There's a lot of love for FNV on these reviews, but coming to it after FO3 I was disappointed. The release was rushed out too soon after FO3 - and it shows, horribly at times. I was expecting a fuller experience but FNV's wasteland is relatively underpopulated in sites & lore. Caves and buildings fewer and relatively uncomplicated (often cut-&-pasted from FO3, such as FO3's Regulators' HQ showing up in FNV several times). Furthermore these locations & rooms are relatively uncluttered and untreasured, and the Strip is ridiculously split up (with no fast-travel!) - all due to the game being designed with gaming consoles in mind rather than PCs). There's also a clumsy abruptness with no play after the main ending, yet 3 of the 4 DLCs require a late-game high level player! Some of the issues are fixed/lessened by mods (my first was to undo the timed-health nonsense for food and get it back to how FO3 does it) but I'm not here to review mods. You're halfway through the game before you can get a nice FNV home, only to never bother using it because you can't fast travel to anywhere near it and even then have to go through hoops to reach it each time. The ammo-making bench thing is a complicated mess, and the much touted companion-wheel annoys me as it's fiddly - I'd rather just have menu lists. Then there's the annoying micro-stutter present at times in FNV, no matter what you do, but nicely absent in FO3. The ONE thing this game DEFINITELY improved over FO3 was the ability to look down the sights of all guns rather than just sniper ones. Otherwise the FNV makers put most efforts into faction storylines - again much touted but often shallow and sometimes silly (Elvis impersonators?!), though this mess is somewhat saved by a few semi-insteresting "moral dilemmas" and different endings. None of this is to say FNV is bad. I don't think I wasted money buying it, but after one playthru will rather go back to playing FO3 (for a 3rd time!) until I've a PC that can play FO4.
I'm halfway into a 2nd playthru, which you can do thanks to the different ways you can play, the sheer size of the game, and all the mods and addons you can install. My only gripe is if you come to the game for the first time as I did, by buying this GOTY version with no foreknowledge, you may get unlucky (as I was) and encounter the later-released DLCs early on (except Broken Steel) when they're best avoided until you're in the mid/late phase of the game. The following DLC info contains no spoiler except some in the last para, on Operation Anchorage: Broken Steel: you won't meet until after ending the main quest's "Take It Back" and it's great not in itself (because once completed the game thereafter soon becomes boring and is effectively concluded) but for the simple fact that it enables the game to be played after the original game's "Take it Back" quest is completed. I thus recommend not starting Broken Steel ("Death From Above" quest onwards) until you exhaust all else and want to steer the game toward it's conclusion. Point Lookout ("The Local Flavor" onwards) - the best DLC, it's another map region with plenty to do. The Pitt ("Into The Pitt" onwards) - another region, but small map and just one slavery-type quest with no black or white solution, but no impact on the main game. I didn't like it, some do. Mothership Zeta ("Not of This World") - best avoid or at least until after "Take It Back", for it's a very different and monotonous (seemingly endless) warren, after which you can only go back to a small part. I didn't care for it at all. Operation Anchorage ("Aiding the Outcasts"), or as I call it "Fallout 3: Call of Duty" - SPOILER here: This is a game within a game (a training sim of commando ops) used to train recruits for fighting a WW3 Chinese invasion of Alaska. The Outcasts need you to play it in order to unlock an armoury. Fun but it's final boss-fight is glitchy, and the bullet-proof armour it grants ruins any real difficulty in the main game.
I bought this because plenty here say it's what newer Fallouts (if they'd stayed isometric) would've been like. Well, I didn't really play those (watched a pal play some Fallout 2), but I'm a huge fan of Fallout 3. And as an old strategy wargamer I've played lots of isometric games over the years, and most of them are turn-based too. So I thought, after a second Fallout 3 playthrough, I'd try Atom - ugh, big mistake! I got little or no sense of the supposed charm or sense of place or time. The rpg elements seem painfully potted, the plot is shallow and very pedestrian, and the frequent and often very wordy text interactions reminded me of a rather uninspiring 1980s text-based dungeon game - and a naff one at that. The graphics ARE defintiely quite a lot better than Fallout 2 from 1998, though for a 2018 game I was expecting more isometric zoom than there is (I kept wanting to pull back for a wider view), and wanted more camera height options. And the point'n'click, map and item handling aspects are of haphazard/inconsistent logic and often unguided guesswork - so the game seems stuck in the 1990s in more than just appearances! And it is a game that's aimed at 11-16yr olds. It would've probably been ok for those younger players in the late 1990s too, but in the early 2020s? Definitely not, unless they're in need of a fix, no matter how bad.
Great game & series. Tons of mods in the community too, but Afrika Korps, already has pretty good out-of-the box graphics (for 2003). It's really the earlier two titles that need mods to make them bearable. You can read game-info & reviews elsewhere, I'm just giving install help/advice: 1) The 1.04 patch is NOT needed! That was a Vista patch for the first port of the game into dgital download that supposedly helped some win7 users too, but has since been corrected. If you had CDV's retail DVD version like I do, it's the 1.03 version from winXP days yet installs fine on Vista, win7, and win10, without ANY special compatibility needs. However, that leaves 2 issues, screen format and fog, covered below: 2) Screen format - sorry, you are stuck with traditional 5:4 and 4:3 formats. No workarounds. Stretching the image is horrible. Play with black bars down either side if you have a widescreen. 3) Ddraw, dxcfg, and fog. If you had Nvidia or intel (integrated) graphics you couldn't get one of the weather effects, fog, unless you played on windows XP, but ATI drivers kept/reintroduced the required fog table files for Vista and win7. The ddraw.dll file & dxcfg applet are new additions which put fog (and antialiasing) back in the game for integrated graphics but at huge cost to frame-rates for dedicated cards. If you have an ATI card you don't need it anyway as you already have fog & AA! Just remove the ddraw.dll file as keeping it in the folder slows the game down massively! - and don't use the dxcfg setup applet that comes with it, just use ATI settings. If you have intel integrated graphics keep the ddraw.dll file but don't use the dxcfg applet unless your intel graphics driver can't set the graphics you want. If you have Nvidia the ddraw.dll will give you about 20 fames/second, so throw it (and the dxcfg applet) away and live without fog, it's only eye candy anyway (which you often switch off for planning moves) and you can still set AA in the Nvidia control panel.
