Pretty much every place that has tons of pre-war supplies to loot (would have been scavenged a long time ago), way too many functional radio towers that conveniently led to a stash of supplies, homes still occupied by people happily living just a few steps away from a supermutant "lair", people living alone in the wasteland with no protection steps away from something extremely dangerous in general, factories randomly placed around the map with still-functioning machinery and tech that hasn't already been looted after 200+ years, generic raiders camped all over the place with no power structure or explanation of who they are or why they're there...etc. In general it felt really densely packed with stuff, and a lot of it was stuff that didn't have any business being there except to patronize the player.
I'm not saying that NV isn't guilty of some of this as well. I think some of it is a side-effect of the wasteland not really being big enough to contain all of the places. However, in NV different parts of the map have a discernible theme and the places flow into each other in a natural-feeling way. The lay of the land, the placement of locations, the placement of critters, enemies, etc., just seem to make more sense. In Fallout 3 it felt like a fairly uniform wasteland with evenly-spaced attractions for a video game player with little regard for anything's existence needing an explanation outside of, "here's a place that will be fun to explore." I dunno...I'll admit that I can't 100% put my finger on it. I just got a strange post-apoc "theme park" vibe off of it.
Again, I'm not saying it's bad...just that it could probably feel more natural than it does. As it is it feels a little "plastic" to me. At the same time Bethesda did a really good job of creating places that tell mini-stories, and that's really cool. I would have liked to have seen more of that in NV. I'd just like to see it integrated into the wasteland in a more natural-feeling and plausible way than it was in FO3...if that makes any sense.
I feel almost exactly the inverse of this regarding the two games. FO3 had an incredibly cool aesthetic; the nurse's log entries in the camp outside Germantown police station being a prime example. It's NV that feels like the 'wasteland theme park' to me. The great war has almost been forgotten and with it the impetus for survival seems weaker to me, There seems little point to my actions as ultimately I don't identify with any of the characters or their motives in NV.
Nowhere in the Mojave do I get the same desolate wonder I got from coming across a satellite array in the capital wasteland, then seeing another couple in the distance to go and explore, complete with a insane ghoul scientist who wants one last nuclear fireball to purge the wastes. In the Mojave it's all been done, there seems little point in exploring as everything interesting is either long gone or the property of an arbitrary faction.
As antagonists the legion make little sense too, they seem like a more trite version of Lord Ashur's slavers in The Pitt. Their backstory was believable in that universe, the backstory for the legion stretches credibility paper thin; the whole setting comes across as pastiche to me.
I do however think FO3 and NV are flip sides of the same coin and I'm glad each exist for fans of their different interpretations of the FO universe, it's really interesting how varied the interpretations of both game worlds have been. :foodndrink:
» Sun Mar 06, 2011 4:34 pm 
) at world building. It wasn't even their series and they did awesome with it.
