Well, yeah. That's exactly what I said. I was referring to the 'prettiness' factor, nothing else. Both FO3 and NV had to use the same engine, so both looked old and uglier than Skyrim's brand new sportster engine.

Knew full well you were being sarcastic, my good man. But it was snide sarcasm pointed directly at me, hence my reply. There's good humored sarcasm, and there's... other kinds. I do know the difference. But enough of that, back to discussing the topic.

Screw New Vegas, if they could get the guys that wrote Mask of the Betrayer to write the expansion/next elderscrolls game i could die happy.
Best rpg nobody played.

Yes, they should do that.

That was Obsidian.

I'm know, what i don't know is if the same writers still work there
Maby i should've worded it better but it's late over here

Wasn't it Dietz, I think that's the guys name that wrote Mask Of The Betrayer and singlehandly saved Neverwinter Nights 2 from being mediocore.

Because I have an imagination, and the rest happens under the hood and intuitively through gameplay and perks.

Honestly, the stupid arguments that this board generates. I love both FNV and Skyrim. I guess that makes me a lover of both mindless nature sims and ZOMG BEST RPG EVAH games. Whatever. It causes less stress in my life not to sweat the labels.

I heard Oscuro the creator of OOO was part of the NV team. If so, I'm not surprise why many folks think NV had better rpg elements. Oscuro was the first modder that "saved' Oblivion from being an arcade game.

Wikipedia: "Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer (also referred to as NWN2:MotB or MotB) is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game developed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_Entertainment and published by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari."

Hah. gotta love it.

No thanks, I'd like to stay away from old, outdated RPG mechanics. We don't need numbers and stats to play, enjoy and roleplay in Skyrim.

Eh. I play TES for Bethesda's TES. New Vegas was a good game, don't get me wrong. I just think that with a few more tweaks and some awesome DLC, Skyrim may yet live up to Oblivion.

Give Josh Sawyer and co. credit too.
As I've said and others have said, New Vegas has another nice treat: BALANCE.

There is no "ok I got Umbra and Daedric armor, I have the best gear now." No, with each character you have to pick up the unique weaponry, play around with it a bit, think, and realize if the weapon's stats compliment your player's stats well or not. This is the work of Josh Sawyer and co.

And the RPG elements, such as the simple fact that dialog choices actually have meaning (90% of the time, if presented with three dialog choices, all three give different results, unlike Skyrim where you could yell "PINEAPPLE!1!" at the whiterun guards when you first go there and they'd still let you in) and how often stats are incorporated into dialog and actions (medicine to convince people you're a doctor, science to reprogram a terminal, explosives to teach people about their use) are products of Josh Sawyer.

Josh Sawyer did a presentation on what makes a good RPG and it's actually quite good, and outlines a lot of points that have actually been brought up in this thread, such as how developers should cater to theoretical RPG character types when designing the game (think of a variety of examples, use them as a way to outline diversity in dialog and such) and how NPCs should react to as much as possible. Though yeah, more on topic, I think Skyrim is more desperately in need of writers than anything, so if I had to pick one part of Obsidian's team to steal, it'd probably be Avellone and the writers of Obsidian.

I think I have to agree with Longknife.. He has it spot on (imo) Bethesda just cant make a actual RPG its just not their formula.. I think the genre that gamesas games fit in... is "Open world Dungeon crawler with dialog" I am a Fallout 1+2 fan.. but when I played Fallout 3 i thought it was awesome... then when I stopped playing it and replayed FO 1+2 a year later i realized how bad it was for a Fallout game. As I think about gamesas games.. it seems to me to be a "Dungeon and Dragons campaign without the dungeon master" there is no one to say that you cant do this "quest" or use this "item" because of your character class.. there's no character definition.. because you can do physically every thing.. Skyrim for example.. you don't have character class's... you can max out everything become the god of death and life... in the original Fallout's your tag skills went up 3% until 100% then it went up by 2% per skill points "i might be wrong on the numbers" your un-taged skills all went up by 1%. The perks you chose helped define what character you were. None of it showed in Fallout 3 "which had a horrible perk system" I mean come on the perk Almost Perfect... you could get 10 in everything...it all comes down to " here we made this world were you can do EVERYTHING with no consequences!"

Look, if its falloutNV + skyrim, it can end up like this:

well structured quest and interesting storyline + awesome skyrim graphics and some features = win

BUT lets hope it doesnt end like this:

Buggy crappy game + glitches, baskethead man, backwards dragon, boring questlines, reptitive gameplay, killxgetygotoZ

you figure your choice

That is the crux of the problem. Beth can make a sandwich but not the sandwich that we need or want. It's like instead of it being a Ham and Cheese Sandwich, it's just Ham but with Chocolate instead of cheese. It's not terrible but it's not what we expect with a sandwich or with an RPG. Not to mention it causes problems like bad taste.

Broken Steel ruined Fallout 3 but I'll save that for another time.

Two Worlds is in the same ball park as TES. Albiet, Two Worlds is like that crappy baseball team that is always in last place, and TES is the world series champ.
FalloutNV is basically a huge total conversion compared to Fallout 3. The only real difference is it was an official project, and had enough content to be sold as a stand-alone game and for a full game's price.

I completely agree that FalloutNV was better then Fallout3, but think of who worked on it. We are talking some of the original people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2 back in the day.

That being said, and like others have said, FalloutNV cant hold a torch to Fallout3's exploration. The world design was just so much better, which made the game interesting to explore, which is what BethesdaGS is aiming for. Obsidian aims for story.

If anything, however unlikely, it would be interesting if BethGS made a game world, and Obsidian filled in the quests and story. Though i wouldn't want it to be Fallout or TES related.

New Vegas was a fun little game good for a single playthrough. But, the entire world is too wrapped up in 'the big story' to make replay appealing. How do you avoid 'the big story' in subsequent plays? All in all, replaying New Vegas has the feel of being stuck in the movie Groundhog Day.

Overall, I prefer the setting focused design of BGS titles that feature a wonderful place to explore full of various stories over heavily story focused titles where the world's only purpose is to provide the setting for a 'big story'.

There are three games left on my computer, DA:O, FNV and Skyrim. For me, FNV is a pretty good shooter based RPG—minus the DLC’s, though it seems rather short in play time. As far as Skyrim is concerned while I have been playing it a lot, well over 500 hours-- I have never finished a game, based on the negative feedback of the main and final quest. Moreover, I have never been past level twenty. I just keep restarting the same game with the same character. The only thing that keeps me playing is the awesome eye candy thanks to modders like Caliente. Incidentally, as for traveling the open world I fast travel everywhere I go, more often than not.

I still think....

Todd Howard and Josh Sawyer. Both have made presentations on how to make a game. Don't mean to be lazy (too preoccupied right now to look them up myself), but compare and contrast them. Sawyer offers a copy of his most recent presentation for free on his blog, Todd's are video presentations that can be found on Youtube. The differences are very noticeable.
Sawyer will make a statement (in a presentation about what makes an RPG an RPG and how to help support development of various characters without taking away character freedom) about how all choices should actually matter and how he told his team while they were developing New Vegas that he doesn't want to see ANY dialog options offered for the player to use that have nothing unique about them in the way the NPCs react to it. He also recommended that developers think up a couple potential roleplaying characters that might be common among players (think The Man With No Name from the spaghetti western movies was a character they tried to make playable for New Vegas via dialog, as an example) and do their best to provide players with tools that allow them to actually make those characters. Sawyer presents a systematic formula on how to go about creating an RPG, step-by-step, from the dialog to the quest branches to the game endings.
Todd Howard on the other hand just makes broad statements about player freedom and how anyone should be able to do whatever they want and enjoy a game. I don't recall him ever really presenting a structure or a plan (save maybe that little diagram about difficulty and player frustration), but rather he spends his speeches arguing in favor of his philosophy of player freedom and games are art and so on.

To me, Todd Howard just focuses on a broad idea with no real plan, whereas Sawyer focuses on a tiny detail and builds up around it with a plan and structure, trying to capture the element of that tiny detail within the whole game on a large scale. Todd Howard seems like a more creative thinker whereas Sawyer is more of a logical one. The result is Todd provides games with intros that some players like because they're free to ignore the main quest without people constantly reminding them of their intended role (the canon role) whereas Sawyer's game makes your character encompass the main quest somehow because everything in the world extends from it in some way. Whereas Sawyer provides players with weapon balancing that makes each weapon and character unique because he actually sits down and does the calculations involved to provide such balance, Todd can't seem to focus and the result is there's total imbalance without fail, with every Bethesda title having a notable god tier and trash tier.

Overall, there's been debate as to what makes an RPG, and who am I to judge? Some people for example would prefer FO3 over FO:NV as an RPG simply because FO3's main quest gives you a great option to be a nobody and ignore the main quest completely whereas FO:NV is gonna make you be a Courier and it's gonna make you get involved with the politics. (though in fairness, this also ties into a moral lesson the game tries to get across) However, I don't really know anyone who would question the RPG elements of New Vegas, whereas plenty would question the RPG elements of Skyrim.

And why? Because again, Bethesda's philosophy about player freedom. When the player says "Bethesda, I wanna pick this master lock for the unique weapon even though I'm a barbarian that communicates by grunting" and Bethesda says "Sure, no problem!" When the player says "Obsidian, I wanna hack this terminal so I can get the code for free .308 rounds, even though I'm a an INT 1 character that solves all his problems by smashing them," Obsidian answers "lolno."
The result of Bethesda's philosophy is that there's no player recognition. They don't want to break your immersion by accidently calling you something you're not, the result being you have to imagine people recognize you. The result is there's no limitation, and literally anyone can do anything, from picking pockets to cracking skulls. The result is there's no consequences for your actions unless YOU actively choose to take them.
As I said, some people may prefer this, but of course, it is hard to call it a role-playing game when, to the extent that I'm an honorable barbarian in Skyrim, I'm an honorable barbarian in Goldeneye64. Or any other game really...

While I agree that NV is a better RPG than Skyrim, I certainly don't want another company having their go with TES series.

I've enjoyed both studio's work at different points in my gaming career and basically leave it at that.

In a perfect world, Obsidian would do the writing, Bethesda would do the world; however, both studios have different visions and after Skyrim, I'd wager to say different audiences as well.

Voice-acting a huge Beth world with Obsidian quality dialogue would cost a ton, and then they lose their pick-up-and-play crowd.

There's many more reasons, but I don't feel like getting into them right now.

I played Skyrim for about 400 hours, had a good time, but the replay is barely there, entirely due to mechanics and other reasons Longknife covered. I continue to play NV 1 1/2 years after release because there's inevitably *some* path or quest that encourages replay. That's somewhat evident in MW/OB but Skyrim just wasn't enough role-play.

Let Obsidian write the story and quests and NPCs, and let Beth keep doing the lore and world building. You do that....and that will be the last game I ever play.

One, they accepted that agreement, they knew what they were getting themselves into. It's not Bethesda's fault that they missed the mark by 1 point.

Also, that makes Beth look worse than they are. Obsidian still got paid, it was just a straight amount and they got no continued royalties. But Obsidian used a series and content that Bethesda now owns the rights too, which usually results in them getting the shorter end of the stick. This is commonplace in business. That article makes Bethesda look like mischevious thieving bastards, and they really aren't.

Ok... because this thread had me in nostalgia mode, I decided to continue my New Vegas run tonight. I can't believe that anyone would say that it's a better game than Skyrim. Granted, I like New Vegas, but damn is it buggy, the graphics are pretty outdated, the character movements are terrible, the voice acting isn't great, the dialogue menus are a pain in the butt (having to forward through dialogue then find/click "Goodbye"), etc. I just got through "trying" to do that quest where you save that rancher's kid from the White Glove Society and I had to reload saves 5 times because it was so bugged. Finally, I got it to work they way I wanted to. I had the replacement meal cooked, released him from the freezer, brought him out to the meal, humiliated Mortimer, walking through what seemed like hundreds of load portals on the way, then went out to bring kiddo to his daddy. So, I finally bring him to dad and dad doesn't recognize him. I don't get my reward. I'm walking around him, jumping up and down on the bar, nothing, same dialogue options... I was pissed. I wasted about an hour and half on a buggy mission when I could have been looting in Skyrim.

Honestly, it was a good experiment for me. Skyrim is way better and I, unfornately, don't think I'll be heading back to New Vegas anytime soon... if at all. Deus Ex is in the mail anyway.

Edit: I vented my frustration by killing each and every person at the Lux Casino, by the way... including that stupid rancher's son who kept crouching around like an idiot instead of recoginzing that I just saved his butt from becoming steak and led him to his father... who didn't recognize him either!

Granted, NV is far from perfection and bug/crash-free -- that one quest (admittedly not good, by your own opinion) is about as deep as 75% of any Skyrim quests. "Go Here, Kill X" ad naseum with pretty graphics certainly does not exemplify superior gameplay.