This.

Yeah, that's why it failed.

Agreed. Fallout 3 is separate from the rest if the series. But regardless of whether one thinks it's good or bad, you have to acknowledge the fact that Bethesda used it to revive the franchise. I can forgive a lot of Fallout 3's sins for paving the way for New Vegas.

New Vegas was boring dreck with no story. Fallout 3 won't be topped anytime soon.

What the fuck do you even like about new vegas? What kind of bizarro universe are you guys living in?

It's amazing how consistently wrong your opinion is about everything, gmonk.

I liked both games, though New Vegas was superior.

New Vegas had actual villains (Caesar, House) with actual goals that had underlying reasons. There were companions with actual stories and goals you could help/hinder/ignore. The game culminates in a war where you decide which faction (NCR, Caesar, you, nobody) wins. It had weapon mods, a more believable setting, and you didn't start out having to go through childbirth, your 10th birthday, etc. before getting out into the larger world.

Fallout 3 tends to fall short when you look at how much of it doesn't make sense (water staying radioactive for 200 years, the GECK being turned into a Genesis Device from Star Trek III, the GECK being used to create water that shouldn't be impure in the first place rather than using it AS a Genesis Device, etc.). Your father is a moron, you can't ever not follow the main questline even if you think it's dumb, the Brotherhood of Steel don't act in character, and Tenpenny Tower makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Tenpenny nukes a whole town because it's an eyesore? What? Okay, but how are these people richer than everyone else? There's nothing they do or make to make them rich (as opposed to FNV's Gun Runners). Then you can let Roy in which is "good karma," but he slaughters everyone there.

Again, both games are enjoyable, but Fallout 3 is best in the sidequests. Even its DLC is broken/nonsensical whereas FNVs ties into its main quests/the Mojave much more effectively.

I think there's exactly one thing in New Vegas that refers to Fallout 3. They were probably forced to put it in to show that Fallout 3 is canon. I would have put a large non-functioning cannon next to it.

My allergy to F:NV comes from those who treat Fallout as some kind of untouchable Holy Writ. Great game, sure. However, long slow slogs over the same dull tile set got old. With F3, I didn't mind roaming through the ruins of NoVa. Having read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I understood what Bethesda did with F3.

That said, I'll still give Obsidian's future offerings a shot, even though I'm jonesing for Fallout 4.

I thought the vault childhood sequence from Fallout 3 was the best part :(

It was having to do the pain in the ass quests for fucking Mad Dog that made me quit. Fuck you, fuck your good fight, fuck your tree, fuck you putting me up against waves of super mutants so early on.

Not sure if any other games has ever done this but I thought the Vault sequence. was a brilliant way to structure an RPG. I've never iked the way RPG player characters start off fully formed yet completely blank at the same time, this worked for me.

NV didn't appeal to me so much because I don't really like Westerns. It's not a big deal for many people but I only really enjoy games where the setting/premise/dramatic genre excites me.

It was pretty far removed from a western, other than the state it's set in and some people have cowboy hats.

I preferred New Vegas because it felt like closure. I watched Van Buren develop for two years just to be shot down in the 11th hour by Herve Caens stupidity. So the fact that it used much of the same intended script and setting was great. I thought the weirdo courier/prophet/nemesis plot device explained in the last DLC was awful (actually, most the DLC wasn't great) but all in all, NV won the fight between the two.

HOWEVER!!!!!!!

F3 brought the series back. It modernized it in a way that Van Buren wasn't going to (though VB was 6 years before) and for better or worse, it was at least trying to be reverential to the originals instead of just a cash grab like everyone worried about.

One of my favorite things about Skyrim was my speculation on the next Fallout. With Bethesda creating a better crafted world than both oblivion and F3, I'm hoping that skill translates to F4 and by proxy any future obsidian fallout, if they get another crack at it.

I do not get Caesar's Legion as part of the Fallout world, even if the game's original creators created it. It's just a dumb faction. Trying to run up on guns with melee weapons is dumb. Roman cultism post-apocalypse is dumb.

More importantly, FNV was released as a broken game and it was not really fixed. Obsidian/Bethesda should have been boycotted into bankruptcy for it. FNV is a great example of everything wrong with the gaming industry in so many ways. It got fantastic reviews out of the chute, and it was unplayable.

A little post script here...

I loved Fallout 3. Still do. Went to the midnight release, even dragged along the (now) wife. Got the Limited Edition, plus the hard cover strategy guide. Whole she-bang.

When New Vegas was announce, I dismissed it as a pretender to the throne. When it came out and was found to be a "buggy mess," I felt justified in my original assessment.

I then went back and played through Fallout and Fallout 2 and Tactics. Yay GOG. With a new found hankerin' for everything Fallout, I started looking into cancelled Fallout projects. It turns out there was an "original" Fallout 3 (Van Buren) and that a lot of the folks who worked on it went to Obsidian... and New Vegas.

I picked up New Vegas used a couple years ago. The list of preferred differences SteamPoweredKleenex made ring very true to my own. While Fallout 3 is the technically superior game and I laud Bethesda for the grat job it did, New Vegas has more character IMHO. It just feels like a more complete world, where there is no 'good and evil'... only 'us and them.'

TL;DR

Fallout 3 is great
Fallout: New Vegas is greater, due to rose tinted glasses.

I love them both. :3

I wish there were a historical Jesus so I could go back in time and shoot him in the fucking face for ruining everything.

First the dark ages and now the ending to Fallout 3. I hope everyone involved in that ending dies horribly while someone that could easily help them looks on for no reason. Except one of them. I hope that guy becomes President and a secret service agent takes a bullet for him and he spends the rest of his life a pariah because everybody is pissed off that he didn't jump in front of the secret service agent to take the bullet for him.

SPK put up a pretty thorough explanation for why F:NV is the better spiritual sequel, but yeah, you could really just cite F3's bullshit ending and be done with it.

I always loved finishing Fallout games because by the end it laid out all of consequences that your actions took on the world you had just passed through -- but ultimately your efforts were mostly forgotten or taken credit for by the surviving members of the town, and you were really just more of a footnote in all of these communities' histories. It made the world feel like it had a life on its own, and you got a sense of quiet dignity after you'd finished the main quest and rode off into the sunset.

At the end of Fallout 3 the game seemed to break its back bending the narrative to make you THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WASTELAND ANYONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT, despite the fact you are more or less just running through a self-obsessed, objectivist nightmare world. F3 might've given more opportunities to blow shit up and kill supermutants, but it felt about as much like a Fallout game as Fallout: Tactics.

I think some people take these games way too seriously. FO3 just let you explore an open world, apocalyptic wasteland thing and just have fun with it and do whatever you largely wanted to, which is what I liked about it. The storyline wasn't very strong, but I don't think the vast majority of the people who played it gave a shit.
Obsidian seemed to have a weird allergy to this type of thing. New Vegas felt like they were clumsily trying to reconcile the fact that 99.9999% of everyone who loved FO3 wanted more open world stuff with their desire to tell a more focused, linear storyline with more distinct characters (and actual villains). To get around this, Obsidian, in my opinion, did something very awkward and designed the world to still be technically open, but basically funnel you along the storyline. Anyone just wanting to enjoy the open world nature was pummeled into submission by the ludicrous difficulty and basically discouraged from getting out there and doing what they wanted in favor of the devs trying to get you the play the game in a way they preferred you to play it. I found it somewhat annoying, personally, though I understand why some liked it better. I also preferred FO3s design approach of "pick a direction and you'll find something interesting to do/explore" as opposed to NVs approach of "pick a direction and you might maybe find something that kills you or some sort of invisible wall meant to limit your progress." Most of these are things I also really disliked about the original FO games as well. So for me, personally, Bethesda was the best thing to happen to the franchise, clumsy storytelling and all. I would like to see Obsidian get to do another Fallout, but I look forward to what Bethesda does with their next entry moreso. On a side note, though, there is absolutely no comparison whatsoever between FO3s shitty ending and ME3s shitty ending. FO3 suffered just bad writing and wanting to create an awkward excuse to add the DLC and the "proper" ending (which was also clumsy), but the ending didn't negate the entire game. ME3s ending was a deus ex machina of the worst kind that literally negated every single thing about the series up to that point for no other reason than to try to "mindfuck" the audience thinking it was epic levels of cleverness to do so.

Well, I actually liked the ending to Fallout 3 so :P

It is easier to enjoy when you play your character as a moral straight-arrow.

Stanley, I have to call you out on saying FO3's ending wasn't linear.

Can you side with the Enclave? No. Oh, sure, you can nuke the Citadel, but only after you've gone on a GECK fetch for the BoS, been captured and taken to Raven Rock, walked behind a giant robot, and reactivated the water filter. You literally cannot do anything else and advance the plot. You can't even do any of those things to help/hinder another faction. Put FEV in the water? Congrats, you can't drink it and some ghouls die off. Other than that, you had no impact.

Can you not activate the water purifier? No.

Can you advance the plot without rescuing/dealing with your dad? No.

Apart from some dialog options, is there any difference at all in how the plot progresses based on your actions? No.

About the only real choice you get is whether or not to nuke Megaton, which is a dumb thing to do, economically, and the reason behind it makes no sense.

At least with FNV, you can pick which faction takes the prize, blow up the dam, and affect the futures of several NPCs and settlements. That's one thing FO3 really got wrong was how the ending was presented: It listed off your actions as they pertained to you (whether or not you were evil, mostly) without telling you how you impacted the future of the wasteland, like F1 and F2 did. FO3 is a fun game, but its main plot IS linear and awfully written. It's the post-apoc version of the main quest in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. You have more fun if you just ignore it and dick around in the larger world.

they actually addressed this in a DLC by letting you do that and play a little mission afterwards of you doling out water supplies to the wasteland, then blowing up some Enclave base that's important for some reason.

like people talk about how Bioware buckled on the Mass Effect 3 ending, but jesus christ, at least they didn't just release a DLC that just let you make some Geth platforms take over The Citadel for you, so you can go back to mining planets for minerals and asking Joker about robot sex.

The companion characters:

A dog. The dog gets a pass because he can't push buttons.

Jericho. He gets a pass because he won't push the buttons.

Butch DeLoria. He is the only companion that has an business asking to draw straws. The only one.

Star Paladin Cross. She's a fucking soldier. She's getting hazard pay. It is literally her job to sacrifice her life if necessary.

Clover. She's a slave. She may be evil, but she's also crazy and might just do it. It's worth asking.

Charon. He's a fucking slave AND immune to radiation.

Fawkes. Almost everybody had this companion on their first playthough. He's a nice guy and he loves radiation.

Oh, and the fucking robot. This is literally the whole reason that robots exist.

Yeah, the DLC lets you still go through with the Water Purifier approach, though, and what I'm saying is it doesn't make sense to even mess with Project Purity when the G.E.C.K. itself is supposed to radically terraform the wastes on its own - pure water, trees, etc. They ruin the G.E.C.K. to do a shittier goal with it, is what I'm saying.

And Blue makes a great point about Charon and Fawkes. The DLC allows you to survive and do some more stuff but it still doesn't make sense to get so heavily dosed.

I had Fawkes at that part and he just refused to do it for me because "it was my destiny." Which is bunk. He's Lawful Good, man. He's supposed to help out any way he can.

If you activate the G.E.C.K. in the Vault instead of nabbing it, you get a flash of white light and some text about how awesome the G.E.C.K. works, which probably tells us that the original ending was probably meant to take place there.

You die in the explosion and probably get regurgitated as part of the new wastes.

They could have just taken the G.E.C.K., had a robot activate it safely somewhere, and that would have been a much better outcome for the Wasteland.

Even the Enclave would have known this.

I just assumed it was broken or something. I mean, did they rig it to kill the person that activates it? Maybe it kills everybody like that hovering hippie van from that Civilization game.

I thought it was already established what the GECK did, and it wasn't some sort of magic nanotech make everything better spell. It was a kit. Open the box and it's got doodads and a sheet of instructions in it. Somebody successfully deployed one in Fallout 2. It was enough to build a single functioning city.

Blue, that was it. It was an actual kit. I don't mind that they made a different version of the GECK for FO3 that was basically a Genesis Device that kills whoever activates it (it could be darkly humorous if that was a requirement, as their DNA is used as a template or something). The problem was they gave you a Genesis Device and then railroaded you into not doing anything remotely intelligent with it.

Oh, man, good call.

Just remember how awful the point and click thing was and how hard it is to actually shoot enemies. Grind for health in the graveyard before you go anywhere.

p.s. cant wait to see what wasteland will be like and wheres fallout 4 already. i wants more gnomes