I was not very impressed with the piked mountains of dirt. Sand creates mounds, but not peaks. A lot of the Mojave desert seems pastel yellow and sand is more of a flat brown with light flares of yellow. I liked the coloring of red rock canyon, but there isn't any rocks in the grand canyon. It is all clay, clay boulders, clay layers and sections.

The foliage or plant life in New Vegas... Is strange... What is a Mesquite Honey pod?. As soon as I saw it, I thought -- Someone must have barried some "Kraft Honey Mesquite barbeque sause and radiation took its course".
Mesquite is a wood -- Mesquite honey sause, is corn syrup with honey, vinegar, and other numerous spices. It is not a pod nor does it grow freely.......

Cacti grow in patches not sprouts of just one and two--here and there... A cactus patch can grow endlessly - It can consume an entire acre of land if it remains untouched.
Tobacco doesn't grow in deserts -- They grow in arid plains that have rain. It also looks a like wheat.

Other then that the map is not as big as, fallout 3. The image of the map, is but - the essential free area.. Is not even near as large.

A lot of the places in fallout 3, you could get what was once there... A forest fire consumed area/ or some lakes dried up.
In new vegas, it is all the same. There isn't any real idea of what happen in the New Vegas world, as far as the ecosystem goes... A petrified forest would been cool--with trees that are just all white and falling apart from lack of rain and a sense that a drout took place that made the place into a desert, would have been cool.
Some parts it just looks like a lot of effor was put into an area.. Like red rock... Then Ceasors legion camp looks like it was just tossed together...
Hoover Dam doesn't even really look like the actual Dam either.

The game is fun, it has all that same neat story behind it, but there is a lot of parts of the World of New Vegas, you can just tell people were either getting tired or just, got really lazy in making it.

Obviously they are forced to scale down, they can't have a map literally as large as Nevada. That's why the Dam doesn't look exactly right, and why Vegas isn't about fifty times larger.

Fallout 3's map actually wasn't bigger, the math has been done on that and the rectangle of usable land in New Vegas has more square 'feet'.

I agree that Cacti grow in patches, though I've lived in places with Cacti (Texas, mainly), and you will find a lot of lone cacti around. Still would have been cool to come across a bunch of massive patches of mutated Cacti, maybe some really big ones that are hollowed out and used as shelter? Maybe?

I kinda like the color scheme. I didn't at first, so much brown/yellow filter...but later I felt like it fit the mood of the game. It's mood color, not realism color. Dirty, depressing, somber, muted. I liked the occasional sand swirl in the air, too. I don't want it to be colorful and vivid when everything else about the game is kind of a downer (to me). What I didn't like was how in certain areas they used an almost purplish brown filter, like near the Dam. What was that about/supposed to represent?

Plants...eh...I just assumed they were supposed to be mutated, and because of that, anything goes. Perhaps there is no longer enough nutrition in available soil even for mutated cacti to spread out that much.

The grass effect I always turn off, so all I ever see is rocks and the occasional pick-a-plant. It makes the ground graphics feel a bit emptier, but I turn it off because I can't stand to see "grass" drawing itself into the game in the distance and even on max setting I can always still see that. Pet peeve of mine.

Maybe the limited engine is the one to blame

It wouldn't kill you to Google things once in a while.

http://nativeplantproject.tripod.com/honey_mesquite.htm There's your honey mesquite.

Also, it seems barrel cactus are capable of growing on their own. http://www.google.com.au/images?q=Barrel+cactus&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1280&bih=607
AND, coyote tobacco does grow in the desert. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotiana_attenuata

I kinda agree. But somehow, the game feels extremely different from fallout 3. I guess it's the tint.. I'll wait for a wasteland retex or NMC to make a super high detailed one...

Did I miss something? The Grand Canyon =/= Red Rock Canyon. Or am I mistaken?

Depends.
Is Grand Canyon to west of Vegas or south IRL?
I Don't know but I definitely don't think it's the grand canyon.

Crescent Canyon is not the Grand Canyon btw.

I'm a live and let live kinda guy, complain about what ever you want, thats partially what these forums are for...submitting your opinion...HEHE, but when I read the above I about died.
First off tobacco "does" grow in the desert, and "arid plains with rain" ? what the heck is that supposed to mean? that statement makes no sense at all, again HA HA.LMAO, and lastly I lived in North Carolina for 5 years when I was a kid, I picked tobacco for extra money and believe me a tobacco plant looks nothing like wheat.

Keep in mind House only stopped 68 of the 77 nuclear missiles headed for the Mojave area.

Coyote tobacco (nicotiana attenuata) can grow in a lot of different environments and at various elevations. It's also native to western North America. And it doesn't look like wheat. (I can't think of a tobacco plant that actually looks like wheat honestly.)

So all the rocks in http://www.americansouthwest.net/arizona/grand_canyon/moran3_l.html don't exist? How about http://www.americansouthwest.net/arizona/grand_canyon/hance-raft_l.html? :shrug: Guess you know as much about the Grand Canyon as you do about plant life in the region, eh?




Try http://www.world-guides.com/images/arizona_az/arizona_az_state_map.jpg.

Wouldn't 'arid plains with rain" include deserts? I mean, it does rain in the desert sometimes. And it is pretty arid...

As some have already posted do a search and alot of whats in the game is what you expect in this climate.

Also remember its NOT sand very little of this area has sand in it.. sand exists but its not sand as in a sahara its sand and dirt and that doesnt form dunes. I have lived in places like this and yes it DOES look exactly like it does in the game.. mostly from rainfall and rockfall.

Ah, thanks, don't know much of Usanian geography.

Nice post!

/sarcasm Yes apparently those rocks don't exist and the Grand Canyon moved west of Vegas during or shortly before the war to avoid being hit with nukes. /sarcasm

The map itself isn't smaller, but the city is.
I'm really bummed about that, because I preferred the urban areas in FO3 over the wastes.
When NV was announced I was expecting a bigass city with a small piece of desert around it. I was wrong.
NV is great either way though.

In case you didn't notice, the DC ruins in Fallout 3 was also mostly home to hostile super mutants and other types who just want to kill you, with only a few select locations that were inhabited by non-hostile people. By comparison, many parts of New Vegas have some form of non-hostile communities in them, though only the Strip itself actually seems to be in really good condition. Thus, DC may have been bigger because while it was an urban environment, most of it was a hostile environment to explore rather than an actual settlement in the game, because of that, I'd say they were able to make it larger.

But since I've not too familiar with the real life geography of the region New Vegas portrays, so I won't try to judge how accurate it is, but as a video game world, I'd say I'm fairly satisfied with it. Now, I agree with the criticisms that a lot of locations seem fairly generic and pointless, but the overall geography felt more varied than Fallout 3, which was nice. I think the fact that it actually looks like a place that could potentially support life, due to the presence of living plants, does a lot to make it more enjoyable to explore. It also feels like there's more places that are dramatically different from the surrounding wasteland. Places like the area around Jacobstown (I'd never have expected to see forested, snow capped mountains in a game with post nuclear desert wastelands, at least I wouldn't have if I hadn't already seen a screenshot of that region before playing the game.) or that vault with all the plants growing from it, I always get the numbers of vaults mixed up so I find it easier to remember them by some notable aspect of them rather than the numbers, unless it's a number that's easy to remember or one I hear about a lot like Vault 13. In Fallout 3, the only location that really made me feel like I had entered an entirely different environment from the rest of the game (Outside of places added by the DLC, anyway.) was Oasis, everything else was just some variation of drab brown.

I didn't like the unnatural orange tint that much, though. It was unrealistic, and I really didn't feel like it helped the atmosphere, and that's why I use a mod to get rid of it. Still, at least it's better than green like in Fallout 3.

Sand Dunes can peak. However what they are trying to represent are not sand Dunes, but a formation called Adobe. From a distance it looks like sand, even when standing on it it looks like sand. However it is basically a rock. Little to no vegetation will grow on it.

As for the Red Rock Canyons, I live in the SW US and there are a lot of Red Rock formations around me. They got the look and feel of a Red Rock canyon just right.

As for Vegetation, it looks real enough for game. If you want to get real picky about it, there is not enough diversity of plant life.

As for the monotony of the desert areas, well, it is pretty monotonous.