I'm not even sure what that means. When you end the game there are upwards of 200 different endings pertaining to each faction, NPC, town, companion, etc. You can wipe out entire towns of people. You can destroy the Brotherhood in the Mojave. You can help or wipeout just about every faction in the game. Hell, you can choose to screw everybody over and take New Vegas for yourself.

When the devs decide on a canon ending all that wont matter.You can pretend it is an alternate timeline if you would like.

I agree with everything you said except Scaling IMO its should be like in OOO/FCOM. The Scaling in Fallout: NV IMO made the game feel linear, made it feel similar to Oblivion scaling, and it was a cheap way to block the player from going to straight into Vegas.

Also I might be in the minority but I really loved "hardcoe mode".

The NCR good karma ending is likely the canon ending as in every FO prior to that the good karma ending that did the least damage to the world ended up being the canon ending. Also, there is probably never going to be a sequel to NV. FO4 is a Bethesda project, not Obsidian. Still don't see your point. Because the endings wouldn't be canon we should have a linear game with no choice as to the outcome? No thanks.

You can get right to Vegas by cutting cross country east with relative ease if you want (tag stealth and go at night). It defeats the purpose though as you are supposed to be following the person who shot you in the head. If you get right to Vegas and go to the Tops you'll find Benny there.

I also loved hardcoe mode.

fixed

Fallout 3 had a great "feel" and the gameworld and random occurances were better. But it wasn't a better "RPG". There were few moral choices of consequence, playing an evil character did not make sense AT ALL since you are given a background (a loving, sheltered upbringing by a very nurturing dad). You couldn't even join the fricken Enclave to rebel against dad and his project for abandoning you.

So much is broken in that game from an RPG perspective. Bethesda just can't write for sh**. Their strengths lie elswhere so I try to just concentrate on that.

Not even dialogue and voice acting? Moral choices within a quest? You really don't think New Vegas is stronger in those areas? I find that surprising frankly.


Actually I love Dragon Age ll (think I'm the only one?). Not a great RPG but I love it as a game. It's more about relationships and friendships than "epic" events. I can't get enough of it quite frankly.

"Illusion of choice"? Man, your just being pitiful now. Choices in NV have a massive effect on where you can go, what you can do, who can be with you and how the world reacts to you. Those are actual choices and consequences, something that doesn't exist in Skyrim. Little one word responses are indicative of the fact that you actually have nothing to say.

I agree about Player Dialogue and Companions. Were way better in New Vegas.

The landscape wasn't a problem for me because they didn't force much dungeon crawling on you like FO3 or TES games. They kept the dungeons small and varied which is fine by me. For me what made the landscape boring was not the desert itself. It was the lack of random occurances and such. The world got very empty quickly after you walk acrossed it a couple of times.

More is always better, there's no denying that. But i still disagree on a few of these, such as the perks. They are entirely different and can't even be compared. The perks in Skyrim represent your mastery of the skill. The power you actually gain compared to 0 in a skill in NV and 100 in a skill is very small, only doubled. Meaning I ended up using energy weapons at 18 skill and guns at 100, because the damn energy weapons did more damage.

And for companions, that's what they chose. Instead of adding 5 companions (pathetically little) they chose to add much, much more companions. That's a choice I'd have made myself if I was in their shoes.

As for scaling, there's definitely area based levels in Skyrim. You can't walk around every place in Skyrim as level 1 without being outmatched. In fallout new vegas, the game world because linear because of the cazadores, deathclaws, giant radscorpions and super leveled ghouls. I prefer a little more open, while at the same time having enemies that are clearly higher level than you in the world.

Take a breath.
I actually agree with you to an extent.
The fact remains Whatever you choose in the main quest ultimately wont matter.Unless you happen to choose the Dev approved canon ending.
So all you get to choose is what uni the bad guys wear

It's difficult to compare the two. New Vegas is very much a social RPG, while Skyrim is more traditional fantasy. New Vegas offers few quests, but they are for the most part very complex, with choice intimately defining them, and in cases completely altering their outcome. Skyrim offers far more content, but it's comparatively simple. New Vegas' skills were liberally applied to the social aspects of the game, while Skyrim's are applied to the world and to combat. Most of New Vegas skills are not primarily for combat, while Skyrim has very few that aren't. To be honest, when I think back or play New Vegas now, I compare it to Deus Ex: Human Revolution more than Oblivion or Skyrim. The two games share an open world structure and other common elements, but are two completely different types of RPG.

That said, I would like to see more of the social aspects in Skyrim. The application of speech and barter skills are disappointingly simplistic, the companions aren't interesting at all, and the world doesn't seem to notice at times that you are famous. A reputation-style system would have been nice and go a long ways towards making the social aspects of Skyrim more immersive.

One of the strengths of New Vegas was that most of the side quests also felt relevant to the main quest. Whether you followed House, the NCR or the Legion, at some point you had to meet and befriend or destroy the other factions. The Brotherhood, the Khans, the Boomers, the Three Families, even the Enclave remnants, they all got involved in the end, they all mattered in the fight. It made the world and its quests feel way more like a coherent, interconnected whole than Skyrim did, because in Skyrim everything is in its own little compartment.

New Vegas also did allow more branching in conversations and quests. While in Skyrim your only option usually is to ask about additional information on points mentioned over the last few sentences, New Vegas offered snarky retorts, reward haggling, bribes, threats, that actually changed the outcome of the conversation and allowed you to orient the quest toward a different resolution. In New Vegas, the overwhelming majority of the quests could branch towards not only two or three different ends, but two or three different means to reach these ends. In Skyrim, the overwhelming majority of quests follow a single path, and usually involve combat over any kind of stealth or trickery or negotiating.

There is also a lack of compelling characters. Oh, a lot of them have a veneer of being interesting, but they have little depth. No memorable villain to ever actually thwart anything the player does, no character development going on for any friend or foe. And why? Because all the time, these friends or foes appear to play their part for one or two quests and then get discarded. The companions offered are fine in that context, though. They each have enough of a somewhat unique personality to be on par with anyone else you meet. They do lack some functionality, however.

Finally, I have to give to Skyrim that its world design is the better one. The outdoors and dungeons and cities feel much more alive, functional, storied and compelling to explore than anything in New Vegas ever did. This is Bethesda's trademark, after all. I also think that with the way they handled skills, perks and scaling this time around, they finally nailed what they had been trying to do over the past installments, and it feels good. Game is great, game of the year material even. I'm just saying they need to polish quests and characters' interestingness, the whole choice thing, not only of where you go or what you do, but how you do it, for the next installment.

Saying "No" to Caesar results in him being pissed and him warning you to be very careful what you do next.
Saying "No" to Ulfric results in him saying OK, fair enough, you know where I am if you change your mind.

The impression left in NV is that you are a welp, pissing off a powerful guy.
The impression left in Skyrim is that he is a welp and you are the one with all the power.

It is subtle things like this that make NV years ahead in game design when compared to Skyrim. I'm not just talking about this one example, but the whole dialogue system in NV is so much stronger. It's a real shame that we ended up with a system that hasn't changed from previous ES games (Perhaps due to Ken Rolston having left). It didn't have to be a radical new design or be as deep as Planescape: Torment was. Just make actions have consequences. Saying no should mean no, not "I'll maybe do it later then, best if you kept it in my journal".


Edit: Forgot Ken's name

This is just my humble opinion, take it as you will.

When it comes to creating a game-world and platform Bethesda is the much better game-developer. They are better at creating worlds, design, and working with the game-engine to maximize the game experience.

Obsidian though really really really knows how to make a story. Even when New Vegas was probably one of the craziest buggy as hell games I have ever played I STILL loved the damn game because of the story. Character dialogue, quest story lines, journals, etc. Hell I remember spending hours in a dlc just to find all the individual parts to a story about a guy who did his best to save some kids from cannibals and eventually dies from cancer/old age. Those kids eventually grew generations later to become a pack of tribals in the game that help you and revere this man as their patron saint. Stuff like this is what so many rpgers LIVE for in games. It makes the game world seem so much more rich even without the fancy textures and world mapping.

Don't get me wrong I love skyrim (played over 100 hours and still plan on playing many many more hours) but I don't quite as attached because of how the quests really lack any form of story (or make sense). Also the deadric princes/princesses REALLY don't seem all that threatening as in oblivion. Small things like that ruin immersion for me.


And the biggest thing that the OP mentioned that I really really support is the introduction of a reputation system and faction system into the game. The fact that thalmor don't blast me on sight even after I burned down their embassy in storms of fire, ice, and lightening irks me. That and the fact that imperial soldiers don't try to destroy after I did many bad things (don't want to spoil) also REALLY irks me.

So yeah thats just my take on it.

God you're wrong. I've never sides with the NCR, either with the legion or with house. There was a lot bigger difference than the uniform, let me tell you.

Hopefully they don't repeat Skyrim's mistakes with fallout 4, so far new vegas had alot that skyrim would have benefitted from. Skyrim feels kinda stale to me despite the awesomeness of it.

So what is your solution, then? Create a purely linear story? I prefer choices in my games.

Those little things, the endless backstories, are what make RPGs good in my opinion. The amount of thought put into even a side quest like Democracy Inaction in Vault 11 is awesome. I mean, it's easy to never even go there in the main game. I also especially love how the DLC tied into so many people who you'd heard about in the game but had yet to see.

Choices matter in TES. So does customization and making your character as you want them. Skyrim allows some of that but not to the extent of Oblivion and Morrowind.

I would like some more factions and some should have consequences, but they all should have some impact on the game world.

I Strongly Disagree with the scaling being better then Skyrim, easily the worst decision made when designing New Vegas. A system like Fallout 3/Skyrim would've been better off then the linear forced monster zones and heck I could sneak north of Goodsprings and find incredible equipment that allows me to pown almost everything for the 1st 1/3 to 1/2 of the game.

Other then that New Vegas did some things better like Better customization of stats at the beginning but Skyrim has a much better open world and is the better game overall. New Vegas's important NPC's are safe from the immortal status because they were not near any combat areas thus no threat to being killed, unlike Skyrim where Dengeir could get killed by a Dragon and that screws up the Civil War line or Esbern could get killed by a Dragon and that screws up the Main Quest, etc.

Another key difference, if I want the challenge, I can kill Caesar and have the Legion abhor me for the rest of the game and plague me with hit squads. Ulfric? Yeah, not so much.

I agree on most of these things.