I don't know you personally but know we have similar enough opinions on Fallout 3 to confidently recommend NV to you. There is a lot less hand holding. You actually have to LISTEN to what the NPC's are saying to you to get an idea of where to go, what to expect , who you might be able to trust and hope to foresee their true intentions. Actions HAVE consequences. All Skills have value to some degree. Combat is trickier. Not a perfect sim or anything close, but noticeably better than FO3. Doesn't feel as cheap. The writing is better. Hell, talking to a 'relatively' meaningless NPC named Easy Pete in Goodsprings showed immediately better quality voice acting over anybody in FO3 - including Liam Neeson. :shocking:

Take all this with the giddyness of a kid with a new toy, as I am only 4 hours in, but the improvements are very noticeable.

That's because you weren't using the AutoAxe. muahuahuahuahuahua

I too am only running on first impressions since I'm only a few hours in and haven't left Goodsprings yet. My initial feeling is that I didn't have the same pull with FO3, but am just really stoked to be back in the Wilderness with some new things to explore.

Maybe it's because I'm a chick, but the James story line in FO3 immediately grabbed me. In fact, I started playing the game because I walked past my husband playing and heard the baby cooing at James. Yeah. :laugh: And when I busted out of the Vault, finding Dad was all I wanted to do.

So, the opening felt flat in comparison, not the same emotional kick, but there is the sense of a completely wide-open world of possibilities and the first few quests I've gotten have held my interest. Can't wait to get going on more.

I dont feel this game is lacking at all. Ive only put in a few hours and Im amazed by it. Im already hooked.

This game has more in every way, and not only is it quantity its quality. I think this game is superior to Fallout 3 which I loved dearly, but this is just a straight upgrade. Even performance wise it looks better and performs better. I think you just have a case of the nostalgia bug, but thats your opinion.

This game has more of a survival feel to it. The tone feels more like the old Fallout games.

Oh my god, I expected the exact same thing! I walked up to him and knew exactly what voice he was going to have, and he didn't!

The gameplay feels bettter to me, but the story seems very hollow and spread out so far. Also, basically everything is about backstabbing someone, but it is New Vegas so I guess thats okay...

I doubt that. I think it's more that Obsidian is a "story" developer while Beth is a "world" developer. So far as I know this is Obsidian's first real open world game. Inevitably they're not going to be as good at developing a Bethesda-style game as Beth would. On the other hand, they bring different strengths to the table. I'd be very surprised if folks who favor Obsidian's approach don't think the game is better than FO3, just as I'd be surprised if folks who prefer Beth's approach don't find it lacking in certain ways. The secret of enjoyment will be to play it on its own terms, taking pleasure in what it does well (while praying for TES V ).

I feel the same way. Reading all of this just makes me want to play this game even more!

I think my assessment is right, it looks like all the hardcoe old school guys love NV while the FO3 fans arent that impressed. While I tend to think its too FO 1/2, I have to applaud Bethesda for taking a chance, most companies these days dont have the balls to go again the "Mainstream" and appease a niche audience.

It's just you.

I wouldn't say that. I'm a FO3 fan and I'm loving New Vegas. I haven't played FO2, but I didn't like FO1 that much (though, to be fair, I never finished it either).

From what I've seen it's only a small percentage of Fallout 3 fans who have any real problem with New Vegas, so I think your assessment is more than a little off.



How can a Fallout game be too much of a Fallout game?



I don't see why it has to be one extreme or the other. What Obsidian did was try to was create a game that both classic Fallout and new Fallout fans would enjoy, and for the most part they succeeded. They didn't try to cater exclusively to either the old fans, or the new fans; what they did was find a nice middle ground.

Bethesda is better at exploration, Obsidian is better at story-telling, in my opinion. That's what I gather from the experience thus far, and that's what I expected.

It's just a different game. I loved FO3 (for one complete play through), but I get a little bothered by the way a lot of games work in relation to the main storyline. It's throw them in and say go forth into this world, it's big, mean, and scary, but we will make sure you never get terribly of track or go too long without direction. I personally like that it's building up slowly and I feel like I can choose my own path so to speak. I feel like I have a choice as to how I want to go. FO3 you could be good, evil or indifferent, the same in NV, but you toss in multiple factions and that really adds to it IMO.

I wanted to help Goodsprings and had zero desire to assist the Powder Gangers. Granted I am not to a major faction choice yet, but man are the NCR seeming kind of douchy and I will more then likely side with them, but I may not. I also see myself playing NV more then once through completely.

I am a little iffy about VATS this time around. I feel like I am getting a lot of one shot limb cripples (on non sneaked baddies and from the games get go) than I was in FO3, but that is evened out by me having less one shot head shots. I like that I don't feel like I all powerful, I felt pretty sure of my godliness pretty close to the start of FO3. The first time I ran across Jackals in NV, I got my ass handed to me a couple times. I came up with a new tactic and it was far easier. I hate Radscorpions with a passion now, there's never enough AP ammo or dynamite.

I can see how a person that this is there second Fallout game (FO3 being the first) could be a little let down, but give it a go and stick without and remember, you not too long ago got shot in the head, so things shouldn't be totally clear as to what you should be doing.

:laugh:

Tell me about it. That's considered as a bad thing now? Oh dear...says a lot really.

I think I'll get the game soon.

Is it just me or is fallout nv the same exact game as fallout 3 with a couple new features and a new story? Once I left Goodsprings and hit the wasteland it just felt like good old fallout.

It is all opinion and myne is, it's improved.

i am 15 hours into the game now. currently deciding a certain persons fate in a certain camp. Anyway, i gotta admit during the whole good springs and primm section, i was rolling my eyes wondering why this game sorta... svcked. But then i met the legion (damn those guys are bad news) at the next town and i started to come around. From there on in it got better. I feel Fallout 3 did a better job of making a more natural appearing world (a few places and things in new vegas look and feel out of place) but i am still loving New Vegas, i would say in many ways it is better then Fallout 3 (such as story and voice acting), but its also worse in a few (like the appearance and layout of towns). All in all i take the good with the bad and am having a blast, pretty sure im more addicted to NV then i ever was to FO3.

oh one complaint, that part with the stealth boy super mutants was STUPID. I had to set the game to very easy (playing on normal generally) to get through it just because i didnt think i would need to bring 1 billion bullets and 1000 stim packs with me.

also to people saying you need to wait forever for the game to open up compared to 3, that simply is not true. You just need to wait a bit for the main questline to diverge. at anytime u can go off into the sunset and find a little village that needs help with a few things. Compare that to 3, where no matter what, the main quest will always turn out almost the exact same.

IMHO, the "slow start" is to give the player the feeling of stark contrast between the repopulated "ghost towns" in the wasteland and the bustling New Vegas strip.

Still, if you take the time you can "make a difference" as early as the first town, Goodsprings.

Very early on you also get an idea of the bloated bureaucracy that that NCR has become and you can choose to help or hinder their influence (and the towns and people they are supposed to protect) over the Mojave wasteland.

Yeah, same here (aside from some serious performance issues on the PC, but that's been solved now).

I feel like F3 basically put everything into the intro, and then it kind of dumped you into a world without much character afterwards. The intro sequences were so compelling that it kind of gave you the momentum you needed to get to each next major production element, leading up to the giant robot scene at the end. There was plenty of stuff to explore in between, but it was mostly inconsequential; you rarely engaged in interesting side-quests and generally just moved from one Oblivion-style "dungeon" to another collecting loot. That's not to say I didn't enjoy F3... it was great to be back in the Fallout universe, and the gameplay mechanics were all fairly fresh so it was certainly fun to play, but I always felt like I was not particularly involved in the events of the world so much as just wandering through killing things and collecting stuff.

Fallout:NV starts off really slowly and builds over time, very much like the original Fallouts. I don't want to turn this into a spoilers thread, but things get more interesting as you move on (the first two towns are basically part of an extra-long tutorial, IMO). As a big fan of F1/F2, playing NV feels like coming home. That said, you might still not like it if you felt F3 was really compelling from a plot/writing perspective. And of course the gameplay and graphics are certainly no longer new and impressive, so obviously that aspect of novelty isn't going to be there.

As far as complaints that the world feels kind of low-population, I think this is unfortunately just a concession made for consoles and lower end systems. It was exactly the same in F3, the population of the towns and such felt very limited, and I think it's mostly because there are only so many NPCs you can put on screen on weaker hardware without things bogging down on those systems.

Not played it yet either (I'm in UK so not long now) but ever since the first previews I've always felt the intro was going to be a little weak, especially in comparison to FO3.

I've been playing games for 25 years now - it takes a very special kind of intro to amaze me but honestly, FO3's intro blew me away - I loved it, it just worked on so many levels and was a very different approach. People often rave about the intro of the Half-Life games - yeah, they're okay but, for me, FO3 has one of the best intro sequences I've ever seen in a game.

Against that, Obsidian were always going to have a hard time. Don't get me wrong though, I still expect NV to be a great game.

Allow me to say that I feel Fallout 3 and New Vegas are near-identical products.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's familiar, and comfortable. The wasteland seems a bit less daunting when you realize you've explored one before. It's all about learning to take one thing at a time so one isn't ovewhelmed.

I've got to say the guys and gals who are pro the differences between FO:NV and FO:3 have really got me psyched to play FO:NV it sounds like they fixed a lot of the the things that I found wrong with FO:3 (don't get me wrong I love FO:3, I've got a couple of hundred hours play time invested in the game and back in the day I played the hell out of Fallout itself). I wish I didn't live in the UK and have to wait for the game to unlock. Fallout 3 was pretty bland in places compared to the original and was lacking some of the stuff that made the game great, but made up for it with updated game mechanics and the resurrection of the franchise. Damn you Americans and other exotic nationalities don't know how lucky you are.