To be fair, the west coast had The Vault Dweller to stop the Master and The Chosen One to stop the Enclave. If either one of those failed you can bet there wouldn't be a civilization on the west coast. The east coast is what would happen if the big bad organization full of crazies is left unchecked.

Except it isnt.
The Enclave just recently got there. Autumn, the commander, was born on the West Coast. They were pretty much all on the West Coast and retreated back East. They might have had a FEW people around on the East Coast but they weren't doing anything. Eden wasn't broadcasting during the period of Fallout 2 and before.

So...no. Not an excuse. In fact, it makes the East Coast look even WORSE because they had it easier. All they had for the longest time was Super Mutants, which apparently was just a localized problem. So localized in fact that that Rivet City, which is right next to a Super Mutant camp, never had problems with Super Mutants. I'm talking about the people outside the city. You could be a bum, on the wrong side of the bridge, sleeping outside and still not have to worry about Super Mutants. Traders coming and going without being harassed by mutants.

Like many other intellectual properties acquired by another party, Fallout 3 doesn't truly understand why the previous games were so popular and throws in as many recognisable things as possible that are devoid of the depth of previous games. Many of the sentient races of Fallout 1 & 2 have been reduced to mindless enemies, and the factions have no ideology beyond gaining power for power's sake. By contrast New Vegas has enemies that'll sit down and try to convince you they're right, and even the main antagonist doesn't want any trouble. Fallout 3 is like a theme park ride, New Vegas like an authentic Wild West saloon. Both are very different kinds of fun.

Nailed it.

*Fallout 4 SPOILERS*

The Institute from Fallout 4 have been operating on the east coast for a while. You even encounter an agent or two in Fallout 3. They have been destabilizing the Commonwealth primarily but also influencing outside areas to prevent something like the NCR from forming (a threat to them). They are insidious and very hard to detect. You can bet a lot of super mutants and radioactive horrors plauging the east coast are their creations. The Institute is essentially the Think Tank without the foil of Dr Mobius.

I played Fallout 4, thank you.
The Institute is nothing like the Think Tank, like at all, minus being scientists. They're closer to being a ripoff of the Enclave without trying to kill everyone outright.

And no, they didn't do anything to the Capital Wasteland. You run into them and their creations ONCE during the entire duration of Fallout 3. They're not responsible for the Capital Wasteland being so bass ackwards.

I've never played Fallout 3 or NV before a couple of weeks ago. I bought them both when they first came on GOG, and I played many hours in Fallout 3, but I didn't play NV yet. I've never played Fallout 1 or Fallout 2.

IMO Fallout 3 is a very bad game. Fallout 3 has a terrible story, terrible characterization (most especially the player character who feels like an inanimate object rather than a real person), terrible gameplay, and is mind-numbingly boring because all it does is copy & paste the same 6 - 8 environmental tile sets and the same 15-20 enemies millions of times. If you've seen one subway station, you've seen them all. If you've seen one part of the desert, you've seen it all. If you've seen one war-torn street, you've seen them all. If you've seen the inside of one building, you've seen them all. If you've seen one Raider hideout, you've seen them all. Etc., etc.

Fallout 3 is probably the most over-rated game of all-time. I am bewildered as to why such a bad game has such acclaim, none of which it deserves.

Simply because of how terrible of a game Fallout 3 is, I don't see how NV could possibly be anything but a major improvement.

Fallout NV is a far better game in pretty much every respect but one: it has better characters, more believable environments, better gameplay, a better plot (one could even say it simply has a plot), more choices with deeper consequences, etc. The one thing it lacks is not so much a fault of the developers as it is a "fault" of natural evolution and also a case of false expectations from the players' side: as some people in previous posts have already mentioned, NV is a game about a future civilization rising from the ashes of a nuclear holocaust, and not about the nuclear holocaust itself. As in, the holocaust is more of a historic event by that point and not an aspect of the contemporary world.

It's been 200 years after the War and yet in FO3 you still find unlooted supermarkets and pharmacies, skeletons of people who died during the nuclear explosions, "forgotten" locations that "no one else ever explored", destroyed buildings still standing, people still living in filthy shacks and treating clean, non-irradiated water as a rare commodity (!), etc. You also get a Wild West frontier-type setting where people are living in isolated communities and trade is limited to a few daring merchants traveling between them in a no-man's land rife with outlaws, and where organizations like the BoS or the Enclave can do pretty much whatever the hell they want because the world is in a state of constant dog-eat-dog and might-makes-right.

Now compare this world with the world of NV: you get people leaving in... oh what the hell, I'll call them cities, even if what we 're shown in the game is seriously lacking in size (and also lore-wise we learn from the NCR citizens that back in California there are actual cities, something that older players have known since FO1), you get a huge number of people living under a single governing body, you get an actual government with an actual standing army (but one which still retains that Wild West, kids-pretending-to-be-adults feeling), you get a BoS that has gone into hiding because it refuses to accept that the world has changed back to where a bunch of gung-ho supersoldiers have no business running around treating the world as their personal playground and its inhabitants as their inferiors, you get the once almighty Khans having been reduced to a sorry drug-cooking gang of outlaws, etc... but most importantly, you also get electricity, clean water and fresh food!

In other words, FO3 is all about surviving in a devastated world where the devastation event is still fresh, and where the until recently pampered survivors are struggling to cope with a suddenly hostile environment. It's a world where survivalist nutheads, military-type tough guys and of course "lone riders" (like us!) get their chance to shine, either by protecting the weak or by becoming their "kings" or even their worst nightmares. It's like a movie set in the aftermath of a huge hurricane, where people exit their basements and experience the shock and the despair that comes from their world having been destroyed - only in FO3, the WHOLE world has been destroyed. This allows the player to actually feel like exploring a new world, in the "archeological" sense that someone above me correctly mentioned. The setting is post-apocalyptic in every single way, and it's really much more true Wild West than NV is with its casinos and its cowboy hats and its cowboy accents.

NV is the complete opposite. It's a world where "something" happened 2 centuries ago, but which is (or should have been*) pretty much ancient history by now. You get the Wild West in its final days, where the reach of the law is more or less indisputable and the few bands of stubborn outlaws that remain are of minor importance. The feeling here is not one of despair (oh God everything we knew is gone what are we gonna do) combined with excitement (a new world where everything is possible, yay!) but one of hope (things are finally looking up again) combined with sadness and a longing for a simpler past where a man (or a woman I guess :P) could make his fortune simply by being tough and working hard. As I said, it's exactly like the final days of the "last frontier" that was the Wild West before "progress" came stomping through with its trains and cars and what have you. NV is set in a pretty much already explored world, where the point is not to cope with the lack of civilization's luxuries but to deal with its increasingly restrictive attitude toward its "citizens".

So, the issue here is that FO3 and NV are made for completely different audiences: the first is made for people who like exploring the despair, but also the hope and sense of freedom and wonder that an "abandoned" world brings on the table - it's essentially a "remake" of FO1, at least in mood. The other is made for people who enjoyed the world of the first 2 Fallout games and were longing for a game set in that world as it was left at the end of FO2, which is a world where the problem at hand is no longer one of everyday survival, but rather one of learning to live together again as a whole instead of individuals, to build a society like we used to have, in essence to rebuild our lost world. In other words, Fallout's world is no longer a post-apocalyptic one.

The problem with FO3 is that, for marketing purposes, it used the timeline of FO2 and set itself 200 years after the War, when what it really wanted was to be a post-apocalyptic game, complete with survivalism and mutated critters and dangerous outlaws and gunfights and unexplored "mysteries of the old world" and still-waiting-to-be-found treasure and what have you. But all that doesn't make sense in a world set 200 years after the nuclear holocaust, and even if one could make the argument that the world COULD have been like this 200 years after a nuclear holocaust, it still doesn't make sense in the Fallout setting where the world for good or for worse has supposedly been rebuilding for at least the past 100 years (since FO1). In other words, Bethesda's world just doesn't make sense. But really now, what can you expect from the guys that in FO4 made it so you can find "ancient" sealed vaults which in their depths hide "ancient long-lost tech" such as modern chems, booze, and even "pipe" weapons? Talk about world integrity :P

So that's the real issue: not only is FO3 worse as a game when it comes to individual elements (characters, plot, locations, gameplay, etc), something which could even be hand-waived as a subjective opinion, but it's also completely absurd in terms of world building. Because, even if a pure post-apocalyptic setting might be preferable to some people (myself included), a coherent world is even more preferable, especially if we 're talking about a sequel set in an already established world. That's the real reason NV is objectively a far better game: because it respects its predecessors and because it creates (or rather builds upon) a living, breathing and ultimately believable world, even if subjectively it may not be the world some would prefer it to be.

Now, if only we could have a believable world set in a pure post-apocalyptic world and not 200 years after the [insert world destruction event here]!

*The bane of post-apocalyptic absurdity for the sake of "drama" is evident in NV as well, things like people living in filthy buildings with punctured walls and skeletons lying around etc. But I believe Bethesda as a publisher might have had a hand here, enforcing on Obsidian their "trademarked" style of the Fallout reboot. Oh well.

This and everything else. What I was going for but you said better.

I just saw a video that did a pretty good break down of Fallout 3 and I have to say I'm convinced; Fallout 3 is fun if you wanna just wander around and do random stuff like getting into fights with raiders and the like; but Fallout New Vegas is actually a great game, not merely an enjoyable if you're into that sorta thing type game.

The world of Fallout 3 is really really bland to be honest, wander around the deserts or deserted suburbs or the urban ruins but that's not really much of a world. Not really much interesting stuff to do, there's not even much of a story. It's a pretty basic story in a sense that your merely a captive of, and really your only choice (which is horribly unforgivable in an RPG) is do what you're supposed to do or become as evil as Hitler for the evlulz. Fallout 1 and 2 and New Vegas all gave us plenty of interesting choices but Fallout 3 gives us "do you choose to nuke a whole city because?"

Eh. Fallout New Vegas simply is a good RPG, it's got all the pieces there. In comparison to 3 it also just has a lot more content too. There is basically nothing 3 does that's better than New Vegas and about the only thing they really tie on is stuff related to the engine and the like.

I always found it strange that so many members of the Brotherhood, essentially a zealous cult with no wriggle room, decided to follow Lyons over their code. They didn't even bother giving an explanation for this either. I preferred Fallout 4's portrayal of the BoS a lot better than 3's.

And yeah, the Super Mutants of 3 are a horrible excuse so they could have ogres. I don't even think they give an excuse for why this version of FEV turns them yellow and always makes them stupid.

Definitely. Gives me hope for the next installment.

Maybe setting north of the originals, chicago, yellowstone, rockies, could give an interesting setting.
And maybe just a few decades after the bombs this time, forget the continuity if you can't handle it.
Just give us a big wide map to explore with interesting stuff, then add some silly main quest for us to ignore.
Bethesda style.

So far I've played Fallout 3's main quest up until "Enter Vault 87" and I've also done about 40 side quests, including all of the GOTY add-on content (except for Broken Steel). I don't have an hour count because I was forced not to use the GOG client since my Intel graphics makes the game crash instantly if launched that way (and I had to use a third party mod to make it work with the direct launcher). But it feels - in a bad way - like I've played for hundreds of hours (the real number is probably more like 75-100 hours).

That's because Fallout 3's gameplay is a chore IMO. The endless rubble piles that are copy and pasted thousands of times into every city environment, and which arbitrarily block the player, drive me nuts. It forces me to hug the pixels along every nook & cranny of the city until finally, eventually, after much agonizing gameplay, I realize that no above-ground path to my destination exists.

In turn, I am forced to take a random guess about which of the dozens (at least it feels that way) of subway stations will hold the "correct" path to my destination. Often my arbitrary guess is wrong, which wastes a ton of my time and energy and adds exponentially to the gameplay's aggravation factor. This problem is also made worse and more boring since all the subway stations are the same as one another.

I needed a break from all that, and so I tried playing New Vegas. I instantly felt drawn into the NV world in ways I never did in the FO3 world. I was emotionally moved by the way the Sunny Smiles character helped me get on my feet. She felt like more like a real person than any character I've met in FO3, except for the Dad character.

The first quest that brings the whole Goodsprings town together was more immersive, entertaining, and fulfilling than anything I experienced in FO3.

So was the NV quest "Come Fly With Me." That was such an innovative & creative use of ghoul characters, it almost blew my mind. I can't help but to shake my head at FO3 when I contrast NV's "Come Fly With Me" with FO3's one-dimensional non-feral ghoul characters (they are barely different than the feral versions), whose only character traits are to be perpetually angry, hate humans, and swear a lot.

So far I've played 16.5 hours of NV and I've never felt bored. I am always entertained, intrigued, and curious to play more and see what happens next. Every quest, and almost every character, has been way more intricate than any of their counterparts from FO3. NV never put rubble piles to block my path and force me to pixel-hug walls....and then meander around random subways stations....except for NV does have a little bit of that when trying to determine how to enter the NV city strip...but NV's implementation is nothing compared to how FO3 makes rubble-pile-player-blocking a core component of its gameplay.

I love the interesting little touches in the NV world, like the sign that has spray painted messages that say "F you Courier Six!," the gigantic iron statues of a cowboy shaking hands with a ranger, the way the NV tower lights up & glows at night and you can see it from miles away. Those kind of details are sorely lacking in FO3. In FO3 it's more like, "oh, here is another generic subway entrance....yawn!; here is another generic cave entrance, yawn!; here is another generic vault entrance...yawn!; here is another generic small town of shacks...yawn!;" etc. etc.

I saw a post on this board that says FO3 has a better open world than NV, but for the reasons I've mentioned, I don't see how? As far as I can tell, the NV world demolishes the FO3 world in pretty much every way imaginable...except perhaps that the NV world may be "smaller" because NV has vastly less copy & pasting of the same identical environments ad infinitum. But that makes NV's open world better, not worse.

If I had to criticize NV, my criticisms would be:

1. Like FO3, a lot of the building interiors of NV look the same as each other (and the NV interiors also look the same as the FO3 interiors). However, NV mitigates this problem way better than FO3 does, because NV populates those interiors with interesting & unique quests, whereas FO3 does not.

2. I consider the crafting in NV to be overly complicated and very poorly explained in-game (actually, it's not explained at all other than a brief two-second comment by Sunny Smiles about making some lousy powder or something...and that isn't even about ammo). I don't like RPGs to be dumbed-down, but I don't see why NV has to clutter up my inventory with tons of non-working ammo that must later be crafted into working ammo. Just make all the ammo work in the first place, like it does in FO3. And I don't understand how the "breakdown" system works and why I would want to own the huge clutter of crap ingredients that "breakdown" gives me. I would have much preferred if the designers just let me collect the final versions of re-transmogrified "breakdown ingredients" in the first place, so as to render the "breakdown" feature unnecessary, as it is unnecessary in FO3.

3. I don't like how the NV Pip-Boy interface makes "Notes" much harder to find by removing the very useful "Notes" tab that is present on the FO3 Pip-Boy interface.

^ As someone who feels FO3 has a better open world... let me explain.

I feel it has a better open world in that you can turn 360 degrees from your starting point exiting the vault and go off and find interesting things.

FNV, on the other hand, is much more linear about how you explore the world with paths blocked off by higher level creatures.

With that out of the way, I couldn't agree more about things like the horrendous copy paste subway systems in F03. Every location in FNV has a purpose and doesn't overstay it's welcome. Ironically the laser focus of the locations in FNV is likely due to the time limitations they had in development... and they used that time to great effect. Sometimes less is more.