The Top Six Reasons Fallout 3 Is Better Than Fallout New Vegas

[Wunderbar]

Yeah, Bloodlines was great... it's too bad Obsidian doesn't have anyone nearly as good as the people who made it. Wait, what? The two guys responsible for Bloodlines are working at Obsidian and in charge of their next game? No fucking way!

but not Brian Mitsoda.

 

[Bester]

Of course there's no reason to hope for Obsidian to have competent staff in any department if their MAIN DEPARTMENT (writing) sucks.

Yeah, Bloodlines was great... it's too bad Obsidian doesn't have anyone nearly as good as the people who made it. Wait, what? The two guys responsible for Bloodlines are working at Obsidian and in charge of their next game? No fucking way!

My mind is blown.

- We have absolutely no precedents where people aged and couldn't do what they used to do in their younger years, sure.
- Owners absolutely don't meddle in the process and turn projects into shit, this literally doesn't happen at Obsidian. I love Feargus' goodreads library, only quality content there.

 

[deuxhero]

I also prefered the tone & one particular annoyance I have with New Vegas is the different types of ammo. For me that just adds tedium not depth.

It's an FPS. Nearly all the combat strategy it has, other than designing your character, is picking the right gear/bullets for each situation. And that's what you dislike?

Anyway, below Hard difficulty bullets don't make much of a difference, although they are crucial on Very Hard. You can still play an Energy character if you don't want to deal with that.

It was just faff which felt pointless mate. Micromanagement which didn't really add anything, and just meant you had to swap ammo now & again.

I've always been one who hates ammo & inventory management tbf. Even collecting ammo in dumber games like Mass Effect 2 annoys me, compared to recharging ala Mass Effect 1. Guess it's just part of playing all those Shoot Em Ups in the 80's & 90's where infinite ammo was common place.

I know Fallout is about survival & yep get & like it's place there & don't mind it in a singular capacity. But having several & changing between ammo types just felt too much, & annoyed me more than anything.

The multiple types of ammo are really nice if you play with the reloading bench. The big problems are

1: Armor is so common (any threat worth bothering with special ammo has it) so AP always wins
2: that "surplus" (who the hell is surplussing all this corrosive ammo?) ammo destroys your gun which means you're spending to repair or replace it and there is no reason to use it beyond availability. Would have been better if the game handled "cheap" ammo by making it fairly inaccurate (Cheap stuff in "standard" calibers can have two-three times the spread of good stuff. If you blame it on post-war ammo manufacturing and even 5x could be fine. Strangely the game supports changing spread based on ammo type but only one type actually bothers changing it), maybe do less damage (cheap ammo is often underloaded. 10mm, 357 and 44 mag are the most frequent victims of this.*) or jam more (every gun in NV has a unique jam animation and you'll never see any of them beside the varmint rifle without trying) and then called it "bulk" (which they do for energy cells) or "cheap".


*NV 10MM is worse than 45 auto it likely is a case of this. That or, as 10mm is post-divergence, Fallout 10mm is actually 40 S&W (which is a 10mm) or equivalent.

 

[Diggfinger]

Of course there's no reason to hope for Obsidian to have competent staff in any department if their MAIN DEPARTMENT (writing) sucks.

Yeah, Bloodlines was great... it's too bad Obsidian doesn't have anyone nearly as good as the people who made it. Wait, what? The two guys responsible for Bloodlines are working at Obsidian and in charge of their next game? No fucking way!

My mind is blown.

Jason Anderson and Boyarsky were responsible for making Bloodlines great. The former is not at Obsidian.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

When New Vegas first came out I heard endlessly from "dirty casuals" how FO3 was better, but now-a-days even even they tend to comment that New Vegas was better or more memorable. Possible incline of species but unverified.

It's just that in a long stretch of time passionate fans will always win against dirty casuals. Casuals move on pretty quickly from game to game, from movie to movie. Passionate fans stays and they will shape the future narrative about a given work of art. That's why bad movies and games are usually forgotten given enough time even if they are popular in their times and good things will eventually come on top.

 

[JarlFrank]

- If it had to be an FPS game, then look at Far Cry games where gunplay is polished to such a degree that you get endorphins just by firing. I'm not a fan of mixing RPG skills with the inability to aim, despite what VD says about it. If you want to mix RPG in, add something on top, but don't break the first rules of the FPS genre, where my aim is as good as I fucking aim. I had this problem with VTMB too, and many critics at the time, but that was literally the only problem with VTMB. Not so in FNV.

Oh god this endless complaint again. Why is it so hard to understand stat-based aiming? Same thing in Alpha Protocol and Deus Ex, critics and idiots freak the fuck out because they can't handle the concept. Far Cry is an FPS with RPG elements, not an RPG with FPS elements, like New Vegas. That's why they're different. Also it takes barely any leveling at all in New Vegas before you're head-shotting like a master, so it just comes off as whining. At least with Deus Ex it took half the game probably to get good crosshairs.

Oh yeah let's defend shit gameplay elements because it's an RPG and stats should govern your skills lol.

I love Deus Ex and Bloodlines, but the exaggeratedly huge crosshairs weren't strong points of these games, quite the contrary. It was even quite silly in Deus Ex how a supposedly trained special agent couldn't hit the broad side of a barn at low guns skill, with weapons that any jackoff from the street could shoot reasonably well even if he had never held a gun before. Even Morrowind's "if the dice roll fails you miss" combat system was better than the ridiculously exaggerated crosshair expansions in DX and VtM:B.

There are other ways to make stats influence your effectiveness with guns, which would be more interesting and fun gameplay-wise than just making your bullets go anywhere except where you're pointing the gun.

In modern games with ironsight modes especially you can effectively implement a higher degree of weapon sway. Your gun would still shoot as accurately as it does based on its own properties - pistols having more spread than rifles, for example, but it would be solely dependant on the gun's own properties, not on your skill. But when aiming, you'd have to manually correct your aim more than if your skill is high.

In a game with ironsight mode, you can also remove the crosshair for aiming from the hip, making low skill hipshots very inaccurate. At higher skill levels, you can add a crosshair for hipshots. Boom, MASSIVE difference in accuracy between low and high skill!

You can also alter other things not related to accuracy. Reloading speed, for example, or chance of fumbling during a reload (like when reloading a bolt-action rifle bullet by bullet rather than with a stripper clip - oops, low skill character just dropped a bullet instead of putting it in the chamber). Reloading a magazine could take 5 full seconds for a low skill character, and just one second for a high skill character. Massive difference right there!

Same with things like cocking the bolt in a bolt-action rifle or using the pump-action of a shotgun. An amateur will be slow and clumsy, an expert will be quick and efficient, effectively increasing the potential rate of fire as your skill increases.

With SMGs and other automatic and even semi-automatic weapons you can modify the recoil based on the character's weapon skill (or on the character's strength stat), influencing whether you can hold a gun steady during sustained fire or not.

There are so many ways of having stats and skills influence the handling of firearms in first person RPGs that don't involve making crosshairs so massive, using them at low skill isn't fun at all. "It's an RPG so stats should matter" is not an excuse for shit gameplay elements, but instead should be an inspiration to come up with good ways to make the stats count.

 

[Bester]

Of course when a """DEVELOPER""" says it, let's rain brofists on him. But when it's this edgy guy says it, rate him retarded and autistic. Not that I mind, far from it, but can you at least contain your ass-licking tendencies from such overt display, guys? Let's keep it civil, ok?

 

[Black Angel]

Oh yeah let's defend shit gameplay elements because it's an RPG and stats should govern your skills lol.

But in an RPG, stats SHOULD govern character's skills?

Also, I would say New Vegas's gameplay elements were shit EXACTLY because it wasn't entirely governed by character's stats and skills. It should've gone to the first-person gameplay template in the first place.

 

[Goral]

Slightly off-topic but this is so disturbing and triggering that I have to post it:


I haven't watched it but the title says it all (I've read a short summary in Polish so it's not just the title).

 

[JarlFrank]

Oh yeah let's defend shit gameplay elements because it's an RPG and stats should govern your skills lol.

But in an RPG, stats SHOULD govern character's skills?

Also, I would say New Vegas's gameplay elements were shit EXACTLY because it wasn't entirely governed by character's stats and skills. It should've gone to the first-person gameplay template in the first place.

If you had read my entire post you would've seen all the alternative ways stats can influence gunplay than merely widening the crosshair which I have suggested, because making you inaccurate as fuck at low skill level makes gunplay really unfun when your skill level is low, and there are more interesting ways to make stats count.

 

[Falksi]

Forced replay value

Whoever posted this just screams to be a Bethestard that is too used to be able to do every single thing in one playthrough, which is fucking stupid in games like these. The branching paths in New Vegas is one of my favorite things in the game because it allowed me to pick the faction that would fit the beliefs of my character, you know, actual roleplaying.

And continuity issues? Fallout 3 has probably the worst continuity issues in the series. Why the fuck is BoS in the East Coast, aren't they fighting the NCR at that time? Wasn't the Enclave completely destroyed in Fallout 2? If anything, New Vegas has way better continuity than 3.

Last, Mr. New Vegas is way better than Three Dog. Mr. New Vegas sounds like someone you want to hang with, while Three Dog sounds like a creepy (he somehow knows everything you do in the wastleland) asshole that i would just punch in the face the first second i saw him.

Whilst I much prefered Fallout 3's first playrthough to NV's, I will say that the FO3's second playthrough was far, far worse for sure.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Whilst I much prefered Fallout 3's first playrthough to NV's

Please elaborate because I honestly can't fathom why this would be

 

[Falksi]

Whilst I much prefered Fallout 3's first playrthough to NV's

Please elaborate because I honestly can't fathom why this would be

I was sucked in by the atmosphere more; everything was fresh as it was my first Fallout game; the tone just sat very nicely with me; exploration felt great as you never knew where you were gonna end up; and overall I just warmed to it.

New Vegas had a more comical tone & felt more about survival than exploration (second I went north I got wasted). It also felt a bit gimmicky & a bit of a let down when I actually arrived at New Vegas, so - whilst I still enjoyed it - it just didn't push my particular buttons like FO3 did.

That said, on later playthrough's FO3's shallowness shines through, & NV is by far & away the more enjoyable.

 

[Black]

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

(second I went north I got wasted)

My dude, there are signs saying "DON'T GO THIS WAY" along the North passage between Goodsprings and Sloan and more than one person in Goodsprings tells you not to go that route (Sunny and the barlady both for sure).

Oh boy Dorito Pope and Todd "Sweet Little Lies" Howard talking about an award he doesn't deserve.

 

[Ocelot]

When are we gonna get the "Fallout franchise was never good in the first place" opinion ship going?

If Bethesda keeps releasing shitty FO games there's going to be a point where good FO games will be a minority.

 

[Perkel]

But in an RPG, stats SHOULD govern character's skills?

Whole point of a stat is to represent skill of someone instead of actually doing it yourself.
If you can display such skill yourself then there is no need for stat in first place.
Which means aiming shouldn't be skill in stats in this case.

But there are ways that could have effect on without being annoying. For example hand sway, how fast you move from hip fire to sight shooting and how much time it takes to remove hand sway, how fast you change mag, what your character do if weapon jammed (if he can do something at all without spending a lot of time), recoil handling, someone shooting first ime AK47 in full auto would not know how to properly handle gun and so on.

Speaking of which FNV had good implementation of some of those. Like firing speed and reload speed was tied to agility.

 

[Okagron]

My dude, there are signs saying "DON'T GO THIS WAY" along the North passage between Goodsprings and Sloan and more than one person in Goodsprings tells you not to go that route (Sunny and the barlady both for sure).

Even then, it's quite possible to go north and not have much trouble because i have done it. Yes, the game does make going north harder than going in the "intended" route, but going north is pretty viable. You also get cool stuff if you go north, stuff that you normally get later in the game if you go the normal route instead.

 

[Tygrende]

1: Armor is so common (any threat worth bothering with special ammo has it) so AP always wins

Cazadores beg to differ.

(who the hell is surplussing all this corrosive ammo?)

Surplus ammo being corrosive is realistic. Surplus ammunition is ammunition that was originally manufactured for the military, then made available to the public because the military decided to replace it. In the past, primers were made with corrosive salts.

 

[Falksi]

(second I went north I got wasted)

My dude, there are signs saying "DON'T GO THIS WAY" along the North passage between Goodsprings and Sloan and more than one person in Goodsprings tells you not to go that route (Sunny and the barlady both for sure).

Oh boy Dorito Pope and Todd "Sweet Little Lies" Howard talking about an award he doesn't deserve.

And that sign fits, but from the initial outset it just didn't feel as free & open as FO3 did on it's first playthrough because of it.

 

[DalekFlay]

There are so many ways of having stats and skills influence the handling of firearms in first person RPGs that don't involve making crosshairs so massive, using them at low skill isn't fun at all. "It's an RPG so stats should matter" is not an excuse for shit gameplay elements, but instead should be an inspiration to come up with good ways to make the stats count.

Fallout 4 pretty much followed the template you're describing and people (not even just people here) went apeshit over it becoming a Far Cry 3 style shooter rather than an RPG. Which, I mean... yeah. The line there is pretty blurry outside of Fallout 4 having more dialog. Which is fine if you want a game like Far Cry 3, a game I genuinely enjoyed as an open-world shooter with RPG elements.

If you want to make a real RPG though, I think New Vegas style stat influences are essential and enjoyable. If you want to be good at guns ASAP it's very easy to do so... tag skill, perks, etc. can make you a relatively good shooter right at the start. Same for Deus Ex and dumping points into pistols or rifles ASAP, which I tend to do.

 

[Sigourn]

When are we gonna get the "Fallout franchise was never good in the first place" opinion ship going?

If Bethesda keeps releasing shitty FO games there's going to be a point where good FO games will be a minority.

Good:

- Fallout
- Fallout 2
- Fallout: New Vegas

Bad:

- Fallout 3
- Fallout 4
- Fallout Shelter
- Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

Depending on your opinion on Tactics, the franchise may already be "bad" already.

 

[Citizen]

When are we gonna get the "Fallout franchise was never good in the first place" opinion ship going?

If Bethesda keeps releasing shitty FO games there's going to be a point where good FO games will be a minority.

Good:

- Fallout
- Fallout 2
- Fallout: New Vegas

Bad:

- Fallout 3
- Fallout 4
- Fallout Shelter
- Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

Depending on your opinion on Tactics, the franchise may already be "bad" already.

You forgot Fallout: Ressurection and Nevada. The franchise's still okay.

 

[deuxhero]

1: Armor is so common (any threat worth bothering with special ammo has it) so AP always wins

Cazadores beg to differ.

(who the hell is surplussing all this corrosive ammo?)

Surplus ammo being corrosive is realistic. Surplus ammunition is ammunition that was originally manufactured for the military, then made available to the public because the military decided to replace it. In the past, primers were made with corrosive salts.

I never said there being corrosive ammo was unrealistic. I said
1: It was unrealistic because there is nobody to be surplussing it. The only military power with the manufacturing base who could is NCR, and they're in the middle of an active campaign so why the hell are they selling off ammo? If I had to write in an explanation I'd say the NCR's leadership decided to switch over to non-corrosive right before the new war with the Legion and sold off the old stock. It would fit their fucked up logistics, though nothing in game ever implies it.
2: making the cheap ammo corrosive was poorly balanced. Making the cheap ammo cost more long term means you'll only use it on guns you're going to throw away anyways or have a ton of repair material for, which just means the varmint rifle.

 

[Tygrende]

1: It was unrealistic because there is nobody to be surplussing it. The only military power with the manufacturing base who could is NCR, and they're in the middle of an active campaign so why the hell are they selling off ammo?

I always assumed it's pre-war surplus. It wouldn't even make sense for NCR/Gun Runners to manufacture corrosive ammo.