought mudcrabs stronger than you!''

If you're expecting something else, you're doing it wrong.

cos invisible walls totally improve the game right?

It does make tonnes of improvements, just not in the world building department.

Watch the making of videos. They tell the voice actors to cram as many lines into a session as possible, changing tones quickly, and thus lowering the quality. In other words: Bethesda doesn't care about dialogue or the quality of voice acting, the only reason its in there is because text-based dialogue won't sell.

And also have to disagree in regards to "Fallout NV is just Fallout 3 with mods." To avoid a lengthy argument I've repeated thousands of times: writing, writing writing, writing, writing.

I wasn't aware that Skyrim didn't have invisible walls.

The invisible walls are annoying I'll grant you that. But that doesn't ruin the game or make it any worse.

Also, NV isn't Fallout 3 with mods. It's much more than that. But hey, everyone will repeat the "New Vegas is Fallout 3 with mods" like some say "Skyrim is a mile wide and an inch deep". It's the same old let's repeat what he hear from older kids.

It actually does in the sense that the world makes sense and is not a theme park.

I don't know about world building. Sure invisible walls were annoying (but easily fixed by mods, such as http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/45104 which also deals with lots of bugs. I haven't run into a single issue in 20 hours of play), but the Mojave Desert itself was set up far more realistically than the Capital Wasteland. All sorts of organizations have been set up, there are proper trading routes with stops along the route and an actual base of operations for it, there's plenty of agriculture, the sources of electricity are shown (the dam, the HELIOS power plant)... The setting made sense.

In the Capital Wasteland it looked like it had been just a few years since the bombs fell. Megaton, one of the biggest 'cities' around, relies completely on trade since the town basically has 1 brahmin for agriculture. There's usually only one guy with a brahmin standing outside the gates for trading, yet there's a large number of people living in the town, most doing apparently nothing. And all the abandoned buildings/shelters filled with pre-war food and medical supplies that somehow were never looted by anyone in 200 years, until some kid comes out of a vault and decides to look around.

Don't get me wrong I love Fallout 3, but you have to stop yourself from thinking about some stuff too much or it doesn't make much sense. An underground cave filled with kids, with a crappy barrier being the only thing that separates the kids from a vault filled with super mutants that's linked directly to their home? Large amounts of 200 year old food all over the place, that's perfectly edible too?

Fallout 3 may be more enjoyable to explore as a sandbox world, but in my opinion New Vegas has a more believable world.

I enjoyed them both, just fine.

No Fallout 3 is.... But, noooooooooo it's true.

Yea that's why I like NV more. And everything else that Obsidian threw in.

From what I understand F04 is going to be made by a seperate Bethesda team. So there's still hope that we'll get something different.

What I do like about Fallout 3 is that it basically forced Bethesda to implement choices into their quest, because it's an important part of the series. Some of the quests were pretty cool (though I think NV did it even better with less black and white choices and more options overall; Compare FO3's http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Blood_Ties to NV's http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Beyond_the_Beef). With Skyrim on the other hand it seems they went back to Oblivion style questing. The quests were fun, mostly, but there weren't a lot of choices to be made. Obviously the 'random' quests were shallow, that's just the nature of the design, but I expected a bit more from the rest.