So: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It's pretty rare to have such an apples-to-apples comparison between games and their developers. Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and developed by Bethesda Game Studios; Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They both take place in the same in-game universe, they were both developed using the same engine, and they both ostensibly share the exact same underlying gameplay mechanics and genre. These are games from two of the biggest western RPG game studios around (Bioware's also there, of course), but although both studios sort of share the same philosophy of providing freedom, choice, "open-worldness," and player-driven gameplay, how that ethos manifests in their actual games is actually pretty different.
There's also this divide between the players, and it isn't just that people slightly prefer one over the other; the emotions run higher than that*. Fallout 3 is, I think, going to come to be one of the defining games of the Xbox 360/PS3 era, and for the generation growing up on those consoles, it's going to define what video games ARE, pretty much. And a lot of those people played New Vegas afterwards and found it boring, and restrictive; they thought it didn't measure up. And then there's the people that consider New Vegas one of the best RPGs of the last couple years, who detest Fallout 3 and that hate everything Bethesda did to the franchise (if they played 1 or 2 first). Sure, there's a middle ground, but there's also a lot of people that feel very strongly about this. So what makes Bethesda's Fallout so different from Obsidian's? One of the biggest, I think? Bethesda's games get better as you move away from their games' cities and people, but those are the areas where Obsidian's games excel the most.
