Saying there's empty space between locations is NOT saying the game doesn't have enough dungeons.
This is not the first time that you very poorly worded your argument. Don't say others don't have basic reading comprehension when you lay out your arguments like shit.
And this isn't the first time you've ignored half of what I'm saying to just talk past me and monologue the same platitudes that everyone here has had carved into their brains for literal years as if it's not a given. So let's see what I said originally.
"Bethesda is good at putting 10-15 minute exploration loops in their world, but the issue is of course is that is literally all there is."
Use your big brain here. What could I possibly be referring to with "
10-15 minute exploration loops"? Could it be the Ruins/Draugr Dungeons/Raider Camps that are literally the only thing to do in Bethesda worlds?
"The distinction for me has always been that in a vacuum of writing, Bethesda's worlds are better."
"Conversely, walking the Mojave in Vegas felt like an arduous chore. Empty walking between my destinations (which I really wanted to get to and enjoyed) so I could speed over to the next faction or questline."
"I distinctly remember enjoying the minute to minute lonely wandering and picking over ruins in Fallout 3, but feeling nails start pressing into my frontal lobe whenever there was any written content"
Here I have drawn a clear division between story/writing content (of which Vegas is inarguably full of) and open world exploration content. My point, clearly, is that the Mojave
largely acts as connecting tissue to reach the next bit of writing whereas the Bethesda worldmaps are basically entirely comprised of exploration short gameplay loops in an attempt to compensate for having barely any worthwhile written content.
The problem of littering your world with dungeons is that it makes the world absolutely ridiculous. How many broken power plants, supermarkets and other broken buildings can a single region have? It's absolute nonsense.
Quite a lot assuming your setting isn't rural Wyoming. Even then, you can also have Wasteland era structures too for that type of gameplay. Newly constructed Wasteland faction areas of many kinds (Forts, outposts, chem-labs, sci-fi agri-farms), vast animal nests/burrows, et cetera. The fact that it's retrofuture America also gives you good reason to have some interesting industry going on, like how rural West Virginia in 76 has a gaudy, gigantic retrofuture raised train system splitting through the forests resulting in these huge industrial support columns spiking the landscape acting as nests for animals, (dead) settlements, watchposts or booby trapped raider stashhouses. Even ignoring the gameplay content it is interesting to look at because its absurd sci-fi infrastructure that you'd literally see suggested in a "World of Tomorrow" magazine and reminds you that Fallout was a retro
future and not just retro. There is plenty of opportunity there. Kind of like how Van Buren's version of the Grand Canyon would have been an industrialized futuristic mining operation pre-war turned post-war cannibal hideout, whereas in real life it's just an empty pit of nature.
It also makes the dungeons start to blend with each other after a while, killing any uniqueness these places could have. This is a problem completely separate from writing.
This is something I agree with to a pretty large extent, however I disagree in part that it's not due to the writing. As I said in the original post, what makes this problematic design is that it's literally all there is to do in Bethesda worlds. If you've done ten dungeons it starts to wane because you're also aware that this is the meat and potatoes of the game, especially when even the written content results in you doing the same stuff as exploring. If you have New Vegas's level of quality written content spread around the map, the game would massively boosted then by exploration having these fun gameplay loops dotted and threaded into the world. I don't know if you've ever been involved in tabletop, but the balance between dungeoneering and roleplaying is a very well weathered and respected concept.
Additionally, Bethesda's dungeons whilst satisfying/fine on a gameplay level also lack any contextual writing. The Raiders have as much character as a pack of wolves, if you applied this type of design into a world with as strong writing as Vegas, you could give these dungeons far, far better context. A good example of this is when Vegas actually does this in the Honest Hearts DLC, most people would say the best part of that DLC is the Survivalist, and ultimately in terms of gameplay it's about the exact same as some of the more mediocre/weaker Draugr caves in Skyrim. Or in the base game with some of the Vaults like 22 or 11. It just doesn't do it nearly enough nor as well in terms of the dungeoneering design.
And a reminder that the Capital Wasteland and the Commonwealth are nowhere as big as the map in Fallout 1 and 2, making the amount of these buildings even more ridiculous given how small the area is in reality.
You're aware of course that real life Boston and Washington DC are far, far larger than what is presented in Fallout and have far more buildings? This is a very strange argument. Yes the 3D Fallouts have a smaller map scale than 2D Fallout's maps, but 3D Fallout is still a miniature version of these regions.
So no, Bethesda's worlds aren't better, they are theme parks that nonsensically litter the world wtih dungeons to fuel Bethesda's gameplay loop of "explore, kill and loot" because of the dopamine rush. But at the end of the day it makes the world extremely forgettable because all these locations might as well be the same place with slightly different layouts.
Here you go doing the monologue thing addressed to nobody at all. Wow, Bethesda's worlds are theme parks? Haven't heard that one before, how fascinating.
You know hard as shit it would be to combine both? You know why Bethesda overuses this design? Because it's easy as shit since you don't need to write anything for these locations outside of very basic stuff. There's a reason New Vegas has a lower number of dungeons compared to the Bethesda Fallouts, because writing compelling stories to every single one would be insane and take so much work. Plus level design that doesn't repeat like they do in Bethesda dungeons.
I'm aware doing this wasn't in the scope of Vegas's development which is why I said my own thoughts on it were an empty platitude because of course it'd be ideal to combine both. You also wouldn't have to do "insane" writing to make them flavourful. 76 for being an objectionable, lore-breaking all around terrible game actually does a decent job at giving flavour to its endless dungeons because it is literally the only thing it can do. Even something like writing up a podunk raider-tribe with simple internal drama that reacts in logs to you bringing down their hideouts elsewhere would be fine, or tying in these dungeons into larger storylines (NCR armories, Legion stashouses etc etc)
Fallout 1 also has a lower number of dungeons because the devs knew writing compelling content for each is hard and that game is arguably the best in the series. Your game having a ton of dungeons is not a good thing by default.
Nobody said that it was, who is this addressed to?
