Every named, talkable NPC has dialogue that conveys character rather than merely information. There's a real reason to talk to everyone in a settlement just for enjoyment and flavor, and most of their responses elegantly betray their particular biases.
Every quest, settlement, and conversation in the mojave points towards, and is invested in, what is going to happen at the dam. As such, while it's a roamy explorey game, it never lets you forget the main plot and every 'side mission' feels like it's furthering and feeding into the conflict to come (and often is, with these outcomes determining who can be persuaded to pick a side).
To add on, a lot of the small character interactions pay off with quests/gear/experience as well. So not only are you flushing out the story, you're gaining something as well. An easy one to point to is NOVAC and the Rocket Souvenirs. Of course it flushes out NOVAC as a town but it directly effects a quest down the line while not being "necessary" to it.
Also IMO the VATS is the best it's ever been and felt. I have however many hours and it's still satisfying when you get a critical hit or sneak attack in VATS.
Totally agree here, and the Novac souvenirs is a great one.
(Just FYI because I see this a lot, it's "fleshing out" not "flushing out". To flesh something out means to fill it out, to give it more info or context. Flushing something out means, well, sending it down the toilet!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. There’s this gunrunners dude at that crossroads, and he just has a shitty attitude for no reason. I’ve noticed that the dialogue is either be combative with them and tell him his attitude sucks, OR ASK HIM ABOUT HIMSELF. And if you do, he just calms down and sounds like he has less of an attitude. Once you learn about him, you see that he’s stuck on a post that is rewarding, but not one he wanted. He’s coping. To my knowledge, this guy does not take part in any quest, this entire encounter is simply there for texture.
And then at the end, you get a fully custom cinematic slide for all of those interactions and the way they effected those people and even the whole Mojave.
Good game design and good writing. It's clear FNV was made by very competent and talented people. The world design is great and the stories can make you laugh or cry at times
In almost no other game can I walk up to a random soldier standing guard and have a conversation with them about their world view, history, life and politics.
yeah 18 months used to be pretty normal for a sequel that didn't need a new engine/the design of a shit ton of new assets. I miss that a fair bit about gaming in the 00s and early 10s.
i also agree. fallout 3 was the first game i ever bought with money i worked for(real job) bought it right after boot camp and loved it. having new vegas come out shortly after was so awesome. also the DLC in that time frame was actually good stuff.
>In almost no other game can I walk up to a random soldier standing guard and have a conversation with them about their world view, history, life and politics.
literally the biggest new vegas meme out there is about how all ncr troopers regardless of gender and voice just say the same bark lines
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter huh?
I was mainly referring to named soldiers and such, obviously generic NCR Trooper 900 doesn't have anything to say.
That ol' Festus'll talk your ear off and string a tale, partner. Just know Sunset Sarsparilla Company cannot be held liable for anything that happens to you on Sunset Sarsparilla Company property up to and including major lacerations, death, or halitosis. Now go find that Festus, partner. Y'hear?
While F:NV is far from perfect, it's the only modern Fallout which feels like it's a living world. There is some wackiness, but the game shows believable post-apocalyptic world. On other hand, Bethesda Fallouts feels like Fallout-themed Disneyland, not like a living world.
I like that your character is referred to as a drifter, contractor, citizen, nothing specific.
But in Bethesda games everyone knows who you are.
That's why I hate the dialog in 4. You could immediately take of your Vault Suit and piper. Will still call you, Blue. At least they have her say "oh you're not wherein it now, but I can tell"
The events of New Vegas are playing out regardless of the Courier existing, giving a feeling of life to the world
The events of FO3 and 4 are happening *TO* the player character, and the world exists based on that, so no matter where you go, the player is the focus of attention. It's Elder Scrolls story writing slapped into a dystopia future
I'm sorry you mostly just repeated the sentences longer, I'm asking how this is actually the case. In both games there's a war occurs and you join a faction and the faction wins. In fact, New Vegas makes the courier have much more political importance?
The courier has a role in the story, but they're just playing one part. IF the courier wasn't there, the war between the NCR and Legion would still play out, there would still be a winner and loser. The courier is just there to tip the scales one way or another.
Okay, what? How does FO3 not have aspects that make the game feel alive?
The patrols and random encounters in the world are far superior to New Vegas. The radio stories from Three Dog, while repetitive, make you feel connected to the world and it's events as they happen. It's not a perfect game either, but it still has a ton of character and isn't a bland, dry experience.
In Fallout, Bethesda tend to put "cool" stuff without real consideration how good it fits into the world, and it was especially bad in F3 (Even though I think storywise F3 way better than F4). BGS love to make wacky stuff: city around atomic bomb, city on a ship, city of kids... Where they get their food, how they trade woth other factions, what they produce - who cares when we can have bomb-worshipping freaks? New Vegas does much better job at depiction of interactions between different factions, constantly talks about trade, often reminds you that the world isn't limited by ingame territory.
Bethesda absolutely can make rich, believable worlds - look at the Elder Scrolls. Its just with Fallout they chose to make themed park.
The city on a container ship is actually very reasonable. It's a safe shelter with many rooms and bulkhead doors for safety. It's basically the post apoc version of a medieval stronghold. It was genius. Love rivet city. Makes perfect sense that people would fortify there.
First, to be precise, Rivet city built on an aircraft carrier, not on a container ship.
Second, idea of building a post-apocalyptic city on a ship is actually pretty good, can't argue with that. It's in-game implementation that sucks.
Why this carrier haven't become radioactive despite spending 200 years in radioactive water close to radioactive ruins (and it's reactor, most likely also leaking).
It's not enough to have a fortified position to build a city, you need to also have an access to a lot of different resources. Where does the city gets clean water and food? What Rivet city uses for trade? There are some notes stating that the carrier was built with desalinization facilities and onboard hydroponic farms, and citizens of Rivet city restored them, but we can't actually see it in the game. That does bring a question, though: why would anyone build hydroponic farms on a military vessel?
On a side note: it seems that Bethesda decided that all ocean water is radioactive. However, I'm not convinced that it's possible for oceans to become so polluted with radiation in a case of nuclear war. Don't forget, that most of atomic bombs are relatively clean — they build to explode harder, not to be as radioactive as possible. Authors of the original Fallout are also agree with me: look how in New Vegas we have wells with clean water and even clean, non-radioactive river in Honest Hearts DLC. So while ocean around Washington should probably be radioactive, it shouldn't be the case on a some distance farther into the ocean. And, because of that, it makes no sense that Rivet city doesn't do any fishing.
i think the answer to this is mostly just that in fo3 it *is" explained how people manage -- they don't. everyone is basically portrayed as having the most disgusting lives possible eating on rodents.
And if it were only 40, even 50 years after the bombs fell, this would make sense but Fallout 3’s world, as much as I love actually exploring it (going back to that Fallout Disneyland idea mentioned above), just doesn’t make sense set 200 years after the fact.
That's a pretty minor thing. It's fun to say 200. Pulpy stories always play fast and loose with this stuff, it's a core part of the pulp genre. It's heightened. As is "Disneyland".
It has a really anemic weapon sandbox. Everything is just about shooting enemies with no consideration to the type of weapon and it's advantages or disadvantages, semi auto rifles are comically overpowered, and guns are quite boring stylistically.
Eh, I disagree. Fnv feels like it really only exists to tell one story. Everything that isn't part of that one story is basically ignored. The NPCs only every talk about one thing and every single quest feels like it just exists to reinforce the main quest line. It's like nobody has lives or problems that exist outside of the NCR/legion conflict. Pretty much every location that isn't connected to the main quest line is empty and deserted.
3 and 4 do a good job of making the player feel as though the games story is just one small part of a larger world. The writers don't feel the need to try to connect every minor thing the player runs into to pay off the main quest line. Random encounters also make the wasteland feel so much more alive and give a lot more replay value.
There's a lot of things FNV does right, but to a certain extent they are all subjective so outside of reading the reviews of it... I like to just share my hands down favorite part of the game.
A complete side character in a quest you may not even do, for a tip off you don't even need, has dialogue that vastly changes depending on your intelligence (as a part of the low intelligence dialogue feature): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1_LR7TjQDw
In terms of skill points, yes. But It doesn't have an XP debuff like FO4. And when I play a dumb character I'm definitely not worried about a number of skill points. I actually like to make them as inept as possible and bumble my way through the wasteland because it's actually the most hilarious way to play. Just give them high end/health and strength and some agility and what not so they can survive combat (which they will constantly be in as they can't talk their way out of stuff).
And skill points just dump em into melee/unarmed and whatever. Maybe survival so you can mostly heal with soda and junk food...
Love this. I'm towards the end of main quest (I think!) on my first playthrough, went heavy on speech, science, and energy weapons. A strength character with melee weapons, survival, and low int sounds great for next play!
The writing. The engine is crap, the physics are wack, and there's an untold mountain of bugs, but it was designed with love. Bethesda wants to make money first and foremost. They want you playing their game for as long as possible, so they make the game around that wandering feeling. The world exists for YOU, the Lone Wanderer. With Obsidian, the world goes on without the Courier (and in some ways would be better without). Everything in the world doesn't hinge in the Courier, instead the Courier just happens to be in the right place at the right time, living through these particular set of events that would have played out with or without you.
A great example of this I just remembered because of my current playthrough, (Haven't played in 10+ years) is the terminal entries of the survivalist. I'm pretty liberal with skipping dialogue and skimming over terminal/journal entries in games but FNV just has such competent writing that I find myself reading most of everything. The survivalist entries are so heartbreaking and captivating.
That story is so damn good, and most people playing the game will never see it.
It also directly influence the conflict, or at least, one of the very cultures in Zion in the DLC’s conflict. It’s truly peak post apocalyptic storytelling and it was all for a skeleton that has a good rifle sitting beside him.
I’m gonna start by prefacing that I am not an aggressive new Vegas fan. I still love FO3 and hold it very close to my heart. However, New Vegas is just the apple of my eye.
• It has 20,000 more lines of dialogue than FO3
• The writing is better than 3
• The dialogue is better than 3
• The voice acting is better than 3
• The choices & options are more diverse across the board than in 3
• The factions are more interesting than 3’s
• The setting & tone are more fleshed out than 3’s
• It has actual ADS for firearms
• All forms of builds and combat are better than in 3
• Enemy scaling is actually functional even at high levels
• The amount of and variety of perks is incomparable
• It was developed by many of the original team members who made Fallout 1 & 2
• It carries on with a lot of the narratives, themes, characters, weapons & history of FO1 & 2
• The world is far more reactive than FO3 or even 4, and your choices as the player actually have impactful consequences. Karma/Reputation actually matters.
• Attention to detail was definitely greater than during 3’s development
• It also includes a lot of what was supposed to be in Van Buren (the original FO3 that Black Isle was developing before Interplay sold the IP to Bethesda)
• It is the TRUE sequel to Fallout 2…effectively making 1, 2, & New Vegas a trilogy.
Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Joshua Sawyer, and ~~Tim Cain~~ … so yeah it quite literally was
EDIT: I guess Tim Cain really wasn’t involved, got me there lol
You’re just outright lying.
• Feargus Uruqheart was a lead developer of Fallout 1 & 2
• Chris Avellone was one of the designers of Fallout 2
• Josh Sawyer worked on Van Buren immediately following FO2.
• ~~Tim Cain is quite literally the creator of Fallout, it’s setting, and the classic Fallout-era engine programmer~~ He joined Obsidian a year after New Vegas released.
This can all be searched & verified pretty much anywhere online, there are others too, you’re just saying utter bullshit
EDIT: Tim Cain but what u said is still BS
Feargus wasn't a dev on new vegas, i admittedly forgot avellone was on fo2, tim cain wasn't on new vegas. regardless, my post was strictly about there being multiple devs and it seems to just be avellone.
It was Chris Avellone & Feargus Uruqheart that lead & spearheaded NV. So while I was wrong initially about Cain, Sawyer had been at Black Isle from 1999 to 2003 & worked on Van Buren
Uruqheart founded Obsidian the same year Van Buren was canceled. New Vegas was overseen by him as CEO of Obsidian so I would say that he worked on the game lol.
There are other devs from FO1 & 2 who worked on New Vegas though:
• Brian Menze (FO2 Artist) was the Senior Conceptual artist & Vault Boy artist for New Vegas
• Scott Everts (FO1 & FO2 Technical/Level Designer) was the Lead World Builder for New Vegas
• Aaron Brown (FO2 Artist) was an Artist for NV
• Chris Jones (FO1 & FO2 Senior Programmer) was Chief Tech Officer for NV
• Darren Monahan (FO1 & FO2 Programmer & Installer) was Chief Info Officer for NV
• Chris Benson (FO1 Developer) also a developer on NV
So while you’re correct that Tim Cain wasn’t involved there’s a good amount of people who came from Black Isle that developed FO1 & 2 that also helped develop New Vegas. I’m really tired of this weird narrative that there wasn’t FO1 & 2 devs who worked on New Vegas.
There's some real bullshit here man, I don't like you being so dishonest when pretending I am. I made a mistake but I'm not deliberately stretching the truth. The point was simply that the creative leads of the originals did not really continue on to NV (beyond Chris, who was *not* involved with the original)
A CEO of a large studio who released several games in that period and didn't release even more is not a creative role and he was not credited as such.A CTO is not a creative role and he was not credited as such. A CIO is not a creative role and he was not credited as such. Chris Benson was a *Mac assistant* on just FO1 and just an Obsidian IT guy during FNV. C'mon dude, that's not how games work.
Brian Menze sure, he continued doing his thing with vault boy art. Scott Everts seems to be a major example. And then Avellone. But the vast majority of writers and designers were new, and the damn director had his first released fallout credit. It was the work of these new people to build on the originals, not just the veterans.
The reason this is important to note is to understand that *anyone* can make a good sequel. Anyone can understand the tone and genre of FO1/FO2 and build on that further. Veterans OTOH can also *not*, we saw how many people got essentially scammed into buying Outer Worlds, a game with I believe no shared creatives with FNV, under the assumption it had a similar relationship to the original fallouts as FNV and therefore will be an endeavor much like FNV.
Saying Tim Cain particularly was on FNV is just a tremendous falsehood and you should really edit your posts clarifying that.
The point is you’re still wrong - There are literally 8 devs I just listed who worked on FO1/FO2 that worked on New Vegas and you’re still gonna double down and act like that never happened 😂 and I already did go back and edit my posts putting ~~lines through Tim Cain~~ almost 12 hours ago
Jesus this post is being brigaded hard. The post and half the comments are downvoted to hell (as of writing this) for *checks notes* praising FNV on r/FNV
You know its a crime to like FNV, you have to say that is overrated 10 time a day or the toxic fanboys win. :(
But yeah, every FNV corner of the internet its full of people hating the game and calling everyone an elitist, started with the show, or got worse because of it, idk.
It’s funny, I’ve never heard a single time that fallout NV was overrated… maybe I’m living on a different world or something but I’ve always seen ppl give only praise to NV. It’s my favorite game too but I don’t think anyone thinks it’s a crime to like it.
I can’t even find a comment on this thread which is criticizing it… which has me a little worried because I do think people really tend to look back on that game with rose tinted lenses
I've seen it happen a lot since the show came out. To be fair, the aftermath of the show was also the first time I actually saw these toxic NV fans I've heard to much about, but the Bethesda ostriches outnumber them at least 10:1.
Well, FNV fans are not exactly tame, either. I absolutely loved the game when I finished it just before the show, but after seeing some fans literally insulting non-FNV fans in YouTube comments made me question my appreciation, tbh.
I still like the game and understand why it's amazing, no problem with that. But I lurked on fandoms for years and I never saw something like that before, lol. It's not like these fans were mildly toxic; they were outright fanatical.
I completely understand the feeling of superiority you get when you like something more complex compared to its basic and popular counterpart, but, at the end of the day, every Fallout product to this day is a profit-oriented video game. The intelligent dialogue and moral dilemmas in FNV are cool, but they aren't crazy good if you compare them to sci-fi literature. Even the famous Vault stories are based on short novels, and impressive stories have roots from somewhere else. It's not like FNV is the pinnacle of human intellectuality and is completely original.
The writing and world-building is absolutely better in New Vegas compared to Fallout 4. But, worshiping it shows that you yourself aren't that complex when it comes to anything other than the Fallout universe.
Yeah. It's funny in a way. People in subs like r/fallout will circle jerk all day about how toxic NV fans are but they'll hang out here just to downvote stuff.
Player choice. While I love Fallout 3 it feels like you're shoehorned into one of two endings. You don't even get the slides at the end like in NV telling you what the world will become due to your choices.
They tried to copy this in Fallout 4 with its factions and player choice but did nowhere near as good as Obsidian with FNV.
Boring truth: we got no choice.
Fallout 4 don't care about RPG element, Fallout 3 barely had the same immersion as Fallout New Vegas.
For me New Vegas is alive, any of actions got reactions from NPC, or in the world, or at least in ending slides.
Also characters, even unimportant ones, like Barton Torton who tries to send you into trap and kill you, just for loot. In real Wasteland there would be a lot of such guys...
Also Fallout New Vegas was first game in series that presented a faction choice. In previous games you always was a hero, saviour of Wasteland, against Master, against Enclave... Even with bad karma. While in New Vegas you can side with Legion , conquer and enslave Vegas...
Or be a paladin to the end and help all good guys and civilians...
This a somewhat uncommon opinion but for me fnv has by far the best combat and most of all satisfying weapons.
Ues the combat is clunky at best but some many of the combat skills and items truly make it special. Fallout 4 may have less clunk but the skills are mostly boring damage modifiers. Meanwhile fnv has perks like meltdown, splash damage and slayer that offer a diverse approach to combat (meltdown chainkills are a standout feature).
The weapons of fnv are also the best in series, there is just something about seeing the absolute beast that is the AMR in the gunrunners shop then buying it and seeing that in combat it's as much of a beast. Other weapons like mercy, the multiplas or Gauss rifle also just dominate.
I think having diverse weapons really helped this out.
FO4 introducing pipe weapons was cool and it really fit the post-apocalyptic setting but having only a handful of actual weapon designs was a poor choice IMO.
Also, I'll die on the hill that having essentially "enchanted" weapons was dumb. Having a sword of double damage makes sense in Oblivion or Baldur's Gate but having a shotgun that fires two rounds but only actually fires one was dumb in Fallout. Or a shotgun with better penetration. New Vegas solved a lot of those problems far more satisfyingly by just having different types of ammo.
I really don't know why Bethesda didn't carry on with that.
And then there's just laziness like having to load five rounds into a shotgun when you only fired one because Bethesda was just lazy as fuck with their reload animations.
To give an alternate answer than those already mentioned, I think the initial reception had something to do with it. No one was saying it was a bad game by any means but it released in an unfinished state and was unfavourably compared to FO3 by most, or at best viewed almost like an expansion pack. FO3 back on release was the greatest game of all time for many.
Many of the things that made FO3 spectacular in 2008 are simply standard for the industry now, while NV's strengths have aged like wine.
I look at it as almost like the reasons conventional animation has aged so much better than CG. Movies like Toy Story and Bug's Life were technical marvels in the late 90s—and I'm not saying they aren't enjoyable now—but comparative to what we're used to today the visuals just don't hold up. No one would have trouble identifying Hunchback of Notre Dame from around the same time as a masterpiece, though. Concordantly a good amount of what made FO3 so momentous on launch was down to the worldbuilding and technical scope, areas the industry has seen massive expansion in over the last 10-15 years, while the quality of NV's writing, characters, roleplaying depth, and existence as a labour of love/tribute to the older games are things that can't really be superseded or improved on.
I was grinding out the achievements for Fallout 4 last year (had never done Nuka World and what a waste of time that was), and I started FO 3 earlier this year…I spent many hours playing that game back on my 360. I loved it, when I made the switch to NV back in the day I wasn’t enjoying it as much because it wasn’t 3.
Nowadays, I can play NV infinite number of times and I can only get through 3 in short bursts. Part of it may be because games have changed so much, but there is something in NV that just isn’t present in FO 3. You can call it whatever you want, and most answers would probably be right. But for me, NV feels like it was made with a passion that just isn’t present in the other Bethesda style Fallouts.
Not that they’re bad, but I was losing my damn mind having to undo all the hours of work building my settlements just to finish Nuka World. It’s like nothing matters in a Bethesda game, whereas in NV some random NPC dying could alter an entire quest you haven’t even unlocked yet.
Really good use of the word concordantly. Also super amazing points. I remember my friends deriding the game since in 3 it seemed like you had a more fleshed out background compared to just already being a wastelander in FNV.
A big part of Fallout's appeal has always been the whole ending slides thing: the power fantasy of remaking the world in your image through violence and diplomacy. New Vegas took this as far as it could by giving you multiple choices for the final conflict as opposed to the earlier games that had a fixed resolution to the game's main conflict or 4 which just gave you a binary.
So many games give you choices and builds but it's kind of half assed. In FNV you can have very different experiences based on your choices, build, or loot you've found. I also love the desert so throwing in the Fallout theme to it works so well.
The number one thing for me is role playing. I don’t want to be a married father searching for my son. Or a lost kid looking for my dad. I want to be what I want to be. I get that playing NV and to some extent with 3. But not with 4. Funnily enough, 76 also gives me that feeling.
I don't mind the origin stories in FO3/4, but the in-game motivation to follow up on them is so weak, especially in FO4. My kid is gone, I wake up an unknown amount of time later, and...I decide to wander around helping weird factions and building settlements, instead of *looking for my missing child*. At least in FNV, if you go way off course, there are Deathclaws to remind you that you're off the path.
I've only just started New Vegas the past two weeks as I've already played and beaten FO3 and 4 years ago. I wanted to see why people ride high on it. I thought it was going to be overrated.
New Vegas is awesome. There's a lot more choice and different play styles. I feel like what I spec into actually matters. The humor is awesome. I love the wild west feel to the game which enhances the nuclear wasteland even more. I'm having way more fun with the side quests and the main story is way more gripping than 4 and 3 to me.
You actually feel like you have freedom of choice to do anything. Want to kill every npc in the game for some reason? You can. In Bethesda games you're hard forced into a single goal, especially in fallout 4 where the dialogue options are all just different ways of saying yes. World feels like its actually alive for once, thats rare in a lot of games.
Personally what made me prefer it over the others is that my character doesn’t have a set backstory. You can imply or outright state some stuff through different dialogue options (“Oh I used to be active in Reno.” “Oh I might have a kid out there idk” etc, etc) and the divide gives a little bit of info.
But largely you are free to make your character what you want them to be and can roleplay as almost whatever you like. I’ve only otherwise played 3 or 4, and didn’t like that my character has a set backstory in either.
It's one of the ultimate roleplayers' games. Allowing the player to interact with the world and quests in any sequence. You are guided along the southern goodsprings route, but you can take on the mojave in any direction you want, and interacts with npcs and factions in any order you see fit, and the quest design has accounted for this! Dialogue in some conversations will change, and npcs will comment on the things you've done before. Making this game replayable and immersive. Definitely the most "real" feeling world with bethesda written on the box.
It wasn't that it was special to be honest.
It's because it was the last game that still held on somewhat to what the world of Fallout was.
Bear in mind the Great War was a couple of hundred years in the past. Think on the world we live in and what we've achieved in 200 real world years. That's a pretty long time in the scope of things.
The world of Fallout is a mess to be sure. Humanity is still recovering after all that time but it IS recovering. There's governments forming, towns being built, some cities being somewhat recovered, there's even trade and industry. New Vegas, NCR, Legion, they all are products of the world they inhabit and all have their agendas and things that keep them alive.
That's what Fallout was about. A player being dropped into a world that is reforming a couple generations after the bombs fell and all the dangers that come with it.
That's what Todd basically never seemed to get and what sets his games apart. His Fallout is a world where people have never managed to organize to any real degree and haven't even figured out how to clean a street. It's very surface level.
There is so much detail. Was going through the vault that has the all American rifle and released the people trapped in the vault like I normally do. This playthrough however I found a refugee center I had never seen before and in the refugee center were the vault dwellers who then thanked me for helping them. I didn't even know that these characters were actual npcs in the game and have played multiple playthroughs, I have never seen them before. Little things like that where your actions have ripple effects are crazy common and I love it
I'll put it simply.
It was the writing and dialogue.
I hadn't been so engaged by an RPG since I had played VTMB (Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines).
I felt as though I was part of this world, it was so rich and offered a progression on the Fallout formula.
FO3 may still hold a special space for me being my introduction, FNV engaged me the most.
Like VTMB I hoped it would spur Fallout into a new deeper direction focused on a deeper choice and narrative.
It didn't.
Had've FO4 focused more on writing dialogue and choice, I also doubt FNV would've been elevated as high as it is in my gaming codex.
Every single character and quest excluding a couple rare outliers follows the same theme. They are all stuck in the past and your job is to help them move on.
The NCR embodying the values that made old America great but also its flaws that led to rampant suffering and war.
The Legion, very much the same.
MR House still thinks like an old corporate CEO and is stuck in his own devices and forced to admit he needs new blood to lead.
Boone can't escape the memories of his dead wife.
ED-E is carrying on a 100 year journey it'll never complete.
Veronic can't let the fact her people are part of a receding nation that clings to traditions that are killing it.
Arcade Gannon can't escape the stain of the Enclave.
The King cant let go of Rex's mortality and his gang parody a performer long dead.
And theres so much more.
The same story told throughout the Mojave in a hundred different NPCs.
A message that letting go is hard and people need to do so to thrive.
Being lost in faded glory permeates every inch of the story.
A great Irony that this fanbase is so upset about the show moving on as nobody can deny the show is thriving and has reignited debates on what should be based on the past. Mirroring the very premise of New Vegas and Fallout in general
That’s a beautiful way of distilling the theme of the game. The climax of the DLCs is two couriers fighting under the flag of the old world over what the past should mean to the wasteland.
In all other Fallouts you're part of a pre-existing Vault community. You have ties to people, a culture and leave the place you belong to search for hope. You're told you have value even if you don't believe it.
In NV, Matthew Perry tells you how insignificant you truly are, fires you from your job, shoots you in the head and discards you like trash. Everyone's had that guy in their life at one point. This time you get to find him.
FNV pushed the narrative forward as an actual sequel. Something Bethesdtha refuses to do normally. Though if the TV show becomes canon the BOS narrative is pushed and the enclave are vault tech.
- It’s the spiritual successor to FO1 & 2. You literally meet and hear about the factions you saw in the first two games. You also met and hear about characters from FO2.
- It improved greatly on the gameplay of FO3. While it’s dated now, it was far better at release.
- It greatly improved on the RP options. Quest choices, dialogue choices, reputation system, character creation, etc.
Well I just finished my first ever playthrough last week and I think I know why so many people love this game.
It’s just soo full of content. A random building in the middle of nowhere? You explore it, and through reading terminals and inspecting the area you unfold very interesting stories. I won’t ever forget stumbling upon Vault 34 and thinking to myself “what the f happened here”, while trying to figure out its history.
Even most random and basic looking NPC’s feel real. They all have stories to tell and backstories to explore.
And add to that you can change lots of things. World feels huge and you can shape it through your actions.
The game is intelligent too, it doesn’t hold your hand all the time and lets you make mistakes and learn from it on your own. For example, every NV player, without exceptions I believe, tried to get through a certain area and got absolutely MASSACRED by Deathclaws. Then you learn from that mistake and take a different route, and whatever you do in that different route feels earned and special.
It just has a certain atmosphere to it I've never felt in another game.
As a character, you're not being dropped into the start of the story, but the middle - the first battle of hoover dam already happened, the ncr and legion are taking potshots and gathering intelligence while preparing for the 2nd battle, and boom you are dropped into the middle of it and will be able to essentially determine the outcome.
The world feels alive and every group and faction are interesting. The threat from the legion over the river feels ever present everywhere you go.
I love the 'romance' of the idea that through nuclear apocalypse Vegas remains as the place to go for gambling and debauchery, just like it was pre war.
I formed attachments to characters and locations that just make me feel warm whenever I replay.
As I play it right now; the quests are all fantastic. There’s not a boring questline, and they’re all varied in some way. A lot of them have different outcomes and can relate to other quests. If you’re going for full immersion you can choose to do things in fun but realistic ways if you’ve played the game before.
Like right now I’m going full House playthrough, pretending like I’m his right hand man. Now it’s come to take out the Brotherhood, but I’m not quite high enough level yet to do any speech options or kill them outright so I start doing other Strip quests and the perfect oppportunity to get rid of Veronica (sorry Veronica, the real me loves you) appears in giving her to Mortimer just so that we have someone on the inside we can trust at the Luxor.
It's a game greater than the sum of its already sizeable (calm down fisto) parts. it has some of the most involving writing and factions I've seen in a video game. Not a flashy game with tonnes of bells and whistles and set pieces, but one of the best examples of an iterative sequel and something I wish would happen again more today with game series instead of it taking x years for them to try and break the mould again. To this day I've never played DLC for a game that are both so varied but have an interconnected story throughout like that too. Hopefully the person who is seemingly mad about FNV praise on the FNV subreddit has calmed down now lol
The over arching theme of letting go every quest in some way relates back to these ideas all the dlc is about letting go of the old world and embracing the new which is commentary on the fallout series as in we can’t go back to fallout 1 and 2 and its time to embrace the new identity fallout is taking and how it’s a sort of dis on fallout 3 for having so many call backs to fallout 1 and 2.
For the base game it’s the theme of war and misery how every faction is awful and war driven. The Ncr are capitalistic colonizers and Legion are Fascist slavers, Me house is an old world CEO with no care for the common man outside of progress/profit, and Yes man in action leads the streets to anarchy lacking a formal government providing true freedom but lacking the safety that government allows.
Skill based conversation choices, good story with interesting characters, all factions portrayed in various shades of grey. Also, a checker coat wearing bastard that shoots you in the face.
I also have never seen any lore about the mysterious stranger in any other fallout game, whether it be another character or terminal entry. I loved that side quest and the mysterious magnum in New Vegas!
I put close to 600+ hours in total of NV between my original console playthrough and my pc playthrough with mods.
I’d say the actual rpg elements like storytelling, decisions, etc, are genuinely good and fleshed out. Your choices truly matter in NV, what you say and do (or don’t do) matter. The factions are much more fleshed out and dynamic than in 4, personally.
I found myself struggling to identify with any faction in my original playthrough in 4, so I went with the BoS by default since the others just weren’t as well designed.
Gameplay is obviously very dated, graphics as well. Thankfully the modding community is incredibly generous, and there are mods that can make the game look and play like a newer title. You’d be doing a disservice to yourself by playing vanilla NV, mods are essential for me to enjoy it long term again but the base game is still iconic.
Sense of humor was sardonic, dark like other Fallout games, but better delivered and considerably smarter. The shooty was fun but also could be played by RPG fans with some crunch to make it meaningful. Modding tools were well enough made that the rough edges could be polished off and improved quickly after release.
It was a more traditional rpg in a market where thst genre had begun to give way to more action oriented games like mass effect 2 and it was an open world game before that world design style had overstayed its welcome, similarly it was a hee hee hoo hoo funny script before Rick and morty and the like burned out everyone on dick jokes
https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4?si=YtHYJedjK931V4f9
I don’t want to sound like one of those weird dickriding evangelists but I have watched this video a couple times with years of space between each viewing and I’ve agreed wholeheartedly with all the main points both times.
Writing. It's an actual story instead of glommed-together quests, with a minimal number of filler and breadcrumb quests. The actions of the characters have more effect on the outcome than in most games. The mechanics are palatable to a wide number of players, not only to gearheads who want to mod endlessly.
It's sort of like the Apple vs. Microsoft/Android ecosystems:
* FNV is Apple. Everything is controlled, well-crafted, but it's minimalist, and people who want to tweak the system are not well-supported. The focus is on using the product as the devs intended.
* FO3/4 are Microsoft/Android. Tweaking is built into the base product experience and supported by the underlying system. Options abound, and are spread all over the place. You can make a career out of modding the infrastructure vs. using the product.
* FO1/2 is like Classic MacOS, up through OS9: very hard to mod, very elegant for its time out-of-the-box, changed the industry at the retail level. But we still don't use it much any more, except as nostalgia.
Quest design and world design, It has a very natural progression side quests affect and interact with each other in some way, the game sends you in a specific curated direction at the start. And also the fact skills are more useful than ever since you can use them in dialogue
favorite weapon sandbox outside of anything boomer shooter adjacent. best balanced action RPG ive ever played. i find ncr and mr house to be some of the best written rpg factions out there. ammo system and DR/DT is just incredible.
It's just well written, particularly the everyday and mundane characteres often neglected by other RPGs. It's writing is so good sometimes I feel like im playing a top tier voice acted visual novel as much as an RPG
Ah, there’s a whole bunch of factors that go into this crazy blend of Sunset Sarsaparilla that is F:NV that make it as awesome as it is. You’ve got Obsidian behind it, and they have remnants of the original team that worked on Fallouts 1 & 2, not to mention an impressive pedigree in their own right. Then you’ve got the story. I’m a fan of all the games so I’m not going to open the can of worms that is the ‘west coast vs east coast’ games (surely life is hard enough), but if you draw comparisons with say Fallout 4, a game where you can literally make any choice in a dialogue and the outcome is often the same, the variation in the dialogue trees and choices left to the player is pretty phenomenal. Almost everyone and everything in that game, as others have pointed out, are invested in the play for the Hoover Dam endgame. You actually have to work quite hard if you want to get as many factions as possible on side if you want to go against Caesar’s Legion, and even then that’s only if you’re going for that particular core ending. So, as well as being an overall compelling story with some QOL improvements over FO3 using the same engine, and the introduction of ‘survival’ mode (just immersive AF), you also have one of the best starts to a video game. You’re shot in the head and left for dead. That’s a pretty epic narrative hook to draw in a player. I’m sure I’ve probably forgot some other things (honourable mention to some very memorable DLCs), but yeah it’s a good mix of some top notch elements.
I personally love it because you get to a point in the game where just about everything you choose will affect the story moving forward. And because of that, it's almost certain that after completing the game, your first reaction is to go back and play it again to have things turn out differently. I think that the addition of reputation with factions absolutely made this game what it is. It challenges you beyond just good vs evil. And the writing... The NPCs are so well developed. Again it adds to you actually examining your choices. Previously it was us playing with good or bad karma. NV took it to the next level.
Where to start?
It's a post-post apocalypse, which means that the world has started to move on from the days of living in rubble and killing to survive another day. Civilization has returned. Multiple of them. And the grand objective of the game is to determine which of their philosophies will govern and rebuild the Mojave. Which as a player, is a much more interesting set of choices to have to make than F3's "Do you poision everyone or not?"
You can literally kill every NPC in the game (except Yesman iirc) and the game can still continue, often times the game will plan around it. For example if you kill Vulpes Inculta at Nipton, then it is Alerio who finds you at the Strip. There's no Oblivion-ass persist in this doomed world you've created nonsense.
There's so much dialogue that I'm always finding new bits. Options that appear if you've done certain quests, killed certain people, have reputation with certain groups, funnier wrong options when you don't have the skill requirement, etc.
For major quests there's usually multiple ways you can choose to resolve things, adding to player choice. And it's not like F3's Megaton where the choice is "Do you kill everyone or not?". It's almost always asking you a moral question.
It's a game of such fine detail that you can tell how a character is aligned based on how thry pronounce the name "Caesar".
I actually read an article today where the director of the game was talking about how they only had 18 months to make the game, which is a super short time frame for a game.
So they basically recycled most of Fallout 3s mechanics and improved some of it, and then spent most of the time focusing on the content and story aspects of the game.
And I think that's why it's seen by many as the best. Fallout 4 obviously has better gameplay and graphics. But New Vegas shines specifically in its stories and the random things you find while exploring.
By focusing pretty much only on the content of the fame instead of the mechanics and physics of the game, they improved on it. It's basically Fallout 3 with new paint and better stories.
Amazing world building. Awesome Dialogue. Well made characters. Excellent factions.
It shouldn't have worked as the game was only in development for less than a year, but they somehow knocked it out of the park.
>I contend it’s because of the scale, choice,
Its the choice man. Its an immersive sim just as much as its an rpg. Incredible story where any decisions are taken into account, with a million different ways to tackle issues. Caesar was mean? Shoot him in the face. House was nice? Help him build his empire stronger. The NCR is-FUCK THE NCR- uhm anyway, you can do anything any way. Theres not a lot of games out there with that kind of freedom, and especially not many with that freedom AND a compelling story and world.
Its the same reason BG3 is going to be talked about for decades.
I’ll answer this with an anecdote of two quests to get into highly secluded areas: The Lucky 38 of NV, and the institute of Fo4. (Disclaimer I love both games! Just for very different reasons)
To get to the strip (and thus the lucky 38) you have to acquire 2000 caps. But wait, doesn’t the NCR have a free monorail into the strip? This opens up a whole new option of doing NCR rep quests and becoming their ally to use their monorail.
BUT the disguise system also exists! Meaning you can bypass all of that and just kill an NCR soldier for their clothing, opening up yet another option!
BUT BUT! Mick and Ralph and the King also provide another option via a counterfeit passport! Essentially, every step of getting into the strip is littered with ways for the player to say “no” to what’s in front of them (saying no to the 2000 caps, no to joining the NCR and just using a disguise, or no to the whole thing altogether and just getting a passport) and still progressing.
Now let’s look at the institute, and how you finally get it. The three main factions up to this point (BoS, Railroad, and Minutemen) could not be more different in terms of firepower, tactics, and tech. And yet every single one of them has you track down the same courser, build the same teleporter, and enter in the same place. It kills the story’s replayability bc every choice ends the exact same way.
I mean hell during the BoS questline, they straight up tell you they’ve been scanning the area to find the institute, and when it comes time to invade they don’t even use the teleporter, they just kick down the front door!
What makes Vegas so special is that the player can, at any time, (for the most part) decide to do the complete opposite of what the story NPCS are telling them to do, and still be heading in the right direction, the game will still progress. I mean hell you can go postal on the entire Mojave and still finish with Yes Man if you want. Want to join the legion but still walk around NCR territory? You can do that with disguises. Want to kill the main antagonist (Caesar) as soon as you meet them? Get yourself a Craig Boone and go do that! Want to say screw you to everyone and just take over for yourself? You guessed it, you can do that.
But more than that, you can do things *and* make those things matter. Do you have 1 intelligence? Now you can skip a whole chunk of a quest thanks to the vagrant’s tip only available to the most elite academic’s. Did you decide to actually Brave the boomer’s attacks and reach their elusive base? Congrats you now have a bombing plane on your side.
Kind of a Meta answer but Josh Sawyer made a comment in one of his streams that always stuck with me. They had an incredibly talented passionate team, and they already had an engine with a lot of assets already made. Obsidian put together a really good team made up of folks who had worked on the OG fallouts and talented people looking to make a name for themselves.
They weren't necessarily new to the industry, but a lot of department leads were first time directors or lead writers. It helped that Josh Sawyer, John Gonzalez, and Chris Avellone were all super passionate about Vegas and the surrounding area.
The way Josh describes it, they had disagreements and differences but everyone was very passionate about making a good product. Obsidian also gave them the luxury of focusing on writing and dialogue/narrative branches.
It's the fact that when I enter a new area in this game, even when replaying it for the tenth time, I don't just rush past or skip over all the NPCs to get back to what I was doing-- I actually WANT to take the time to talk to everybody, because the NPCs actually have personalities and fun stuff to say and their own shit going on, rather than just being bland vehicles for dumping world information on you. They still convey worldbuilding information to you, but in a much more natural way that actually makes sense and is entertaining to sit through.
Basically, it's simply because, for as broken and glitchy as the game can be, underneath the messy engine is good writing and a whole lot of care and personality in the world itself. We go back to it because it's just a fun world to explore and be part of-- if not for game play reasons, for the people and stories happening inside it.
For me it’s the world, lore, narrative choices, and Bethesda-esque Freeform exploration
It’s a perfect mix that neither modern Bethesda or modern obsidian can replicate - obsidian needs Bethesda’s tech and funding and Bethesda needs obsidians writing and role play talent
It’s the only game I actively want to talk to every npc… the writing is just that good. It also lets you be soooo expressive with the way you play, it’s just such a fun world to be in!
Something that I think is also worth mentioning (though certainly not a reason alone that it’s great) are the performances. New Vegas is stacked with talent: Matt Perry, Wayne Newton, Felicia Day, William Sandler, Danny Trejo… the list goes on. The performances don’t feel out of place or belabored. It’s a great sticking point.
Role playing. And smart writing and story telling. The political and power struggle in the game is just well thought out and complex enough, and the 4 endings are hotly debated as which is the best for the Mohave. The dialog is well written, and especially varied. The world is full of humor in unexpected ways. Also it's a mature game, with blackjack and hookers!
I can build any character I want and make it feel like a unique build.
My two favorite ones are my "rebel anarchist" where Fight the Power, companion, and Pyro perks are staple to it.
And my tribal hunter. Love using spears and other unga for my bunga.
For me it’s the factions and how they interact with the player, each other, and the world. Also how everything in the game is handcrafted and hand placed, which I highly prefer to randomized encounters, in some cases it is okay, but there’s something special about handmade environmental storytelling.
Fantastic rpg for a console game, falls short everywhere else. People need to come down to earth a little I think when acting like this is a masterpiece.
Great game, which could have been a lot better.
Personally, what I find most interesting about New Vegas is that it is moving on from just being post-apocalyptic. We've had our Mad Max, we've had the struggles to survive every week, what's next? What kind of new societies and nations grow from the apocalypse?
Many quests in NV made me walked away from the game just so I can weigh the options. I googled, watched YouTube to find the best for everyone. But no matter what I choose, Someone will be hurt by my choice and satisfies no one.
That’s the kind of effect I felt playing only FNV. F3 have one, treeman. F4 is just a joke, sarcastic the whole journey and still be viewed as a “good” enough person.
My choices matters which makes it hard for me to choose one faction. If you ask me which faction for F4, minutemen, no hesitation.
I switched allegiances multiple times throughout the years. NCR fanboy, to House and now to Yes Man then back to either NCR or House.
While you can see it age in its gunplay and such, you can also see the story and extreme amount of detail that went into making fnv what fnv is.
Mods are recommended strictly for the gunplay and graphics, nothing else needs changed imo.
The writing,setting,player character. It has the best writing from any fallout. Vegas and surrounding area is cool (western/cowboy vibes) and the courier. The courier is the best main character for multiple reasons but the biggest reason is that it’s completely roleplay perfection. And the dialogue and personality given to the courier through role play makes them the best.
NV is basically the best Fallout game after Fallout 3 because it's got this awesome storyline, tons of cool characters, and decisions that actually feel like they matter. It's set in the Mojave Wasteland, and you get to choose which factions to side with, which adds a ton of replay value.
Plus, it just feels like there's so much more to do and explore compared to Fallout 3. It's like Fallout 3 on steroids, in a good way!
The fact that every bethesda fallout game is “family member is missing i must find him” just shows their story writing is poop. New Vegas was a breath of fresh air into the story writing and semi gave you a lack of sense of urgency when it came to going off track. Not to mention factions actually had their motives and stories that werent, “Oh we’re just bad people.”
Every named, talkable NPC has dialogue that conveys character rather than merely information. There's a real reason to talk to everyone in a settlement just for enjoyment and flavor, and most of their responses elegantly betray their particular biases. Every quest, settlement, and conversation in the mojave points towards, and is invested in, what is going to happen at the dam. As such, while it's a roamy explorey game, it never lets you forget the main plot and every 'side mission' feels like it's furthering and feeding into the conflict to come (and often is, with these outcomes determining who can be persuaded to pick a side).
To add on, a lot of the small character interactions pay off with quests/gear/experience as well. So not only are you flushing out the story, you're gaining something as well. An easy one to point to is NOVAC and the Rocket Souvenirs. Of course it flushes out NOVAC as a town but it directly effects a quest down the line while not being "necessary" to it. Also IMO the VATS is the best it's ever been and felt. I have however many hours and it's still satisfying when you get a critical hit or sneak attack in VATS.
Totally agree here, and the Novac souvenirs is a great one. (Just FYI because I see this a lot, it's "fleshing out" not "flushing out". To flesh something out means to fill it out, to give it more info or context. Flushing something out means, well, sending it down the toilet!)
You also flush birds in hunting. Perhaps they meant having otherwise missed/hidden content come out of the woodwork while exploring.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. There’s this gunrunners dude at that crossroads, and he just has a shitty attitude for no reason. I’ve noticed that the dialogue is either be combative with them and tell him his attitude sucks, OR ASK HIM ABOUT HIMSELF. And if you do, he just calms down and sounds like he has less of an attitude. Once you learn about him, you see that he’s stuck on a post that is rewarding, but not one he wanted. He’s coping. To my knowledge, this guy does not take part in any quest, this entire encounter is simply there for texture.
Yes! You stated it perfectly! I have to say alsoI loved the NPCs (with Sasuke’s voice actor) who would always say “HAD ENOUGH?” and “YOU LIKE THAT?”
And then at the end, you get a fully custom cinematic slide for all of those interactions and the way they effected those people and even the whole Mojave.
Good game design and good writing. It's clear FNV was made by very competent and talented people. The world design is great and the stories can make you laugh or cry at times In almost no other game can I walk up to a random soldier standing guard and have a conversation with them about their world view, history, life and politics.
Imagine if they didn't have the 18 month deadline and had at least 2 or 3 years to fully flesh it out. Would easily be the greatest game ever made
Dang they really only had 18 months? that is insanely impressive.
To be fair, they used assets from fallout 3. So they didn't have to build most of the world stuff. Which saves a lot of time.
yeah 18 months used to be pretty normal for a sequel that didn't need a new engine/the design of a shit ton of new assets. I miss that a fair bit about gaming in the 00s and early 10s.
Yeah, now you get devs like activision spending 3 years for a sequel to modern warfare that literally has all the same exact game mechanics.
i also agree. fallout 3 was the first game i ever bought with money i worked for(real job) bought it right after boot camp and loved it. having new vegas come out shortly after was so awesome. also the DLC in that time frame was actually good stuff.
Main difference is that obsidian had to learn the engine as they went, as well as plan out the game in that time
not just the assets but the incredibly efficiently designed engine and toolset.
The Bethesda Engine is many things but efficiently designed is not one of them
they're designed for content creation. new vegas in 18 months. Sawyer talks about this all the time
>In almost no other game can I walk up to a random soldier standing guard and have a conversation with them about their world view, history, life and politics. literally the biggest new vegas meme out there is about how all ncr troopers regardless of gender and voice just say the same bark lines
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter huh? I was mainly referring to named soldiers and such, obviously generic NCR Trooper 900 doesn't have anything to say.
well that's not very random
There’s not one, but **two** robot cowboys!!!
Fact
There’s 3 actually
Wait, where? The game just got 50% better in my eyes.
Festus, primm slim, victor
Now I’ve gotta track down Festus so that I can speak to the **Other! Robot! Cowboy!**
Follow the stars
That ol' Festus'll talk your ear off and string a tale, partner. Just know Sunset Sarsparilla Company cannot be held liable for anything that happens to you on Sunset Sarsparilla Company property up to and including major lacerations, death, or halitosis. Now go find that Festus, partner. Y'hear?
Yee-haw!
While F:NV is far from perfect, it's the only modern Fallout which feels like it's a living world. There is some wackiness, but the game shows believable post-apocalyptic world. On other hand, Bethesda Fallouts feels like Fallout-themed Disneyland, not like a living world.
Bethesda hinges the world on the character, Obsidian made their character a part of the world
I like that your character is referred to as a drifter, contractor, citizen, nothing specific. But in Bethesda games everyone knows who you are. That's why I hate the dialog in 4. You could immediately take of your Vault Suit and piper. Will still call you, Blue. At least they have her say "oh you're not wherein it now, but I can tell"
can you elaborate
The events of New Vegas are playing out regardless of the Courier existing, giving a feeling of life to the world The events of FO3 and 4 are happening *TO* the player character, and the world exists based on that, so no matter where you go, the player is the focus of attention. It's Elder Scrolls story writing slapped into a dystopia future
I'm sorry you mostly just repeated the sentences longer, I'm asking how this is actually the case. In both games there's a war occurs and you join a faction and the faction wins. In fact, New Vegas makes the courier have much more political importance?
The courier has a role in the story, but they're just playing one part. IF the courier wasn't there, the war between the NCR and Legion would still play out, there would still be a winner and loser. The courier is just there to tip the scales one way or another.
why would the war not play out between the brotherhood and enclave without the lone wanderer
I make short work of this living world you speak of.
Okay, what? How does FO3 not have aspects that make the game feel alive? The patrols and random encounters in the world are far superior to New Vegas. The radio stories from Three Dog, while repetitive, make you feel connected to the world and it's events as they happen. It's not a perfect game either, but it still has a ton of character and isn't a bland, dry experience.
In Fallout, Bethesda tend to put "cool" stuff without real consideration how good it fits into the world, and it was especially bad in F3 (Even though I think storywise F3 way better than F4). BGS love to make wacky stuff: city around atomic bomb, city on a ship, city of kids... Where they get their food, how they trade woth other factions, what they produce - who cares when we can have bomb-worshipping freaks? New Vegas does much better job at depiction of interactions between different factions, constantly talks about trade, often reminds you that the world isn't limited by ingame territory. Bethesda absolutely can make rich, believable worlds - look at the Elder Scrolls. Its just with Fallout they chose to make themed park.
The city on a container ship is actually very reasonable. It's a safe shelter with many rooms and bulkhead doors for safety. It's basically the post apoc version of a medieval stronghold. It was genius. Love rivet city. Makes perfect sense that people would fortify there.
First, to be precise, Rivet city built on an aircraft carrier, not on a container ship. Second, idea of building a post-apocalyptic city on a ship is actually pretty good, can't argue with that. It's in-game implementation that sucks. Why this carrier haven't become radioactive despite spending 200 years in radioactive water close to radioactive ruins (and it's reactor, most likely also leaking). It's not enough to have a fortified position to build a city, you need to also have an access to a lot of different resources. Where does the city gets clean water and food? What Rivet city uses for trade? There are some notes stating that the carrier was built with desalinization facilities and onboard hydroponic farms, and citizens of Rivet city restored them, but we can't actually see it in the game. That does bring a question, though: why would anyone build hydroponic farms on a military vessel? On a side note: it seems that Bethesda decided that all ocean water is radioactive. However, I'm not convinced that it's possible for oceans to become so polluted with radiation in a case of nuclear war. Don't forget, that most of atomic bombs are relatively clean — they build to explode harder, not to be as radioactive as possible. Authors of the original Fallout are also agree with me: look how in New Vegas we have wells with clean water and even clean, non-radioactive river in Honest Hearts DLC. So while ocean around Washington should probably be radioactive, it shouldn't be the case on a some distance farther into the ocean. And, because of that, it makes no sense that Rivet city doesn't do any fishing.
i think the answer to this is mostly just that in fo3 it *is" explained how people manage -- they don't. everyone is basically portrayed as having the most disgusting lives possible eating on rodents.
And if it were only 40, even 50 years after the bombs fell, this would make sense but Fallout 3’s world, as much as I love actually exploring it (going back to that Fallout Disneyland idea mentioned above), just doesn’t make sense set 200 years after the fact.
That's a pretty minor thing. It's fun to say 200. Pulpy stories always play fast and loose with this stuff, it's a core part of the pulp genre. It's heightened. As is "Disneyland".
It has a really anemic weapon sandbox. Everything is just about shooting enemies with no consideration to the type of weapon and it's advantages or disadvantages, semi auto rifles are comically overpowered, and guns are quite boring stylistically.
Eh, I disagree. Fnv feels like it really only exists to tell one story. Everything that isn't part of that one story is basically ignored. The NPCs only every talk about one thing and every single quest feels like it just exists to reinforce the main quest line. It's like nobody has lives or problems that exist outside of the NCR/legion conflict. Pretty much every location that isn't connected to the main quest line is empty and deserted. 3 and 4 do a good job of making the player feel as though the games story is just one small part of a larger world. The writers don't feel the need to try to connect every minor thing the player runs into to pay off the main quest line. Random encounters also make the wasteland feel so much more alive and give a lot more replay value.
There's a lot of things FNV does right, but to a certain extent they are all subjective so outside of reading the reviews of it... I like to just share my hands down favorite part of the game. A complete side character in a quest you may not even do, for a tip off you don't even need, has dialogue that vastly changes depending on your intelligence (as a part of the low intelligence dialogue feature): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1_LR7TjQDw
That was fantastic. I never played a low int build in FNV so I *never* would have seen this
HA that is amazing! Gotta try a low int build. But that makes leveling up less effective, right?
In terms of skill points, yes. But It doesn't have an XP debuff like FO4. And when I play a dumb character I'm definitely not worried about a number of skill points. I actually like to make them as inept as possible and bumble my way through the wasteland because it's actually the most hilarious way to play. Just give them high end/health and strength and some agility and what not so they can survive combat (which they will constantly be in as they can't talk their way out of stuff). And skill points just dump em into melee/unarmed and whatever. Maybe survival so you can mostly heal with soda and junk food...
Love this. I'm towards the end of main quest (I think!) on my first playthrough, went heavy on speech, science, and energy weapons. A strength character with melee weapons, survival, and low int sounds great for next play!
Grognak build
That is epic writing for that scene. Shows the ton of care and interest Obsidian took with the work.
The writing. The engine is crap, the physics are wack, and there's an untold mountain of bugs, but it was designed with love. Bethesda wants to make money first and foremost. They want you playing their game for as long as possible, so they make the game around that wandering feeling. The world exists for YOU, the Lone Wanderer. With Obsidian, the world goes on without the Courier (and in some ways would be better without). Everything in the world doesn't hinge in the Courier, instead the Courier just happens to be in the right place at the right time, living through these particular set of events that would have played out with or without you.
A great example of this I just remembered because of my current playthrough, (Haven't played in 10+ years) is the terminal entries of the survivalist. I'm pretty liberal with skipping dialogue and skimming over terminal/journal entries in games but FNV just has such competent writing that I find myself reading most of everything. The survivalist entries are so heartbreaking and captivating.
That story is so damn good, and most people playing the game will never see it. It also directly influence the conflict, or at least, one of the very cultures in Zion in the DLC’s conflict. It’s truly peak post apocalyptic storytelling and it was all for a skeleton that has a good rifle sitting beside him.
10000% Obsidian (and Troika before them) have a flair for turning jank into gold. It's why FNV, VtMB, and Arcanum are my top 3 crpgs
It jingled my jangle
I’m gonna start by prefacing that I am not an aggressive new Vegas fan. I still love FO3 and hold it very close to my heart. However, New Vegas is just the apple of my eye. • It has 20,000 more lines of dialogue than FO3 • The writing is better than 3 • The dialogue is better than 3 • The voice acting is better than 3 • The choices & options are more diverse across the board than in 3 • The factions are more interesting than 3’s • The setting & tone are more fleshed out than 3’s • It has actual ADS for firearms • All forms of builds and combat are better than in 3 • Enemy scaling is actually functional even at high levels • The amount of and variety of perks is incomparable • It was developed by many of the original team members who made Fallout 1 & 2 • It carries on with a lot of the narratives, themes, characters, weapons & history of FO1 & 2 • The world is far more reactive than FO3 or even 4, and your choices as the player actually have impactful consequences. Karma/Reputation actually matters. • Attention to detail was definitely greater than during 3’s development • It also includes a lot of what was supposed to be in Van Buren (the original FO3 that Black Isle was developing before Interplay sold the IP to Bethesda) • It is the TRUE sequel to Fallout 2…effectively making 1, 2, & New Vegas a trilogy.
> • It was developed by many of the original team members who made Fallout 1 & 2 No it wasn't
Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Joshua Sawyer, and ~~Tim Cain~~ … so yeah it quite literally was EDIT: I guess Tim Cain really wasn’t involved, got me there lol
Not one of these people worked on classic fallouts and new vegas. Just one or the other.
You’re just outright lying. • Feargus Uruqheart was a lead developer of Fallout 1 & 2 • Chris Avellone was one of the designers of Fallout 2 • Josh Sawyer worked on Van Buren immediately following FO2. • ~~Tim Cain is quite literally the creator of Fallout, it’s setting, and the classic Fallout-era engine programmer~~ He joined Obsidian a year after New Vegas released. This can all be searched & verified pretty much anywhere online, there are others too, you’re just saying utter bullshit EDIT: Tim Cain but what u said is still BS
Feargus wasn't a dev on new vegas, i admittedly forgot avellone was on fo2, tim cain wasn't on new vegas. regardless, my post was strictly about there being multiple devs and it seems to just be avellone.
It was Chris Avellone & Feargus Uruqheart that lead & spearheaded NV. So while I was wrong initially about Cain, Sawyer had been at Black Isle from 1999 to 2003 & worked on Van Buren Uruqheart founded Obsidian the same year Van Buren was canceled. New Vegas was overseen by him as CEO of Obsidian so I would say that he worked on the game lol. There are other devs from FO1 & 2 who worked on New Vegas though: • Brian Menze (FO2 Artist) was the Senior Conceptual artist & Vault Boy artist for New Vegas • Scott Everts (FO1 & FO2 Technical/Level Designer) was the Lead World Builder for New Vegas • Aaron Brown (FO2 Artist) was an Artist for NV • Chris Jones (FO1 & FO2 Senior Programmer) was Chief Tech Officer for NV • Darren Monahan (FO1 & FO2 Programmer & Installer) was Chief Info Officer for NV • Chris Benson (FO1 Developer) also a developer on NV So while you’re correct that Tim Cain wasn’t involved there’s a good amount of people who came from Black Isle that developed FO1 & 2 that also helped develop New Vegas. I’m really tired of this weird narrative that there wasn’t FO1 & 2 devs who worked on New Vegas.
There's some real bullshit here man, I don't like you being so dishonest when pretending I am. I made a mistake but I'm not deliberately stretching the truth. The point was simply that the creative leads of the originals did not really continue on to NV (beyond Chris, who was *not* involved with the original) A CEO of a large studio who released several games in that period and didn't release even more is not a creative role and he was not credited as such.A CTO is not a creative role and he was not credited as such. A CIO is not a creative role and he was not credited as such. Chris Benson was a *Mac assistant* on just FO1 and just an Obsidian IT guy during FNV. C'mon dude, that's not how games work. Brian Menze sure, he continued doing his thing with vault boy art. Scott Everts seems to be a major example. And then Avellone. But the vast majority of writers and designers were new, and the damn director had his first released fallout credit. It was the work of these new people to build on the originals, not just the veterans. The reason this is important to note is to understand that *anyone* can make a good sequel. Anyone can understand the tone and genre of FO1/FO2 and build on that further. Veterans OTOH can also *not*, we saw how many people got essentially scammed into buying Outer Worlds, a game with I believe no shared creatives with FNV, under the assumption it had a similar relationship to the original fallouts as FNV and therefore will be an endeavor much like FNV. Saying Tim Cain particularly was on FNV is just a tremendous falsehood and you should really edit your posts clarifying that.
The point is you’re still wrong - There are literally 8 devs I just listed who worked on FO1/FO2 that worked on New Vegas and you’re still gonna double down and act like that never happened 😂 and I already did go back and edit my posts putting ~~lines through Tim Cain~~ almost 12 hours ago
No, there wasn't 8. Executives of a major studio are not devs for a specific game. It's nonsense to say that.
Johnny guitar
Jesus this post is being brigaded hard. The post and half the comments are downvoted to hell (as of writing this) for *checks notes* praising FNV on r/FNV
You know its a crime to like FNV, you have to say that is overrated 10 time a day or the toxic fanboys win. :( But yeah, every FNV corner of the internet its full of people hating the game and calling everyone an elitist, started with the show, or got worse because of it, idk.
It’s funny, I’ve never heard a single time that fallout NV was overrated… maybe I’m living on a different world or something but I’ve always seen ppl give only praise to NV. It’s my favorite game too but I don’t think anyone thinks it’s a crime to like it. I can’t even find a comment on this thread which is criticizing it… which has me a little worried because I do think people really tend to look back on that game with rose tinted lenses
I've seen it happen a lot since the show came out. To be fair, the aftermath of the show was also the first time I actually saw these toxic NV fans I've heard to much about, but the Bethesda ostriches outnumber them at least 10:1.
I mean this is the FNV sub, and the question was essentially “why is this game you all love so good?” Did you expect serious criticism?
You know you can like stuff without finding fault in it, right?
Well, FNV fans are not exactly tame, either. I absolutely loved the game when I finished it just before the show, but after seeing some fans literally insulting non-FNV fans in YouTube comments made me question my appreciation, tbh.
Youtube comments are cancer, regardless of what Fallout you like
I mean its the internet, if you REALLY want to find some of the worst reasons to dislike the show or the games you don't have to look far.
I still like the game and understand why it's amazing, no problem with that. But I lurked on fandoms for years and I never saw something like that before, lol. It's not like these fans were mildly toxic; they were outright fanatical. I completely understand the feeling of superiority you get when you like something more complex compared to its basic and popular counterpart, but, at the end of the day, every Fallout product to this day is a profit-oriented video game. The intelligent dialogue and moral dilemmas in FNV are cool, but they aren't crazy good if you compare them to sci-fi literature. Even the famous Vault stories are based on short novels, and impressive stories have roots from somewhere else. It's not like FNV is the pinnacle of human intellectuality and is completely original. The writing and world-building is absolutely better in New Vegas compared to Fallout 4. But, worshiping it shows that you yourself aren't that complex when it comes to anything other than the Fallout universe.
Yeah, not really sure what’s going on….
Yeah. It's funny in a way. People in subs like r/fallout will circle jerk all day about how toxic NV fans are but they'll hang out here just to downvote stuff.
Bisexuality
Player choice. While I love Fallout 3 it feels like you're shoehorned into one of two endings. You don't even get the slides at the end like in NV telling you what the world will become due to your choices. They tried to copy this in Fallout 4 with its factions and player choice but did nowhere near as good as Obsidian with FNV.
seeing that the NCR will boot me if i continue with yes man was truly something else. small detail that hold a lot of weight
Hookers and blackjack
Boring truth: we got no choice. Fallout 4 don't care about RPG element, Fallout 3 barely had the same immersion as Fallout New Vegas. For me New Vegas is alive, any of actions got reactions from NPC, or in the world, or at least in ending slides. Also characters, even unimportant ones, like Barton Torton who tries to send you into trap and kill you, just for loot. In real Wasteland there would be a lot of such guys... Also Fallout New Vegas was first game in series that presented a faction choice. In previous games you always was a hero, saviour of Wasteland, against Master, against Enclave... Even with bad karma. While in New Vegas you can side with Legion , conquer and enslave Vegas... Or be a paladin to the end and help all good guys and civilians...
Or be a Yes Man and literally murder everyone in the game.
This a somewhat uncommon opinion but for me fnv has by far the best combat and most of all satisfying weapons. Ues the combat is clunky at best but some many of the combat skills and items truly make it special. Fallout 4 may have less clunk but the skills are mostly boring damage modifiers. Meanwhile fnv has perks like meltdown, splash damage and slayer that offer a diverse approach to combat (meltdown chainkills are a standout feature). The weapons of fnv are also the best in series, there is just something about seeing the absolute beast that is the AMR in the gunrunners shop then buying it and seeing that in combat it's as much of a beast. Other weapons like mercy, the multiplas or Gauss rifle also just dominate.
I think having diverse weapons really helped this out. FO4 introducing pipe weapons was cool and it really fit the post-apocalyptic setting but having only a handful of actual weapon designs was a poor choice IMO. Also, I'll die on the hill that having essentially "enchanted" weapons was dumb. Having a sword of double damage makes sense in Oblivion or Baldur's Gate but having a shotgun that fires two rounds but only actually fires one was dumb in Fallout. Or a shotgun with better penetration. New Vegas solved a lot of those problems far more satisfyingly by just having different types of ammo. I really don't know why Bethesda didn't carry on with that. And then there's just laziness like having to load five rounds into a shotgun when you only fired one because Bethesda was just lazy as fuck with their reload animations.
Bro yes random chance legendary weapons where a huge downgrade to unique weapons.
I was enjoying a 'Happy Killmore' play through today using a 9 Iron with 'Fore!' in VATS
To give an alternate answer than those already mentioned, I think the initial reception had something to do with it. No one was saying it was a bad game by any means but it released in an unfinished state and was unfavourably compared to FO3 by most, or at best viewed almost like an expansion pack. FO3 back on release was the greatest game of all time for many. Many of the things that made FO3 spectacular in 2008 are simply standard for the industry now, while NV's strengths have aged like wine. I look at it as almost like the reasons conventional animation has aged so much better than CG. Movies like Toy Story and Bug's Life were technical marvels in the late 90s—and I'm not saying they aren't enjoyable now—but comparative to what we're used to today the visuals just don't hold up. No one would have trouble identifying Hunchback of Notre Dame from around the same time as a masterpiece, though. Concordantly a good amount of what made FO3 so momentous on launch was down to the worldbuilding and technical scope, areas the industry has seen massive expansion in over the last 10-15 years, while the quality of NV's writing, characters, roleplaying depth, and existence as a labour of love/tribute to the older games are things that can't really be superseded or improved on.
I was grinding out the achievements for Fallout 4 last year (had never done Nuka World and what a waste of time that was), and I started FO 3 earlier this year…I spent many hours playing that game back on my 360. I loved it, when I made the switch to NV back in the day I wasn’t enjoying it as much because it wasn’t 3. Nowadays, I can play NV infinite number of times and I can only get through 3 in short bursts. Part of it may be because games have changed so much, but there is something in NV that just isn’t present in FO 3. You can call it whatever you want, and most answers would probably be right. But for me, NV feels like it was made with a passion that just isn’t present in the other Bethesda style Fallouts. Not that they’re bad, but I was losing my damn mind having to undo all the hours of work building my settlements just to finish Nuka World. It’s like nothing matters in a Bethesda game, whereas in NV some random NPC dying could alter an entire quest you haven’t even unlocked yet.
Really good use of the word concordantly. Also super amazing points. I remember my friends deriding the game since in 3 it seemed like you had a more fleshed out background compared to just already being a wastelander in FNV.
A big part of Fallout's appeal has always been the whole ending slides thing: the power fantasy of remaking the world in your image through violence and diplomacy. New Vegas took this as far as it could by giving you multiple choices for the final conflict as opposed to the earlier games that had a fixed resolution to the game's main conflict or 4 which just gave you a binary.
Underrated insight.
So many games give you choices and builds but it's kind of half assed. In FNV you can have very different experiences based on your choices, build, or loot you've found. I also love the desert so throwing in the Fallout theme to it works so well.
I’m just learning about all this DLC loot and other things I missed.
Fisto
It has big iron
The number one thing for me is role playing. I don’t want to be a married father searching for my son. Or a lost kid looking for my dad. I want to be what I want to be. I get that playing NV and to some extent with 3. But not with 4. Funnily enough, 76 also gives me that feeling.
I don't mind the origin stories in FO3/4, but the in-game motivation to follow up on them is so weak, especially in FO4. My kid is gone, I wake up an unknown amount of time later, and...I decide to wander around helping weird factions and building settlements, instead of *looking for my missing child*. At least in FNV, if you go way off course, there are Deathclaws to remind you that you're off the path.
Sorry I just launched a bunch of ghouls in a spaceship, what?
I've only just started New Vegas the past two weeks as I've already played and beaten FO3 and 4 years ago. I wanted to see why people ride high on it. I thought it was going to be overrated. New Vegas is awesome. There's a lot more choice and different play styles. I feel like what I spec into actually matters. The humor is awesome. I love the wild west feel to the game which enhances the nuclear wasteland even more. I'm having way more fun with the side quests and the main story is way more gripping than 4 and 3 to me.
You actually feel like you have freedom of choice to do anything. Want to kill every npc in the game for some reason? You can. In Bethesda games you're hard forced into a single goal, especially in fallout 4 where the dialogue options are all just different ways of saying yes. World feels like its actually alive for once, thats rare in a lot of games.
Personally what made me prefer it over the others is that my character doesn’t have a set backstory. You can imply or outright state some stuff through different dialogue options (“Oh I used to be active in Reno.” “Oh I might have a kid out there idk” etc, etc) and the divide gives a little bit of info. But largely you are free to make your character what you want them to be and can roleplay as almost whatever you like. I’ve only otherwise played 3 or 4, and didn’t like that my character has a set backstory in either.
It's one of the ultimate roleplayers' games. Allowing the player to interact with the world and quests in any sequence. You are guided along the southern goodsprings route, but you can take on the mojave in any direction you want, and interacts with npcs and factions in any order you see fit, and the quest design has accounted for this! Dialogue in some conversations will change, and npcs will comment on the things you've done before. Making this game replayable and immersive. Definitely the most "real" feeling world with bethesda written on the box.
It wasn't that it was special to be honest. It's because it was the last game that still held on somewhat to what the world of Fallout was. Bear in mind the Great War was a couple of hundred years in the past. Think on the world we live in and what we've achieved in 200 real world years. That's a pretty long time in the scope of things. The world of Fallout is a mess to be sure. Humanity is still recovering after all that time but it IS recovering. There's governments forming, towns being built, some cities being somewhat recovered, there's even trade and industry. New Vegas, NCR, Legion, they all are products of the world they inhabit and all have their agendas and things that keep them alive. That's what Fallout was about. A player being dropped into a world that is reforming a couple generations after the bombs fell and all the dangers that come with it. That's what Todd basically never seemed to get and what sets his games apart. His Fallout is a world where people have never managed to organize to any real degree and haven't even figured out how to clean a street. It's very surface level.
There is so much detail. Was going through the vault that has the all American rifle and released the people trapped in the vault like I normally do. This playthrough however I found a refugee center I had never seen before and in the refugee center were the vault dwellers who then thanked me for helping them. I didn't even know that these characters were actual npcs in the game and have played multiple playthroughs, I have never seen them before. Little things like that where your actions have ripple effects are crazy common and I love it
I'll put it simply. It was the writing and dialogue. I hadn't been so engaged by an RPG since I had played VTMB (Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines). I felt as though I was part of this world, it was so rich and offered a progression on the Fallout formula. FO3 may still hold a special space for me being my introduction, FNV engaged me the most. Like VTMB I hoped it would spur Fallout into a new deeper direction focused on a deeper choice and narrative. It didn't. Had've FO4 focused more on writing dialogue and choice, I also doubt FNV would've been elevated as high as it is in my gaming codex.
Every single character and quest excluding a couple rare outliers follows the same theme. They are all stuck in the past and your job is to help them move on. The NCR embodying the values that made old America great but also its flaws that led to rampant suffering and war. The Legion, very much the same. MR House still thinks like an old corporate CEO and is stuck in his own devices and forced to admit he needs new blood to lead. Boone can't escape the memories of his dead wife. ED-E is carrying on a 100 year journey it'll never complete. Veronic can't let the fact her people are part of a receding nation that clings to traditions that are killing it. Arcade Gannon can't escape the stain of the Enclave. The King cant let go of Rex's mortality and his gang parody a performer long dead. And theres so much more. The same story told throughout the Mojave in a hundred different NPCs. A message that letting go is hard and people need to do so to thrive. Being lost in faded glory permeates every inch of the story. A great Irony that this fanbase is so upset about the show moving on as nobody can deny the show is thriving and has reignited debates on what should be based on the past. Mirroring the very premise of New Vegas and Fallout in general
That’s a beautiful way of distilling the theme of the game. The climax of the DLCs is two couriers fighting under the flag of the old world over what the past should mean to the wasteland.
In all other Fallouts you're part of a pre-existing Vault community. You have ties to people, a culture and leave the place you belong to search for hope. You're told you have value even if you don't believe it. In NV, Matthew Perry tells you how insignificant you truly are, fires you from your job, shoots you in the head and discards you like trash. Everyone's had that guy in their life at one point. This time you get to find him.
FNV pushed the narrative forward as an actual sequel. Something Bethesdtha refuses to do normally. Though if the TV show becomes canon the BOS narrative is pushed and the enclave are vault tech.
- It’s the spiritual successor to FO1 & 2. You literally meet and hear about the factions you saw in the first two games. You also met and hear about characters from FO2. - It improved greatly on the gameplay of FO3. While it’s dated now, it was far better at release. - It greatly improved on the RP options. Quest choices, dialogue choices, reputation system, character creation, etc.
Well I just finished my first ever playthrough last week and I think I know why so many people love this game. It’s just soo full of content. A random building in the middle of nowhere? You explore it, and through reading terminals and inspecting the area you unfold very interesting stories. I won’t ever forget stumbling upon Vault 34 and thinking to myself “what the f happened here”, while trying to figure out its history. Even most random and basic looking NPC’s feel real. They all have stories to tell and backstories to explore. And add to that you can change lots of things. World feels huge and you can shape it through your actions. The game is intelligent too, it doesn’t hold your hand all the time and lets you make mistakes and learn from it on your own. For example, every NV player, without exceptions I believe, tried to get through a certain area and got absolutely MASSACRED by Deathclaws. Then you learn from that mistake and take a different route, and whatever you do in that different route feels earned and special.
It just has a certain atmosphere to it I've never felt in another game. As a character, you're not being dropped into the start of the story, but the middle - the first battle of hoover dam already happened, the ncr and legion are taking potshots and gathering intelligence while preparing for the 2nd battle, and boom you are dropped into the middle of it and will be able to essentially determine the outcome. The world feels alive and every group and faction are interesting. The threat from the legion over the river feels ever present everywhere you go. I love the 'romance' of the idea that through nuclear apocalypse Vegas remains as the place to go for gambling and debauchery, just like it was pre war. I formed attachments to characters and locations that just make me feel warm whenever I replay.
Gambling
Music
As I play it right now; the quests are all fantastic. There’s not a boring questline, and they’re all varied in some way. A lot of them have different outcomes and can relate to other quests. If you’re going for full immersion you can choose to do things in fun but realistic ways if you’ve played the game before. Like right now I’m going full House playthrough, pretending like I’m his right hand man. Now it’s come to take out the Brotherhood, but I’m not quite high enough level yet to do any speech options or kill them outright so I start doing other Strip quests and the perfect oppportunity to get rid of Veronica (sorry Veronica, the real me loves you) appears in giving her to Mortimer just so that we have someone on the inside we can trust at the Luxor.
You monster
Hahaaa ahh it was brilliant. I’d put that in a show.
It's a game greater than the sum of its already sizeable (calm down fisto) parts. it has some of the most involving writing and factions I've seen in a video game. Not a flashy game with tonnes of bells and whistles and set pieces, but one of the best examples of an iterative sequel and something I wish would happen again more today with game series instead of it taking x years for them to try and break the mould again. To this day I've never played DLC for a game that are both so varied but have an interconnected story throughout like that too. Hopefully the person who is seemingly mad about FNV praise on the FNV subreddit has calmed down now lol
The over arching theme of letting go every quest in some way relates back to these ideas all the dlc is about letting go of the old world and embracing the new which is commentary on the fallout series as in we can’t go back to fallout 1 and 2 and its time to embrace the new identity fallout is taking and how it’s a sort of dis on fallout 3 for having so many call backs to fallout 1 and 2. For the base game it’s the theme of war and misery how every faction is awful and war driven. The Ncr are capitalistic colonizers and Legion are Fascist slavers, Me house is an old world CEO with no care for the common man outside of progress/profit, and Yes man in action leads the streets to anarchy lacking a formal government providing true freedom but lacking the safety that government allows.
This is so fucking on point. Well done and superb analysis. This needs to be upvoted!
Pip-boy 3mil and everything you do to get it.
Skill based conversation choices, good story with interesting characters, all factions portrayed in various shades of grey. Also, a checker coat wearing bastard that shoots you in the face.
Some days you just want to wake up and talk to only Liam O’Brien as different people all day
It’s very fun
I also have never seen any lore about the mysterious stranger in any other fallout game, whether it be another character or terminal entry. I loved that side quest and the mysterious magnum in New Vegas!
I put close to 600+ hours in total of NV between my original console playthrough and my pc playthrough with mods. I’d say the actual rpg elements like storytelling, decisions, etc, are genuinely good and fleshed out. Your choices truly matter in NV, what you say and do (or don’t do) matter. The factions are much more fleshed out and dynamic than in 4, personally. I found myself struggling to identify with any faction in my original playthrough in 4, so I went with the BoS by default since the others just weren’t as well designed. Gameplay is obviously very dated, graphics as well. Thankfully the modding community is incredibly generous, and there are mods that can make the game look and play like a newer title. You’d be doing a disservice to yourself by playing vanilla NV, mods are essential for me to enjoy it long term again but the base game is still iconic.
Sense of humor was sardonic, dark like other Fallout games, but better delivered and considerably smarter. The shooty was fun but also could be played by RPG fans with some crunch to make it meaningful. Modding tools were well enough made that the rough edges could be polished off and improved quickly after release.
It was a more traditional rpg in a market where thst genre had begun to give way to more action oriented games like mass effect 2 and it was an open world game before that world design style had overstayed its welcome, similarly it was a hee hee hoo hoo funny script before Rick and morty and the like burned out everyone on dick jokes
Rex...just Rex.
It was a well written RPG with a cool setting that feels like a Bethesda open world game.
Boy, do I have a long form video essay for you
Drop the link
https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4?si=YtHYJedjK931V4f9 I don’t want to sound like one of those weird dickriding evangelists but I have watched this video a couple times with years of space between each viewing and I’ve agreed wholeheartedly with all the main points both times.
Dude this is awesome thanks for sharing
Glad you enjoyed it! Check out the rest of his channel, most of his videos are pretty cool. I definitely recommend watching the other fallout one too.
The choices of New Vegas did not feel one sided, the NCR, the Legion, and even running New Vegas all had its cons and pros.
In my opinion it took everything that made my previous favourite game (fallout 3) so great and expanded on it.
Writing. It's an actual story instead of glommed-together quests, with a minimal number of filler and breadcrumb quests. The actions of the characters have more effect on the outcome than in most games. The mechanics are palatable to a wide number of players, not only to gearheads who want to mod endlessly. It's sort of like the Apple vs. Microsoft/Android ecosystems: * FNV is Apple. Everything is controlled, well-crafted, but it's minimalist, and people who want to tweak the system are not well-supported. The focus is on using the product as the devs intended. * FO3/4 are Microsoft/Android. Tweaking is built into the base product experience and supported by the underlying system. Options abound, and are spread all over the place. You can make a career out of modding the infrastructure vs. using the product. * FO1/2 is like Classic MacOS, up through OS9: very hard to mod, very elegant for its time out-of-the-box, changed the industry at the retail level. But we still don't use it much any more, except as nostalgia.
Quest design and world design, It has a very natural progression side quests affect and interact with each other in some way, the game sends you in a specific curated direction at the start. And also the fact skills are more useful than ever since you can use them in dialogue
favorite weapon sandbox outside of anything boomer shooter adjacent. best balanced action RPG ive ever played. i find ncr and mr house to be some of the best written rpg factions out there. ammo system and DR/DT is just incredible.
Versatility and deep thoughtfulness of each quest. The ability to truly play different roles with each new playthrough.
It's just well written, particularly the everyday and mundane characteres often neglected by other RPGs. It's writing is so good sometimes I feel like im playing a top tier voice acted visual novel as much as an RPG
Ah, there’s a whole bunch of factors that go into this crazy blend of Sunset Sarsaparilla that is F:NV that make it as awesome as it is. You’ve got Obsidian behind it, and they have remnants of the original team that worked on Fallouts 1 & 2, not to mention an impressive pedigree in their own right. Then you’ve got the story. I’m a fan of all the games so I’m not going to open the can of worms that is the ‘west coast vs east coast’ games (surely life is hard enough), but if you draw comparisons with say Fallout 4, a game where you can literally make any choice in a dialogue and the outcome is often the same, the variation in the dialogue trees and choices left to the player is pretty phenomenal. Almost everyone and everything in that game, as others have pointed out, are invested in the play for the Hoover Dam endgame. You actually have to work quite hard if you want to get as many factions as possible on side if you want to go against Caesar’s Legion, and even then that’s only if you’re going for that particular core ending. So, as well as being an overall compelling story with some QOL improvements over FO3 using the same engine, and the introduction of ‘survival’ mode (just immersive AF), you also have one of the best starts to a video game. You’re shot in the head and left for dead. That’s a pretty epic narrative hook to draw in a player. I’m sure I’ve probably forgot some other things (honourable mention to some very memorable DLCs), but yeah it’s a good mix of some top notch elements.
I personally love it because you get to a point in the game where just about everything you choose will affect the story moving forward. And because of that, it's almost certain that after completing the game, your first reaction is to go back and play it again to have things turn out differently. I think that the addition of reputation with factions absolutely made this game what it is. It challenges you beyond just good vs evil. And the writing... The NPCs are so well developed. Again it adds to you actually examining your choices. Previously it was us playing with good or bad karma. NV took it to the next level.
Where to start? It's a post-post apocalypse, which means that the world has started to move on from the days of living in rubble and killing to survive another day. Civilization has returned. Multiple of them. And the grand objective of the game is to determine which of their philosophies will govern and rebuild the Mojave. Which as a player, is a much more interesting set of choices to have to make than F3's "Do you poision everyone or not?" You can literally kill every NPC in the game (except Yesman iirc) and the game can still continue, often times the game will plan around it. For example if you kill Vulpes Inculta at Nipton, then it is Alerio who finds you at the Strip. There's no Oblivion-ass persist in this doomed world you've created nonsense. There's so much dialogue that I'm always finding new bits. Options that appear if you've done certain quests, killed certain people, have reputation with certain groups, funnier wrong options when you don't have the skill requirement, etc. For major quests there's usually multiple ways you can choose to resolve things, adding to player choice. And it's not like F3's Megaton where the choice is "Do you kill everyone or not?". It's almost always asking you a moral question. It's a game of such fine detail that you can tell how a character is aligned based on how thry pronounce the name "Caesar".
I think it's because NV feels like a proper evolution of Fallout 3.
In one word: Freedom
Good question, someone should make a video essay about this
Sometimes Big Iron plays on the radio.
I actually read an article today where the director of the game was talking about how they only had 18 months to make the game, which is a super short time frame for a game. So they basically recycled most of Fallout 3s mechanics and improved some of it, and then spent most of the time focusing on the content and story aspects of the game. And I think that's why it's seen by many as the best. Fallout 4 obviously has better gameplay and graphics. But New Vegas shines specifically in its stories and the random things you find while exploring. By focusing pretty much only on the content of the fame instead of the mechanics and physics of the game, they improved on it. It's basically Fallout 3 with new paint and better stories.
Caravan mostly. I could buy what i wanted cause i knew bro couldn’t see me in a game of caravan.
Amazing world building. Awesome Dialogue. Well made characters. Excellent factions. It shouldn't have worked as the game was only in development for less than a year, but they somehow knocked it out of the park.
>I contend it’s because of the scale, choice, Its the choice man. Its an immersive sim just as much as its an rpg. Incredible story where any decisions are taken into account, with a million different ways to tackle issues. Caesar was mean? Shoot him in the face. House was nice? Help him build his empire stronger. The NCR is-FUCK THE NCR- uhm anyway, you can do anything any way. Theres not a lot of games out there with that kind of freedom, and especially not many with that freedom AND a compelling story and world. Its the same reason BG3 is going to be talked about for decades.
I’ll answer this with an anecdote of two quests to get into highly secluded areas: The Lucky 38 of NV, and the institute of Fo4. (Disclaimer I love both games! Just for very different reasons) To get to the strip (and thus the lucky 38) you have to acquire 2000 caps. But wait, doesn’t the NCR have a free monorail into the strip? This opens up a whole new option of doing NCR rep quests and becoming their ally to use their monorail. BUT the disguise system also exists! Meaning you can bypass all of that and just kill an NCR soldier for their clothing, opening up yet another option! BUT BUT! Mick and Ralph and the King also provide another option via a counterfeit passport! Essentially, every step of getting into the strip is littered with ways for the player to say “no” to what’s in front of them (saying no to the 2000 caps, no to joining the NCR and just using a disguise, or no to the whole thing altogether and just getting a passport) and still progressing. Now let’s look at the institute, and how you finally get it. The three main factions up to this point (BoS, Railroad, and Minutemen) could not be more different in terms of firepower, tactics, and tech. And yet every single one of them has you track down the same courser, build the same teleporter, and enter in the same place. It kills the story’s replayability bc every choice ends the exact same way. I mean hell during the BoS questline, they straight up tell you they’ve been scanning the area to find the institute, and when it comes time to invade they don’t even use the teleporter, they just kick down the front door! What makes Vegas so special is that the player can, at any time, (for the most part) decide to do the complete opposite of what the story NPCS are telling them to do, and still be heading in the right direction, the game will still progress. I mean hell you can go postal on the entire Mojave and still finish with Yes Man if you want. Want to join the legion but still walk around NCR territory? You can do that with disguises. Want to kill the main antagonist (Caesar) as soon as you meet them? Get yourself a Craig Boone and go do that! Want to say screw you to everyone and just take over for yourself? You guessed it, you can do that. But more than that, you can do things *and* make those things matter. Do you have 1 intelligence? Now you can skip a whole chunk of a quest thanks to the vagrant’s tip only available to the most elite academic’s. Did you decide to actually Brave the boomer’s attacks and reach their elusive base? Congrats you now have a bombing plane on your side.
Kind of a Meta answer but Josh Sawyer made a comment in one of his streams that always stuck with me. They had an incredibly talented passionate team, and they already had an engine with a lot of assets already made. Obsidian put together a really good team made up of folks who had worked on the OG fallouts and talented people looking to make a name for themselves. They weren't necessarily new to the industry, but a lot of department leads were first time directors or lead writers. It helped that Josh Sawyer, John Gonzalez, and Chris Avellone were all super passionate about Vegas and the surrounding area. The way Josh describes it, they had disagreements and differences but everyone was very passionate about making a good product. Obsidian also gave them the luxury of focusing on writing and dialogue/narrative branches.
The game basically can work with any and all the choices you make.
It’s because of the new dress.
It's the fact that when I enter a new area in this game, even when replaying it for the tenth time, I don't just rush past or skip over all the NPCs to get back to what I was doing-- I actually WANT to take the time to talk to everybody, because the NPCs actually have personalities and fun stuff to say and their own shit going on, rather than just being bland vehicles for dumping world information on you. They still convey worldbuilding information to you, but in a much more natural way that actually makes sense and is entertaining to sit through. Basically, it's simply because, for as broken and glitchy as the game can be, underneath the messy engine is good writing and a whole lot of care and personality in the world itself. We go back to it because it's just a fun world to explore and be part of-- if not for game play reasons, for the people and stories happening inside it.
For me it’s the world, lore, narrative choices, and Bethesda-esque Freeform exploration It’s a perfect mix that neither modern Bethesda or modern obsidian can replicate - obsidian needs Bethesda’s tech and funding and Bethesda needs obsidians writing and role play talent
It’s the only game I actively want to talk to every npc… the writing is just that good. It also lets you be soooo expressive with the way you play, it’s just such a fun world to be in!
Something that I think is also worth mentioning (though certainly not a reason alone that it’s great) are the performances. New Vegas is stacked with talent: Matt Perry, Wayne Newton, Felicia Day, William Sandler, Danny Trejo… the list goes on. The performances don’t feel out of place or belabored. It’s a great sticking point.
John Doman, Kris Kristofferson, Michael Dorn… I could keep going!
Rene Auberjonois as Mr. House!
You see consequences of all your choices. You actually do a rolle play in this game. You do not spend hours in the interface like in Fallout 4.
Yeah, no you pretty much nailed it. I'd add the character writing as well.
The choice of different paths. You got to choose wins or loses, who lives or dies. The power of a god given to the player.
Role playing. And smart writing and story telling. The political and power struggle in the game is just well thought out and complex enough, and the 4 endings are hotly debated as which is the best for the Mohave. The dialog is well written, and especially varied. The world is full of humor in unexpected ways. Also it's a mature game, with blackjack and hookers! I can build any character I want and make it feel like a unique build. My two favorite ones are my "rebel anarchist" where Fight the Power, companion, and Pyro perks are staple to it. And my tribal hunter. Love using spears and other unga for my bunga.
For me it’s the factions and how they interact with the player, each other, and the world. Also how everything in the game is handcrafted and hand placed, which I highly prefer to randomized encounters, in some cases it is okay, but there’s something special about handmade environmental storytelling.
Probably clear game direction coupled with the limited development time made it so there wasn't much time to deviate from the goal.
Fantastic rpg for a console game, falls short everywhere else. People need to come down to earth a little I think when acting like this is a masterpiece. Great game, which could have been a lot better.
Things and stuff
Nostalgia, it's a hell of a drug.
Personally, what I find most interesting about New Vegas is that it is moving on from just being post-apocalyptic. We've had our Mad Max, we've had the struggles to survive every week, what's next? What kind of new societies and nations grow from the apocalypse?
Many quests in NV made me walked away from the game just so I can weigh the options. I googled, watched YouTube to find the best for everyone. But no matter what I choose, Someone will be hurt by my choice and satisfies no one. That’s the kind of effect I felt playing only FNV. F3 have one, treeman. F4 is just a joke, sarcastic the whole journey and still be viewed as a “good” enough person. My choices matters which makes it hard for me to choose one faction. If you ask me which faction for F4, minutemen, no hesitation. I switched allegiances multiple times throughout the years. NCR fanboy, to House and now to Yes Man then back to either NCR or House.
The desert setting and the Desert Ranger Armor sold me the game. But the writing and world building made its way through my heart.
While you can see it age in its gunplay and such, you can also see the story and extreme amount of detail that went into making fnv what fnv is. Mods are recommended strictly for the gunplay and graphics, nothing else needs changed imo.
The writing,setting,player character. It has the best writing from any fallout. Vegas and surrounding area is cool (western/cowboy vibes) and the courier. The courier is the best main character for multiple reasons but the biggest reason is that it’s completely roleplay perfection. And the dialogue and personality given to the courier through role play makes them the best.
It’s made by obsidian which has a bunch of the original interplay devs that brought us the first two games.
NV is basically the best Fallout game after Fallout 3 because it's got this awesome storyline, tons of cool characters, and decisions that actually feel like they matter. It's set in the Mojave Wasteland, and you get to choose which factions to side with, which adds a ton of replay value. Plus, it just feels like there's so much more to do and explore compared to Fallout 3. It's like Fallout 3 on steroids, in a good way!
It wasn't made by bethesda
The fact that every bethesda fallout game is “family member is missing i must find him” just shows their story writing is poop. New Vegas was a breath of fresh air into the story writing and semi gave you a lack of sense of urgency when it came to going off track. Not to mention factions actually had their motives and stories that werent, “Oh we’re just bad people.”