@hayt: my bad. I got a couple of different news stories mixed up.
As for world design, New Vegas weas missing a lot of small details in the world design that is present in FO3 and 4. The map is smaller in New Vegas, its less densely populated with things to do, has less atmosphere, less meaningful side content, more being forced to travel from one side of the map to the other then back again quests, less dungeons, and a lot less polish. The world is essentially one plane with no real verticality to it outside of the odd building or hill, it was just a small piece of desert. While the other fallouts have underground areas, tall buildings to explore, highways, real dungeons, etc.
Bethesda Fallouts also have more attention to detail than New Vegas, for example, the jumping physics in Bethesdas engine are half-broken and this allows you to parkour up mountains that you normally shouldn’t climb up. In FO3 there were numerous times I used this as a shortcut to bypass walking around a mountain and found flat sections that you can tell were purposely placed there to aid you in your quest to break the game, hell, there are even spots with treasure that you couldn’t reach any other way, that is a level of detail that just wasn’t there in New Vegas... in New Vegas Obsidian tried to prevent that stuff by just creating invisible walls all over the place because they didn’t want to spend the time to actually design the world in a way the character wouldn’t get stuck in. They failed at that as well because there are more points where my character was stuck in the geometry of the world than in any other fallout.
Hell, Obsidian trying to actually prevent people from actually exploring or breaking the game is a huge disservice to the Bethesda style. I remember getting out of the vault in FO3 and I found my Dad within the first half-hour and every main story quest (you can still do them) acknowledged that you interrupted the structure of the game (i.e., Two Dog thanking you for fixing the radio tower even though you already found your dadj, that sort of stuff was blocked in New Vegas. Obsidian tried to make things as linear as possible in order to protect their story, that might be cool for people who give a shit about story, but it removes player agency and the sense of just being lost in a giant world. That feeling of being lost and alone in an alien world is one of the things that makes Bethesda games special and by forcing the player down a corridor, relative to FO3, they kind of screwed things up.
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