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I don't care if I get crucified for it, but for all its flaws I enjoyed Fallout 3 and 4 far more than I enjoyed Fallout: New Vegas. Maybe it's because I'm more of a shooty shooty bang bang blow up gamer than an intertribal politics gamer, but I just liked them better.
For me, Fallout 3's setting and atmosphere is more interesting to me. Plus nostalgia plays a much heavier aspect since it was my first Bethesda Fallout and the premise and mechanics of the world were more novel.
Gameplay wise 4 blows both of the others out of the water for me due to the addicting loop of collecting salvage and modifying equipment, along with the shooting finally becoming enjoyable in its own right.
The atmosphere in FO3 was absolutely garbage.
It's like they cherry picked elements of the originals and then cobbled them together into a very bad Fallout.
To date FO3 is the worst Fallout for atmosphere. Even sitting below the unmentionable.
The atmosphere, taken moment to moment, or at individual locations was good. The coherency of the explanations behind a lot of things and the coherency of the world as a whole was pretty disjointed.
Yeah I found 3's atmosphere to be pretty interesting too. I liked the feeling of danger and tension throughout the world, and how scary it was to make those first few journeys out from megaton as an early-level player. Not to say NV didn't have that feeling at times, but the atmosphere certainly made it feel a little safer.
As much of a retcon as it is to have such a disastrously destroyed world at the time period it was set, I still think it was a good choice to go "all out" with it.