If you haven´t already and got some love for oldschool isometric RPGs check out Fallout 2 - one of my all time favorites.

I mean which other game gives you the chance to create a moron as your character (if you put too little points into Intelligence), who hardly can talk and thus can´t finish most quests the usual way.

Get them both if you can. If you can only buy one of them, then get 3 first, & then NV at a later date. They're both excellent.

Also, on the Fallout 3 store page, it says that "Fallout 3 is not optimized for Windows 7 and later".

On that note, it works fine on my Windows 7 laptop but YMMV.

Hardly a choice, FO3 is a typical Bethesda blunder walking simulator, New Vegas has a lot of atmosphere and a fuckton of content but is still very open.

No doubt: Fallout New Vegas. It's better in many ways from an old series fan's PoV =)

I prefer New Vegas but get Fallout 3 so you won't be disappointed if you decide to get it down the road.

New Vegas, any time, all the time.
F3 was made by Bethesda. It had mostly forgettable characters and locations, and Bethesda didn't bother too much with lore.
New Vegas was made by Obsidian, the guys who were involved in making original Fallouts. NV has a great atmosphere, awesome characters, interesting quests. I have over 100 hours in there, and still haven't finished main quest line =) NV is the best new fallout, that's for sure ;)

I would advice Fallout 3. While playing fallout new vegas i got bored out of my mind. 24 hours in and still nothing interesting had happened. Fallout 3 is a little bit better.

Fallout 2 HANDS DOWN!

Again?

I played both. Each game has its own flavor, and optimally, you really should play both. They go on sale enough that its worth it to pick them up. That said, even though New Vegas was a GIANT pain in the ass for me, crashing every 20mins, then 10, and then 5mins near the end of the game, I enjoyed New Vegas more.

If it's one or the other - get Vegas, it does pretty much everything better. If you intend on playing FO3 at some point, best to get it now instead, going from Vegas to FO3 feels jarring to say the least.

Try to get both, there's a mod called "Tale of Two Wastelands" (TTW) that let you play fallout 3 in new vegas engine, and you can travel across them whenever you want,story and all, its a bit tricky to make them work but its worth it

I would say fallout 3. New Vegas just seemed, incomplete.

Fallout 3! Best Fallout in my opinion

I enjoyed more Fallout 3, expecially the landscapes and general atmosphere. The story is good but if you want a story that based on your choices take NV.

I think the DLC is better on Fallout3 but New Vegas has a lot better of an improved game over Fallout3. Also with the factions in New Vegas, it offers a lot more diverse & repeated games.

I voted FNV but I truly recommend playing both... preferably F3 first then FNV after. They are not interchangeable games and should be enjoyed individually! I love both of them. I'll admit the main story is not that great in either game. I was more invested in F3 story though. In FNV I kind of felt like "why should I give a shit about this Courier stuff?" But it's the environment and side quests that draw you in. FNV definitely has a leg up on F3 in terms of size and length of game. It's got a lot more quests and areas to explore.

"why should I give a shit about this Courier stuff?"

Because the guy shot you in the fucking face and was after odd packages, I find that much more intriguing then a badly rehashed F1/F2 mashup with bad writing that was F3 main story line :-P.

Might aswell give my two cents, I prefer New Vegas as a better game, I like the mechanic of joining a faction! but Fallout 3 is a great experince to start.. I say both! :D

I like to compare Fallout 3 to Fallout 1... and Fallout New Vegas to Fallout 2.

As was the case with Fallout 1, 3 was a world in desolation. Lots of gray, lots of ruins, lots of doom and gloom. People are just barely surviving. It's like the world a month after the nuclear apocalypse. Fallout 3 got the "doom and gloom" vibe down pat... but you can only do so much with it.

Fallout 2 and Fallout New Vegas are like how the world might look after a year or two. It's less about survival, and more political. Societies are starting to form, different groups vying for power. The human race is past the "survival phase" and are rebuilding, which naturally leads to conflict. Makes for a more interesting story, and a lot of different creative directions it can go in.

In my opinion, the better game to go with is Fallout: New Vegas. That has very personal reasons though.

I have played all the TES games from Morrowind on, and I really didn't like Morrowind or Oblivion at all. They felt empty and devoid of life to me, they weren't pretty enough for me to feel like I was getting anything out of exploring the world sightseeing because they were so empty, and likewise they were so empty that I couldn't really go out and find enough stuff to fight to feel fulfilled there either. The only thing I particularly ever enjoyed with those TES games was playing around and making my own stuff, but that wore thin quickly when I realized I could either A) Go play a game that I actually enjoyed playing, or B) Fully learn to code a game I'd enjoy if I'm going to spend the time having to build one myself. I've only just picked up Skyrim recently, and have only played it for a very short while to try it out. It does not seem to be nearly as devoid of life as the prior two installments, and so I can actually say that I think I may enjoy that one.

Additionally, I was a teenager when the original Fallout games were coming out. I held a deep love for a lot of that Interplay and Black Isle studios work. To me, Fallout 3 was nigh on blasphemous. It had nothing in common with what is, to me, a "real" Fallout game. For several years, the way BethSoft took the Fallout IP, the way they stomped all over it imo, and then stomped all over Interplay trying to do the FO MMO made me extremely hateful of them as a company. The fact that there was an actual proper Fallout 3 mostly completed that they just threw away also made me very resentful of the FO3 we received instead. I really didn't get over that resentment until I decided to put it aside in favor of supporting developers doing something interesting despite being BethSoft published (Dishonored).

Because of that, I support FO:NV to a much higher degree, because it was developed by Obsidian, handled by people that were responsible for the original games. It takes much more from the originals in building the world. I find it to be much more full of life, things to explore, people to meet, and choices to make that at least give a superficial feeling of my choices mattering more. I prefer it very strongly.

From what I have gathered, that sentiment seems to be fairly universal amongst us older gamers that are fans of the original games. A number of people that were new to Fallout with FO3 seem to like that game more for some reason, and that makes it hard to really recommend one over the other in any objective way. However, given the binary nature of the question, my answer is to pick up FO:NV hands down, though I'm sure there will be argument against it. To me, FO3 is more like Morrowind/Oblivion - empty and dismal, with very little to offer across a fairly vast worldscape. FO:NV would be, I think, closer to Skyrim, in that it is much more vibrant, more full of life - people, places, and things to explore and be engaged by, more story to experience, and so on.

I hope that the explanation of my position helps make it useful to you. I don't want to be one of the types that lays down his opinion as though it was gospel, the only possible true position, because I don't believe that is accurate - no matter how strong the feelings are on my side, it doesn't make them objectively and universally true. So in giving the caveats to my position up front, I hope I've kept things honest and informative enough to be of assistance. The Fallout universe is dear to me, and I think it to be one of the best of the CRPG universes to explore, so I hope you are able to make the right decision for yourself here and get in to it in a way that you can find engaging and fulfilling yourself.

Also... Sorry this kinda turned into a wall o' text. lol