Ha! Good.

I feel like I need to do this constantly in order to get a fair shake, but here it goes: I love Fallout New Vegas, it's a well designed, well written, fun to play game - and then on to the 'however' ...

My opinion of the proximity of the Deathclaws to the start point varies somewhat from yours, respectfully. You mentioned that they are a deterrent, and I agree, but I really don't see them as some sort of quasi-philosophical statement about how harsh the wasteland is, I see it as a not-so-gentle nudge to go south and complete the quests in the order that the developers wrote them. That's why you get people feeling like the game is more linear. Apparently you can get by them with some effort, but the one time I tried it I got this feeling I was somehow exploiting the game ... like when you stand on a rock and shoot a Deathclaw to death as it roams around unable to get to you? I'm not so sure the game was designed to disallow them getting to you while you spend 300 9mm rounds tenderizing their skull.

Starting placement: You can't go west because that's the edge of the map. You can go east for a little, but then you're blocked by mountains and presented with a mountain pass teeming with creatures too difficult to beat. Of course, by the time you can beat these creatures, the point of a shortcut between the east and west of the map is completely moot, but I'm not going to knock more areas to explore. The other easterly, northern route is inhabited by Supermutants. So ... the most sensible and very obviously promoted route to go is south to Primm. See how people might feel it's more linear?

Let me pause for a moment with a disclaimer of sorts. I actually don't mind all that so much and I'm not even arguing for change, just stating what I think might have been a different/better way to go about, which is personal preference. I do miss being able to hike off in several directions from the start, but this is a different game ... and sure, if you rush to New Vegas with a stealthboy the main quest probably (?) retroactively completes/invalidates so nothing breaks. Given that, it's arguably a usable path so maybe it's more open than some are giving it credit for.

However, I don't think it's fair to begrudge folks wanting more of a sandbox feel. It's not like the last game with almost all the same assets, published by the same folks who developed said game two years before didn't offer that more sandboxy feel, yeah? It's not coming from nowhere.



No, and if I argue against Deathclaws jumping you a 5 minute walk from where you start the game, that isn't me saying I want them 2.7 million miles away in an obscure location. Why is it you state your point in absolutes? Why can't they just be "further away"?

I'm not playing this game for realism though, so I'm a slightly nonplussed about the mention of dumping the most powerful creatures the game has to offer in your path at game start as realistic. If we start the 'realistic' argument, we could go on forever about how the game would be different, so lets not.

Probably all been said on this thread already but -

I think the lack of scaling all over the place is one of the best things in FNV compared to Fallout 3.
In Fallout 3, the lone wanderer leaves the vault into a Capital Wasteland populated by mole rats, bloatflies and vicious dogs. Hostile, but the folk around can cope. Then it turns into an environment only the wanderer with his rapidly evolved God-like powers could possibly survive in. Lucky Harith with his single guard must be clinically insane to venture out of Canterbury Commons with endless deathclaws, sentry bots (coming from the mysterious hidden factory somewhere) and albino radscorpions terrorising the countryside. No wonder Sierra Petrovita never leaves her house.

FNV feels like a far more realistic world. Deathclaws are deadly, live in packs with a dominant male and female, have young, and their pack has its territory. The roads are relatively safe, but off the beaten path there's dangerous wildlife. The world doesn't magically change just because you're more powerful, but when you're more powerful you can go to more dangerous places. Or go there early on if you want a real challenge.

And there's a very straightforward, easily found, easy for a low level player path coming out north of Nipton, so pretty much straight to Novac, (and then pretty much anywhere) if you don't want to go round the big loop .

Personally I'll be gutted if Fallout 4 ends up going back to random creatures that just happen to match your level popping up arbitrarily all over the countryside. With FNV Obsidian seem to have thought a lot more about creating a game world that feels like it could be an actual place and has some kind of internal logic. I think that's a big improvement.

I'm finding these FO3 vs FO:NV arguments a bit impotent. When you compare these Fallouts to something really linear, say DA:O, the differences between the two Fallouts are pretty small.

The only linear aspect of FO:NV to me, is that there is only one direction to go at the start of the game. With FO3, you can choose a direction to go. Aside from that, the differences are small.

Then define 'farther away.' How far is far enough? When should one encounter them? Perhaps you don't need to speak in absolutes, but "farther away" isn't good enough either. Is your far enough going to match someone else's far enough or vice versa?
If you can sneak past them (I haven't needed a Stealthboy to do it, some of it's just luck), then for me it feels like I'm doing something awesome...many heroes in many entertainment stories sneak past big dangers on their way somewhere. I don't see this as an exploit. If they'd really wanted you to be unable to pass at all, in any fashion, they would have blocked off the road with impassable objects or more invisible walls & cliffs.

I do understand the frustration of leaving Goodsprings and running into things that kill you. I experienced it myself, and not just with the big bad baddies. But with a combination of sneaking around, a lot of caution, you CAN explore without heading to Primm first. And you will kill what you can, and you will level, and then you'll explore more. I guess the problem I have is that I'm not seeing a huge difficulty in being able to kill early lower lvl things with a 9mm pistol and going on from there. I also don't view this as problem with the game...as someone else said way back, it's just personal preference. I appreciate that you prefer things to be another way and might like NV better if they were so, but there are other games that do this. Not all of them can or should be only for one type of style, even within a series.

Well said! :foodndrink:

Just want to remain people there is a path to the east without getting close to Primm.

There is also a path to north which you can avoid the Quarry.

I understand. I loved Fallout 3 and I love Fallout: New Vegas, but New Vegas just scratches that gaming itch better. The choice to place Deathclaws in close proximity to the starting area was probably not decided on based on what I described; that's just what I gathered from it. Fallout 3 never had that feeling to it. I always felt a little off in that game because I could wander anywhere and kill anything that got in my way. Obsidian's decision to engineer the game to nudge the player south is probably the most accurate explanation but it just doesn't make sense to me to claim the entire game is linear because of this.

If Obsidian decided to let me go anywhere I chose at the start of the main quest, I would get the same feeling from it as I got from Fallout 3 and Oblivion... That the main story doesn't matter at all. One of the things I hated about Fallout 3 was that very issue. Nothing about the main story felt urgent so I could take a month of in-game time off and wander around, and everything would be just the way it was before I diverged. In New Vegas I feel the intended urgency and urge to put a bullet in Benny's skull because I'm trodding along to the close of the first act. The beginning of the game can be considered linear in that respect, but not the whole game. Fallout 3 is linear through and through in the main story. It's just lets you fart around endlessly until you get bored enough to put up with the nonsensical main quest.

I won't berate people for criticizing the game because it's not sandbox-y enough. I personally don't want to play in a sandbox, but I guess I understand why others would. My main beef is when people miscategorize the game as something it isn't... 'Linear'. That's just a poor definition for the game. A better way to describe it would be 'focused'. The game is 'story focused' not 'linear'.

I loved Fallout 3.

I invested well over a hundred and fifty (if not two hundred) hours over multiple games, trying to play through it from every possible angle. I started the FO series with 2, and I knew FO 3 had issues. But I was able to look past them to see the game that laid under the surface.

Now that I've played Fallout New Vegas I know that Fallout New Vegas is the game that Fallout 3 should have been. Fantastic writing, choices for virtually every option imaginable, individually impressive locations, memorable companions, every single action or choice I make mattters, and a better color palette from blue and grey. If you can think of something to do in New Vegas chances are the game has already thought of that possibility. And once you enter "near end game" the choices of what to do become vast. You had one railroad line for FO3. That is linear. If I want to help people, destroy people, or take over places in New Vegas I can. I can end the game multiple ways getting a multitude of endings. That is not linear.

But that's not to say I "hate" Fallout 3 now. So with that in mind, I'll summarize my opinions on my side

The Wasteland is not an amusemant park. It's not a fun place where you can just venture into finding skill books, ammo, and toys at every possible area. It's a Wasteland. Full of death, radiation, and pain at every juncture of the road. There's a reason people huddle up into towns for protection in every single Fallout game ever made. It is a cruel harsh world that if you let it will chew you up and spit you out. If it was so easy to survive (because of high level scaling for instance) then everyone should be able to go out and do what they need to do. Why ask the player to go somewhere if they can just buy a 9mm from the local shop and go walk there dealing with molerats along the way? Because the quest giver is lazy? That's not how the game works logically. So why should a different rule apply to the player?

When you played Fallout 2, sure, you could find all kinds of neat things if you knew where to look. But getting there? At level two trying to stay away from Centaurs, Fire Geckos, and all kinds of nasties? Hell of an undertaking. Possible, but difficult. You could beat Fallout 2 in about half an hour if you knew exactly what to do and where. Some will question that design decision, but it's one of choice. If you want to beat the game that quick? By all means. It's your game world. Fallout 3 lacked that feeling. The feeling of being in control of your own destiny. The feeling of danger. Of never knowing where you could die next. Where the next big battle is. Or enemies that you felt you had to avoid. New Vegas has restored that feeling.

As for the discussion of "Being a God character", saying to "turn up the difficulty" is a lie. I played through FO 3 enough to know that yes, very hard could be difficult, but once you turned that corner around level ten there was nothing even on Very Hard that could kill you. And god forbid you picked up Grim Reaper's Sprint at 20. New Vegas has fixed almost all of those issues (including nerfing Grim Reaper significantly). In terms of comparison, Very Hard hardcoe in New Vegas is ten times the difficulty of Very Hard in FO3. I tried to play through it in my first game. After not getting anywhere after four/five hours of gameplay, I turned the difficulty back down. Even Geckos were proving to be a big challenge to actually not get horrifically mauled against.

Basically, what I'm trying to say, is if you started playing Fallout games at 3 and don't like New Vegas because it isn't three that's fine. We're all entitled to our opinions...But technically you are wrong. This game is Fallout. Fallout 3 is the abnormal one. Fallout New Vegas has taken the framework Bethesda created and imported all the history, factions, purpose, and feeling from 1 and 2 into the engine of 3. Bethesda knew this themselves, or they wouldn't have outsourced to Obsidian who were the very people who helped create the original games.

This *IS* what Fallout is supposed to be. A rewarding storyline driven open ended RPG experience. If you don't like it, then you don't like it. But arguing the point is foolish.

Socks, on 30 November 2010 - 12:28 AM, said:
Probably all been said on this thread already but -

I think the lack of scaling all over the place is one of the best things in FNV compared to Fallout 3.
In Fallout 3, the lone wanderer leaves the vault into a Capital Wasteland populated by mole rats, bloatflies and vicious dogs. Hostile, but the folk around can cope. Then it turns into an environment only the wanderer with his rapidly evolved God-like powers could possibly survive in. Lucky Harith with his single guard must be clinically insane to venture out of Canterbury Commons with endless deathclaws, sentry bots (coming from the mysterious hidden factory somewhere) and albino radscorpions terrorising the countryside. No wonder Sierra Petrovita never leaves her house.

FNV feels like a far more realistic world. Deathclaws are deadly, live in packs with a dominant male and female, have young, and their pack has its territory. The roads are relatively safe, but off the beaten path there's dangerous wildlife. The world doesn't magically change just because you're more powerful, but when you're more powerful you can go to more dangerous places. Or go there early on if you want a real challenge.

And there's a very straightforward, easily found, easy for a low level player path coming out north of Nipton, so pretty much straight to Novac, (and then pretty much anywhere) if you don't want to go round the big loop .

Personally I'll be gutted if Fallout 4 ends up going back to random creatures that just happen to match your level popping up arbitrarily all over the countryside. With FNV Obsidian seem to have thought a lot more about creating a game world that feels like it could be an actual place and has some kind of internal logic. I think that's a big improvement.

I agree with both of these.

Humm, long thread. Wonder if anyone will skip over this post the way I've just skipped over the last 5 pages

My definition of a Sandbox game:
You can go anywhere at any time and complete many quests in any order.
This does not mean it is safe to go anywhere at any time, this does not mean that all quests are available/doable at any level and this does not mean the map is devoid of obstacles you must navigate around. There's a lot of fun and satisfaction to be found in working out ways to deal with higher level encounters, likewise in improving your character to tackle the once impossible quests. A map devoid of obstacles is flat and mostly pointless, that said a map full of invisible walls is very frustrating and does kill some of the feeling that comes from exploring.

My take on Exploration: Explore
Fo3 rates highly on discover, so much to be found, everywhere. Fo3 rates quite low when it comes to searching, I mean, there's so much to be found, everywhere. F0NV turns this around in that you do need to search quite hard at times to find anything more than a bottle of dirty water. To my mind makes exploration more like, well, exploring and less like a guided tour. As for the explorers perk, well, we can argue if walking from one marked location to another marked location has anything at all to do with exploration

There is only One Path out of Goodsprings:
Totally incorrect. I know of three ways to travel from G'springs to Vegas and while there may be some close calls all can be travelled safely at level 2 without the need for stealth boys. The alternate routes are not explicitly signposted nor are they highlighted on your PipBoy, but they are there to find if you like to explore In general I think FoNV handles the idea of safe paths quite well, caution may be required but most dangers are to be found a little off the beaten path.

Oblivion:
Comparing Oblivion to my take on a sandbox game is like comparing a modern children's play pen to the old sand pits of my youth. The former is a safe, sanitised little world created just for the PC, the latter is full of all sorts of broken glass and brown smelly bits and beasties and so much fun, even after you start bleeding IMO Fo3 greatly improved on Ob, FoNV improves on Fo3, it is a little strange that so many of the 'advances' serve only to bring the games a little closer to Morrowind and thence Dagerfall. Sure Morrowind had a lack of high level content, something addressed in Bloodmoon - I think I still have bruises, but I still consider it an RPG/sandbox gold standard.

Main quest/story:
The beginning is quite good but I can't say I care too much about the ending. I'm referring to Fo3 and FoNV here and indeed many other games, maybe this is just me. What I do like about FoNV is the level of complexity, ambiguity maybe, eg: The NCR supports and is supported by large corporations such as Crimson and the Van Graffs, both of these have committed far greater atrocities than Mr House yet operate within the NCR umbrella. Mr House would be a perfect fit for the NCR but he dared committed a crime against the NCR, the crime of independence, the crime of saying no, and for this he must die! So much for the good guys, the NCR, and don't get me started on the dodgy deals they do to get food supplies for the troops. Wonder where the strange meat comes from? There is your answer

Linear:
It looks like the whole definition of linearity has been tossed out the window in some parts of this thread. To return some sanity, linear , more often in gaming used to describe having to follow a fixed path. I could say the subway level in Fo3 is linear but there are options, so... The journey from G'springs to Vegas certainly has obstacles in the way but there are options, so... Oblivion, for all the good it did you you may as well have been playing on rails but even here I think linear is too harsh a word. As for story options in any game that aren't fully realised or there to be explored, reality of budgets I'm afraid. So long as an effort has been made, as it has in both Fo3 and FoNV, I struggle to call either linear.

Don't worry, I don't skip over posts I agree with. :thumbsup:

Amen. Said beautifully.

:rolleyes:

So you never died to any of the games tougher enemies, at all? You were never once, caught off guard or killed? It was always a cakewalk.. you were never swarmed? Just entering vault 92 at old olney can pit you against 3 mirelurk hunters and kings off the bat. Most people get caught off guard there and die the first time. I find your claims of ease (and other peoples) really hard to believe. Of course things get easier once you know what to expect. You've already explored the location and know what's going to attack you.. No one plays a game for the first time knowing how to kill everything, I.E. shoot mirelruks in the face takes most people trial and error to figure out. Furthermore, hiding behind a space an enemy can't get to you and sniping it (killing behemoth with hunting rifle) can also be done in New Vegas, so it's a moot point. Try charging it with the rifle and come back , not exploiting pathing A.I.

Furthermore, the 3 dog behemoth is supposed to be easy, he's the weakest one in the game aside from possibly the one where you find the Terrible Shotgun and Barter Bobblehead. It's an introductory to the radio station and it's supposed to feel epic.

Next you're going to tell me you never had a tough time killing a Feral Ghoul Reaver. What'd you play the game on, easy?

FO3 had plenty of challenging opponents. You only figured out how to destroy them best by getting your [censored] whooped. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly talkin' out there butt.

As I said I always had a huge supply of Stims so I was never in any danger. The only times I did ever die was Going out for "fun" like seeing if I can take out a spawn of enemies while in trader clothes or what not. I never died once in my first run through of the MQ. (Normal difficulty) I died plenty of times after that when I added mods and so forth.

Also If you payed any attention at all to the tips the game gives you you'll be quite aware of enemies weaknesses. (you do pay attention to those loading screen tips right?)

It really isn't that hard to pull up the pipboy heal up and use a med -x before your health gets below 30% in those areas your talkign about.

I never really found any "challenging" enemies in FO3. As everything is to a lesser extent scaled with you. You could kill Super mutants with ease with very early weapons. So no fear there. Deathclaws too. All the Melee enemies had problems hitting you if you learned to circle strafe but thats a FPS short fall I guess.

:rolleyes: God forbid people play a game to have fun, not see Game Over screens like they're playing some arcade game from the 80s. RPG's aren't about frustrating difficulty, the fun ones aren't at least. There are plenty of games out there without the ability to save, or with time limits or limited 'lives'.

You wanna go to the movies and have to sift through more and more tedium just to get to the movie (what you paid for) or would you sit there like a sap with a smile on his face and go "i like being bored, wasting my time and my money, yay dedication!"

Repeatedly killing players at the beginning of the game in order to coerce them into playing the main quest and not doing anything else (or basically, using end-game enemies as a wall at the start of the game) is a lazy way to design your game. You interplay [censored] are just embarrassing yourselves more and more by defending such oft used, cliche techniques that have already been exploited to death by hundreds of games over the past 20 years.

Can we get past tedium and get to the fun, and enjoy the game? Here's a thought: learn to enjoy a real game that employs freedom, so that you can use your imagination instead of button mashing the trigger and going "hur hur" when you kill something every 5 feet, thinking yourself some kind of video game playing God. This isn't Halo or Call of Duty. Some people get bored when games are too simple and you simply walk from point A to point B blasting everything in your path and turning in "go fetch that go kill that" quests. That's where exploration comes in and entertains.

The Fallout franchises have always been about a couple things. Freedom to design your character how you please. Careful inventory management. Exploring a desolate wasteland (you were dubbed the lone wanderer after all). Talking to people, sometimes resulting in funny dialogue sometimes serious. And killing lots of dudes and horrific mutated monsters. FO3 had all of the above. FONV has all of the above except proper exploration. That's all, it's that simple. Calling New Vegas linear isn't an insult and shouldn't be taken like one like people are; it's just a truth. The world (not story!) is linear, you are guided down a path that only forks out at the end of the game (small help it does by then). There are lots of linear games out there that are a lot of fun, new vegas is one of them.

Sorry, but the more this thread grows I see people say more and more offensive and unnecessary things, the more I wonder why I bothered to start the thread at all.

You can discuss whether you like or hate the game, but please stop bashing others or saying things like how people "baffle" you or how they want these ridiculous extremes like being "spoon fed" or wanting no challenge, God mode, etc. It's just flame for the fire and serves no positive purpose.

This was a good post, among many. I cannot compare anything directly to Oblivion because I never played it. However what I said in my post stands: You are told this is the way to go to complete the quests in the order in which we wrote them. That clearly follows the example in which I used it and the generally accepted definition of linear - a series of events in which one follows another one directly. We can change the nature of the argument and say that because you can sprint past Giant Radscorpions at level two to get over by Helios 1 that that was an "intended route" and it's all super open options from the start, but I'm more inclined to disagree. Same with sneaking past Deathclaws, Cazadors, Giant Radscorpions or the Supermutants/Nightkin that were placed there quite clearly to deter the player from walking straight north, killing Benny and auto-completing the main-story quests south and south east. Just because you can stealthboy or otherwise finagle your way past them, I'm not so sure anyone can argue this was an intended path since I'm willing to say most of what you'll run into beyond that is beyond your level anyway. I'm not saying it's not fun an exciting, because it sounds like it can be, I'm saying I don't think skipping a whole portion of the main quest by going through the "employees only" door is exactly a shining example of a non-linear questline.

Linear may be deemed harsh, but it depends on the connotation. I don't want to use it in a negative way, necessarily, but I can understand how some players may feel that they are told "Option A: this is the next step, go there or die horribly" when option B is to face all four of the top-tier creatures in the game at level 1. I'm not going to argue other game plots, or movie plots or whatever - I would just like to clarify why some people feel this game is more linear than the previous iteration, and why they could be on to something. This brings us back to the exact title of the thread: "Fallout New Vegas seems more Linear than FO3."

All that said, I'm on my second playthrough and having a blast. Beyond any talk of linear or non-linear the story is great and great fun. I wouldn't be here typing long posts about it if it wasn't.

I think your problem is that you see something in Fallout 3, and believe that those things are what Fallout games are actually about. You're quite wrong. In Fallout 1, I went into a cave very early in the game and found a Deathclaw. Guess what? It killed me several times. RPG's are about overcoming adversity, especially Fallout. What people, including you seem to miss is that Fallout 3 was a Sandbox game, with some RPG elements, a post Apocalyptic GTA if you will. There is a distinct difference between a sandbox game and an RPG.

Being able to run everywhere instantly does not make an RPG.

Wow, you mean you'd stubbornly bang your head against a brick wall if it was in the way of the direction you want to go? You wouldn't like just go the easy way the devs wanted you to go before it turned into the situation your going to great lengths to describe?



Your playing the wrong game then, it's is a story driven experience first pointless enemy grinder third....



Ok I agree with you on the Character, Management, dialogue, and only partially on the "exploration" bit (It depends on how you use it. Some seem to use it as "wander around aimlessly looting stuff" However what the Hell Fallout 1 and 2 aren't Fallout anymore you have to start on Fallout 3 that arguably the most detached from the core gameplay as the hated BoS? I would definitely say the stick to which the series should be judged would be the first game in the series don't you think?

Edit: Exactly Stabs, I had plenty of times I got a random encounter in the originals that was suicide at the beginning few levels.

I see things differently. I look at the past Fallout games and see how old they are. And how old I am now, having been a kid when I played them. I think that games should change over time, not stay the same for fear of being different. I really don't think that the more freedom a player has the worse the experience, because the experience is directly in your control. Want the main quest now, or later? You decide. Enjoy the game for 80+ hours exploring, or just plow through it in 3 days and be bored until the next thing on the block comes out. The game has all of the elements of the past game. If it's not supposed to be a sandbox RPG, I feel like I've been fooled into thinking it would be. Fallout 1 and 2 were.

Also, Fallout 1 AND 2 never put 5+ deathclaws in your path 100% of the time. The games had random battles, you could just quicksave out of a bad situation. You could literally run from the weakest part of the game to the strongest with relative patience and ease. I believe there's a speedrun on youtube of someone beating Fallout 2 in 13 minutes.

In FONV which is a modern game, you can't just quickload those deathclaws away. They run faster than you and you can't enter a gray area on the screen to escape them. They're a wall. You CAN get past them, but at level 5 you're going to use all of your stimpaks doing it, and you're going to be hard pressed to fight any of the challenges beyond the wall, because there are more walls beyond it. You're simply not supposed to be there yet.

It isn't? So they can't be further away, they have to be 236.4 meters away from the southwest quadrant to be satisfactory to me? No, I simply wish they had placed them somewhere "farther away", there are really quite a few options. Out by that crashed plane in the lake bed east of Mojave Outpost for one of a hundred if you need an example.

I understand the Deathclaws usage in placement just fine even if I'd have preferred something a little different. It is what it is though, it's not world-shattering and as I've said before I love the game anyway. I certainly can't complain that the reason for the Deathlcaws and other various tough monsters being there don't make sense, because they do, so it's easy enough to look past.

You are right. Games are not generally about frustrating the player with insane difficulty, but most games offer some sort of challenge at least. That's not even the point of this thread however.

Fallout: New Vegas isn't linear. That's the only point I've been trying to make (I don't speak for others though). It's guided for maybe the first third of the main quest and then you're free to do whatever your heart desires. There are places to explore, things to do, people to kill, and weapons to lock and load throughout the entire Mojave Wasteland... Yet people stick to the claim that the game is linear because you are guided, not forced, in a direction south in the beginning of the game. The mischaracterization of the game just frustrates me.

Your lumping of the opposition into a group described as intolerant and/or ignorant is in itself offensive. There are those on both sides of the board that gravitate towards the extremes and choose to illustrate their views in offensive manners but not everyone who disagrees with you is that way. I'm not some power gamer or COD/Halo fanatic that desires nothing more than a nosebleed inducing challenge in every game I play (just like most others who agree with my views aren't). It seems however that I'm unable to praise the game I enjoy without being labled as some rabid fan who lashes out with no remorse. I can't state a logical and well thought out viewpoint without being called an 'interplay [censored]'...

Fallout: New Vegas delivers on freedom, exploration, challenge, and story in my eyes... As well as many others. Call me whatever choose for seeing the game for what it was designed to be. Same for me defending it.

I have to say.....yes, I never died in FO3, not once in combat....I only die when I try to get to the ground from the Tenpenny balcony

Just wanna get that out of the way :angel:

Not at all, New Vegas is full of road blocks. Those deathclaws are only one. There are also cazardors (sp) and giant scorpion spawns all over the place. Deathtraps for low level characters. Until you've been "spoon-fed" the main quest for the 3rd time in a row... you can't easily take those things on.

You don't sound like you've experienced what I have with the game, and until you do you really won't understand. You probably haven't explored off the beaten path for very long. :banghead: <- silly for fun

Edit: forgot to mention invisible walls. FO3's rubbles in the DC area aren't comparable, the DC area was a tiny part of the lower right side of the map.. FONV's walls are all over the entire main map.

I don't think easy is fun. I don't think Call of Duty World at War on Veteran is fun either. I enjoy challenges and that maybe due to the lifestyle i live. I enjoy camping, hiking, rock climbing, skiing, (never got good at snowboarding) etc. So I think cakewalks are boring. A challenge forces you to think and react to change the way you repeatedly approach a problem.

Fallout was a slight challenge but was enjoyable. It was a bit on the easy side for sure. I did die, but I never got stuck on any part.
Oblivion was where the scaling was the worst I beat the game at level 3 I think. I just never slept and spent my point and every enemy was level 3, so me with a steel sword I stole, sliced through the entire storyline.

Fallout New Vegas does use some slight and smaller scaling tactics especially with weapons, but I really enjoy what they did here. I like that I can see a giant rad scorpion at the start of the game and avoid that spot. Its nice to know I wont be able to kill everything I come across, after I die once and reload. I am more cautious in Fallout and have to devise plans and traps to survive. I use the chems to my advantage. I still am a bit heavy on stimpacks (playing normal on hardcoe) but I play a stealthy character approach.

I am not invalidating your opinion just posting my findings and how I am enjoying the game.

EDIT

This is my 3rd play though. And I did ignore the mainquest there are plenty of other quests to do for experience. I had to ignore areas, sure but I was able to also find new areas to explore in the process. I am currently level 15 in my 3rd play though and I am now getting to the point where I can handle Giant Rads and Cazadores. I liked that if I walked around like I owned the wasteland it, instead, owned me. Ive actually done 3 quests. Just checked. Ive gotten my experience killing what Ive come across and opening locks and computers. I also took down a couple giant rads earlier in my career, but careful use of mines and stealth. I was broke, but hell I was like level 7, I shouldn't be a demi god quite yet.

I just walked from Goodsprings to New Vegas, and didn't fight one Deathclaw. Seriously.

If I had Fraps I'd make a video. Maybe I'll just video it with my phone and put it on youtube.