So, from what I can tell from the internet, a lot of people were disappointed when they finally got to the New Vedas Strip. It's why mods like the Strip Open and New Vegas Restoration came around and visually they make a big difference toward creating a city of light that was supposed to have been spared the destruction.

But the longer the fallout series goes on, the more we see... that maybe destruction it was spared from wasn't, well, that bad. Boston's skyscrapers haven't collapsed from the bombs, or from time and the elements. Many of DC's iconic buildings are still intact enough for useability.

So... NV actually is a bit shabby. But it's supposed to be the great city that survived the war largely untouched. So I'm looking at pictures of the casinos and Freemont street online (having never been there myself.) Wow, fantastic. Freemont street looks... weird and cool. I can't even quite tell what I'm seeing in the air above the street.
Here's the inside of Caesar's Palace (Ohhh, I wish they'd been able to use that name in the game, what irony.)
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-las-vegas-caesars-palace-shopping-mall-78794034.html

Left abandoned but un-nuked, that interior would decay a little, but still... it would be far, far nicer than what we see in the Tops, or even the Ultra-Luxe. Its insane grandeur, even as an old abandoned building, would amaze, I think.
Anyone else think the casinos should have had flashier interiors closer to the real things? The tops actually looks shabby by comparison, and looks like it never was all that grand even pre-war. But the main Casinos on the real strip, they all seem grand.

Maybe someone who's been to Vegas and can comment from experience.

Yeah i agree, it'd be great if only the strip could have been a little more big, like with more named characters(and therefore more quests) and unnamed ones(just to fill the vibe that the casinos are "alive"(i know that there's a mod called "populated casinos" on the nexus) also maybe with another faction in the strip, more population and houses overall [like a private big mansion where you have to steal something because of a quest or maybe even protect it depending on who gives you the quest, idk just some thoughts]

The same with the legion, i would like to see more legion territory, as another guy said in another post, we only got to see the Legion's army, not the state/nation the conquered lands and the people living there, though we hear of them through the game it's a shame that we can not see all of that.

But ya know the reason why the strip feels so shallow, Obsidian making a game in 18 months with an engine that they didn't know(thus the shit-ton of bugs on release and the bland map, well except for the quests)

Yeah but I'm not even talking about size as much as I am the shabbiness of the casino interiors compared to real life. Even 200 years of abandonment can't totally erase that much grandeur. The New Vegas casinos were likely never that posh to begin with, compared to their real life counterparts, for some reason.

Yeah how they talk up the casino's and New Vegas they make it sound like a awesome place then you get there and it's really lacking in the way it was hyped up.

Also it really is a shame they didn't use Ceaser's palace because it would have tied into the game perfectly. I always did wonder why it wasn't used. @Sirdanest you said they couldn't use it? Why?

I assumed it's the reason they couldn't use coca cola, and went with Nuka cola instead. Real brands and businesses aren't usually mentioned in games.

Yeah, strip in game doesn't look much grander than New Reno or Shady Sands from Fallout 2. Both those places had buildings, roads, power and seemed in better/as good a condition as New Vegas.

I'm guessing time constraints and engine limitations held back the game. I know map size was limited due to the game's console release according to Obsidian

https://www.dualshockers.com/obsidian-consoles-held-back-fallout-new-vegas/

Which is a real shame, but the game engine itself is quite shoddy. Even Skyrim/Fallout 4's current engine really struggles with rendering numerous NPCs at the same time. Try running populated casinos, or populated wasteland and see what happens to your framerate. It struggles to render to much in a single cell, which sucks like hell.

As for branding, yeah, Nuka Colas been in there since one. It's more a parody of that 50's culture, and capitalism monetising the upcoming nuclear holocaust. I mean look at the kids sent to school with Vault Tec lunch boxes, Radiation King TV's (which are also a Simpsons reference) or the idea of a company like vault tec in general. It's all a big part of the game's 50's style American culture. That said, it would be nice to see more advertisement in New Vegas. We got a lot, but more things like neon signs, flashing letters, that kind of thing. New Vegas fro the people of the Wasteland is supposed to be like stepping into another time. In reality, it doesn't really seem all that much more prosperous than what we hear or see of the NCR.

@IRORIEH Man i would give you a +rep if i could, i forgot to mention that console stuff, that's right, they couldn't do the strip as they wanted because of console problems, instead they had to split it to save memory.

Btw i hope that if Bethesda make another fallout (which with all my decadent soul willpower, i don't want) they make a new engine from scratch, gamebryo/Creation is broken and outdated.

@Sirdanest Yeah, like IRORIEH said, the Nuka-Cola thing it's a direct parody of Coca-Cola and the 50' paranoia of a nuclear war, not a copyright issue.

Yeah, even back during the concept phase, the Strip was intended to be this giant chunk of surviving civilization that Mr. House had preserved and maintained.