I'm aware of that, Vegas itself was spared a direct impact but California where the NCR came from was not so lucky. Basically the whole reason the NCR want Vegas is Hoover Dam which survived because large portions of Nevada were spared. It still doesn't explain why the East Coast did nothing to rebuild in 200 years while the West Coast did.

It's not totally abstract. That's not what I said. What I said was it makes sense to a 60s mindset. What causes the abstraction are those subsequent 50 years of scientific and technological progress.

So yes, things like how societies form and other such sociological matters naturally aren't so very different to what they'd be like if the game was based on current knowledge and ideas. But even in this area it is very starkly different if you look closely. Some things you could take to be bad characterisation are in fact down to a different approach in writing the characters.

Point, but still, my main point is that while Fallout 3 had better set pieces, the worldbuilding in it was subpar. Better setpieces? For sure. There seems like there is more in F3 due to DC being more interesting (even if NV has more settlements, more locations,and more characters), but in the end, F3 was made without taking a single moment to think how the world it happens in could function. Things and locations are there just because. Meanwhile New Vegas does take the time to consider those things. Hell, it is one of the main themes in both the base game AND the DLC.

One of the things I really would have liked to see in Fallout 3 - there are a lot of things that I'd like to have seen enhanced, but this was the most... visible - is a more developed Megaton. An open trading centre. Some civic structure. Something more than people living in bits of rusty fucking plane. Seriously how have they not all been killed by rust inhalation?

So yes I do appreciate what you're saying here. New Vegas might not have been so memorable in terms of scenery, but it's much more than just scenery.

New Vegas was a crashing POS when it launched on all platforms. I don't think you can say with a straight face it was "stable" when it crashed every hour of gameplay for at least a month after launch. Very few people didn't have serious issues with it. Now it runs just fine, but it was freaking embarrassing at launch.

Well maybe I was just used to tweaking the POS engine from Fallout 3 but with the right ini changes and settings applied (mostly the same ones from FO3) it was extremely stable. I actually don't remember having a single CTD until I started modding it.

Well that may be true but if you launch with a config that's non-functional (or barely functional) for everyone, you launched a broken game. I couldn't go to one of my clients and ask them to pay up if I gave them working software but a broken config that they had to debug/tweak themselves.

It's a fundamental problem with the actual game engine though, there's very little that can be done with it other than allow it to wallow in all your ram like some Golden Hedonsim bot. Obsidian and Bethesda before them cant really recommend screwing with the config files directly because it can screw up the game entirely if you don't know what you are doing. That said, anyone who made the tweaks to FO3 years ago knew exactly what to look for in the New Vegas config files. Enable large adress aware, increase rendered cells, increase draw distance, enable multi-treading that kind of thing. When the engine is not being asked to render an entire cell right in front of you alakazam style then you would be surprised how stable it can be.

Sure Obsidian could have made those changes for you but not everyone has more than 3GB ram or more than two cores. That's why people with decent rigs quickly got past the problems while those playing on outdated ones were having the same problems as console users.

If only there was a program that could do arbitrary things when you put their program on your computer then they could intelligently make those decisions...:)

I think id tried that with Rage and it's adaptive setting which was a complete shambles. If Carmack can't make something like that work then who can you trust to do it. Certainly not Obsidian >_>

I realise this might be second nature to you, but not all of us consider tweaking a config file to be part of the core experience. Without putting significant time into research and trial-and-error most people wouldn't even know where to start. Heck, most people probably don't even know there is such a thing as a config file, or at least that it doesn't decode into gibberish when opened.

That said, I do dig around in them occasionally, although I rarely do anything except flip the binary options not found in the options menu in-program unless there is an indication that doing otherwise will work.

YES!

Well I guess my point was people who bought New Vegas likely also bought Fallout 3 and had to do all that tinkering the first time so it just came naturally to do it again. The engine being identical to both Fallout 3 and Oblivion then most of the fixes that work with one, work with all the others. There are tools to make configuring your files easier like the NVConfigurator which Fallout 3 never had (till the config tool was adapted) but as with all things YMMV.