First of all, I'm quite new to the Fallout universe. F:NV was my first fallout game. But I'm already fully into the fallout universe, I'm getting F3 in a week or two.
I played trough quite many playtroughs. And now I'm keeping asking myself: Is the map too small? I tried some roleplaying, I wanted to have a wasteland survivor kind of guy. And I'm not sure if the wasteland is big enough. There are towns and cities on almost every corner, I wish there was a huge, townless wasteland space in addition to the current map. What do you think?

BTW, is the F3 map bigger? How big is the wasteland?

Fallout 3 has less settlements, and IMO is a more enjoyable game to explore (though I find New Vegas better in the story/quests department). I don't know if it's actually bigger than New Vegas, it could be.

It sounds like you would enjoy Fallout 3.

I wouldn't really say the FO3 map is bigger , but there is definitely more to explore .

I wouldn't say it's bigger, in terms of scale, I'd say NV is smaller actually. D.C. is one city, but New Vegas takes place in a region of 1 metropolitan area and 3 smaller towns (Pre-War I mean).

My initial impression when first seeing the NV map in-game for the first time was 'that's all there is??' anyways lol. I felt F3 was bigger when playing it before NV, but I have not played F3 in a very long to give them a fair comparison.

It might have more to do with there being more locations/signs of civilation to discover and see in NV (towns,caves,vaults,etc) and them being fairly close together. It just seems a bit cluttered in comparison to F3, giving the illusion of being smaller I guess. They're probably about the same size if you were to put them side by side.

Yes, the map is too small. It tried to cover too much territory in too small a space. That meant too much down scaling. Things were too compressed and settlements had to be smaller due to lack of space. I would have liked to see the map at least 4x the size, covering the same content.

Yes it is. Basicly, the map in New Vegas shows an extra 1/5 of the map, that you can't even access.

Jacobstown is the furthest area you can venture to out west, which is saying something seeing as it shows you TONS of area beyond that. The top of the map stops at the Northern Passage, the entrance to Honest Hearts. Caeser's Island is the furthest you can go East, and a lot of the area is taken over from the river, which is stupid.
You seriously can't access 1/5 of the map.
EDIT: The trading post south of Nipton is as far south as you can go.

Like many others, I was disappointed with the NV map.

The first time I wrote about here on the forum somebody mentioned the developer did something to prove the NV map itself is just as big as FO3 (tiles or something). That may be true, but the invisible walls are really frustrating. It's almost like they have invisible fences bordering each side of the map that make almost a 1/3 of the total map inaccessible. So maybe technically the total size is equal but in fact it's not because virtually all of the FO3 map is accessible.

Well, it just depends on how you play. It's a small map if you explore it running everywhere and fast traveling around to find everything, but when you make every single adventure into an excursion, forbid fast travel, and only explore during the day whenever possible, than everything goes much slower and realistically, creating the illusion of the map being larger than it is. You can make it almost halfway up in levels without leaving the southeastern corner if you pace yourself fluidly enough.

Still, this wouldn't be necessary if it weren't for New Vegas having an inflated map with quite a bit of inaccessible nothing and boring fast travel points that you would never want to travel to.