It's fun to delve into Skyrim every now and then and plunder a few dungeons... but it didnt have the same impact on me as New Vegas had. That game was amazing.

Not to say Skyrim is a bad game, but Bethesda have been butchering the things that got me into the series in the first place. I started with Morrowind and was disappointed with how Oblivion turned out. I had no idea it could get even more dumbed down than that game. Skyrim is a new low for the series.

I think Obsidian's quests and storylines are largely over rated.

I literally don't remember one single quest from Fallout: New Vegas that stands out to me as memorable. There are only a couple characters that stand out to me, and not all of them were for good reasons. The game couldn't keep my attention for more than about 20 hours before my desire to play it just faded out, and I haven't picked it up since.

That's just my opinion, but I really think Obsidian and Fallout: New Vegas is greatly over rated.

And yet, DC seems to have largely similar structural damage to the West Coast areas as seen in Fallout 1. I mean, you've got the mall, the Lincoln memorial, the capital building, museums, tons of apartments and houses, etc all still largely intact. If the capital had been completely glassed, I might take this argument more seriously. And even then, you have Ghoul's who were there when the bombs fell. What do Ghoul's stop caring about basic amenities or something? They're totally cool with just chilling in the bombed-out rubble of their former homes?
If you have an issue with the setting then that's fine. I can't really see them taking the fallout franchise too far into the future without it transforming into something else. I'm not sure what that has to do with the internal consistency or believability of the world that was presented, however. That's what is being questioned here: the quality of world design, not the setting choice.

I loved new vegas, but it only held my attention for about 40 hours.

Im past 300 in skyrim atm


Quality of world design? Bethesda hands down.

I cannot count how many times I ran into invisible barriers in NV...

Over gameplay?

Disagreed.

Especially when I don't think that Obsidian's story is all it's made out to be.

The difference there is the game is playable until you hit the memory issue on the ps3, the issue with NV is you did that quest it would break your game regardless of system, and it was also a key quest to progress the main story line unless you by-passed it (few ways depending on character builds or knowing the next step in the quest line.)

Story over gameplay for me, i have games that I love for the story, but the gameplay makes me want to throw my controller.

Fortunately skyrim is good in both areas.

I never can understand people's problems with linearity. Especially when people talk about it like it's the bane of existence.

And right there is where logic fails.

The amount of fallout you'd experience after a full on nuclear war would take centuries to clear, at best the people in Washington DC would only have been able to inhabit the area in the last few decades (Megaton is only a few decades old, the BoS only moved into the Pentagon in the last few decades etc).

Now when it comes to New Vegas how much of said change actually happened in the two hundred years since the bombs fell? It was only recently that House turned the tribes of the region into the Families, and turned the Strip into what it is in game. Benny was a tribal for crying out loud, what happened in the Mojave didn't occur over generations, it only just happened.


These are roleplaying games, they should be open enough for you to decide your own role, to make your own story. Linearity tells you their story for you and makes you follow it, you might as well be playing a FPS or 3rd person slasher.

Don't think it is necessaily the fact linearity is bad, but that a linear game is being disguised as an open world game.

Because people don't want to have to think or pay attention to a story. They just want to get a sword and run in a random direction and hit anything that moves

Some games do this very well however. Just not Skyrim IMO.

walk through door *crash*

dont get me wrong i loved new vegas but that happened to me ALOT

Quo Vadis Bethesda

Linearity has its place, but not in Skyrim, not how it was in New Vegas.

So how about the next Elder Scrolls made by SquareEnix, making the game jRPG levels of linear for the sake of a better story?

Story is all that matters, right?

Except thats exactly what all the quests in Skyrim do, unlike New Vegas which actually gives you some choices throughout the story. I find it ironic how people can call Skyrim more open. Sure, the world is more open with no boundaries. But I don't think that is true freedom when it comes to an RPG.

Yes, but no one wants interactive manga stories,



Open as a sandbox, closed as a proper RPG,
i'd personaly play Bethesda games for quality sandbox, exploration and... mods, i do not expect any deep great story and characters because from expierence i know bethesda just cant provide this

A great many of the crashes from FNV and Fo3 occured because neither game was 4gb enabled (if we are talking about PC that is). Just look at Skyrim pre-4gb enabler patch, your game would hit the memory usage limit with one largish mod, or however many active vanilla objects, and go straight to desktop. Post that, crashes are much much more rare. It is the same if you use an unofficial 4gb enabler for FNV and Fo3.

Then you haven't seen quite a few quests in Skyrim...

More linearity adds better ways to tell a story. They could make the main character more indepth, events happening the exact time and way it was written, presentation could be excellent...


I can count on one hand how many "proper RPGs" have several quests with multiple endings...

just endings, not even mentioning completely different scripted means to finish them...

You can choose not to do quests in Skyrim and still have the game progress. In New Vegas your quests are 75% NCR oriented. Try playing New Vegas up to the point of confronting Benny without doing a single NCR oriented quest, and tell me how much you have to do.

First, this still doesn't address what Ghoul's were up to for 200 years. Second, the potential for "effects" to last centuries doesn't say much. What level of nuclear war must have occurred for these long term effects to exist? What exactly are these effects? How are we determining the scope of their impact? How much of an effect do they still have after ten years? After 50? After 100? If DC was hit so hard as to prevent any rebuilding for nearly two centuries, then why are there any buildings still standing, especially those in the heart of the city?

The NCR is from Fallout 2. Fallout 2 took place 80 years after Fallout 1, which takes place 80 some years after the bombs dropped. Fallout New Vegas takes place some 40 years after Fallout 2. There's a whole lot of civilization outside of the game world you don't have direct access to---the difference is, it's still represented in the game. And while New Vegas might not be as developed itself, it accomplished far, far more than anything seen in Fallout 3.

Too bad that's the only choice you ever get in Skyrim. "Do the quest, or don't". And even if I decide not to do it, the game just decides to throw the quest in my journal anyway.

And that automatically means you have no choice but to do them?

This also happened in New Vegas.

Oh and quite a few Skyrim quests have optional parts and outright different endings in them...

New Vegas didn't do that at all. Besides the main quests, nothing was added to my journal without me accepting it first. In Skyrim I'll walk into Markarth and a courier will come up, give me a note then "bam" another random, boring quest added onto the pile of quests I'll never be interested in doing.

It's pretty disingenuous to suggest the number of branching quests in Skyrim approach the number of branching quests in New Vegas.

Radiation is the effect, fallout. It isn't all "BOOM", the menace of nuclear weapons is that they make places unlivable. Boom is secondary.

And for Ghouls, not all Ghouls are created straight away, some Ghouls like are created afterwards. Also the very likely small Ghoul population would of had to contend with the Super Mutant threat, other Ghouls being hostile and other mutating creatures. Also big negative for the Ghouls, they can't have children, their population numbers can't grow beyond Ghouls being created afterwards. You need population growth to have significant change.

Yet we are talking about the same world, the Brotherhood of Steel and Enclave developed outside of the area the game takes place. Just because the NCR developed on the coast, doesn't change the fact that virtually nothing happened in the New Vegas area in those two hundred years either. Heck New Vegas by some people's logic should have become a metropolis of civilization in those two hundred years, especially considering that virtually no nuclear weapons fell on it thanks to "laser defenses".