So since I know some of you dudes are playing New Vegas anyone wanna tell me what's new in it? Like what are the big things that differ from Fallout 3 is there anything particularly amazing because it'll be a while before I feel like I've played enough Fallout 3 but I've kinda been considering playing New Vegas at the same time because it does seem interesting.
This is a difficult thing to really describe. The fundamentals of the game are identical. You sit down and play the game for an hour or two and it'll basically feel like an expansion pack to Fallout 3. But the more you play the game the more it'll just feel pretty different. I'll throw some bullet points out there for you, since the differences come more in nuances and design choices rather than really overarching changes in the game.
-The atmospheric(non-radio) soundtrack is A LOT more in-tuned with what you're doing in the game. This was probably my biggest gripe of Fallout 3 in relation to the earlier Fallouts. Mark Morgan's soundtrack for the first two Fallout games was absolutely incredible, and I felt it did more to further the atmosphere of the game than anything other element. They took a really big step back with the Fallout 3 soundtrack. Not that it was bad(it was quite good), it was just profoundly unambitious and didn't try to seriously affect the feel of the game outside of the rare occasion. They offer a pretty easy fix to this in New Vegas: They basically blended the soundtracks of all three main Fallout games(which includes A LOT of Mark Morgan's original Fallout 1&2 soundtrack) as well as throw in some original work, and went pretty far out of their way coding appropriate locations/encounters/etc that would trigger particular songs. The end result is that the soundtrack does feel pretty representative of what you're doing in the game, unlike Fallout 3 which never was close to achieving this.
-The map design is SIGNIFICANTLY better paced in New Vegas. I get that they were going for pseudo-realism in Fallout 3, where very frequently you will spend an hour(real time) walking somewhere, but in general that did make the game more tiresome and got pretty excessive at times. This was pretty evident on the world map, but it was PARTICULARLY noticeable in the subways. Apparently the guys at Obsidian were bothered by this as well, so their remedy was to include a roughly equivalent amount of locations and things of interest on the map, while decreasing the overall map size by about 75%(possibly more, just an estimation). The individual location sizes did not decrease dramatically, on average, but they did away with those particularly long and grueling areas that take well over an hour to explore. This definitely quickens the pace of the game and makes it generally more exciting without it feeling like they're really cheapening the experience of it. Even though I enjoyed Fallout 3 quite a bit, I would very frequently get bored enough to stop playing with some frequency. This did not happen in New Vegas.
-It's the REAL sequel to Fallout 2. I don't really say that to diminish what Fallout 3 was, I just mean this literally. A lot of the main guys from Fallout 2 worked on New Vegas, so the story of the game definitely feels more like the continuation of it, while Fallout 3 definitely felt like the surprisingly good Bethesda version. The types of characters, the factions used, and the general themes of the game really feel more like something you'd see in Fallout 2 than Fallout 3. I guess the big reason I say this is the presence of the New California Republic, since that was a distinctly Fallout 2 entity, and it's really the group of people in the game with the largest visibility in the game, but it extends more than that. Unique to Fallout 2 were the presence of communities of people whose roots appear to be quite a bit before the suggested early 20th century civilization, feeling more like traditional Native American culture and community than anything else. People like that were not particularly visible in Fallout 1 and 3(at all?), but they play a major role in New Vegas. It's really things like that.
-The story is a bit better, making some strides to diminish the GOOD/EVIL approach to everything. You could pretty much categorize most people in Fallout 3 as either DEFINITELY GOOD or DEFINITELY EVIL, but there's much more of a gray area in New Vegas. With the exception of a few clusters of people, most everyone is either AWFUL or TERRIBLE, and it's actually somewhat hard to complete the game without completely fucking someone undeserving. In general, New Vegas does probably as good a job as any game I've played in giving the player difficult decisions to make to change the outcome of the game. The downside however is that, even though the decisions you make are more skillfully crafted and generally more worthwhile on some literary level(lol), they don't really reflect in the world at all, as everything stays pretty much static the whole game. Still, that there's any sense of TURMOIL is pretty cool, since Fallout 3 was mostly devoid of that. Also, the characters are a lot stronger and more interesting. Very few characters stood out on their own merits in Fallout 3(usually the voice actor helped a lot) but there were quite a few very interesting and well-written characters in this game that took inspiration from some unique and surprisingly appropriate sources.
-The voice acting cast is, on the whole, a lot better and more diverse. Bethesda has always had this THING where they would cast the minimal amount of actors possible and just recycle them an unreasonable number of times, often to the point where it's glaringly obvious that you're just speaking to the same person for the 1000th time. Fallout 3 was better in this regard than Oblivion(which was incredibly bad), but it still wasn't perfect. While I think there were some duds in New Vegas, they did a very good job of spreading people out and getting a few key actors that they knew would give strong performances. In particular William Sadler, Kris Kristofferson, Dave Foley, and, in the most appropriate casting ever, Wayne Newton, turn in some strong performances. I'm hesitant to give the game TOO much praise in this category though, since Liam Neeson and ESPECIALLY Malcolm McDowell from Fallout 3 were worlds better than anything New Vegas had to offer, but on the whole New Vegas was more committed to doing a good job with this.
I know I'm forgetting some stuff, but that's all I can think of at the moment. For reference I have logged 150 hours in New Vegas and done virtually everything in the game, so there's really nothing major that I haven't experienced yet. I think what I've suggested here is pretty much the full extent of some differences, minus some technical things that diverge slightly from the way it was done in Fallout 3.
All in all, these are fairly minor changes that you really only become consciously aware of after you've spent a significant amount of time in the game, but I felt they add up to being a pretty unique experience. I was kinda expecting the game to be more of a carbon-copy of Fallout 3, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that they DID really make their own game within the overall context of Bethesda's prior technical work.
Basically, I really enjoyed Fallout 3, but I thought New Vegas was a substantially more interesting/worthwhile/fun game. Kinda regret POWER PLAYING IT and finishing absolutely everything in a month, since it turned out to be the best cumulative experience I've had with any game on the xbox. I was really burnt out of Fallout 3 by the end of it, but I'm still finding myself wanting more from New Vegas. It's exceptionally rare that I ever say that.
The game, however, is not without flaws(I've talked about some in this topic) but it's probably the best thing that's going to come out for a long time. If you're at all interested in new games, this is the one to get. This is DOUBLY true for people who loved Fallout 2.
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