Why is Fallout New Vegas considered good?

[Saldrone]

I liked how New Vegas just deleted the Big Guns category dividing it into Guns, Energy Weapons and Explosives implying that Big Guns in Fallout 3 were too clumsy and uncomfortable to use by design to practically spend skill points on such tools

 

[Losus4]

The problem with FNV is that Stewies Tweaks is pretty much essential, but the mod has grown so enormous and bloated that sifting through 4000 lines of settings in the ini is more trouble than it's worth. Many of which are repeats/similar to prevous ones, and in some cases just a cheat. The mod was great in its early days when it was just essential QOL fixes, now it's a bloated mess and not worth the headache.

I liked how New Vegas just deleted the Big Guns category dividing it into Guns, Energy Weapons and Explosives implying that Big Guns in Fallout 3 were too clumsy and uncomfortable to use by design to practically spend skill points on such tools

"When Bethesda merge skills it's dumbing down, but when FNV does it it's improvement." - FNV cult acolyte.

 

[unseeingeye]

The solution for you is extended level threshold mod, aka raise xp req for each level to make you stay lower level longer. It also provide an incentive to do low level quest, because you need every piece of XP.

If you are bored of playing through the official route, you can do the adrenaline junkie route by running north road, with the help of turbo and stealthboy (if you gather any in GS). Cazadores are the biggest threat, then Deathclaw. Going this way you can skip a slew of quest in Mojave Outpost, Nipton, Searchlight, Novac, Repcon Launch site, and Boulder City. it make no sense in term of quest, but you have freedom to do it.

Otherwise, shut up. Our OCD is our burden to bear, not excuse to complain~ Find ways to deal with it.

I'm using something of the sort for leveling, I forget what but I'm running a Tale of Two Wastelands setup on my Steam Deck with 385 mods. A significant number of them are weapons mods, and weapon animation mods on an individual weapon basis rather than a pack because I like the work of several different mod authors.

I don't go to Stalker mod levels of difficulty for New Vegas but I play the game on hardcore mode with certain tweaks mods that rebalance the leveling and availability of items. I know the game like the back of my hand and have for years so I replay it less and less frequently in order to let enough time pass for my enthusiasm for the Fallout setting to be renewed. Plus its always fun to return after a year or so and catch up on what the mod community has developed during my absence; updating my mods and checking out new ones is half the fun, though mod testing results in going through the Goodsprings opening a million more times than normal.

I just had to restart yet again yesterday because I saw that I'd missed a handful of mods that recently updated and included significant enough changes to warrant the restart. Right now I have the game looking by far the best I've ever gotten it to, and I'm not using reshades or major overhauls. I tweaked the config file through MO2 to increase the amount, the density, and the variety of the vanilla grass and with the visual mods I'm running it looks amazing, and I finally managed to get the dawn sky horizon to seamlessly change without the intense brightening effect through a combination of mods like Dusty Distance Redone and the Fog Remover, TTW Vibrant Weathers, Desert Natural Realism Redux, Climate Control with the 3D Rain mod, Cloud Shadows and a few others I can't think of offhand.

One of the mods I like the most that came out around the last time checked back in is Real Time Reflections, and the fact it has a patch for B42 Optics is just awesome. I also love that B42 Optics lets you reposition scope sights too. But on my Steam Deck I actually prepared 4 different controller configurations that I can instantly switch back and forth from as necessary, one layout for adjusting the 3rd person camera position mod, one for the scope sight realignment mod, another for messing with things like Armed to the Teeth Redux and the mod that lets your reposition any weapon in first-person mode to get rid of clipping and such when increasing the FOV, while my basic layout one makes use of the 4 back buttons for things like the hotkeys on mods that let you inspect remaining ammo and weapon condition, the wristwatch one (such a great mod), etc.

Anyway I do enjoy the slower leveling that necessitates completing the loop quests, and what I do is fly through them quickly in a kind of autopilot mode until I get to the 188 Outpost and then allow myself to get immersed into the character and roleplaying. Another thing that definitely makes going through these much more tolerable is mods like Sweet Pain NV (the overhaul of A World of (Less) Pain), Mojave Raiders, The Living Desert, and such like. I thoroughly enjoy some of the areas added by A World of Pain, but obviously the original mod is completely insane and ruins the overall experience especially with the many non-voiced acted NPCs walking around with end-game level equipment. But the massive changes and reductions made by AWOLP and then Sweet Pain on top make it so much more enjoyable; stuff like the Powder Gangers cellar hideout beneath Jean Sky Diving for instance, really add to the game and make it possible to go through all that early content with new stuff to discover.

 

[agris]

unseeingeye I would love to see your mod list, broken down into crude categories like:

balance - easier
balance - harder
flavor

something like that

 

[unseeingeye]

unseeingeye I would love to see your mod list, broken down into crude categories like:

balance - easier
balance - harder
flavor

something like that

I'll bring my Steam Deck with me to work on a slower day and go through it. I set it up last year and only recently went back to it to update it and play through the New Vegas part (I just couldn't make it through Fallout 3.. I tried) so I'm having to remember how I set it all up, but my MO2 is fairly well organized so it shouldn't be too difficult.

 

[blessed king of longing]

>mods will fix it

It's the most broken of all Gamebryo games, for sure. But the difference between FNV and nu-Bethesda games is that you don't need to mod it into something else, adding new mechanics and stuff. FNV has a decent foundation for a roleplaying action game and you only need to fix things here and there.

no matter how much you mod it, it's still oblivion with guns.

 

[roguefrog]

Put simply, Fallout: New Vegas is considered good relative to Fallout 3. In Fallout 3 you're forced into being a Brotherhood of Steel lackey no matter what following the main quest, which was just all kinds of dogshit.

New Vegas at least gives you some autonomy, giving you a free hand in how to handle the factions e.g. help/kill/ignore.

Bethesda tried to follow this up in Fallout 4 but their factions were just dumb as hell and didn't make any sense. Like the minutemen were the stand-in wildcard option similar to Yes Man, but they were a bunch of pathetic losers. Why in the world would I want to help them?

 

[Butter]

Bethesda tried to follow this up in Fallout 4 but their factions were just dumb as hell and didn't make any sense. Like the minutemen were the stand-in wildcard option similar to Yes Man, but they were a bunch of pathetic losers. Why in the world would I want to help them?

They failed their faction-based story because they couldn't even decide what the conflict was. The Railroad/Institute/Brotherhood are all interested in synths and the ending or continued existence of the Institute. The Minutemen are like a proto-government who want to protect settlements from raiders. They have absolutely nothing to do with the Institute/synths storyline, and no reason to get involved in that conflict. Despite Emil Pagliarulo's apparent subscription to the idea "Keep It Simple Stupid", he went for a ludicrously convoluted plotline and didn't have the chops to manage it. New Vegas actually did "Keep It Simple Stupid" better. The conflict is over control of Hoover Dam, and by extension the water supply and electricity generation. That's all it needed to be.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I remember loading New Vegas once, made it to the first bar or whatever that was and shut it off and have yet to touch it since.

I didn't have a problem with the intro or the guy you meet during character creation. The narration and voice acting felt very much something you'd expect from Obsidian and under normal circumstances i would have had no issues playing the game. But the engine, design of the world and the graphics in general just filled me with utter revolusion. I've seen games with bad graphics before, but this was the first time i felt literally sick to my stomatch.

It's a pity because it is not Obsidian's fault that Bethesda are completely and utterly dogshit at making games but god damn.

And no, modders ain't gonna fix it. I tried and it didn't do jack shit. Game still looked like shit even after a ton of mods. Just something about how the terrain or the assets are modeled that makes the engine unsalvageable. You can spend 1000 man hours on photoshop making the best, most high definition textures in the universe it ain't gonna change squad.

Modding New Vegas also introduced me to a new form of cancer, which is the modding scene of Bethesda games. I never saw a game that was this complicated to mod in my life, and it's all the more absurd when the end result still looked like shit.

I'd like to try again one of this days but just the thought of looking at this fucking thing again makes me gag. I so wish somebody would just port this game to the original engine.

 

[9ted6]

And no, modders ain't gonna fix it. I tried and it didn't do jack shit. Game still looked like shit even after a ton of mods. Just something about how the terrain or the assets are modeled that makes the engine unsalvageable. You can spend 1000 man hours on photoshop making the best, most high definition textures in the universe it ain't gonna change squad.

Modding New Vegas also introduced me to a new form of cancer, which is the modding scene of Bethesda games. I never saw a game that was this complicated to mod in my life, and it's all the more absurd when the end result still looked like shit.

It was partly the modding community that put me off the entire series for good.

Realizing that the apparent majority of the fanbase was genuinely crazy made me feel weird being part of it. Not the only reason but it's what got me down the road of coming to believe Fallout is just retarded.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

saying new vegas is better than fallout 3 is like saying Unreal Tournament 2004 is better than Unreal Tournament 2003

New Vegas is leaps and bounds better than Fallout 3 was. Fallout 3's plot made absolutely zero sense, was loaded with all kinds of lore breaking bullshit for the sake of "It's got ghouls/Supermutants/etc, it must be Fallout!", vampire cults, and lots of other silly shit. The Enclave made no sense, the Brotherhood of Steel made no sense, Supermutants made no sense, Harold the Ghoul made no sense - especially him morphing in to a tree, and the list goes on and on. Fallout 3 was shit, brought to you by the studio that can't even keep Elder Scrolls' lore straight.

That FNV is living rent-free in everyone's head at Bethesda, and that it makes them seethe with the passion of thousand suns.

This is definitely the case. There's a reason why they won't let Obsidian touch their property ever again.

I liked how New Vegas just deleted the Big Guns category dividing it into Guns, Energy Weapons and Explosives implying that Big Guns in Fallout 3 were too clumsy and uncomfortable to use by design to practically spend skill points on such tools

This is JE Sawyer. He's been bitching about gun skills in Fallout since the early 2000s. It's almost like arguing a fantasy CRPG should reduce the martial skills down to "Swing" and "Stab". Can't say I liked this change.

In Fallout 3 you're forced into being a Brother of Steel lackey no matter what following the main quest, which was just all kinds of dogshit.

Fallout 3 followed too much "Rule of Cool" design. Join the Brotherhood. Why? Because look at all this cool shit! Look at the giant retro-mech! Look kids, it's a supermutant, only BIGGER!

It's completely ass that pretty much everything from Fallout and Fallout 2, which were exclusive to the West Coast, explained why they were exclusive to that area, just suddenly mass migrated all the way to the East Coast just because that's where Bethesda wanted to set the game. They wanted the game set there, but didn't want the challenge of coming up with anything new. And the one new thing that they did come up with, the extremely stupid thing, was what the plot of Fallout 4 revolved around.

 

[Bulo]

If you think Fallout 3 is bad, just wait until you play Fallout 2

 

[laclongquan]

Fallout 3 proved, not that there's any doubt but the Morrowind fanbois keep denying, that Bethesda writer department just cant step up the tasks. From talent, to ability, from range of topics, to depth.

A lots of topics in Fallout 3 that we keep complaining about, can be dealt with if the writers just did their jobs competently and adequately.

Example: the issue of BOS change into shining knights of wasteland fighting army of darkness. That is the issue Saint Proverbius and his ilks keep complaining nonstop about, cause they deviated from the old image in F1/2. That can be dealt with by writings depicting the change in thoughts, in philosophy over the long treks from West Coast to East Coast. The ideal place to store all that writings would be the Pitt in same name DLC. Playing the Pitt I keep expecting more things coming up with the old Scourge but zip. keep expecting more things about why and how an ex BOS scribe turn into a slaver warlord, and the origin of his wife: zip.

Or hell, in main map. There are some things about Enclave scientist and fire ants. but only three or four places with giant ants and nothing connect them together (marygold, Shalebridge, Chrysler building etc...)

The most noticeable thing in Fallout 3 is places with zero writings develop them further. The contrast of that you can see Fallout New Vegas, which is lots of places mentioned but undeveloped. Case in point: Easy Pete mention his old claim by the river, but we never know if that's Jim lucky mine, or old Searchlight mine, or coyote mine. FNV is full of ideas waiting for further development, but F3 is just plain lack of that.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

If you think Fallout 3 is bad, just wait until you play Fallout 2

Fallout 2 has the problem of being more of a theme park than a coherent world. You have Gangster Land, Future Land, Western Land, and so on where each town has it's own theme with a few other towns sprinkled in that are more along the lines of Fallout's towns. Fallout 2 was also a game made in slightly under a year where they pumped in enough people to the project in order to make it bigger and get it done. It was developed and designed with very little communication between designers, stuff shoved in, rushed, and pumped out the door because Interplay was already failing at that point.

Example: the issue of BOS change into shining knights of wasteland fighting army of darkness. That is the issue Saint Proverbius and his ilks keep complaining nonstop about, cause they deviated from the old image in F1/2.

It's almost like Bethesda played Fallout and just remembered the good ending to Fallout for the Brotherhood of Steel, and that was the basis for the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3. Then they started scrounging for ideas for Fallout 4 and played Fallout Tactics, so the Fallout 4 BOS was based on that. It also makes no sense that the Brotherhood of Steel were as big as they were in both games in the context of Fallout and Fallout 2, and it also makes very little sense that the BOS would be overly good in one game, then a few years and around 200 miles later, they're the exact opposite. Then again, Fallout 4's morality is pretty fucking stupid.

It also makes very little sense that the BOS would be that different given the retconning of the Vertibirds they did for Fallout 4. They seem to have enough Vertibirds in order to have one on call for the player. At that point, you have a paramilitary organization with a means of communications. Hell, Fallout 3 introduced HAM Radios.

 

[Lemming42]

The Fo3 Brotherhood don't bother me too much honestly, if they switched the names around (Outcasts calling themselves the real BoS and Lyon's Pride calling themselves the Outcasts), and the Outcasts played a greater role in the story and were causing more problems for the Lyons group, then it wouldn't be too bad as a plot.

If you accept Fo2's weird portrayal of the BoS, then we know they were trying to get vertibirds, so an expedition to Washington is both canon-compliant and makes perfect sense. Of course the tech-obsessed wankers would want to head over to the capital to see what they can scrounge. The game just needed to go into more depth about the schism and preferably have people like Cross and the Scribes explain to the player exactly why they chose to side with Lyons (Cross does talk about the "Codex" and the "Lyons Doctrine", so there's presumably a quasi-religious element at play as there was in Fo1 - not sure if many other NPCs go into it). The story also does show some signs of discontent - Scribe Yearling in the library still treats you like shit for being a wastelander and indicates that she's not at all happy about the split and has sided with Lyons partly against her will. Lyons himself also mentions that he hears rumours of people under his command planning to defect to the Outcasts.

Super Mutants are the only reused thing I just can't accept in Fo3, makes absolutely no sense at all, even within the context of Fo3 itself.

 

[agris]

The game just needed to go into more depth about the schism and preferably have people like Cross and the Scribes explain to the player exactly why they chose to side with Lyons

the game with "have you seen my father? he's a middle aged man"-tier writing could be fixed by more writing?

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

If you accept Fo2's weird portrayal of the BoS, then we know they were trying to get vertibirds, so an expedition to Washington is both canon-compliant and makes perfect sense.

The Vertibird thing makes little sense with the retcon that they were pre-war. The Brotherhood of Steel had some pretty high level clearance considering where they were stationed and where they went. It also makes little sense that they'd develop power armor and a new flying troop transport and not have plans for both at either facility. Even if they didn't have the plans, they should probably know where army bases might be that would have a Vertibird or two that they could scavenge. Honestly, that retcon makes little sense as to why the BOS wouldn't have both been aware of them and known where to get one if they wanted one.

Super Mutants are the only reused thing I just can't accept in Fo3, makes absolutely no sense at all, even within the context of Fo3 itself.

How about Deathclaws? But yeah, Supermutants make no sense considering they explicitly stated that the FEV was only in Mariposa, which Bethesda retconned. Even then, Richard Grey tinkered with the FEV in order to create Supermutants. It's odd that they would have it on the East Coast as well, and manage to basically recreate everything Grey did in order to make Supermutants just like Grey did with no communication with Grey or even the same goals and ideas as Grey.

 

[Lemming42]

Oh, yeah, Deathclaws too. And Iguana-On-A-Stick!

The thing that always shocked me about the Super Mutants is that, even if you accept Fo3's own logic and get over the impossible FEV retcon, they still don't make sense. They "reproduce" by capturing people and taking them to Vault 87, but it's also a massive plot point in the main quest that no human can enter Vault 87 due to the lethal radiation, forcing the player to infiltrate via the Lamplight caves. So how are captive humans getting taken there without being fried? Unless the FEV works on corpses and resurrects them into living mutants. If there is an explanation for this in-game, I've never found it.

 

[9ted6]

None of the games after 1 make much sense at all and among them only NV even tries to. 2 is just a linear sequence of cringe pop culture jokes, Tactics has you literally visit Simpsons Springfield, 3 barely has a plot and what's there is retarded and riddled with plot holes, 4 is less plot holed but still retarded and 76 is 76.

And then NV also gives up on the story with 3/4 of its DLCs. Dead Money is mysterious spooky ghost casino that exists for no real reason, Old World Blues is Rick & Morty and Lonesome Road is Avellone's incoherent novel / rant.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

...Tactics has you literally visit Simpsons Springfield,...

Fallout Tactics also features the 2nd appearance of Chris Avellone in a computer game, this time as mayor of Springfield:

"People of Springfield. You've all known me as Mayor Avellone for two years now and as Chris Avellone for many years before that. I've always been proud serving this town and all its people - and that's a fact. But I won't stand for this worthless hate violence, not as a mayor, and certainly, not as a man. We shouldn't hate the ghouls for being what they are. They can't help it if they were mutated into hideous looking monsters. Remember, that inside that monster, under the rotting flesh, the flaking skin, and the misshapen features is a second-class citizen. These good people delouse our cesspools, clean our grease pits and work the slaughterhouse. That's honest, hard work! So don't hate them for being insidiously ugly. Instead of attacking them, be kind! Instead of calling a ghoul ugly, tell it how fine it looks! I know you may not want to pat a ghoul on the back and that's OK; just don't burn it's house down. And now here a new bill I would like to present to you: it's called the Bill of Monster Rights. Under this bill, there will be no violence against a ghoul, unless the ghoul started it! And from now on, a ghoul is entitled to payment equal to or greater than half that of a pure-bred human! And lastly, no more will "taking a dump" be referred to as "pinching the ghoul," or "making ghoul babies," or "dropping off the ghoul at the pool." I know we can live together in harmony, I just know it. Thank you!"

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The thing that always shocked me about the Super Mutants is that, even if you accept Fo3's own logic and get over the impossible FEV retcon, they still don't make sense. They "reproduce" by capturing people and taking them to Vault 87, but it's also a massive plot point in the main quest that no human can enter Vault 87 due to the lethal radiation, forcing the player to infiltrate via the Lamplight caves. So how are captive humans getting taken there without being fried? Unless the FEV works on corpses and resurrects them into living mutants. If there is an explanation for this in-game, I've never found it.

Not to mention that they also managed to produce centaurs, which were the goof ups from Grey tinkering with the FEV. I also don't remember West-Tek being anything other than the name of the base in Fallout, but they decided to flesh that out in to it's own corporation in Fallout 3.

The Enclave shouldn't exist in Fallout 3 and beyond, honestly. It would make no sense that you'd have another faction of government in another part of the country that uses the same equipment, same name, and so on. If the Poseidon Oil group got cut off from the East Coast, there would have been some divergence going on there. The one with the actual executive branch holding up in it would probably have the better military equipment, because they're directly under the executive. If the East Coast bunch were members of Congress, then they'd still have some military protection, but the DoD would be with the executive.

It makes a LOT more sense that the Enclave in Fallout 2 developed the Vertibirds and the Advanced Power Armor, though. West Tek(aka The Glow) was were the power armor program was, so if there was Advanced Power Armor, the Brotherhood would have it. Even if you make the argument that they were developed at the same time with the company competing with itself, the Brotherhood would have known about it's existence - just like they didn't really know much about the Vertibirds. It also doesn't make much sense that there's that much Advanced Power Armor in existence and scattered everywhere in the wasteland even with Bethesda's fast and loose retconning of previous Fallout titles. If it were newer, why is it everywhere? If it was around the same time as the T-51b, then why was the T-51b in use by the Brotherhood of Steel and seen in the opening to Fallout as the defacto armor when a better one existed? If the Enclave developed it over the course of 15 decades on the oil rig, it would explain why the Brotherhood didn't know about it.

 

[Lemming42]

The Enclave don't make much sense in Fo3 but I never liked them much in Fo2 so I can kind of accept their presence in Fo3 since it's just a regurgitation of an idea that IMO was already pretty batshit. They're definitely there for the same reason as the BoS and the Super Mutants, which is that Bethesda just lifted random shit from the first two games and awkwardly transplanted it to the other side of the country whether it made sense or not, but I thought a couple things about the Fo3 Enclave were actually more interesting than their Fo2 counterparts. Especially things like the eyebots going round playing the patriotic radio station, which was one of the most striking aesthetic touches in the whole game - completely barren wasteland with this weird robot flying through it playing America the Beautiful.

Also I really like the idea of a ZAX AI that's been left on too long and managed to confuse itself and become some kind of weird caricature of an "ideal" US president while still being forced to follow out its original directive, feels like something suitably pulpy and surreal in the vein of Fallout 1 (though obviously the actual conversation the player has with Eden is totally nonsensical and the story never uses the concept well). Those fake idyllic childhood stories it tells on the radio station are great in retrospect when you realise that Eden is just a glorified large language model smashing together random shit it read in presidential biographies, and that nothing it's saying is meant to make a great deal of sense.

I kind of like the concept of Autumn and an ideological split starting to arise in the Enclave as well, even if serial fuckup artist Emil Pagliarulo manages to completely botch it all with his usual finesse and obliterates any appeal the subplot might have had. There's some merit to the basic idea I think, and it's more interesting than Fo2 where the bad guys turn out to be a bunch of hoary jokes about 90s Republicans and Monica Lewinsky, it's just that like most things in Fo3 it all goes wrong thank to surpassingly bad writing.

The Enclave shouldn't exist in Fallout 3 and beyond, honestly. It would make no sense that you'd have another faction of government in another part of the country that uses the same equipment, same name, and so on. If the Poseidon Oil group got cut off from the East Coast, there would have been some divergence going on there.

Regarding this, I think the people at Raven Rock are all refugees from the California Enclave. If I remember it right, Eden was basically alone in Raven Rock for a couple centuries, which is why it's ended up going crazy and adopting the Eden persona. When it learned of the destruction of the Oil Rig, it sent out an order to all remaining personnel to flee to Raven Rock (in vertibirds, I guess). I might be completely wrong about this, it's been a while since I played it. I'm also not sure why they all decide to randomly submit to an AI when they arrive and learn the truth about Eden, or why they have completely different power armour (other than the obvious explanation that Emil doesn't have a clue what he's doing).

 

[motherfucker]

F4's biggest lost opportunity is never reusing the "middle-aged guy" line.
"I'm looking for a dude who killed my wife. Middle-aged guy. Maybe you've seen him?"

 

[Alan]

Fallout New Vegas is a well-written, creative game. Same thing that made Fallout 1 good imo

 

[Alan]

I think the psi power stuff is okay. Like everything else in Fallout, it makes sense within the context of the game itself and only becomes awkward or unfitting if you take it alongside the sequels. Everything in Fo1 exists to tell one story, the story of the Unity and the journey of the Vault Dweller, and IMO there's nothing in the game that doesn't work to that end. Weird shit like the Glowing Ones and the psi powers and ZAX and the Deathclaw and the Nightkin all work brilliantly because they're there as striking ideas that define the mind-bending surreal horror that the VD experiences on his/her journey into the surface world, which plays out more like a half-comical half-sickening nightmare than a real place. But none of those elements work outside of that, so all the sequels just feel weird as hell, since they're desperately trying to write new and unrelated stories in a setting that was created for the purpose of telling one specific story that's already concluded.

What do you think about the DLCs? Don't they try to tell their own stories?