And in FNV its either..

a ) Never coming.
b ) Blocked off by an invisible wall.

..when it comes to getting off the road and checking out the surroundings.

FNV is like everything has been pulled in closer to the centre leaving a lot of the sides unused. If theres nothing out there its bad. Its essentially no content because there is no reason to ever go there.

Well... Its not content, and its walled off. (players are not missing anything)

I have other games where you can no-clip into areas that were excluded, and find unfinished parts... but its not part of the game. :shrug:

***Its a different story say... in Oblivion where you can climb atop the walls of the Tamriel city and see that the spire has no base and floats above a 4' lake. That is in the game and not off limits to the vanilla PC. (same thing if you climb over the Arena wall :shrug:)

Yeah, no real way to replicate that given the size of the map though, unfortunately.

I need to get that mod to get rid of invisible walls, they're awful.

I kinda wish they had just left the massive empty areas of the map out, tbh.

Hmm, map... Cut off at east and west... What about Oblivions map which had the whole south-western part cut off? Or the north-west/east edges which was rounded off?
I love the map.
It actually seems bigger than Fallout 3 did, most places feel right and it has one hell of a lot more things to do in it.
Fallout 3 just had random dungeon, random dungeon, random dungeon, random encounter, random dungeon...
I think the map gives an illusion that the game-world is smaller than it actually is.
But try walking from location to another one. then look at the map and see how far you've walked, then look at the rest of the map.
It ain't small.
And I think it's good that it's emptier than FO3.
FO3 just felt like it wanted to shove locations down my throat.

I love the way the scale feels in NV. The POIs radiate around Vegas which is realistic, the distances between POIs are significant enough to feel like one really is wandering the deserts of Nevada, and the POIs are large enough to feel important. If anything Fallout 3 felt too claustrophobic considering it was supposed to be representative of a wasteland nowhere near as stable as the west coast.

If there's a problem it's that Obsidian was forced to design a gameworld the way Bethesda would design a gameworld...Where Bethesda would have designed the gameworld in a way that balanced out the locations of the POIs, Obsidian allowed the geography and the location to dictate the way they designed the POIs. I much prefer Obsidian's design...sometimes the wasteland really IS a wasteland, just as it's supposed to be.

This isnt supposed to be fallout 3 THIS IS A DIFFERENT GAME and how do toy cars, nuka cola, and teddy bears make this game a copy of fallout 3? have you ever heard of fallout 1 or 2? this game is supposed to be more like those games.

My vote is for this, this should be a poll.

Yes, that's a key point. It's hard to define exactly what kind of 'empty' you mean. In my opinion, F3 was more 'empty' because of the lack of frequent town populations.

Although I will agree Bethesda are better at creating a sandbox environment.

Ok well I am a "sub-brick" when it comes to Nevada but could it be that Nevada is just as void in real life as it is in the game. I just couldn't imagine their being any more big cities after Las Vegas, Boulder City, Reno, and Henderson.

Also P.S. I feel as though the game is not void at all. It my just feel different that you can't find a plasma rifle in the middle of a kitchen, in the middle of nowhere.

I'd say this:

The map is great so far. I've played nearly 20 hours. There are stretches that make it seem vast and empty. I like that. I like that there are more populated areas than there were in FO3; Bethesda kinda dropped the ball on making enough population centers in FO3. However, there are far too many buildings I cannot get into.

The lack of random encounters makes the vastness boring. I want the game to be fun. It's not whether the game is more like the originals or FO3. I don't really care whether it's more Obsidian or more Beth in flavor. What I want is FUN. So that's not so fun. In fact, there is hardly any combat either. So nothing much happens for long, long periods of time. That is just too much nothing in a game. And I don't want to hear about how it's supposed to be a Wasteland. It's a game. Stuff is supposed to be happening. Walking around looking at scenery doesn't really make much of a game.

I think the companions are problematic and not very good. It's great that they have stories and more dialogue, something they didn't have in FO3, but did in the earlier games, but it's not executed especially well. They are OP in combat and drop down unconscious every time I turn around. As a lover of companions they are making me nutz.

I'm also finding too many of the quests to be fetch and carry in nature. There has only been one so far that I have completely loved. That's too bad. I expected the writing to be better than it has been. All of the characters seem very similar to me. There isn't much individuality. I want more colorful characters that are more memorable. Everyone is pretty bland. I'm waiting for more excitement. It's been fine so far, but it hasn't knocked my socks off.

I'm willing to say that I need to be patient and I will grow to love it. Maybe in another 40 hours I will have discovered that secret and it will enchant me.

There is much more stuff and things to do in New Vegas, but things seem less detailed

I'm conflicted about the map. It annoys me that they even included the areas that you cannot even get to on the map. Why couldn't they have cut it off? It's kind of a tease. I wish they just filled those areas with generic mountain/desert areas with random creature and raider spawns, because that would be better than nothing. Apart from that, I like that the encounters aren't as frequent. I like that more attention was put towards towns, characters, and quests. This game is far superior to Fallout 3, for me.

I'd say that the geometry looks less detailed (but there looks to be more of it... so that would explain it).

No. FNV has 400 (I haven't counted) marked locations. And a some of them are just crap, with little to justify a marked location other than the world builders need to fill an in-game map. Like the pass heading west marked Canyon Wreckage. The pass is blocked off and goes nowhere. Or the Coyote Den on the railroad north of Nipton. A hollow in the rocks with a dead bright follower. When I came past it didn't even have coyote.

On the bright side, there's a heck of a lot of space and essentially unused marked locations for mod makers to make good use off in a way they couldn't with FO3.

I agree. I'm 22 hrs in and have just barely begun to head down the road out of Novac, so I'd say I've taken my time. The environment is pretty bland. Some discover-able locations have nothing in them, like the Race Track and the Dry Lake places (unless I missed something?). Also, you see cool things off in the distance sometimes and run up to it just to discover there's nothing to be found or to see. Like when I saw a large blue airplane that had crashed in the dirt, went up to it, circled it, walked away puzzled that there was nothing around it. I know if everything had loot/monsters near it things would get predictable, but FO3 seemed to do it all a bit better.

Factually and Technically speaking, you are wrong. This game is alot more dense in terms of locations and has more NPC's.


Atmospherically? Thats opinion. I feel its fuller and richer.

I want this to be more of a discussion, rather than empty numbers.


Anyways, I'm not sure if I voiced what I meant properly. ghoulsrpeople2's post was exactly what I was trying to say. Yes, there are more cities. Yes, there are more quests. Yes, there are more NPC's with more voice acting and unique backstories. But all this uniqueness only brings out the problems in the game. I'm wandering in the middle of nowhere. Supplies are running low and I'm almost dead. I see a house on an outcropping of rocks. Making my way over there, I'm greeted by a man with an extensive backstory and many conversation directions. But this is where it ends.

That's great that Obsidian has put more "lore" in the game. But if someone's rambling on for 10 minutes about a convoluted string of events, I half expect a quest to come out of it. But it almost never does. Maybe I've just been spoiled, and I realize that not everyone will have something that needs doing. But, to me, this adds to the emptiness of the game.

One of my favorite things to do in Fallout 3 was to explore all the little nooks and crannies. There would always be something, whether it be a note, a body and gun positioned strategically to show a struggle of some sort, or some Naughty Nightwear with an unmarked quest associated with it. There's very little of this in NV. There's an overabundance of real side missions, but almost no little details that really add to the atmosphere and encourage exploring.

This.

I'm also finding a lack of locations with much to explore about them or much to find in them. I just want a good, old fashioned dungeon crawl every once in a while.

I've played for a good 30 hours now and I have to completely disagree with you. The farther you get into the game the more things start to open up and you'll find places with tons of loot! In my book, New Vegas is the complete opposite of empty.

I've done around six hours and I have so far found it pleasent at the moment. Only thing I have encountered which annoyed me was the invisible walls, one of the most aggrevating things in video games today.

But regarding OP, I can't say I have found it empty.. YET.

comparing this to fallout 3 there is one thing that makes this far better than 3 IMHO.

Everywhere I turn there's something interesting. Quests are more varied and just more of them. Just today I did a couple of quests around Helios and RETCONN and had a freaking blasts there's more choices to make within a given quests and there's just more to do.
Unlike in 3 where I could spend hours looking for something to and just end up killing things.... killing things is fun what was i doing it for?

It's very uneven. You have buildings like the Novac town hall which have huge and intricate interiors. Or the massive interior of the Bison Hotel in Primm. Then you have things like the NCRCF Cell Blocks - which are completely lackluster. Change back and you have the massive interior of the Hoover Dam which is impressive, but feels empty and lifeless.

The same goes for the exterior map design. Compared to FO3, it feels a lot more boxed in. I think that's because it's very much a "you must go counter-clockwise around the map or die horribly". They need to expand the borders and get rid of any invisible walls that box the interior portion of the map. Then let us go west past Mohave Outpost, east into Caesar's lands, maybe north to Utah in DLCs without doing magical "zoning" tricks like was done with Point Lookout. Some areas are wonderfully designed. Goodsprings feels like an actual small town but Boulder City was a huge let down.

On the other hand - with all the boarded up buildings - a project for FO:NV like the DC Interiors project was for FO:3 is going to be very welcome. There are dozens of houses out there that can have interiors added. Not to mention a multitude of train tunnels, drainage ditches and the like.

I remember playing "Lands of Lore 3", and I would walk up to places that looked like they could have something hidden there ~and it was.

Everywhere they could stash a few coins or some little thing... It made finding stuff a bore after a while (for me anyway). In Fallout the crates and boxes , dressers and desks were all empty unless they were isolated or they were in someone's house ~After all, the land had been picked clean for decades, and it would make no sense to find medical supplies in an obvious first aid case.

I do prefer it to be less of a looters paradise, and more of a reasonably good depiction of what it is representing itself as. That's not to say that it should not have secrets, or even troves of stuff hidden away, but these places should be WELL hidden IMO, (and often hard or dangerous to access even if you do know of them).

Well the thing is...

If we had Bethesda do the world design and Obsidian do the writing, we would have the perfect game* and there would be no need to ever buy another game. Thus, the video game industry would be destroyed.

That is why this will never happen

*That is, after all of the horrible, horrible, game breaking bugs had been patched.