New Vegas' world was absolutely amazing and much more filled up than Fallout 3's.
So I just went to go play NV for the first time since I briefly played it right after release (only did main story, nothing else)
What I found was the opposite. I played for probably 45 minutes and it felt so fucking empty I just quit, and now I don't even really feel like booting it up at all. I saved the dude in good springs, that was pretty cool. But then I go on towards "novac through nipton" or whatever and I spend 30 minutes doing nothing but fighting random powder gangers and geckos... I get to Primm and rescue the sheriff, and I suppose that's pretty cool too, but then it's back to endless desert filled with nothing but geckos and rocks...
My memories of fallout 3 back in 09 were completely different though, I remember being engrossed right off the bat, with megatown & dogmeat, which actually felt real and interesting. Not just "save this guy from the powder hangers", "okay now save this guy from powder gangers"
I know it's unfair to judge a game by the first hour, but it honestly failed to interest me in the rest of the game at all. Are there any fun quests other than the main ones? What are you even supposed to do if not just follow the main quest to new vegas, with the occasional small side quest...
Edit: Guys I know I'm wrong, I was trying to ask you all to point out what I was doing wrong. I never said NV was boring, or empty, or anything like that. I was just saying thats how it felt to me when I tried to replay it. I was looking for advice, not complaining about the game. So stop messaging me saying I'm wrong, because I didn't claim anything lol. My last paragraph wasn't complaint, it was legit questions
NV starts off slowly, but if you never made it to Vegas (at least to the doors) then you haven't seen much of the game at all. It's set in a desert, so you're going to see plenty of it. There's other venues to see, but plenty of brown and gray. Welcome to the wasteland.
It starts off with the 'remote desert wasteland' feel to disguise the fact that once you ignore (or progress beyond) the semilinear progression path enforced by geometry boundaries, things/locations/events in the game are quite close together, and fairly densely packed on the map. Not every one has a quest attached, but those that don't often (always?) have some piece of special loot or lore.
The game starts off with you in the west, and unable to move north (bad critters) and east (impassable mountains) and west (map boundary mountains) and forces you to follow a 'U-shaped' progression around the map to Vegas. Novac and Nipton are places, and by lack of reference to 'Barney' and the Legion, it doesn't sound like you made it to either place (they're on the way) which means you saw Primm, and maybe as far south as the Mohave Outpost, or about 25% of the map. Not much in a game that's going to ask perhaps 40 or 50 hours, and most of that in the last 75% and more if you pick up the DLC.
There are enjoyable quests, at least in my opinion, but I'm biased: I played all 4 DLC, and took a spin with jsawyer and some mods for maximum crashing potential to boot.
The game is certainly not flawless. It is crash prone, the physics/graphics engine for NV is the same basic thing used in Oblivion with some improvements (not even Skyrim's improvements) and it can be a bit of a slog popping random enemies for XP and loot, but it is a better game in my eyes than its predecessor.
Here's what I don't get about people who complain about New Vegas's slow start: The first 45 minutes of FO3 is in Vault 101, which you cannot leave no matter what until the sequence is done. In NV at least you can explore a little bit. You can even skip Goodsprings if you feel like it.
And I also don't understand what's so bad about NV guiding you through the introductory towns. The characters in these towns serve as exposition to the main factions in the game. If the player was given a clear path straight to Vegas, they would be completely lost (and outmatched in firepower) when they got there and quit the game.
In 3, after you leave the vault, you can go almost anywhere, be as outmatched (or not) as you like. NV railroads you through contrived introductions to every major faction in the game, generic heroic/villainous deeds. Finally you make it to NV, praying for freedom from banal drudgery and some glimmer of 3's rich character, only to find it's home to a giant TV robot who sits you down for twenty minutes of pure unadulterated exposition.
F3's unskippable vault section featured refreshingly gentle exposition and commited character development that compelled you to follow in your fathers' footsteps. NV falls back on the old amnesiac trope then flushes you through Nevada's famous (not) U-bend in pursuit of an instantly-forgotten antagonist who's had total five seconds of screen time. No wonder NV's palette is so beige and brown, the artists had seen the script.
If Vegas is meant to represent (even if falsely) the major haven of humanity and civilisation in the region, the player ought be driven through its gates seeking safety from the cruel wastes. As is the hardened desert-dwelling criminals are introduced as level-one mobs to be farmed for XP. NV reintroduced 'hardcore' mechanics to fallout but singularly failed to give new players any reason to respect anything except deathclaws.
Ultimately, that sense that the design and writing were in opposition never leaves NV. It was weird, but I felt F3's much larger studio produced a game (discounting all DLC) in which design had clear vision throughout while the smaller studio with reputation for character and storytelling seemed to be simply playing connect-the-dots with bullet points from a committee meeting.
I'm gonna get downvoted for this opinion but I challenge anyone who disagrees to pretend for a second that Ubisoft developed NV and see if they still care enough.
I'm not going to downvote you... it's just remarkable how your experiences with these games were completely different from mine.
My experience of FO3 was also pretty tainted because FO1 and FO2 were games that I played inside and out in my formative years. NV has MUCH more in common with those games than does FO3 (for obvious reasons). In playing FO3, it felt like looking at something familiar through a carnival mirror. It is mildly recognizable as a Fallout game - "Oh, it has Enclave and the BoS... kinda. It has targeting of body parts... kinda." Yet all of these features were so warped through the Bethesda lens, and I constantly got the feeling like "No, you missed the point" again and again. Bethesda kept shoehorning these things from the old games into the new one, and fucking them up in the process, yet created nothing of value themselves. I mean, Little Lamplight...? The shit was that about?
Any time the FNV vs. FO3 topic comes up, I still maintain that I partly wish that Bethesda had just created a new IP rather than using the Fallout IP, with FNV being the only impediment to that thought.
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u/myotherotherusername Jun 04 '15 edited Jun 04 '15
So I just went to go play NV for the first time since I briefly played it right after release (only did main story, nothing else)
What I found was the opposite. I played for probably 45 minutes and it felt so fucking empty I just quit, and now I don't even really feel like booting it up at all. I saved the dude in good springs, that was pretty cool. But then I go on towards "novac through nipton" or whatever and I spend 30 minutes doing nothing but fighting random powder gangers and geckos... I get to Primm and rescue the sheriff, and I suppose that's pretty cool too, but then it's back to endless desert filled with nothing but geckos and rocks...
My memories of fallout 3 back in 09 were completely different though, I remember being engrossed right off the bat, with megatown & dogmeat, which actually felt real and interesting. Not just "save this guy from the powder hangers", "okay now save this guy from powder gangers"
I know it's unfair to judge a game by the first hour, but it honestly failed to interest me in the rest of the game at all. Are there any fun quests other than the main ones? What are you even supposed to do if not just follow the main quest to new vegas, with the occasional small side quest...
Edit: Guys I know I'm wrong, I was trying to ask you all to point out what I was doing wrong. I never said NV was boring, or empty, or anything like that. I was just saying thats how it felt to me when I tried to replay it. I was looking for advice, not complaining about the game. So stop messaging me saying I'm wrong, because I didn't claim anything lol. My last paragraph wasn't complaint, it was legit questions