“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.
No one is seriously pushing 76 in that discussion.
76 is a fun brainless Fallout multiplayer. I’d rather have a real Fallout MP instead of 76, but I can’t lie and had over 100hrs of fun.
It’s absolutely fun with friends, we put in around that many hours and then haven’t played it much since, but for the $10 we paid. It was well worth it.
ive seen it. they are out there. its wild but its true
…
These are not serious people
oh theyre serious. 20k hours into the game, level 10,000. absolute madmen
Hi. I’m here
A lot of folks really live 76. And it’s the only game in the series that offers them what they like, so why wouldn’t they?
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
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
I’ve absolutely seen people who like 3 more than NV. Hell, I might be among them.
Well you folks have been pretty quiet for 15 years. What’s the argument for 3 over New Vegas? Or 3 over 1/2?
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 think it’s just new Vegas stans are very vocal lmao
Well, take this for what it’s worth since I’m personally of the 1 > NV > 2 > 3 > 4 > Tactics/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 even half as good. So comparing the two within their respective genre “spiritual siblings”, NV is a exemplary title within its peers, while 3 is kinda just “one of the post Morrowind Bethesda” games (where Skyrim seems to reign as the champion).
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.
I honestly prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas slightly. It has better level design, vaults, and the world feel more alive.
I just tend to stay quiet about it because people get really toxic when you say anything that could be seen as a criticism of New Vegas.
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 close to a decade at least after its release.
“What does FO3 have over New Vegas”? Well at the time New Vegas was regarded as a cheap knockoff of FO3. It didn’t do much to innovate from FO3 and played like more of a Fallout 3.5 which people resented. It also had a less bleak and more “Zany” tone to it than FO3 did which people weren’t a big fan of. Also by that point Bethesda had a bad reputation for releasing buggy games and NV somehow managed to be buggier and more broken than any Bethesda game had been, and what’s worse is it was never even to this day fixed as several major components of the game remain completely broken without fan patches.
I’ve seen a ton of debate over 3 and New Vegas. People have said New Vegas is too small or too empty. I don’t get that at all, but I’ve definitely seen several people saying so in different venues.
I 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.
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.
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.
The thing with 76 I’d only guess is literally the ability to coop.
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.
I’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.
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
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
My opinion is that only 2 Fallout games were made: Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.
Fight me.
fallout shelter >
Fight me.
Okay, sounds fun.
I could argue that there are more Fallout games than just 1 and 2, and that we should probably admit that if Fallout 2 gets to sit at the “true Fallout” table, Fallout: New Vegas should probably get a chair too. A bunch of the original Black Isle developers who worked on Fallout 2 helped make it, and it continues the same regional story and factions. But then again, maybe having the Fallout 2 developers is not enough to make something “truly” Fallout. Maybe it is the isometric (actually skewed trimetric) view, classic CRPG style. Although once we open that can of radroaches, we get a whole new pile of questions.
So maybe we can swing the other direction entirely and say there are fewer “true” Fallout games, and that only Fallout 1 really qualifies. That does have some logic behind it, since the original creators, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson, left during Fallout 2’s development. Their absence changed the whole design philosophy, shifting the tone, with way more pop culture references and absurdist writing, de-focused the tight world design of 1 so we got a ton of fluff dungeons and encounters, and gave us a more scattered writing experience thanks to the team being split up to work on different sections of the game (Tell me San Fran feels even remotely in the same universe as New Reno). Honestly, the jump from 1 to 2 kinda reminds me of the jump from 3 to NV. They feel the same on the surface, but are radically different experiences once you actually play them. But even then, Fallout 2 still uses the same engine and gameplay loop, so you could just as easily argue it stays true to the original formula.
But if that’s the case and we double down on the ‘gameplay matters more than the writing and development teams’ point of view, then Fallout Nevada and Fallout Sonora belong on the list as well right? They are fan-made, sure, but they run on the same engine and play almost exactly like Fallout 1 and 2. So now we are up to four “true Fallout games.” So our definition needs to rules those out to get back to “only 1 and 2”.
So maybe the fan-made games do not count because they are not official releases? But if it being an “official release” is the only rule, then Fallout 76 suddenly joins the “true Fallout” club too, which probably tells us that the bar has to be higher than that.
So if we say that a “true” Fallout game needs a mix of all the things above, like the original devs from the original studio working on the original engine with the original tone and the closest connection to the original story, then we come full circle and land right back at “Fallout 1 is the only true Fallout game.”
No matter how I slice it, I can’t find a definition that only includes Fallout 1 and 2…
You know… thinking about it, I guess the only constant of every single Fallout game since 2 has been that fans of the previous entry look at it and say “this is too radical a departure, this isn’t a true Fallout at all!”
Tactics was great. I wish there were sequels to it.
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
Bongo
…I’m so happy in the jongo?
Bongo bongo bongo I don’t wanna leave the Congo
despite all the shit I’m still playing my bethesda games…well, only new vegas and elder scrolls but still
I’ve recently come around on Fallout 4 - although it does need a massive mod list to make it good.
Were any of the Obsidian people they brought in the same ones that worked on New Vegas?
A casual look down the MobyGames lists on New Vegas and Outer Worlds 2 still shows a lot of overlap, so probably. It would be weird to invite people who didn’t work on New Vegas to see the realization of a thing they didn’t work on.
As a person who didn’t work on New Vegas, and in fact has never even played a Fallout game, I’d like an invitation if we’re giving them out!
Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone, and John Gonzalez were responsible for disproportionate amounts of New Vegas’s overall design, world building, and writing.
Gonzalez seems to have done a disproportionate amount of the writing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/zohe1a/josh_sawyer_clarifies_who_created_what_in_new/
Of those 3, only Sawyer is on Outer Worlds 2, as the Studio Design Director, a relative demotion from being Project Lead in New Vegas.
Of those Sawyer specifically names… we still have himself, Jesse Farrel, and Jeff Hugses, on the Outer Worlds 2 team.
John Gonzalez, Chris Avellone, Eric Fenstermaker, Akil Hooper, Rob Lee, Charles Staples, Travis Stout, Steph Newland, Mat MacLean, and George Ziets, are all absent.
So basically, almost everyone is gone other than Josh Sawyer and two area designers/writers, who I am guessing wrote the stories and dialogue specific to the areas they designed (for New Vegas).
John Gonzalez was probably the most invovled in actually writing the most important parts of New Vegas, he doesn’t appear to be on the Outer Worlds 2 team.
I don’t think Sawyer was “demoted”. I think he’s just on other projects. Pentiment’s entire development probably fit within Outer Worlds 2’s timeline. I don’t think Bethesda said, “invite everyone who worked on New Vegas” expecting there to be no change in staff in 15 years, but there are still plenty of people from that old project there.
… Hes on Outer Worlds 2.
As basically a design lead, as opposed to total project lead.
Yeah, sure, he could have requested that himself.
It still basically is a demotion, its less responsibilities, not in charge of the whole project.
In fairness, he’s getting pretty old, I don’t blame him.
But the main point here is… its pretty much just Sawyer, out of names people might actually know, who’s the only one from New Vegas, who is on the Outer Worlds 2 team.
He’s on Outer Worlds 2 as “Studio Design Director”, as in duties that apply to the entire studio, a studio that works on multiple projects at any given time. He was game director on Pentiment while Outer Worlds 2 was being built. I’m sure he did plenty of actual work on Outer Worlds 2 the same way that my boss helps solve problems I’m having, even though they’re also working with other teams on other projects. He probably also got started on his next main project right after Pentiment wrapped, all while helping out on Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, and Grounded 2.
its pretty much just Sawyer, out of names people might actually know
I knew very few of these people’s names before looking at the credits just now, but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. There are names on there that you probably didn’t know that worked on both projects.
I… just went to went to Moby and actually ctrl+f searched for the names that Sawyer specifically mentions in his the reddit thread that I linked to.
And I at least already knew Sawyer, Avellone, and Gonzalez, because I’m a pretty big fan of New Vegas.
I’m quite familiar with Sawyer, because…
… Sawyer famously released his own mod for New Vegas, which is basically ‘Hardcore Mode ++’, literally his originally intended design that was not able to be fully stuck to in the main developement cycle of the game.
Other people have since taken his mod further and expanded on it, but you can still find the original though, up on NexusMods.
Just literally named JSawyer mod.
You could go to Moby games and start using Ctrl+F for the names found on the other Moby games page. That’s what I did. I found like 7 or 8 in common before I stopped. That’s enough on its own for a fun reunion on the set of the TV adaptation of the thing you built 15 years ago.
Does he still carry the guilt from the metacritic fiasco?
guilt about what exactly?
well avellone claims obsidian was so poorly managed even if they got the bonus it wouldnt have helped the devs at all, most likely going directly to the obsidian execs pockets (same execs who denied more time on the game)
je sawyer blames himself for not focusing on playtesting and bug fixing until way way way too late in development
so im not sure why todd would feel guilty about it at all. obsidian still got paid in full and the fans got a great game out of the ordeal (after they fixed the bugs at launch)
They never fixed the bugs lol
believe it or not the game actually ran worse than it does now (unmodded)
like, you couldnt even play the game
Oh yeah I’m aware of that. It’s just that foundational game mechanics are still broken to this day lol. Like the game never really reached a polished state, without mods.
theres still a door to a shack that is like a 50/50 chance to crash your game everytime you enter 😂 and its part of a quest
That’d assuming he ever had any guilt over it
Obsidian is one of the better dev houses
“Look guys! 16x the detail!”
“Oh good its shot at 24 fps, just like on console launch!”
I mean the set has missed the mark, from that image in the article. So I’d be pretty disappointed if I was a dev.
And found out filmset scenarios are filled with tricks that make it seem one thing to viewers whilst being something else, just like 3D worlds in games.
Wow and hardly any loading screens.
