I was wondering the desert fairly early on in the game and came upon a small camp held by Cesar’s Legion. There were maybe half a dozen soldiers and two slaves, men taken from a town in the South the Legion had raised, and I had a lingering side quest on my Pip-Boy 3000 to save them. From my position on a small hill, I figured I could kill at least three of the soldiers with my sniper rifle, and then pick off the others as they charged me. The problem with this plan, however, was at the time I was on neutral terms with the Legion, meaning I could pass them in the world without them going for my throat. Due to New Vegas’ wonky system where killing members of a faction make the whole group hostile towards you even if you don’t leave anyone alive to tattle, I was in the tricky spot of deciding if it was worth invoking the wrath of an entire army over two slaves, or if I should just move along.

Luckily, a third option presented itself. While surveying my surroundings, I spotted a pair of Giant Radscorpions, horrible creatures that will happily tear through you or anything else in the game that happens to get to close to them, prowling near the camp. I shot one of them, not enough to kill it but enough to get both of them good and angry, then ran in to the Legion camp and past the soldiers with them hot on my heals. The soldiers opened fire on the Radscorpions, the Radscorpions opened up the soldiers, and the two slaves, unarmed and terrified, bolted for the wastes. After that, it was just a matter of chasing after the slaves to free them while their captors were busy with the giant bugs I’d sicced on them. Quest complete, no harm to my standing with the Legion, and everybody wins, except for a handful of slaver jerks and two monsters nobody liked to begin with.

There are lots of other moments in Fallout: New Vegas, of course. There’s a tangled story with loads of choices to make along the way, complete with different outcomes and consequences based on which way you go. There are companions to meet and befriend, a settlement of Super Mutants to discover in an old ski lodge, and of course more underground Vaults to explore, many complete with their own horrible secrets. As fun as many of them are, though, what sticks with me the most about the game is the same thing I loved so much about Fallout 3 – the massive world it all happens in, and the potential for random stories that are all my own to happen there. Unfortunately for New Vegas, it’s how far short its Nevada desert setting falls of its predecessor’s Capital Wasteland that I remember more than most of what I did there.

There’s just not a lot to do there. Oh, sure, there’s multiple warring factions, which makes things interesting, and the writing and variety of voice actors in Obsidian’s game are overall better than in Bethsoft’s Fallout 3 (that said, I can’t tell you how happy I was to get to the part of the game where I had the chance to silence Matthew Perry’s strangely monotone drone forever), but when it comes to the setting, there’s no contest. For a wasteland, the world of Fallout 3 was teeming with secrets to uncover, random scenes scripted or otherwise to stumble upon, and countless opportunities to take on a given situation from any of a dozen different ways. My favorite moments in the game come in the second half, when the landscape is dotted with Enclave patrols and checkpoints, many of which you tend to find trading shots with the local populace or wildlife. New Vegas has these to a degree (another fun memory: travelling with NCR patrols or merchants and their body guards along dangerous roads, watching them get attacked by Cesar’s Legion, and then looting the losers, all while getting safe passage to wherever I was headed), but not nearly to the same degree. Fallout 3 certainly had its flaws, but it more than made up for them with a wealth of things to do however and whenever you wanted, or just completely ignore. New Vegas, on the other hand, ultimately feels empty and a bit dull despite all its strengths. It has the better story, but when that story is all there really is too do in the huge world they’ve provided, who cares?

I like Fallout: New Vegas a lot, but I haven’t finished it. Instead, I went on to play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a game with a much better handle on what it means to create a world you want to get lost in, and from there to DC Universe Online, where I can hang out with Batman and explore made-up cities I’ve read about for most of my life.. I love open-world games – I have well over a dozen of the things, all lined up under my TV like the Magrathean Spring Catalog – but I love them for their potential for depth and variety, not the size of the world or even their main plot. I want playgrounds, not guided tours, and while Bethsoft’s inevitable return to Fallout is guaranteed to have a an enormous epic plot line, I can also trust them to give me plenty of things to do instead.

1. Run. This is the least likely to work. If wild animals are after you, you can bet on them being faster than you. If it’s raiders or mutants, they’ll chase you down for sport. You’ll just die tired.

2. Fight. The VATS system helps even things out, but until you’ve leveled up a bit nearly every fight is going to leave you cut to little ribbons. If you opt to stand your ground, make sure you have plenty of stimpaks and keep a safe place you can recover at within limping distance.

3. Improvise. There are all kinds of things you can use against enemies to take them by surprise. Wrecked cars will explode with just a few bullets put in to their engine, and the various residents of the Wasteland tend hate each other as much as they hate you and will happily tear each other apart upon meeting. There’s every chance you’ll die in the process, but hey, at least it’ll look cool.

Evergreen Mills is in the Midwestern part of the map – make your way north from Tennpenny Tower and you almost can’t help but find it. In a past life it was a quarry of some sort, but now it’s crawling with Raiders, each armed to the teeth and considerably better fighters than the rabble scraping out a life in the Wastes. When I find the camp, I’m at the point skill-wise where I have a choice: I can try to kill them all and loot the place, but it’ll cost me in stimpaks, ammo, and wear on my weapons that I can’t necessarily afford, or I can try to make my way around the camp, hopefully not tip off any of the guards, and come away with nothing. Not trusting my skill with a rifle to be high enough to pick them off from a distance, I’m making my way through the rocks above camp when I notice the solution to all my problems: in the middle of the quarry is an electrified pen, and inside the pen is a Behemoth, a twenty-foot tall super mutant that can kill with a punch and soaks up damage like a sponge.

I hide in the rocks till night settles, watching the guards through the scope of my sniper rifle in opes of a gap in their patrols big enough to squeeze through. At midnight I turn on a Stealth Boy to max out my sneaking ability, put two rounds in to the pen’s generator to blow it up, and skid down the rocks in to the camp proper. Despite my added sneakiness, one of the Raiders spots me just as I make it to the Behemoth’s cage, but by then it’s too late. With the gate open, the Behemoth is free, and he’s angry.

The fighting lasts till sun up, but only because some of the squirrelier Raiders were smart enough to stay out of arm’s reach for as long as they could. Their friends aren’t so lucky – the ground is littered with bodies that were decapitated by a single punch. After a long night of sustained gunfire, the Behemoth still has over half his health left and shows no signs of slowing down. I’ve been watching the whole thing from a safe distance, taking shots every one in a while at the Raiders he can’t get to. After a while the quarry is quiet again with all of its residents dead, leaving the place ripe for looting. Over the course of the fight, I’ve only been hit two or three times and used up maybe a clip of precious rifle ammo. Not bad for a night’s work.

Of course, around now is when the flaw in my master plan becomes apparent. If I leave my hiding place to have a go at all the lovely bodies loaded down with all the ammo, weapons, and bottle caps I’ll need for a while, the Behemoth will turn me in to jelly. I can hit him from range with my rifle, but I don’t have nearly enough ammunition to put him down. The strongest weapon I have is a combat shotgun and forty-nine shells to put in it, meaning my only choice is to get as close as I can while avoiding his reach. I take a shot at his head, causing one of his health notches to fade a bit. He roars back, stomping the ground and kicking a corpse a good dozen feet or so in frustration.

It’s going to be a very long day.

Of course, one of the major themes of the Fallout games is that things rarely go the way they’re supposed to. Each Vault I’ve found so far has been more of a tomb, a disaster area brought on by whatever social experiment Vault-Tech was running there or from outside influences. Sometimes there are survivors, like the people in Vault 106, driven mad from some sort of experimental gas, or the Gary’s of Vault 108. Sometimes there’s no one left, like Vault 92, an artist’s community where the residents swapped their instruments for laser pistols and tore each other apart. Whatever their story, the Vaults offer some of the most haunting and atmospheric locales in the game, creating a sense of dread that’s impossible to get away from. From the moment you step in to a Vault you can’t help but feel watched, and the feeling sticks with you even after you’ve killed every living thing just to be on the safe side.

While the original inhabitants of Vault 87 are all dead, the results of their experiments are still wandering the halls. the place is absolutely rotten with super mutants, hulking green-skinned monsters that used to be human and now stalk the Wasteland looking for people to kill and eat (if they’re very lucky) or to kidnap and turn in to more super mutants. They’re bad enough outdoors, where you at least have the option of running away, but underground it’s just you and them in a tight hallway, and they tend to be carrying a mini-gun. Lucky, I’ve poured a lot of skill points and perks in to the fine arts of sneaking around and shooting people in the head, so I’m able to take out most of them before they even know I’m there.

I’m deep in Vault 87 when I hear someone crying for help. It’s muffled and a little odd sounding, but given the circumstances that’s pretty easy to understand. I round the corner at a jog, figuring any one who’s still alive in here will need to be gotten out in a hurry, which means I don’t see them till they’ve already opened fire: two super mutants, both carrying assault rifles, both laughing maniacally as they cut me to ribbons. I get a few shots off before retreating, ducking in to a side room and activating a Stealth Boy cloaking device to keep them from finding me. After a bit of healing up and a lot of cursing, I creep back up to the corner. I hear the cry for help again, only this time it’s followed by a guttural laugh. One of the super mutants congratulates the other on his hummie impression, and wonders if they can trick more meat in to coming down here.

I pop around the corner and shoot them both in the head before they can react. Once the hallway is quiet and relatively safe again, I pick my way past their bodies to find there’s nothing else to see. There’s nobody else here, no survivor of Vault 87, no kidnappee about to be experimented on, nothing. Just me and the super mutants, laughing in the dark.

To fully appreciate the weight of how it feels to step out in to the wilderness from the safety of, say, a town like Megaton, you need to be familiar with the idea of random encounters. A major part of the first two games as well (and a big part of why they’re so fondly remembered), random encounters are just what they say on the tin – when out in the wide world between plot points or major landmoarks, you’ll run in to all manner of oddities ranging from seemingly pointless meetings to vital clues pointing the way to some great secret. The blip on your compass could be caravan with stock to sell, a sun-stroked scavenger who’ll talk to you just long enough to mention seeing the light and drinking the water with some religious types before falling dead at your feet, or a couple of Raiders passing the time while waiting for their next victim to pass along by telling ghost stories about the monsters out East that attack the unwary in a flurry of claws and death.

There are funny moments, like finding a group of Raiders taking turns whacking a naked comrade with bats while shouting “Feel the pain! Love the pain!”, and some that are more bittersweet, like meeting Uncle Leo, a Super Mutant who remembers something of his life as a normal human and is on the run from his monstrous brethren for suggesting there’s more to life than killing and eating people. While fast traveling certainly has its uses, just like GTA IV’s taxis or Fable 2′s network of carriages between major towns, it also comes with a price in the form of all the random wonders you might be missing. After all the work Bethesda have put in to sprinkling these strange sights across the landscape, it seems more than a little wrong to not take the time to pick your way through the rocks and rubble or walk down one of the lovely ruined roads still criss-crossing the area (which, according to my post-apocalyptic expertise, should be the best best way to get ambushed by Raiders, a theory that I’m always delighted to see the game prove true). The Capitol Wasteland is a living, breathing world like few others seen in games, a place that I’ve easily spent nearly three solid days in and still don’t think I’ll ever see all of. But man, do I certainly intend to try.

It’s hard to know where to start, as I’ve already spent so many hours wandering the blasted wastelands of post-nuclear Washington, D.C. in search of new things to see, people to meet, and trouble to get in to. What started as an often frustrating experience – this latest installment is every bit as brutal as the classic first two, with little mercy for new players and an almost giddy willingness to let you get in over your head from the word go – has become a completely engrossing one, sucking away hours at a time whenever I pick up the controller. It’s safe to say there’s never quite been a game world like the one Bethesda has created here – Not even Oblivion’s picturesque vistas and forest quite match up to the sixteen square miles of devastation they’ve pieced together here. For a dead world, it bristles with life and a creeping sense of menace. It’s a place that doesn’t particularly want or accept your presence, challenging you at every turn to prove you’re smart enough and hard enough to earn the right to to reach the top of the next hill or uncover a new secret. Even now, after playing for fifty-six hours and change over the last two weeks and hitting the level cap of 20 last night, it’s still surprising how easy it is to get in to serious trouble if not careful. Above all else, Fallout 3 excels at reminds you that it’s not a world to be conquered, but one to be survived.

So how to talk about it? I’m thinking it’s best to lift a page (that is, steal unapologetically) from the likes of Tom Chick and his game diaries over at Fidgit in the form of posting experiences from from my time in the game. It’s a big enough game to more than make sure I don’t cover any of the same ground he did, and by talking about these things here I can maybe – just maybe – offer my hard-suffering girlfriend and any others who happen within earshot a brief reprieve from the constant stream of stories starting with “Okay, so there’s this one bit…” It’s not likely, but we live in hope.

Tomorrow: Getting around.