Okay, to be clear: when I ask that question I am by no means being snide about it or implying that it's a bad game in any way, shape or form.

It's just that I look at it and look at all of the enduring mod support and stuff for it, and I can't really understand why people love it so much, especially in comparison to Fallout 4.

I've played it a little bit before I bought Fallout 4 and it was alright. It was kind of lacking in certain features standard in shooter games, most principally with sprinting (and yeah, I know there's a mod for it but it really should be built in, y'now?). Expansions wise, it seemed to have the upper hand, but that honestly is all I can really say about F:NV (or is it "FO:NV"?).

So FNV was made by Obsidian not Bethesda.

Overall, the game is far darker and more true to the original Fallout and Fallout 2 in terms of gameplay choices, overall feeling and setting.

I personally believe that Bethesda railroads their players in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, there is a set quest that usually involves the PC going from Point A to Point B to Point C with no real choices or consequences along the way. With the addition of a set backstory for the protagonist as well as voiced PC, FO4 lacks any real depth as an RPG. 

FO4 was an improvement on this however with the addition of the warring factions. It also was introduced the gunplay that was lacking in previous titles. However, FO4 took that to the extreme. I dare you to try and play a rogue in FO4 that can complete at least half of the game without killing anybody or at least get into a gunfight.

FO4 also got rid of silly gameplay mechanics like skill checks. Because who really wants to invest into science skills and actually roleplay as a scientist (which you can in FNV). 


There's a lot more than that but I'm heading to bed. I'll edit my post tomorrow with more info of why I personally think it's special.

Just FYI tho, I am still one of the people who loves playing Fallout 4 and has invested hundreds of hours into it.

@Tribal Raven Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, i'm gonna add that NV was more consistent and loyal both to the originals and Bethesda's lore, unlike what Bethesda makes (yeah, they fuck up even with their own lore)

Obsidian took the time to explain the why's and how's of the world, adding up to what was already established.

The perks are way more varied and useful for roleplaying, and character builds instead of just % bonuses (like in 3 and 4) and there's traits too.

New Vegas keeps the original's essence, it is 'A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game' while in comparison, 4 improved on everything as possible to be streamlined and easier to consume and at the same time ditching as much RPG elements as possible, you know, the very same thing that a Fallout is made of.


And yeah, i'm well aware that NV feels lackluster and bland in some aspects.

Well F:NV and fallout in general is not about shooting. In fact the reason most people see F4 as a failure is because the only thing that it did was shooting. Fallout is and always should be about player freedom and making choices (and those choices having consequences). Fallout New Vegas is one of the last actual true RPG games. It lets you make a character good at some things but not so good at others. Every playstyle is supported. You want to be a smart nerd that sucks at guns? sure. You want to be a Punisher style mass killer? sure. Everyone in F:NV can die and it doesn't break the game! You just have consequences. It is a true breathing world with complex stories and mature themes. F:NV doesn't sugar coat the horrible acts that would happen in a post nuke world.

In summary if you dont know why it is so special then play it, truly play it.


If you are really curious

EDIT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7lIwBi9kKo&t=80s

This guy explains all the huge downsides of F4 and why it fails as a fallout game!

EDIT: sorry last edit
Just to clear things up I still enjoy F4 and I have about 500 hours in it but I have around 2000 in F:NV

FNV was all about freedom to play whatever type of character you wanted to be. It doesn't start you in a vault. And unlike FO4, you're not railroaded. You can actually ROLE-PLAY. And FNV is also far more progressive than FO3 and 4 because the best way to deal out damage is to play as a bisexual character. Regardless of your build and character alignment, you absolutely WANT to be bi. You WANT both of the orientation perks. That's 10% more damage against human enemies and extra dialogue options with some characters outside of combat. FO4? The Sole Survivor is locked into being a married cis-het soldier or lawyer with a kid AND the main quest starts in a vault! Fuck that shit! Give me a bisexual female Courier any day of the week. I don't play as men EVER in FNV! Not even in Oblivion, Skyrim, or The Sims 3 (which I gave up after few weeks); and this pattern will carry over into FO3 when I get around to playing that. Hell, in a perfect world, I'd rather have my body cloned and genetically engineered to be female, then turn my brain into an AI and upload it into that clone's brain. This way, I'd start life over as the good sex instead of the shitty one AND keep all the knowledge, interests, hobbies, etc. I had before. Think of it like New Game+ in Chrono Trigger/Cross. I've known since the onset of puberty that I should have had a female body but never told anyone. Not offline, anyway; I'm not even out to my family yet.

Not sure what else I could add that hasn't already been said but I'll try.

Being that a lot of the original crew who made the original Fallout games 1, 2, & Tactics made New Vegas you can really tell that a lot of care went into the world and it's characters. They're very fleshed out especially your companions and all the factions minus the Legion have a lot of detail into their inner workings.

They planned for a lot more features like being able to play as a Ghoul or Mutant in addition to being Human, the world was suppose to be bigger and so were the factions but Bethesda but put them on a restrict deadline and they only had a fraction of the time to finish their game compared to the time Bethesda gave themselves for Fallout 3 & 4. Not to mention they were forced to make it compatible with consoles.

All that combined meant a lot of things needed to be scrapped which is why Vegas is so small and it was so full of bugs on initial release. However even then you can tell the love and attention they gave the game meanwhile Bethesda seems keen on only focusing on the most popular aspects and ditching many of the core elements like for example Skills, Choice [ Almost every option in Fallout 4 leads to same result just changes ether your character was nice, a jerk, or sarcastic about it ], and ending slides of the game to basically turn it from a Isometric/First Person RPG to a Looter Shooter and Base building game.

It also shows with their own games Elder Scrolls Arena and Elder Scrolls 2 were ambitious games but around the time Todd Howard came in during Elder Scrolls 3 they began to become more streamlined, the map of Elder Scrolls 3 was only a small square compared to what it originally was going to be, slowly and surely every Elder Scrolls game would get dumbed down further and further, it would be up to modders to return the old RPG aspects or create new ones themselves.

It is a shame that age will keep many people away from Fallout 1, 2, Tactics, & New Vegas as they prefer to go for the newer shiny Fallout 4, they're really missing out some great stories.

To me,the main difference between NV and 4 was this.

New Vegas is an RPG with shooter elements. 4 is a shooter with rpg elements.
As the others have mentioned,NV was more less restrictive when it comes to play-style than 4,and this was due to the fact that Bethesda simplified the rpg elements to appeal to a broader demographic(i.e. getting rid of skill checks) and refining the action elements(which in my opinion,still isn't great).

I think what makes it special, and why you can always come back to New Vegas is that even the vanilla experience is never the same twice. The framework of the game itself is pretty loose which allows the player character and the player to choose.

The illusion of choice is often brought up in regards to video games. New Vegas is a good example of proper choices and consequence. We all shit ourselves when we decided to kill Vulpes in Nipton because we were used to taking what we want in Fallout 3, and then all these failed quests start popping up and you're like "What have I done?!"

Throwing yourself in with a faction changes the world in a very direct way and shapes the world you inhabit, as well as the player character. Because of this loosely based narrative and tru to its word sandbox feel, it creates the space for modders to customise and fill the gaps in their own image. If you like what another modder is doing then you can enjoy their creation too, until you amalgamate a massive combination of mods to bring a truly unique and visually pleasing, tailored experience.

If the narrative, quests and dialogue weren't so open ended, half the amazing mods we enjoy when we play the game wouldn't exist. Is it because of a restricted dev time? is it because the game is made by a different dev team entirely? Who knows, but it is what makes New Vegas the special experience it is.

Fallout: New Vegas is overrated in my humble opinion, I still love it to pieces - But the sheer blind support people have for it while similarly throwing up all over fallout 4 is pretty astounding. (GUN is usually fine, people are respectful.)

The only huge complaint that I have with Fallout 4 is the dialogue options and how pointless they are in comparison to previous games. Most work out to being the same option with varying rewards and in general, most actual responses aren't really all that memorable or clever.

Now! That being said? I don't really have many other problems with the game because it'd be hypocritical of me to give previous fallout games a pass for them and I usually try to pride myself on having some informed opinions -

- Writing: In general, the writing in FNV is by and large way superior to that of Fallout 4 and to a lesser degree Fallout 3, it also blows the first and second Fallouts out of the water too. But is this something to rag on the other games for? No - Not really, Fallout 3 is written beautifully in most cases, Fallout 4 while being less creative than Fallout 3 is still above average at worst as an RPG. As for direct company comparison - We're talking about Obsidian here... Writing is all they have, it's their best quality and generally what they fall back on when everything else lacks, if they couldn't write better than the competition, they'd be damned. To compare to Da Vinci to a modern artist today and claim the modern artist's work is worthless garbage isn't really a fair comparison.

- Preset Character: The only legitimate complaint I can find here is the player having a voice, which is more of an opinion than a hardset problem as we see games like Mass Effect, The Witcher, etc do fine and receive critical praise. (Fallout 4 is weird in that it doesn't let you create your own character traditionally, it asks you to instead play your own version of the Sole Survivor - Which when looking at that way is more than acceptable when put against the aforementioned 'widely praised' RPGs.)
People seem to forget that in Fallout 2 you had a family as well - Hell, you were shoehorned into being the literal offspring of the previous game's protagonist. Fallout 3 also does - But because New Vegas hadn't come out yet, people didn't know to complain.

- New Vegas didn't get enough time: Gods above I can't begin to go over how much I hate having to read this. It comes up literally everywhere there's even a chance of FNV being criticized and it's absolute rubbish. Bethesda didn't pop their head up midway into development and go - "Oh, by the way, you only have eighteen months to do this- Bye!"
Obsidian knew exactly how much time they had from the get go and due to exceptionally poor management that's now infamous, they decided to try and overshoot anyway which nearly blew up in their face. Now... What many people don't know is - Obsidian was offered an extension by Bethesda which they turned down. It's unclear how long this extension was, but they clearly thought they were ready with what they had. It's also more than fair to mention that Bethesda had to make the fundamental code and systems for both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 - Both of which had some massive changes beneath the hood. Obsidian had everything it needed to start making New Vegas from the word 'Go'. 'Obsidian didn't have enough time' is just a fruity way of saying 'Obsidian has crappy management and direction'.

TLDR Version: I think it's really, really unfair that the things New Vegas did beautifully are used to bash Fallout 4 and 3, especially when a blind eye is turned to Fallout 1 and 2, both of which have some catastrophically bad writing in cases. With 4 it's a little easier to justify, they had the roadmap from New Vegas but this is Obsidian we're talking about - No company is going to be expected to get on par with their writing and for what it's worth - Fallout 4 really did make the effort, picking up many of New Vegas's core elements to implement. What I really can't excuse is people using New Vegas to rag on Fallout 3, it's the equivalent to someone today using a Tesla to shame and ridicule the inventor of the automobile.

I love New Vegas because it's excellent is almost every way. But I also have come to dislike it as it's become a weapon for people to use to shame and ridicule both Bethesda and the people that enjoy their games.

There is nothing to be said about FNV that hasn't been said already but allow me to weigh in on FO4 because I happen to have a lot of issues with this game in particular.

This is going to be long, so strap in and take a drink while you follow my ramblings.

Everything in and about Fallout 4 is half assed. Everything.

Whatever you do, you'll always end up being in charge of everything without actually being in charge of anything.


The Minutemen, the fall back option, make you general after 1 or so missions, which literally has you moving to some settlement, kill some mobs for them, done, you're the one in charge now. However, you aren't. You are still going where Preston sends you and there is no option to tell him to shove it and do it your way. No, another settlement needs your help and all these junkholes specifically require the General of the faction to take care of their problems because without you they'd all be dead anyways, so why bother.


The Institute, the arguably worst faction in the game, makes you their director after Father dies and you can't do anything that a director could do. Stop the sending of Synths to the wasteland? No way, that's what they always did, so they'll continue doing it. Share the knowledge of the most advanced faction with the rest of the wasteland to actually, you know, make it a better place? lol, no.
I think it can be brought up in like one sentence but I'm not sure. What I'm sure about is that even if that is a thing, nothing changes anyways.

You are also not allowed to assign anyone to anything because YOU are still being send out to do quests. The director of the Institute is required to solve all their damned issues personally. Their solution to everything is to basically rule the wasteland by replacing any and all people who are in a position of power. At the minimum. Their end goal is to pretty much replace all humans but the board of directors because humans can't be trusted. This presents a whole new issue because at some point they'll all be dead and at that point the whole thing is being run by Synth with no one overseeing them, which is a pretty stupid plan. The fact that Father has a kill switch for some synth on his terminal tells you all you need to know. They don't trust their own creations and yet they want to populate the wasteland with Synth anyways.


The Railroad, the arguably dumbest faction in the game, make you a member with absolutely nothing to decide yet you are the one to solve all of their problems, do all their heavy lifting and hitting and, most importantly, are the one who keeps them alive. The worst part about the Railroad is the stupidity of everything they do. They free Synths, of which we know that they have a built in trigger mechanism that will make them turn on whoever is around at any given point in time and yet they totally ignore this and continue to free them and send them out to wheverever they please.


And finally, the Brotherhood of Steel. The only thing I like about the Brotherhood is that they're not the Brotherhood from the east coast, a bunch of do gooders who specifically go out of their way to help all humans in the DC Wasteland, which none of them ever did before nor was it ever hinted at in FO1 or 2 that they gave the slightest amount of shit about non Brotherhood members short of lifting any advanced weaponry or armor off of them, or their corpses, because no one but the Brotherhood can be trusted with anything advanced.

In FO4 the Brotherhood is back to that attitude again but the sheer arrogance towards any outsiders is never displayed. The hatred for ghouls and mutants is the same but they treat normal people, well, normal.

In FO1 and 2, and FNV to a degree, they don't trust you, don't like you, and in FNV some of them even try to murder you. In FO3 they don't consider you their friend from the start but they don't particularly mistrust you either.

In FO4, while not being as much as a bunch of asses as in FO1 and 2, they are at least slightly back to old form.  Except it all falls apart the moment you help Danse and board the Prydwin. You do some quests, blast through the ranks, destory the Institute, receive a big speech, done.

Why? All they do is hate the Synth, have you extort settlements, if you want to, and their end goal is to not take over the Institute to actually, you know, take control of the most advanced faction in the game, no, they want to destroy it all. Destryoing Synth, sure, why not, but with the technology of the Institute, which the Brotherhood acknowledges to be advanced, you'd think that taking control of the Institute itself would be the better idea. But no, won't happen.

The whole faction system in FO4 is so comically bad that its stupidity culminates at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

If you're a member of the Brotherhood and the Railroad already none of the factions involved in the battle will attack you. Despite the fact that you rolled in the place with a courser at your side none will care about this. You can even shoot and murder a certain amount of Railroad heavies and they still won't turn on you. The amount of loot you can drag out of there after the battle is done automatically makes you the richest person on the planet, it's that bad. Not even becoming a water baron breaks the economy that much over the knee as that battle does.

And then came the DLCs. The workshop ones, well, to each his own. I sort of enjoyed the settlement system but ultimately it suffered from the same problems the rest of the game has. It was done half assed. Built a giant settlement? A ramshackle junkyard? Nothing changed. For something that was supposed to give you a feeling of rebuilding the wasteland it failed to deliver in literally that one selling point. No settlement has any lasting impact on the wasteland, no matter how much of building you do. Heck, I can't even play the game without Sim Settlements because that's how it should have been in the first place.

Automatron, well, that was fun although short. Turning Codsworth into an overpowered murder machine was fun for a minute but it stopped being fun fast because a modded Codsworth could no longer wear a hat. Which is a crime.

Far Harbour was amazing. It was the only DLC that truly stood out as well done.

Nuka World was, once again, a wasted opportunity. The map itself was great but that's never been Bethesdas problem. That's always been the writing and Nuka World is a prime example of bad writing. The only impact it has on the Boston area is Preston being pissed when you side with the raiders and start to raid your own settlements. That's it. If you refuse to have ANY business with the raiders you have to murder them because they turn hostile instantly. All of them. If you do some quests for them you can restart the park and that's it. And, of course, there is the issue with you being made the boss pretty much instantly. Fallout 4 makes you the boss of almost all factions way too fast.


And please don't ask me about the kid in the fridge.


And finally, the main story. That's just bad, no matter how much you try to justify it. At no point in the story does the main character even remotely consider that his/her son might be dead because he or she literally has no idea how much time has passed since his or her son has been kidnapped. I don't remember if there are time stamps on the Vault terminal logs or not but I don't recall there being any indication of how many days, months, years have gone by between your first unfreezing to witness the kidnap and the murder and the time you are unfrozen the second time to begin the game for real but even if there is, no one comments on it.

You, the main character, mention your son to a handful of people but never to some randos, no, only to named characters because it's impossible that more then 5 or so people might know about him.

When you finally get to meet him, at which point you already know of the atrocities committed by the Institute, you can't even question his motives and call him out on his bullshit. You accept a short explanation and that's it. I make it a habit to greet him with a shotgun to the face because he's a monster who's first real interaction with his father/mother, after god knows how many years, is a prank with a Synth who the player character is forced to believe it's his or her son. Yeah, really nice. It's obvious from that point on that your son does not care about you. Heck, he even admits that instead of thawing you out and bringing you to the Institute he wanted to see if you could make it on your own. Very nice. And, what do you know, this once again changes nothing. At all. You can decide to leave him because the wasteland has changed YOU too much. If you decide to stay, none of this will ever be brought about again. There is no bonding whatsoever, at least not the believable kind. The game fails making you care about your own son after like 1 hour into the game. Heck, on my first playthrough I literally wondered who Shaun was when the player brought him up again after I finally found my way to Diamond City. That's how much the game drops the ball on the whole "my son's been kidnapped" drivel.

Or the interactions with the wasteland in general. You'd think that someone who's been frozen for 200 years might wonder a bit about all the creatures that now roam the place but, no, that pretty much never happens. You wonder about giant radroaches on your way out of the vault and you can question some characters about ghouls and mutants but that's it. There is no reaction to meeting your first ghoul. None to meeting your first mutant. Heck, there is none to meeting any of the various creatures that roam the place. You accept them on first sight, don't wonder how they came to be at all and be on your way. And let's not even start wondering why the player never reacts to all the places he or she clearly knew from before the war.

There is never a "holy crap, this sure looks like shit" moment, it's only done in conversations. I think one with Preston, whom you tell that you used to live in Sanctuary, which gets shrugged off and never mentioned again after 1 whole sentece. And in Diamond City. Not sure with whom but it's also a one liner that does nothing but make you wonder who the hell even wrote this. I think the only thing we get in terms of emotional reaction to the new world is a gasp when you leave vault 101 and in the first conversation with Codsworth after that. After that there is not a single moment in this game where the player just stops and shows any sign of reaction to how the world looks after 200 years in the freezer. How's it all gone to shit. It's just being accepted in the blink of an eye.

Or your encounters with the raiders. There is not a single raider in this game that won't shoot you on sight. If you follow the main story and go directly to Concord the game forces you into murdering the raiders and siding with the minutemen for no reason whatsoever. The raiders are automatically aggro to you and there is never any explanation for this behaviour. You have no reason whatsoever to assume that the raiders are the bad guys in this situation. For all you know, these are just two parties shooting at each other for reasons unknown to you.

Why not give the player an actual choice? Heck, there is literally no way to do an evil play through in this game because every single faction you side with, every single character you interact with is painted in the best possible light and doing the main quest for any of those factions has no good or evil repercussions to it. Not for the ending of the game anyways.

The Railroad just wants to free Synth because they are slaves. The fact that bombing the Institute will kill tons of them isn't mentioned anywhere.

The Minutemen want to rebuild the commonwealth but that falls on its face because the settlements are nothing but a fun way to waste time with. If you like the building stuff. If you don't, plop down a couple of purifiers and get rich fast. That's all that is to the Minutemen. If you happen to end the game with them you blow up the Institute as usual and that's it. The silly thing happens should you be hostile with the Brotherhood, who will go to war with the Minutemen for no reason whatsoever.

The Brotherhood wants to kill all abominations and destroy the Institute. Good, fine with me, at least they are not making up shit to make you care, they straight up want you to murder everything that isn't human but they forget their purpose, which is recovering advanced technology and the Institute is the literal definition of advanced technology in this game. And as mentioned above, should you end the game with the Minutemen and be on hostile terms with the Brotherhood, they will go to war with you. Why? The Minutemen pose no threat to the Brotherhood so that war happens solely for the sake of having more things to shoot at.

The Institute wants to pretty much replace as many humans as possible because their robots are easier controlled what with the built in kill switch and all plus they are not affected by rads. Humanity outside the Institute, and inside in the long run, would effectively be made extinct. That's not a plan but I guess "for science" is reason enough to accept this.

The writing in FO4 is simply shit from start to finish and the main writers should be ashamed by it.

So, in terms of story FO4 is pretty much the worst game in the series because nothing you do matters in terms of how the game plays out, how you view your own actions or how the game ends.

The only thing FO4 has going for it is the environmental story telling. That's something Bethesda really excels at in all their games and if they'd put as much effort in the main stories as they do with all the nice little environmental story telling people wouldn't complain as much.

However, and here's the twist, the way I see it, Fallout 4 is actually a good and fun game. If you can enjoy it for what it is. A shooter with RPG elements and a main story that's best be ignored.

It's, however part two, a really bad Fallout game. If you go in expecting a Fallout game you really need to tune out the main story, because that's just embarassing garbage.

And with this, I'm done ranting. If you made it all the way through, thanks for listening.

New Vegas continued the story that us old-timers had been waiting for, for a very long time. At one point I'd given up hope of ever being able to see what was going to happen next, I had thought Fallout was dead and gone forever. Fallout 3 inexplicably took a whole bunch of factions, creatures, and ideas that probably should have been local, and recycled them 3,000 miles away, with minimal innovation, and as an fallout 1 and 2 old-timer, it irritated me. At least Fallout 4 invented the institute instead of almost entirely relying on material from fallout 2.

I didn't really absolutely despise the writing in fallout 4 like some did. It was what it was, a Bethesda game. I knew that going in. Their companion writing was so far ahead of anything Bethesda had done before, it dropped my jaw. I never expected it from them, they've come such a long way since the "mercenary" in Morrowind, who for gods sakes didn't even have a name let alone a personality. Compare Piper's intro scene or most of the other characters to, what's her face, Star Paladin and tell me that the writing hasn't improved.
*shrug*

Also, welcome to Bethesda: Mod your game, don't ever play it right out of the gate, you'll miss out on so much. Add some new stories and endings if you don't like it; become institute director and make friends with the railroad, etc. You can add or change almost anything that doesn't require more voice work from the original actors. Mod your game, it's Bethesda. They actually expect and intend the modders to finish their games.

I love New Vegas, but I can't stand it pure vanilla today. I'd go mad trying to play it vanilla.

@ maccrawinthejaw (Original Post)

I can tell you for me what makes New Vegas so special. It's actually a few for me.

First and foremost. Fallout New Vegas basically took all of the mechanics of Fallout 3 and perfected them. Iron sights for guns, a massive crafting system similar to Skyrim, and a damage threshold system that made armor actually protect you. These three massive changes made my experience with New Vegas a million times better.

The second one, is from a mod authors prospective. Fallout New Vegas is the last game to use the old gamebryo engine. The same one that Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 used. Meaning it has the most up to date scripting engine / functions, along with the most features possible to work with while creating content. There are a handful of script extenders that further expand on content creation as well.

Third and last, is what the community has done for it. Fallout New Vegas has massive support when it comes to the mods available for it. There's something for everyone when it comes to the things you can download for the game. GUN here is further proof of that. Heck, there's even a total conversion project called Tale Of Two Wastelands that combines Fallout 3 with Fallout New Vegas. So if that's not a dedicated community, I don't know what is!

These are things that make Fallout New Vegas so special for me.

I could write hundreds pages on this, but I would explain it as short as possible.

First things first is of course the RP. In new Vegas, the rp options are big, compared to F3 and F4, where you have a set backstory. Yes, you have a bit of set backstory in NV, but not to that degree.

Second is the world, and world not in open world, which I found lackluster in NV, but in World-building. New Vegas, you see, is more of an a Post-Post apocalypse game, which means survival is not the main theme, but the rise of different ideologies in post war America is. The world and the factions are much better than those of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.

Third is options. There are thousands of choices you make throughout the game, much more than in Fallout 3 (where main story was linear) and 4.

In short, New Vegas is a superior game compared to Fallout 3 and an absolute abomination that is Fallout 4.

I feel as though it’s the most unique game out of the entire series personally. While it was considered a Fallout 3 clone for a long time, the setting, narrative, quests, lore and environmental tone is where New Vegas really shines. Walking through the Mojave is nothing like the Capital Wasteland and this means New Vegas is deserving of it’s status as an entirely separate game, rather than just “more Fallout 3”.

While exploration of the game world may seem intimidating at first, the world still manages to be fun and interesting to explore. There’s a lot of content to uncover, and most if it is left up to the player to find and not just spoonfed to them.

Furthermore, I guess it just gives the player a lot of independence, and the world doesn’t feel half-assed or lazily put together. They not only perfected what made Fallout 3 so great, but they created an entirely new and separate experience all within 18 months. Now, I’ve never been one to judge a game off the development time alone, but that’s pretty impressive. Honestly, the point that a game with a smaller dev team is superior in many ways to a game with double the production time and budget is a valid point and this fact is pretty unacceptable.

In the end, New Vegas had a lot of heart put into crafting it and it does feel as if the people behind it were putting their soul into it. I don’t think I can say the same for Fallout 76, and I don’t know what to say about 4 that hasn’t already been said so I won’t beat a dead horse as I’ve been trying to avoid doing that.

It's classic Fallout in the modern system.

I think it was unique because it melded the old with the new. It really is middle ground and I think that's why people like it so much. I've seen people who dislike the newer titles praise NV, and I've also saw that people who prefer the Bethesda games like NV too.

As far as I can tell, it kind of represents the best of both worlds. I mean, you ask me, it's the best Fallout. But that is purely subjective.

I can answer what is special about NV, but it has a complicated history.
Its fans seem to have forgotten how disappointed many of them were,once upon a time.
Back in the day, so many people were expecting so much and were disgusted and disappointed when they finally got to the strip.
So many people were once upon a time angry and disappointed that it was using recycled assets and was "just a mod for fallout 3."
Not to mention it was a buggy, crashing mess with spinning heads when it first came out.
Its fans have been extremely forgiving, or even forgetful,and now love it for what it is now rather than for what it was. Or can concentrate on what was done right.

Honestly speaking, I really disliked New Vegas when I first played it. Coming straight from Fallout 3, with the Enclave, Pitt, Zeta, the Downtown ruins, and the nooks and crannies you could explore, the Mojave just felt like an empty bore. To this day I still think they really dropped the ball with the size of Vegas and the Strip. Vegas should have taken up the entire top, or top corner, of the map with city ruin LODs spanning off the map to give it the illusion of size. I especially grieve for the cut content and stuff they planned but didn't have time for.

That said in the end it's also become my favorite the more I've played it. The characters, the story, the choices, the community, the mods. Others have already said it all better than I could.

The fallout 3 vs new vegas has a lot to do with whether or not you're coming from Fallout 1 and 2, I think.
Fallout 3 recycled almost all of the old plot and faction elements that had appeared "done and finished" in the previous games, almost as if it was a soft reboot of the whole franchise. But if 3 was their first experience with the series, it would be the one that set the idea of what the series was supposed to be.