xhonzi said:
When I was back in Vault 101, I was having visions of how great a Fallout TV series would be. The mystery of the vaults, the brutal wasteland.
That could be some fantastic TV.
That was one thing I loved so much about the game. Outside of the main storyline, it felt like a collection of short, mostly unconnected, serials. Kind of like a twilight zone type series of strange tales, but interconnected throughout a small region of wasteland.
That was another disappointment of New Vegas for me, everything felt a lot more connected, even side missions; making for a much tighter narrative. Everyone in the game seemed concerned about the same basic things as everyone else ("The Legion's coming and is going to kill us!" "Ohs no! The NCR is too weak to hold off the Legion! I sure wish they'd send us more re-enforcements!" "We're thinking about allying with the Legion to save ourselves from their impending invasion." "I am a member of the Legion, and our invasion of the Mojave desert is impending!" "I am just a trader, lived in the Mojave all my life, but I am preparing to hightail it out of this region prior to the impending invasion of the Legion." "There is an impending invasion from the Legion coming! We should run!" "The Legion's invasion is impending, our tribe is trying to decide if we are with the Legion or the NCR." "I am a Legion Legionnaire, our invasion is impending and will happen very soon, eventually you'll have to join us or die." And so on).
I liked how in the first one everyone had their own troubles and concerns, and very few were aware of the bigger picture stuff. In New Vegas you'll meet a few groups like this, but for the most part everyone is all bothered about the whole Legion/NCR conflict and almost everything in the game revolves around that.
Xhonzi, have you been to the small town (more like neighborhood) of Andale yet? It is one of my favorite examples of how brilliant FO3 can be from a storytelling standpoint. With just a small handful of NPCs, a few hundred words a dialogue, and a small number of generic buildings they managed to deliver a very engaging story for the player to uncover. Or, you could just as easily stumble upon it, see a fairly boring tiny little settlement, and breeze on by without ever learning a thing about the place. Forgot how much I loved that game! All those people that claim FO:NV is ten times the game FO3 was must not have played much beyond the story missions.