IIRC, my problem mainly had to do with processor speed. 
In what way? I don’t have much experience of late 80s PC games.
It’s higher res, with some new art for the npc encounters and combat, but that’s about it.
Not quite what I meant - it was described to me as being, and I quote : “more Ha Ha, less Only Serious”. Least as much as a post-nuclear apocalypse game can be :).
*Fallout 1, 2, NV *can be downright zany or random at times, of course, but for the most part they’re not. And they’re still trying to paint a coherent, interconnected whole. FO3 feels more like a somewhat aimless, disconnected patchwork of self-contained “Fun ! Cool ! Neat !” if you know what I mean.
For all the ragging I’m doing about it, I quite enjoyed FO3 mind you. Even a middling *Fallout *game is still above average. But it’s really no *New Vegas *;).
That can also describe Wasteland, the plot of which is similar to much of 3 and some of NV. Your little group helps fix a water supply, has dealings with a cult of nuke worshippers, clears some renagade robots out of Vegas, and goes up against a megalomaniacal AI wanting to wipe the world in order to create its own notion of utopia. Except that last bit is literally done from within.
Other than a farmer who has gone mad and protects the local mutated wildlife, I don’t recall any real “Ha Ha” moments. Then again, I only made it about halfway through.
Fallout had a layer of humor and a glaze of 1950s retro future that Wasteland did not (as I recall at least).
I also don’t want to see any desert wasteland. Washington DC shouldn’t be a dry hole, which was another sticking point for me in Fallout 3. Which isn’t to say everything needs to be lush with greenery, either. There can be balds and rocky areas. But give the planet some credit - plants will manage to survive anything we humans do short of blowing up the planet. Which is one reason I like to see games set in areas like the Pacific Northwest or the Ohio River Valley. We could look at what happened in areas which faced problems other than surviving in a desert hellhole, or perhaps what happened in locations that weren’t themselves bombarded into nuclear ash but still had to adapt to the post-nuclear role playing era.
Yeah, but the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud were a cult. Crazy, kooky cultists. They were bald from radiation, they revered the NRC, and a good amount of their women were essentially walking radiation depots. (If you killed a RadAngel it left behind a pile of radioactive waste.)
Fallout took place in an alternate universe timeline (one where we went to war with China). Wasteland followed our timeline, though it was made before the Berlin wall fell. Which means rather than the Soviets going bankrupt, the world powers nuked the world in, if I remember correctly, 1998 after spending most of the previous decade pushing themselves to the brink of apocalypse. FO never left 1950’s culture. Wasteland split off our actual timeline much later than that.
But Wasteland was more serious than Fallout. Though there were some humorous aspects. But like FO1 and FO:NV, there was a real coherent world. (FO2 had too many pop-culture references and breaking the fourth wall moments to be counted among its brethren as being coherent.)
FO3 just lacked the same ambiance.
Oh, and another update for the new release of the original Wasteland is that the paragraphs are now integrated into the game.
For anyone interested, Wasteland 2 is in early release on Steam…and you get the original Wasteland with it. Don’t have much to say about Fallout 4, as there aren’t a lot of details yet (it was amusing when someone trolled the Fallout community with supposed early details that were totally made up), but totally looking forward to it when it does come out. Should be pretty cool, as always. Wish they would do turned based one using, say, the new XCOM engine (that’s what the Wasteland 2 team should have used…it’s been hard for me to get into it as the graphics just look odd to me, and the combat doesn’t flow).
I love Fallout 3 for the retro-future post-apocalyptic world it presented me. I went in without any knowledge of the game beside post-apocalypse setting and there’s power armor. It was the most pure video game RPG-ing experience I’ve ever hard.
The first time a Centaur popped out at me from around the corner I literally jumped and yelled “OH SHIT!”
F:NV was also a good game but felt more like a western that just happened to take place in a post-apocalypse.
Well, if you haven’t played the previous Fallout games, then bringing in the sometimes hokey western elements wouldn’t have seemed as much a refreshing change.
There was a car in Fallout 2 - a “Chrysalis Motors Highwayman”, and as I recall the NPCs you’d encounter acted like it was a rarity but not The Only Car In The Universe (even though it was, in that you never encountered another one), if they bothered to comment on it at all.
I agree the lack of player-accessible transportation in the latter two Fallout games was a bit jarring, especially when you consider there are functioning VTOL aircraft (which the Enclave, NCR and Brotherhood all use), a 50-foot tall Death Robot (not to mention the countless other robots wandering around), a monorail, and even a paddle-steamer. There’s also a reference to railways (either functioning or being re-established) in Fallout: New Vegas. Yet not a single car or motorbike, no matter how Atomic Punk/Mad Max-like such a vehicle might be.
I like to tell myself fast travel is facilitated by a car or motorbike your character has scrounged from somewhere. Which you can’t see. Or put anything in the boot of. 
Hell, New Vegas was just begging for horses. Robo-horses, ghoul horses, I’d have even settled for a Centaur horse made of melded bit of horribly mutilated other horses. But how’s a fella s’posed ta ride into the sunset, slightly slumped in ‘is saddle (slumped don’t mean DEAD !) when he’s on foot ? Makes no one lick o’ sense, it don’t.
In fact, now you mention it, aren’t there ads for a robo-horse up allover the place? Admittedly it’s a child’s toy (and therefore not big enough to carry a person and all their gear), but you’d think someone would have found a way to build a full-size one by the time the game is set.
Having cars in New Vegas would also make the Goodsprings-New Vegas run more interesting. At the moment, you really need to wait until you’ve got an anti-materiel rifle and then tediously pick off enough deathclaws to clear a path, if you’re not going to sneak through the Hidden Valley or just cheat by fast travelling across the gap. Being able to buy a car on the New Vegas side would let you punch a hole through the “blockade” instead.
There were also a couple of different cars in Fallout: Tactics.
Giddyup Buttercup? You actually see a full sized one surrounded by blood and dead bodies on board Mothership Zeta, the aliens seem to be a bit obsessed by them. Sadly you can’t ride it.
There’s one in New Vegas - but it’s a wreck. There are a fair few Fallout 3/NV mods that add rideable bikes, to varying degrees of success. Personally I don’t mind the lack of mounts (it’s implied horses are extinct, especially by the NV team or vehicles, it adds to the post apocalyptic feel for me and the size of the world. If you get bored of walking you can always fast travel.
Well, you can fast travel in Skyrim too. But it’s way more fun to just ride (also, saddlebags full of ammo and pre-war money and brahmin steaks ! :))
I hope they bring back all of the “random” encounters that Fallout 3 had (They’re pre-timed but they feel random). Probably my biggest disappointment in New Vegas is that nothing seemed to be really going on out in the wasteland. One of my favorite moments in 3 was slowly sneaking up on a house in the middle of nowhere, when suddenly a guy on fire comes running around the corner being chase by raiders. Made me jump up out of my seat.