nanoUFO'New Vegas is a very, very important game to us,' says mildly exasperated Todd Howard, who will never stop getting grilled about New Vegas
Gradually_Adjusting…“it is obviously difficult to deal with when you’re going back to an area where a game had multiple endings.”
No, Howard. What you are finding difficult is to have any particular vision for a game beyond its literal systems and gameplay loops. You resent New Vegas because people care about it, and nobody cares about 76.
If you have a story you want to tell, you make choices that serve that vision; the problem is Todd doesn’t have one. He bought a franchise built on evocative storytelling and biting commentary and decided its best use is for players to bash virtual action figures together.
Son_of_dadI honestly don’t get the hate. To me, fallout 3 was on another level. It was oblivion with guns in a post apocalyptic wasteland and I loved every minute of it. I had never heard of fallout before bathesda bought it. I think the first 2 games plus tactics only sold like a million copies combined. Fallout 3 sold like 10 million.
I’m just saying, had it not been for bathesda, fallout would be dead and forgotten. I mean I sure as heck would have never heard about it. So I’m glad they made fallout 3, and it was a landmark game in my life.
To try to answer, succinctly (which I’m bad at): looking backward is easier than looking forward. What I mean by that is since you didn’t get into the series until 3, it makes sense that you wouldn’t have a problem with 3 and 4, since it’s harder to see what the series could have been…as pretentious as that sounds.
Where much of the hate comes from (and I think a lot of it is overblown - I’m not trying to justify the behavior of the maniacs out there) is that the overarching progression of the series feels reset. Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 showed a progression in a *post-*post-apocalyptic world, with society advancing again, to some degree. Shady Sands grew between 1 and 2, and was the foundation of the NCR.
So Fallout 3 at the time was IMHO a disappointment because the setting felt more generic, and like they were just playing the greatest hits from 1 and 2. I get the arguments that the setting in-universe was hit harder, but it still felt weird that it was post-apocalpytic instead of post-post-apocalyptic.
One reason (as always, IMHO) that New Vegas was so popular is that it continued to build on 1 and 2. We saw the NCR had continued to grow, other factions rise in importance, and generally felt less like the bombs had dropped the year prior. It’s what a lot of folks hoped Fallout 3 would be, in that sense. That’s my own biased view though, so take it with a grain of salt - there’s folks who want more humor, only isometric, more complex and branching storylines, etc.