Skyrim One Year On: Why Fallout New Vegas Is Better

Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas are two of the best sandbox RPGs of the current generation; the former widely hailed as the best of its kind. Joe at Cinelinx takes a controversial look at why New Vegas is in fact better than the Nordic classic.

[Psychotica]

Not sure what it was about Fallout New Vegas but I couldn't get into it at all. Loved Fallout 3 though.

[Kran]

I think it was the Clans :/

[EVILDEAD360]

LMAO...New Vegas was fun, but was NEVER on the level of Skyrim in ANYWAY.

Again loved the game, but Vegas wasnt even on Fallout 3 level.

Evil

[SnakeCQC]

maybe because it was fallout 3 without the bugs

[Ezz2013]

true and that's because Obsidian Entertainment are the one who made it
and Bugthesda Softworks only publish it

that only show that betheseda can't program any thing right

[Ashunderfire86]

It had a lot of bugs too lol!!! you guys forgot. Heck Obsidian Entertainment made Knights of the Old Republic 2 buggy!!! And didn't patch it back in 2005.

[vallencer]

It had more bugs than fallout 3. Unless we weren't playing the same new Vegas.

[SnakeCQC]

fallout 3 felt like an unplayable £40 beta and new vegas was alot more playable(both were played on the ps3)

[legendof117]

Same here.

[Summons75]

Not made by obsidian is one key reason. The other is despite the bugs in Skyrim, Skyrim is at least playable unlike new Vegas which to this day me and a lot of people I know can not still even start the game because the tutorial area is so broken. Skyrim may have it's problems but at least Bethesda came out and said they screwed up and still work on fixing things while creating new content. Obsidian just blames the world for their problems and never blames themselves. They have always done this since the killed kotr by making kotr2. They blame beig rushed when in reality they are lazy and can't meet a deadline. Prime example of this was Alpha Protocol. Now everyone is feeding them money for a game they refuse to talk about which when it releases will be broken and all together terrible. Then they will say they were rushed and the kind people who fell for their con didn't give them enough money.

Edit: I read the title backwards but my comment is a disagreement to the article. Sorry for the error.

[Irishguy95]

I had no problems playing Fallout New vegas. Fallout new vegas is the only Bethesda game I have liked for the last 5 years until Dishonored came out. Yes that's right...the ones Bethesda did not develop.

New vegas has many many idea's that bethesda should have copied for Skyrim but didn't.

New Vegas major ups -

No level scaling - ie Character progression
Some actual choices and cause and affect - ie RPG
No loot scaling - ie The loot is worth looking for.

For some silly reason bethesda did not put in the good companion model Fallout new vegas had into Skyrim. Every companion had a story, they were interesting and useful. I didn't get it anyway. Fallout New vegas even had a better animal system which Bethesda were hyping up for Skyrim. It's a bit rediculous.

Of course, some people like being able to explore everywhere, I like the fact that deathclaws exist and should avoid them in the beginning.

I also found the quests to be WAY better than Skyrim. Every quest of Skyrim, even the Major side quests was "Go to this dungeon, fight your way through, get the leveled loot at the end".

New vegas had entire area's dedicated and designed around a side quest(The hill at the start with the radio tower on it, the deathclaw valley, Cities, the camp in the mountain, the Brotherhood of steel etc). Bethesda simply didn't do that.

Edit--------------
Oh and the fact is Summons, they don't meet deadlines because the deadlines are too small.

Fallout 3 = 3-4 years dev time
New vegas = 1 and a half

Kotor 1 - 3 years dev time
Kotor 2 - 1 year.

It's rediculous how anyone could expect them to make long Rpg's in that amount of time. And even then Kotor 1 and New Vegas were still amazing.

Well, lets see how Southpark turns out. Since they aren't being held to an unreasonable deadline for it

"Traveling is a joy - not a chore."

To the writer of this article. Spot on. Exploring is simply more exciting in New Vegas. It's like when people complain about Dark souls having a penaly for death. The prospect of Danger makes the games more exciting. Skyrim has no dangers, even dragons just become an annoying repetition that follows you around chipping away at health until you button mash it to death

[Mutant-Spud]

ROFL..Always with the "Rayciss" Stormcloaks, politically correct gaming bloggers always have to mention that,for the record Che Guevara despised Africans and homosexuals, he was also a torturer ,a child killer and a coward who died with a full clip in his gun, Ulfric is squeaky clean in comparison.
Then again since the popular stories of Ulfric Stormcloak and Che Guevara are both fiction I don't suppose it matters much.

[Lordchunk]

Replace New Vegas with fallout 3 and you would of nailed this but oh well.

[MonopolyRSV]

New Vegas plays smooth as butter compared to 3. New Vegas also has better music and a better overall environment. Much rather be roaming the open desert instead of lost in some underground subway with a compass constantly pointing in the wrong direction.

[seanpitt23]

Fo3 better than both sky rim was a major disappointment for me on the ps3

[Eiffel]

I've never been a fan of fantasy settings. Skyrim was my first Elder Scrolls title, that being said I dropped it immediately after sinking around 300 something hours. But keep coming back to New Vegas at least once or twice a week, even playing both Fallout 3 and New Vegas plus all the DLC twice. I'm not sure if this the case for other Elder Scroll titles but the gameplay felt streamlined for an RPG, at least compared to how extensive Fallout 3 and New Vegas are in features, abilities, and impacting choices.

That and the weapon combat left a lot to be desired.

[poo342947294792]

vegas was the best fo so far for me heavy modded with extreme graphics packs for pc was 1337

[shammgod]

Both games had a ridiculous amount of bugs and were unplayable on console

[Ashunderfire86]

I love Skyrim better than both. Play it on PC.

[xerokai]

Am I the only one that noticed this guy got his facts wrong?
1)Oblivion was the 1st ES game this generation, not Skyrim
2)Storemcloaks are conservative not liberal. Stormcloaks are Racist (Check) Believe in Strong local governments aka Jarl's running their cities like their own mini county (Check) Have problems with strong central government and their decisions (Double check).
3)The Empire is Liberal not conservative. The empire believes in racial equality of all it's citizens (check) Has a large central government that makes all decisions (Check) Bends over and takes whatever they have to in the name of diplomacy and keeping the peace (Triple check)

[FarCryLover182]

Am I the only one who didn't run into any big bugs in Skyrim, New Vegas or Fallout 3? The only thing that happened was my game freezed up in New Vegas and in Skyrim, about 15 copies of the same person appeared.

[MrAnderson]

With mods new vegas is amazing, and I always personally preferred it to fallout 3, (my personal opinion)

however it and skyrim are two completly different games, so i don't think you can say which is better, that would be like me comparing tekken to gran turismo, they're completly different.

[Blacklash93]

I agree. New Vegas (and Fallout 3) had more compelling content than Skyrim. If the combat were more interesting and the quests not so same-y I might have a different opinion.

In my experience New Vegas (360) had far worse bugs than both FO3 and Skyrim, though. I had to try booting up the game 4 times to get it to first play properly when I bought it and it froze at least every 2 hours. Not to mention the many bugs with NPCs, quests, and inventory I had to tolerate and work around. It felt nigh-unplayable at times. It's much better now with the serious patch-work gone into it, but I still run into loading issues, occassional freezing, and some quests are still broken.