New Vegas just feels smaller than fallout 3, and much smaller than oblivion. I think that's mainly because of the linear nature of the map. In addition, most locations are quest related already, which discourages their use for mods. And the differences between modeling for oblivion and modeling for FO3 are significant and a large barrier to new modders. Dismemberment hasn't ever been simplified to a point where it's easy to work with, and making something as simple as a new gun is a giant pain in comparison to making a simple sword. Not to mention that only about two people have ever gotten new weapon animations to work.

Besides all that, fallout (both games) just don't have as much of a complicated system as oblivion. A gun is a gun is a gun while a mage isn't a warrior isn't an archer. You get less armor slots, less attributes, less skills, no magic, less books, etc. If a game isn't complicated it isn't as replayable and doesn't encourage new ideas as much as a more complex game.

Don't get me wrong, I really liked fallout 3 and new vegas both. But I just don't play them any more. It felt like I was done with the games shortly after my first playthrough. And the whole "delayed DLC" mess really killed it for me.

New Vega feels smaller than Fallout 3 because it is, the map is at least 30% smaller than FO3. I think the map it self though is better designed than OB because you cant go in a straight line everywhere, because of the mountains in the center of the map. If you could, boy would you really be able to tell how much smaller the map is!

Great, let me know what you think. It's pretty short and I did it just to get used to NV. My current quest mod will be more like 2 hours.

NV feels smaller because like 40% of the map is innaccessable. They made it a selling point to say it was the same size as Fallout 3, and while the actual map is, the accessable area is much smaller.

I see what your saying but in OB and FO3 there were borders, if you disable them you would could go and beyond them and see a half finished world, no loot, no alchemy, etc. The same applies to NV you go to the other side of the range near Goodsprings and its all empty land, no trees,plants nothing but ground textures.

The only difference in what I am describing, FNV map looks the same size as FO3 map on the Pip boy. Just because the maps are the same same size means nothing, FNV's gameworld is much smaller. Who cares about the pipboy map. Its a little said that FNV did the same thing B team game Two Worlds 2.

Any map size would be the same if you zoom out all the way... I mean both maps were generated with the default 64x64 cell grid of the heightmap land generator. So they are indentical in size. The different is a third of the NV map is inaccesable. It has nothing to do with pipboy map size, entirely actual ingame size and accessable area. NV is about 40% less than Fallout 3, though I don't know enough to say anything about Oblivion.

I an speaking the game world, the playable area. The place that has stuff in it. Its much smaller than FO3, we are saying the same thing, so it does not really matter its just semantics. Will start my FNV play session soon, will try to check out your mod at some point during my 4-5 hours of playtime.

Hasnt there been any efforts in trying to fill those empty areas (behind the borders) in Oblivion or FO series? I dont mean with hundreds of new quests or anyhing, just with creatures/ flora etc.

That actually explains why I never really could get into new vegas. It felt very constrained compared to fallout 3. I really missed the exploring of ruins and such. *shrugs* Waiting on skyrim myself.

This is true...

Alright, it's rather short so you will have plenty of time to do it. Honestly I'm almost embarrased by it's length, it will probably be the shortest quest mod I ever make. I like making the more intense few-hour ones so much more. I hope I can get the trailer together for my current WIP, I think you guys will enjoy it.

I couldn't agree more, also I would like to see the conversation editor return, with a little help from devs on using it with large conversations though. I really wish Obsidian or Bethesda would give us a tutorial for it, since it is new for the NV GECK. :stare:

wolf

Its taking me longer than a half hour, I just had to go to Novac and that was about 35 mins into me playing the quest. I will let you know on the nexus when I get done, I was not able to finish Thursday night(had to go to bed) and I have not had time to play and may not till Monday. Good so far though.

Back to the topic of the post;

I really hope we just have a bunch of slightly reticent modders, and that the modding community for New Vegas is not dying. Perhaps we all just need to be a little bit more outgoing in our comments and involvement, to make up for the lack of numbers? I am sure many of us who do actually mod can understand the difference a few comments, or lack of, can make in one's energy and motivation to mod.

I don't think its dying, the Fallouts are just less popular for modding.

@gunmaster - I will have to try the collectors. Thanks.

When you are comparing Oblivion mods with Fallout mods activity - Oblivion has been around for 5 years now; and some of the modding community wandered in from Morrowind. So it is established. Fallout 3 came out about 2 1/2 years ago. Fallout NV has been out for about 6 months. FalloutNV probably caused splittage in the FO3 modding community. The other modding issue with FO:NV in particular - is that it seem particularly more broken than Fallout 3 and we are awaiting the promised patch.

As far as Fallout 3 goes, I consider my modded version of Fallout 3 final. I'm very happy with my FOIP-FWE-MMM-Fellout setup. As far as Fallout New Vegas goes, I'm really just keeping an eye on Project Nevada and nVamp.

But the same can be said for Fallout, some people wandered in from the TES games. And being around longer you would think popularity would wane, otherwise MW should be more popular than OB, but OB is twice as active as MW modding community. The two Fallouts mod community's combined are still only similar to MW in size and half of OB.

Bottom line, I like the TES more and so do alot of the modders. Skyrim is going to half a crazy mod community.

Oblivion is better for modding because the vanilla game is empty. It gives you just enough to want more, and the blank canvas to do it. Oblivion is also pure generic fantasy (elves, orcs, etc.), and that will always be more popular than something as specific as post-apocalyptic, retro-future sci-fi. Fallout 3 is a more complete game than Oblivion and thus does not call out for modding as much, but it is still an open, empty, shallow world that is a good fit for adding user-generated content.

Fallout New Vegas is more of a full-fledged RPG and less of a sandbox game than FO3, and it doesn't have that empty feel. Although there are as many places to go in NV as in fallout 3, most of them are connected to quests, and FNV has about three times as many of those.

well i agree interest for new vegas died for lots of people, but its not because its more of FO3, its because its NOT more of FO3, very little exploring, almost no large building complexes or dungeons to sneak around in, very static map, the desert is super empty, FO3 had city areas to explore and fight in, hide from enemies etc, new vegas environment you're out in the open almost everywhere, no good places to hide, sneak around, fight enemies etc, no supermutants hardly at all, no enclave to fight, hardly any human enemies at all really, everyone is neutral to you, so its becuase NV is NOT like FO3 is the reason its boring.

I felt New Vegas made substantial improvements (particularly in roleplaying and weapons), but the dearth of random and scripted encounters relative to FO3 damaged the game's replayability, and at the very least discouraged exploration.

Debatable, it's FO3+ gameplay wise, with a different feel level design-wise
Same could be said for FO3, but then I grew up on the ultima series, also, let's not forget that if we're doing a comparison of the games, FO3 has just as many areas as FONV, and vise versa. Your still only going to see about a quarter of the game if you only do the main quest, hell in FO3 you see more, because it directs you all over the place. In New Vegas you can basically go, OK, don't care about any faction in my city,don't care about any faction out side my city, [censored] it, let's go to the END GAME [censored]es and ho's.

So you are saying, you want large tracks of gameplay that become very boring the second time you play them? The same could be said for FO3. I think the word you're looking for isn't "map" but rather NPCs. as is Fallout 3's.

FO3 had city areas

Which were mostly linear areas with solid straight line progressions and maybe one or two branches and two to four one to three room buildings in each. you mean traverse, the only area that was vaguely exploration based was the mall. debatable, but again this is a matter of preference, I had fun dikeing around sneaking and sniping things at range.

no supermutants hardly at all,

You mean those things that were supposed to be a west coast phenomenon, and were supposed to be dieing out after FO1?

no enclave to fight,

you mean that faction that was supposed to be wiped out post fallout 2 when you destroyed their oil rig where all of the high command was?

hardly any human enemies at all

You mean besides, the masses of bandits you face, the fiends, the legion/ncr, the casino people if you piss them off. Really, I got lord death of death mountain before I got bug stomper or any of the animal killing perks. If you do practically any of the quests it has you accruing fame or infamy with factions. See, I found FO3 FAR more boring than FONV, to the point where I stopped playing and just started tweaking mods after a certain point. Then I stopped doing that because the game itself disgusted me. It was a combination of sloppy gameplay, sloppy story and sloppy writing that did it. FONV at least tries to correct 2 of those and succeeds partial at both.

new vegas did make substantial improvements, but they didn't capitolize on it, the added cool weapons, made companions work better, lot of quests, good perks, there were some nice locations, but yeah the lack of random events and encounters kinda offset the things they improved quite a bit and for me i just got too familiar with the game in a short time so now i don't really want to play it and i doubt the dlcs will adress this but its always possible i guess. we'll see.

i think the majority of people prob disagree with you, most will say it was a good game but they're tired of it already and only one dlc came out so far, so it just hasn't kept people interested. i understand some people don't care about random encounters and lots to explore but its safe to say most people would of liked random encounters/events, and just an overall more dynamic world. and the OP is right, the NV forums aren't very active. the game never really took off.

You see I got familiar with fallout 3 in roughly the same amount of time I did with New Vegas, 2 play through's max. The random encounters in FO3, they really weren't, they were events tied to activators really. You're always gonna meet Donovan after you do Reily's Rangers and he's always going to be attacking 3 super mutants, you're always gonna meet the trader after you do big trouble in little big town and he's always gonna be going there to sell them what you chose for them to defend themselves. Whats more, they typically only occur in certain cells. And even then only in certain spots in those cells.

Fun list to see just how not random they are.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_random_encounters#Locations

Now replay the original fallouts and try to see if you can spot where the random encounters will happen and just what they will be.

^This

The FONV modding scene has dropped off faster than any modding scene I've seen.
Even the FO3 modding scene lasted a long time compared to what's going on in here.
Heck, I think the first page of these forums have the same 20 threads on the first page since February,
usually the forums move so fast even popular [RELZ] threads usually sink to the bottom.

However, there really just haven't been that many [RELZ] threads to contend with, heck,
even the screenshot threads filled up at a pretty rapid pace in the FO3 forums, and even those are
filling up slowly....

So yea, FO3 generated a LOT more interest than FONV is doing, because there's just more stuff to find,
and more buildings to go into in FO3 than there are in FONV.

I was on about my 4th or 5th play through of FO3 when I accidentally stumbled on two areas that I had never found before that you could enter.

One being some hideout for ghouls over in the buildings in the Gray Ditch Area, and there was also a Doorway I found under some underpass
that I had never known about.

At least with FO3, I could look off in the distance and something would catch my eye, like a church steeple, so I'd walk in that direction to check it out.
When I look at the horizon of FONV, I see either absolutely NOTHING, or Mountains.
Not really conducive to making somebody want to explore....

As far as the West Coast Supermutants who are dieing dying out, they fit in quite well on the East Coast, after all, FO1&2 never mentioned if the FEV
experiments (run by the Enclave) were being conducted on the East coast as well.

I imaged the very buggy nature of the release did not help. I play on pc and started playing on Feb 28th, and still the game is more buggy than OB or FO3(and I use the community patch also). Plus when Fallout 3 came out people said it was OB with guns, now NV is out and its even more of the same. All the cool stuff that wowed me back when I first played OB has become stale, things like radiant AI, physic,etc now its just the norm. So the aging nature of the gameplay/game systems combined with a less than polished release(hell the graphics are worse than FO3! no animated trees and almost nothing reflects in water, sad) don't help make this a must mod kind of game.