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[Sergius]

I'm getting "random" crashes whenever I want to start a DLC. Except they're not random at all, I've narrowed down to hardcore mode (as have many people who just tell you to "turn it off"), except it's not necessary, I figured out that for some reason, if you're sleepy, or hungry or thirsty it will probably make the game crash.

So before embarking I have to go and make sure my needs are as close to 0 as possible.

[Sergius]

Heh, thread seems to have died down with all the hype for Fallout 4, that people have started talking about Fallout 3 and Vegas over there

Anyway.

I finally installed that Tale of Two Wastelands mod, and moved my almost-level-50 character over there (and now every scorpion is an Albino Bullet Sponge), and it's interesting to be able to compare them side to side in the same play session.

Not even going to talk quests or story or gameplay or stupid kiddie cave towns.

One thing I like more about Fallout 3 is how the DC wasteland looks. It definitely feels bigger, not just area wise but all those tall buildings that you can't enter, I missed that feeling of a city. However, the thing is really empty. When playing NV, when standing at any landmark, even with crap Perception (not sure if it helps or not) you can always see one or more unexplored landmarks that you can walk towards. In 3, if you don't have a Quest Mark, you have to pick an empty direction to walks towards, and hope that eventually a hollow triangle appears so that there's someplace to go. This can be considered good and bad tho, for those who think that magic compass markers are immersion breaking.

About impassable terrain: this irks me in both games, but in Fallout 3 is more blatant railroading. In New Vegas, they took a few "hilltops" and decided arbitrarily "thou shall not pass... unless you walk around it and thru the opening". But almost none of these areas are important for quests, most of the times they're like valleys or canyons where you can find a skillbook or some crap. And they did this because they meant for the terrain itself to be "too steep" but people would always find the small ledges to slowly inch upwards. I think it's stupid and pointless and no game has been ruined forever by the mods that remove these invisible walls. But at least the walls are hard-ish to reach.

The only part of the game where I felt this had a point was the Boomer base (so you had to go thru the artillery gauntlet). I never even tried climbing around it, for some reason... but if that's the case, it would be trivial to make some sort of makeshift wall around their area, like the Strip has, atop the mountain or something. Or even some crappy indestructible plywood fence.

Fallout 3 however... these are blatant checkpoints. They are meant to force you to go to the annoying subways. Mandatory spelunking, bleh. Many of these are even empty but you waste your time sneaking anyway just in case. And the impassable "rubble piles" are tiny mounds that can be climbed with little to no effort, then on the top you find out there's an invisible wall. And the only reason this stops being annoying is because you can fast travel and bypass them once you explored for the first time.

In short, I like the terrain of DC Wasteland better (city included), but Mojave feels more alive in many ways (way more pristine too, with proper yet sparse vegetation). Invisible walls are either stupid and pointless (NV), or stupid and blatantly railroading (3).

Also I hate the DR bullet sponge system of F3. It makes so that what gun you're using is irrelevant vs. how many DPS you can put out there. Damage Threshold does make you at least have to consider using large calibers for some targets, even tho you can still plink enemies to death of a thousand 10mm rounds (it has been argued that the original system of F1/2 was better, where DT was usually lower but could lower damage to 0 vs the NV system where 20% of damage goes thru regardless).

[TempAcc]

I liked the DC wasteland more because it felt more like "destroyed civilization" and less like "actual desert" like in NV, altough its completely warranted that the mojave looks like an actual desert, since it IS an actual desert

I generaly liked navigating the open, destroyed urban areas more then the mojave wilderness, there was just a special feeling to it, and it certainly did feel bigger, altough once you got into a subway station, it'd start to feel like an oblivion dungeon crawl, altough it did allow you to go to an entirely different place without taking an above ground path, and I thought that was a neat little detail. At some points this allowed you to choose which enemy you'd fight: above ground super mutants or subway ghouls.

The pitt was also pretty decent in that it added a decent degree of verticality to the game, something the fallout games were always lacking. Verticality does come into play in NV, but its often near settlements like a certain legion town, the khan's place, etc.

Both games suffered from invisible walls, but in NV the invisible walls didn't even make sense, like you mentioned yourself. At some points the game just decides that you cant cross this set of hills and have to go around it, even though it would lead you to the same place and all it does is make you take longer to get somewhere.
This is specially annoying when some missions point you to some cave or other such place in the hills, and then arbitrarily blocks your way there with invisible walls because the devs wanted you to get there through a specific path only. I remember going through this when doing the cazador part of the quests to get the dinner bell shotgun.

[Sergius]

Agreed, the horrible part in NV is actually trying to figure out which side of a crater can be entered, even if you already have the marker on your map. Then, you find a ruined shack, with a locked ammo box with 25 bullets. It was never (almost) anywhere important.

[TempAcc]

The most horrible example of this that I remember is that, in the great khans' settlement, there's kind of path leading uphill, in the back of the settlement, and it seems as if you can keep climbing and it'll lead to a path between the hills. The actual mission pointer was like, really close to that path, so I concluded that, logically, this must be the intended path to that destination, since its linked to a settlement the player can fast travel to.

Turns out that, right the the end of the path, things get just a little too vertical, but you can keep climbing with some effort, and then you hit the invisible wall. The invisible wall that shows cazadors happily flying on its other side! On a path that looks like it was created to allow you to reach that one place! But nop, turns out you have to make a massive detour, get out of the khan's settlement, go around a huge set of hills to the opposite side, then make your way to the cave through there.

Did I mention that the path with the invisible wall right at the end has cazadors along its lenght, making it seem like you're supposed to go through there? Bluh, that quest was annoying.

[ZebioLizard2]

My problem with the DC wasteland is that it's still pretty much a full wasteland over 130+ Years with everyone scrounging leftovers from the broken buildings.

I mean only a few people have decided to even TRY to make some semblance of a constructed town rather then living in ruins.

[Krevsin]

I dislike how fallout 3's cities feel. Not the usual "Megaton is dumb, huh-huh" stuff, but the fact that nobody seems to grow food for... anything, really.

Now for Rivet City and Canterbury Commons, you could make a case of them being trading towns mostly relying on importing food from other places.

The problem is, there is nowhere producing food. Sure, there's hunting and gathering and Rivet City seems to have some degree of food production, but that seems to be confined to lab-scale operations, not enough to feed a substantial amount of the populace. So either all of these people (all the cities, the brotherhood, the outcasts, the slaves Temple of the Union, the unaccountable amounts of raiders and scavengers strewn throughout the ruins) are getting everything they need from hunting (unlikely given how dense the wildlife seems) or the DC ruins had enough clean, storable, long shelf-life supplies to last its quite booming population for more than a century. Again, seems unlikely.

[TempAcc]

I can agree with pretty much all of that.
Well, there's megaton and other settlements, altough they're more like villages then anything. I think its mostly an issue of poor presentation on bethesda's part. Megaton should've been much larger and more developed, having farms and actual commerce instead of just being a huge hole in the groun with a few people living here and there, and the local slavers should've been way more stablished, kinda like the pitt and etc. Megaton could've had its own militia and serve as the hub of some NCR-esque faction, and so could Rivet City, considering the kind of stuff they have available.

There were elements that would justify a more developed capital wasteland, but bethesda just chose to not explore them, probably because their initial scope for fallout 3 was already realized and they didnt want to take too much time to released it. Its too bad none of the DLCs have adressed that issue. Instead of proper civilization in the capital wasteland, we got scary swamp rednecks, aliens and virtual reality. This is mostly why the pitt was the only dlc that made some sort of sense.

[Sergius]

Those are good points. For example, they make a huge deal about there being some vegetation in Harold's grove thing. So... there's no vegetation... anywhere else. So people eat rocks apparently. And expired Fancy Lads Snack Cakes. Which are... infinite or something? Maybe they breed on their own when people ain't looking at them.

EDIT: Another suspicious bit about both games is that you never actually see a squirrel. Yet it's a source of meat for 3 different products... and it's not like people are afraid to call rat meat by its name. Same as iguanas. One theory is that radiation has mutated these animals so that they only exist and breed as cooked foods.

[Krevsin]

I can agree with pretty much all of that.
Well, there's megaton and other settlements, altough they're more like villages then anything. I think its mostly an issue of poor presentation on bethesda's part. Megaton should've been much larger and more developed, having farms and actual commerce instead of just being a huge hole in the groun with a few people living here and there, and the local slavers should've been way more stablished, kinda like the pitt and etc. Megaton could've had its own militia and serve as the hub of some NCR-esque faction, and so could Rivet City, considering the kind of stuff they have available.

There were elements that would justify a more developed capital wasteland, but bethesda just chose to not explore them, probably because their initial scope for fallout 3 was already realized and they didnt want to take too much time to released it. Its too bad none of the DLCs have adressed that issue. Instead of proper civilization in the capital wasteland, we got scary swamp rednecks, aliens and virtual reality. This is mostly why the pitt was the only dlc that made some sort of sense.

I agree. On the Rivet City part at least, I never felt like Megaton should be a powerful faction. The only thing they could've done is make it a more lively trading post, with an actual marketplace and that would illustrate the "we're an important trading stop" part just dandy.

But yeah, there is a hillarious place illustrating this problem perfectly just outside Megaton, in that bombed-out city. It's a house nicknamed "abandoned ranch". There are no visible brahmin or herd animals anywhere, so the moniker must be correct, right?
Well, if you enter it you find a woman who claims she is trying to make it out on her own, tired of being a prostitute. In the middle of literal nothing. What is she going to do? Scavenge? From where? The school overrun by raiders? The super-duper mart also overrun by raiders and also quite a ways away (The distances are scaled down for gameplay's sake)? Is she going to magically grow some brahmin for her to ranch or create corn from nothing?

The only place I can even remotely remember that actually has some agricultural value is just outside Canterbury Commons, a grazing grounds with a herd of brahmin.

[Rolan7]

Eh, I always thought that was just part of the setting: So few people survived the bombs above-ground that, yes, it was possible for a few hundred people to live off scavenged snack cakes and other ironically well-preserved junk food (and canned goods) for several generations.  In urban areas, anyway.  The tribals have crops, because of course there wouldn't be nearly as much over-preserved food in the boonies.

It kinda touched a nerve with me in Fallout 2.  Every act of consumption was depleting the legacy of food left over from before the war.  Like using finite items in a RPG.  There was plenty for a few generations, yeah, but it made me hate places like New Reno.  Nobody cared about sustainability because they were sitting on hundreds of years worth of expendables.  Nobody cared about the future.

(Except tribals, but they had their own problems)

Fallout 3 captured that fairly well I think.  Like the world was over, and just taking a little while to finally sputter out and die.  A glimmer of hope was the focus of the main questline, as it should be.

New Vegas...  Felt like a completely different setting in that regard, and for a long time I strongly resented that.  Too much hope and sustainability.  It grew on me, though.  Instead of inevitable resource depletion ending the world for good, it was more a story of the new world and what ideals would thrive in it.

Edit:
I mean, the Fallout Tactics environmental music sums up what I liked about the early titles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GcBrqEk_k&list=PLS1Q-j5f8Wvz3YVls1suUNy8tRPTb1_ZO&index=19
It's like wailing banshees.

[Rakonas]

F:NV is exactly the product of Fallout 2. It's been 100 years or whatever and what started in Shady Sands has started to make things hopeful again. I don't think you can really claim Fallout 3's lack of people/work as how it should be when it's been so long since the war, and Fallout 1 the first place you go to already has agriculture.

[Rolan7]

F:NV is exactly the product of Fallout 2. It's been 100 years or whatever and what started in Shady Sands has started to make things hopeful again. I don't think you can really claim Fallout 3's lack of people/work as how it should be when it's been so long since the war, and Fallout 1 the first place you go to already has agriculture.

Agreed about F:NV.  I didn't like the tone shift at first, but it was a logical and true sequel to the events of Fallout 2.  Impressively so.

[Krevsin]

The problem is that scavenging a city, no matter how well-stocked it is is never sustainable for longer than a few decades and hunting out a single area makes the wildlife more sparse and the population size less sustainable. Fallout 3 isn't desolate by any means, you can't move for all the raiders infesting the outskirts of DC.

It's not a major issue by any means, it's just a pet peeve of mine.

[ZebioLizard2]

I think the problem is that Fallout 3 looked like it was 20+ years after the war, rather then something like 100+

They changed the date and suddenly it made little sense.