BigBananaDealer'Huge respect to the folks at Obsidian': Todd Howard invited Obsidian devs onto Fallout season 2's set so they could see New Vegas in the flesh
ampersandrew“I think fans debate what their favourite one is, which is understandable,” Howard says. “I think it’s great that you can have a lot of factions and the fans say, ‘Oh, I like one or two or three or four, or Vegas or 76’ now, and so I think that’s really healthy for a franchise where people can say which one is their favourite.”
I’m sure Todd’s head canon is that there’s more of a debate than there actually is.
im not sure what this comment is trying to get at, ive never seen a game franchise more debated than fallout. ive seen every game labelled as someones favorite, including that awful brotherhood of steel game
The fact of the matter is it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean it was a good game or something was done better (which is what Todd is looking for, validation), because some people liked it.
then what is? because 3 new vegas and 4 are all pretty much critically acclaimed, so would we go based off sales then? because in that case the order would be 4 then 3 then new vegas
That's the point, it doesn't matter. Enjoy any you want.
Todd just wants "his" Fallout games to be the most liked, to stroke his ego.
Also side note, sales never works as a metric because the gaming industry is constantly growing, any game released now sells much more than it ever would have 5, 10, 15, 20.. years ago. Regardless of quality.
idk how you get that from todd saying all the fallout games have its fans
and to your last point, fo3 outsold new vegas even though new vegas came out 3 years after
But when people talk about the great RPGs of the modern era New Vegas is brought up while Fallout 3 isn’t. Neither is Fallout 4 for that matter.
a real travesty they arent
Just about any game is someone’s favorite, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of debate. Fallout 4 and 76 appear to have reached an audience much larger than the rest of the series’ usual standards for copies sold, so the sense I get is that if you’re calling one of those your favorites, you most likely haven’t seen most of the rest of the series. I think 3 and 4 get a lot of criticism that may go too far, but the long and short of it is that the consensus is that Bethesda’s entries are not among the strongest in the series.
that may be your opinion but ive seen people who love fo3 but cant get into new vegas, who love 4 but cant get into 3 or new vegas, who love 76 because its online multiplayer and therefore not as big on the single player entries. theres endless debates about it. you may think its consensus but its not as clear cut as you think
hell theres fallout 1 purists who think that game is the ONLY fallout game
I’ve been on gaming forums for a long time, and I honestly can’t recall a single time I saw anything resembling an actual debate that people might like 3 more than New Vegas. I have seen debates of 3 vs. 4 and New Vegas vs. 1/2, but I’ve never come across a debate between people who’ve played more or less the entire series and preferred Bethesda’s games. Maybe that’s you, but this would be the first time.
ive seen it quite a bit. but i think 3 fans are too busy starting up another character to bother with debating 😂 definitely a quiet crowd but not totally invisible
Well you folks have been pretty quiet for 15 years. What’s the argument for 3 over New Vegas? Or 3 over 1/2?
TaterTotWell, take this for what it’s worth since I’m personally the 1 > NV > 2 > 3 > 4 > 76 > BoS persuasion, so our preferences probably overlap and I might not be the best person to speak to why some prefer 3. But here’s my best take at why some people might genuinely prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas.
1. The world is more exploration-friendly.
Fallout 3 drops you near the center of the map, uses fewer invisible walls, and basically lets you run in any direction from the moment you leave the vault. Some of those design choices come at the cost of immersion and a clear sense of progression, but for players who just want to wander and explore, 3 scratches that itch.
New Vegas, by contrast, funnels players through a “racetrack” loop that eventually leads you to the Strip, then sends you outward to deal with the major factions. This structure reinforces the narrative pacing and supports the game’s strong story design, but it does reduce the sense of open-ended freedom.
2. Fallout 3’s dungeons are more extensive.
Most of 3’s dungeons are longer, more combat-heavy, and offer more substantial looting/scavenging opportunities, including bobbleheads and unique gear. While New Vegas has brilliantly written locations (Looking at you Vault 11), many of its buildings amount to one or two rooms, largely due to the game’s famously short development cycle.
For players who enjoy the simple rhythm of clearing out big spaces and gathering loot, Fallout 3 offers more of that classic “delve and scavenge” gameplay, even if its combat system is fairly “mid”.
3. The atmosphere feels more traditionally “post-apocalyptic.”
This one is entirely subjective, but many players feel that Fallout 3’s bleak, bombed-out wasteland better captures the classic “nuclear apocalypse” aesthetic. New Vegas has richer world-building, themes more aligned with Fallout 1 and 2, and a more realistic sense of a society rebuilding after centuries, but its tone is often more eccentric than apocalyptic. For some players, that makes 3 easier to get immersed in.
For the record, I still personally believe New Vegas is the stronger game. (Outside of “atmospheric reasons") Most of the things Fallout 3 excels at are also done just as well (or better) in Oblivion and Skyrim. But what New Vegas does well, player agency and narrative depth, is something very few non-Isometric CRPG games even attempt, and even fewer do it nearly as good.
Still, Fallout 3 delivers the “meditative, exploration-driven gameplay” that Bethesda built its reputation on from Oblivion onwards. For players who fell in love with that formula (especially those who entered the series with 3), New Vegas can feel like a departure from what they enjoy about the series.
And honestly, that’s one of my favorite things about Fallout: every game is a departure from the last. Fallout 2 shifted the tone dramatically from Fallout 1. Fallout 3 reinvented the franchise entirely. New Vegas reworked 3’s skeleton into something more narrative-focused. Fallout 4 emphasized crafting and building. Fallout 76 went multiplayer. No matter which game is your favorite, each one brings something unique to the table.
Anyway, I could talk about this stuff until the actual apocalypse, but I’ll end it here. But hopefully this helps explain why some people genuinely prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas.
Thanks! But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas, so this was definitely all a new perspective for me, lol. I also think there are a lot of people asking for a new Fallout game that haven’t tried 1 and 2, and I’d love to point more people that way when the topic comes up, or at least to the Wasteland games as a close enough proximity.
But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas
Agreed, there are not very many folks still hard Stanning for 3. Though I think a large reason for that is 3 was superseded by Skyrim, and FO4. While NV fans are still kinda waiting on even a true spiritual successor. So NV fans really haven’t moved on, while 3’s fans have long since gone onto other things.
Plus, the things 3 does well kinda makes you “forget about most of it” after a while. Like, I play A Tale of Two Wastelands pretty often, and one thing that stands out about 3’s world is how much of it is just more of the same. It all just blends together. Eventually, the feeling of a real world breaks down, leaving you with a “lot of gameplay with not a lot of substance”
NV’s emphasis on world building and choice on the other-hand makes you think about the game a lot more, even when you put the game down, you can still “play it” just by thinking about how your choices would affect the long term realities of the world.
So while 3’s fans can basically say “Yeah, I really liked that game, the world was fun and stealing the Declaration of Independence from that robot was funny”, NV fans can have full on years long debates of “Independent Vegas vs NCR vs House”, I’ve even seen some mad lads argue that Caesar’s belief that a sufficiently strong opponent to challenge the NCR would force the NCR to address some of the issues they were having as a country. These people are of course insane, but you get my point.
All of this really adds up to the fact that NV built a game that is easy to form communities around, and people are excited to talk about, while 3 kinda just built a really solid turn your brain off game.
For the setting point, I agree three is more classic post-nuclear-apocalypse, but also that’s a big negative. Fallout isn’t just post-nuclear-apocalypse, it’s post-post-apocalyptic. The radiation should be a lot less prevelant and there should be societies rebuilt.
Three feels like it should be set very soon after the nukes fell. A lot of the narrative and environment don’t make sense with the timeline they wrote. There’s speculation this is because it was originally supposed to be set much earlier, but they pushed the date back late in development to make the story BoS VS Enclave, which wouldn’t fit earlier.
100% agree. A youtuber once summed up the setting pretty perfectly imho. They said something to the effect of “Fallout isn’t just a post-apocalypse. It’s an example of retro futurism. Specifically, it’s the year 2077, as the people of the 1990’s imagined the people of the 1950’s imagined it. But then, that society got nuked, and the post-apocalypse imagined by the pop-culture of the 80’s and 90’s rose from it’s ashes.”
3’s more standard “post-apocalypse vibes” don’t really nail the vision of the original Fallout. This is especially a negative if you are coming at Fallout from the standpoint of a long time fan. Like I said in my first rant,
“New Vegas has richer world-building, themes more aligned with Fallout 1 and 2, and a more realistic sense of a society rebuilding after centuries”
And yeah, it seems pretty obvious that 3 was meant to be set much earlier in the timeline originally. With Rivet City being the most advanced in agriculture simply by having a small hydroponics lab, most of society surviving by scavenging, attempts to cleanup and rebuild at an extremely early stage.
I assume that for folks who prefer 3, these are not hills they particularly care about, and that the more generic post-apocalyptic vibes (that were really in vogue when 3 was released) hit the exact fantasy they wanted to play through.
But I wholeheartedly agree with your points.
There’s an added layer to the West Coast games past 1 as well: they’re post-post apocalyptic. We have nations now, the world is rebuilding.
Very true, and that’s on of my favorite elements of the West Coast lore. Honestly, if I could change only one thing about Bethesda’s approach to Fallout, it would be their dogmatic approach to keeping the world locked in time.
I actually enjoyed the show, and am even trying to remain optimistic for season two, but resetting the world building on the West Coast just to keep the apocalyptic tone really made me sad to see. Killed off a story I loved that had been slowly building since my childhood.
Bethesda has a lot of lore issues, but their main one is that they set pretty much all of their games far too late in the timeline. If you want to tell a post-apocalyptic story, that’s fine.
It doesn’t make sense for anything to be living in a place where the water has been poison for 200 years. Fallout 3 would fit perfectly before Fallout 1 on the timeline.
They knew it didn’t make sense for there to be like 3 half-assed towns in Boston after 200 years, so they created The Institute. Who are so all-powerful they wiped the Commonwealth of any real progress toward society, yet have no clear goals and are extremely incompetent. Set it around 60 years after the bombs, maybe take out the Synth plot and replace it with actual, nonconvoluted slavery, thus expanding on the themes of 3.
To me, the show is a collage of scenes that I like, with quite a bit of stuff that I really dislike. There’s really cool ideas in it, and I honestly do love how they reference some of the universal experiences that we get when playing those games. But the treatment of the lore, in general, is honestly borderline disrespectful.
Now, they’ve announced that in Season 2, “…every faction might think they’ve won.” To emulate, “…the story of history depend[ing] on who you ask.” Which, yknow, New Vegas already showed with the vast and varying opinions of its characters, as well as quite literally showing the effect of historical debate with the in-game debate about the Bitter Springs Massacre.
I’m waiting to see how they pull it off, but I can’t see how all the factions could think they’ve won if Mr. House is alive, seeing how you have to assassinate him for 3 of the endings.
Also, Caesar has an incurable brain tumor and you either kill Lanius or talk him into abandoning the front entirely in 3 of the endings. I don’t see how the Legion could ever be doing good. Maybe Macaulay Macaulay “Mr. McCulkin” Culkin Culkin is their new leader.
Yeah, I totally concur, a lot of the stories they want to tell fit so much better closer to the bombs.
I also think Bethesda’s need to make sure every story contains the core elements of Super Mutants, the BoS, Deathclaws, Radscorpions, etc is another key issue they have with the lore. When I played 1 and 2, it felt like I was seeing just a small slice of a world that could have any number of crazy new things in it. But now that it’s basically the same thing coast to coast, the world feels stale and predictable.
And you pretty much summed up all my thoughts on the show. The ‘collage of fun scenes’ made it enjoyable. But it was also beyond disrespectful. Throwing away the world built up in 1, 2, and NV just to make it match the key elements of 3 and 4 is… super fucking shitty.
And I really don’t see how they can make it seem like every faction in NV can think they won without also completely invalidating the significance of the choices in NV. I’m honestly already resigned to Bethesda just killing off that as well tho, so I hope they at least still have a fun collage of scenes.
You’re absolutely right on your point about the core elements. They think that the Fallout universe needs a Triforce, a Master Sword, and a Ganon. But it’s just not that kind of series. The iconography is so much less important than the themes. It feels like they’re jingling keys in front of us sometimes when they show off BoS and Super Mutants (who were supposed to be dying out).
Funnily enough, the only icon they use that would feasibly be in every part of the US was Nuka Cola, and they retconned its design…
ahornsirupAs someone else who prefers 3, I think that it’s more fun to explore and generally has a better atmosphere. New Vegas has better writing but the world feels empty. 3 more fun to actually play. Honestly, I’d probably take 4 over NV for the same reason.
1/2 I haven’t managed to get into. At all.
It depends on your preferences, I think.
Fallout 3 is the better exploration game, New Vegas is the better RPG. Now, I love Fallout 3 and I think it has the best world design in the series (lore not included), but I get a great deal more enjoyment from leveling a character toward a specialization and seeing the different ways my decisions affect the world than I do from dungeon crawling.
New Vegas has me covered there, its perks are really fun and almost all of its many quests have multiple solutions or an alternative quest. However, if I want to scavenge through the wreckage of a dead world I can think of no finer game than Fallout 3.
I don’t think it’s better than NV as a whole, but there are things it does do better. Probably the biggest is the random events. They have a lot more variety and interaction then NV. You might end up with a BoS Remnant group spawn and a Deathclaw, and they’ll just start fighting. NV doesn’t really have this. It’s much more contained and scripted.
In this way, 3 is closer to 1 and 2 than NV is. A large part of the first two games are the random events as you travel the world. NV is almost entirely predictable, with the same things always being at the same spots. 1,2, and 3 are fairly unpredictable while exploring. Landmarks will be the same, but what you see along the way usually won’t be.
I’d consider the random events to be a pretty small part of 1 and 2, and a deterrent to frequent travel, alongside the built in time limits.
If you think this then you’re overdue for a replay of Fallout 1.
How long ago did you play Fallout 1 and 2?
Fallout 1 about 10 years ago. Fallout 2 about a year ago.
That’s why lol. The random events were tied to your cpu speed, and with faster more modern processors you wouldn’t see nearly as many random events.
Eh, I doubt it, because it didn’t seem like I was seeing too few. They came at an appropriate clip, and the second game even gives you a car to see fewer of them after the halfway point.
Unless both 10 years ago and 1 year ago you replayed them on a computer from the late 90’s, you didn’t get as many random events as were intended. Your doubt isn’t a factor, it’s just how the game works.
The very fact that you think random events were such a small part of those games also confirms you weren’t getting as many as you were supposed to lol.
Show me a video of a normal encounter rate from the 90s, and I’ll tell you how my experience compared.
Nope, the opposite. From your casual search:
playing unpatched vanilla Fallout 2 will likely REDUCE the number of random encounters (and the time you spend on the map screen, lic) because the game originally tied the travel rate to your hardware.
There’s a reason why most fan restoration patches include logic to increase the number of encounters, to make the game play more like it was when released.
The reason is because they tied to travel system to clock speeds, and modern processors cause your travel speed to be too fast which the random encounter timing system doesn’t account for. People were complaining about this 15 years ago, the problem only would have gotten worse since then.
The GOG versions do not include any fixes for the encounter system.
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.
Spot-on. 3 absolutely follows the world design of 1 & 2, but it scales it down to a city area instead of part of a state.
I’m a huge New Vegas fangirl, but I will say that the random encounters have kept Fallout 3’s world surprisingly fresh. I’ve burnt myself out on the 30 side quests, but if I just go explore then I usually see something new every playthrough. Hell, 3 was the game that really cemented Bethesda’s status as environmental storytellers with a real knack for making a space point toward its previous purpose. Back before they dropped so many skeletons in random places that it became a meme in Fallout 4.
New Vegas simply does not have that type of design. There’s many more avenues to explore in quests and many more quests, but you can tell they focused the dev time almost entirely in that area. 10/10 tho, would recommend.
Not quiet at all. Lots of people loved 3. I’m old enough to remember when NV was the red headed stepchild of the series. I don’t think you’ve picked up on the fact that New Vegas is a cult hit. It didn’t become everyone’s favorite for half a decade at least after its release.
CoelacanthI have seen debates of both 3 and 4 over New Vegas. These arguments tend to come almost exclusively from newer fans. Anyone who played 1 and 2 first, especially back in the day, tends to have a much less favourable view of the Bethesda Fallouts. But there are tons of Bethesda-first fans who came into Fallout after first playing Skyrim, typically. The 4 fans either love the base building or tend to think the other games are “too old looking/feeling”. The 3 fans… I don’t even know, that game is pretty terrible I think. But they tend to argue the design of the world in 3 is better to explore than New Vegas.
I haven’t personally heard anyone argue 76 is the best Fallout, but I’m sure someone is out there.
3 was the first one I ever played (after Oblivion tho to your beth point) and it was so radically different from anything I played before that I just fell in love.
New Vegas didn’t capture that same feeling in me, I like it but it just didn’t hit me the same way.
Fallout 4 I enjoyed a ton because of the base building and refinements on scrap usage for modifications and such, with mods like Sim Settlements it can be so damn cool.
Basically the only negative things I can say about NV is that they’re really heavy handed with forcing you to go through the map in certain direction/order. Though it still opens up in the second half of the game.
I mean, I love NV and think it’s by far the best 3D Fallout, but it’s also got a ton of performance and bug issues. Partly due to the engine they were working with and the insane development cycle, but still. The game isn’t without issues. It’s famously unstable and buggy if played without mods. I also think it needs mentioning that a lot of the assets look out of place, because they are. The game had such a short development cycle that a lot of them are just reused FO3 assets.
I love it, but there is a reason so many people recommend something like the Viva New Vegas modlist even for a first playthrough.
Tactics was fun.
Agree but I wish it was more like the newer XCOM games.
Makes you think of what could have been, if they’d done the new Fallouts as tactical/Turn Based RPGs, rather than first person shooters - although the new Wasteland games do a pretty good job of filling that niche.
ThunderWhiskersI’m not saying Metacritic is the end-all be-all, but it does confirm the most commonly held opinion about the popularity of the modern games. You may think that there is a real debate here but that just isn’t the case. 4 and 76 are pretty firmly the less well received of these games.
Idk, The Elder Scrolls’ fandom debates a lot too. There’s still people fighting over whether the Stormcloaks or the Empire were right in Skyrim, or whether Morrowind or Oblivion are the best in the series
the civil war questline, even in its unfinished state, might be my favorite in any game due to the sheer amount of debating about it 15 years later
Dude, all the Fallout community is is debate.
We’re just doing our favorite thing: picking a side and trying to solve a conflict between multiple factions.
That’s… Wait. That’s the whole premise of all the games dammit.
Bingo
Bango
Bongo I don’t wanna leave the Congo
morphite88Bongo
…I’m so happy in the jongo?