Because Fallout as a GFWL game was so much worse.

The map isn't any larger, might be smaller even, but it's a different scale. It takes longer to walk from point A to point B than on Fallout 3's map.

That must be the reason people say it's smaller.
GFLW was not DRM in Fallout 3, activating or using it was completely optional, even with the DLC installed.

God dammit this game is messing up my sleep rhythm by the time I finally got up the lecture I could've attended was just ending I should've known better after Fallout 3 yes I'm ranting.

I mean, seriously, I was feeling sort of tired last night. At 21:30 I figured "just an hour". At 22:30 I wanted to round up a quest. At 23:30 I wasn't feeling all that sleepy any longer. Oh, look, the Brotherhood of Steel (BroS)! I'll just poke around a b- DAMMIT IT'S 3:00

Hehe yeah, I know that feeling. Its much like Civilization's "Just one more turn"

Do you dislike FO3? Do you enjoy NV so far? I know next to nothing about NV, and I didn't like FO3, so I'm just going with the tide of those who didn't like FO3.

I pre-ordered the game ages ago and was really excited to get it at launch, unfortunately, it runs pretty badly on my computer. The modded DLL-file that a lot of people are using helped a bit, but it's still far from as smooth as Fallout 3 was. I really hope that it will get better after a few patches.... I don't want to ruin the experience with "sluggish" performance. :/

I may get NV just for the writing that's supposed to be much better than on Fallout 3. But that's not saying much. Anyone else got the impression that the writing in Fallout 3 was complete shite? American daytime tv shit? And it's like Bethesda recognized the stupidity of their ending and where they place themselves with you having a anti-radiation mutant as a sidekick and they poked fun at you with the mutant's complete shite reply of his refusal to get inside and flip the ending sequence switch.

I think it's that nobody seems to have any way of comparing the two. It seemed to take longer to walk places in FO3, possibly because there were fewer of them and you were going longer distances in general before hitting a quick travel point.

NV also seems to focus less on that tedious bit allowing you to do more walking with less fighting of low level creatures. Also the icons seem to scale differently than in FO3 which probably makes things seem smaller.

But at the end of the day, the story definitely feels bigger, but I'm left with this feeling that the map itself is smaller, even though I've heard otherwise.

As for steam saves, I'd wager that the saves include information from previous saves, and that if you did like a diff on them you'd find that most of the information in each save is from previous ones, or is generic character information.
Not true, you had to use it at least once in order to activate it. I know this because I had FO3 and the DLC and it wouldn't add if you didn't use GFWL. They had to pull one of the DLCs from the GFWL because the DRM was broken so that they could fix it.

I'm not sure what about that makes it completely optional.

Excellent post! :)
Also there's a killable kids mod.

Wrong, you only need to login to GFWL to buy and download the DLC, after that you just needed to copy the DLC files manually, you no longer needed GFWL for anything and they didn't needed to be ever reactivated.

They had to pull one of the DLC for some time because they messed up the deployment.

I disliked Fallout 3 because of the story. It was a Frankenstein of the plots from FO1 and FO2. That said I did enjoy Fallout 3 when it was heavily modded. New Vegas is the game Fallout 3 should have been. It's almost a direct sequel to the earlier Fallout games. Everything and I do mean everything is better in NV than it was in FO3.

Didn't some people correct you on this in another thread? You're flat-out wrong, no offense intended. Move the DLC files to the Data folder in your install directory and BOOM they work, no DRM and no GFWL needed. They only require you to be signed-in if you leave them in the GFWL folder, same with saved games attached to a GFWL profile.

That would be me. There is no DRM whatsoever on the DLC of Fallout 3. Move them to the data directory and you completely ignore GFWL.

They tried and failed because they weren't correct. They also failed to provide any citations.
http://www.giantbomb.com/news/fallout-3-broken-steel-dlc-out-somewhat-functional/1239/
Relevant quote: Now, doesn't that sound a lot like there's DRM involved to you?

Dude, just go read up on it or even try it yourself, it's not hard. You can quote some regurgitated game blog all you want, it proves nothing. It's common knowledge on the Bethesda forums and pretty much everywhere else. Move them to your Data folder, see for yourself.

You just look silly right now.