I played Fallout 3 when it came out, and just got bored with it fairly quickly. It's got that Bethesda vibe where everything is great at first, but then you start to get further into the game and everything starts to seem copy+pasted to make the game artificially larger and longer. Is it like that at all? I see it mentioned as a great game all the time, but I also saw that about 3 when it came out.
There is a 2 hour long video telling you why New Vegas is better than Fallout 3. To sum it up: Seems so, cause your decisions matter and also the world was created rationally.
The world building is so much better in NV. You literally just have to ask the game basic questions like “how did they come to settle here?” or “where and how do they get their food from, and how do they protect themselves from outside threats?” Ask that about any settlement in NV and you can get pretty solid answers. Fallout 3? How does megaton survive? There’s no water nearby they can drink, there’s only one Brahmin in the whole settlement, and they don’t really make anything to trade. It’s paper thin world building in three, whereas some thought actually went in to NV.