Aware this opinion probably already exists in this thread but I don't get the hype for New Vegas. It is perfectly playable and fun at points but I would not call it the best game ever, or even the best Fallout game (that title goes to Fallout 4 but that's another post.)
Fallout 4 mentioned as best Fallout game, i should just dismiss everything you say from this point on from that one statement already.
The world design is laughably bad. You could tell they really wanted New Vegas to carry the rest of the game since 95% of named locations are around it but everything outside of that is an empty shithole with nothing interesting. They force you to adhere to Highway 95 for the entire start of the game (unless you want to do cheese strats with the shortcut), which causes tons of problems when you need to revisit it later for quests because if you stray from it at all a Deathclaw or Cazador will literally load into existence in front of you just to kill you.
This is just stupid, there's plenty of stuff to find and do in NV, far from being an empty shithole, just by going what locations are available NV(base game) has 545 named locations, whereas F3 has 163.
They do push you towards taking the Highway 95 route, but so what? What's wrong with that? Many RPGs have different level zones spread out over the world map and most games would guide you towards exploring them from low level to high, and then allowing you to choose otherwise in a repeat playthrough, that's better game design than having all enemies level with you (Oblivion).
Also, "straying" from the highway, how far straying we're talking about here? You act like taking 2 steps to the left from the established route will drown you in Deathclaws, you're just blowing everything out of proportion to make things look worse than they are, come with actual arguments and examples of those things happening.
Everything is fucking ugly. Everything looks like a shitty low effort Blender sculpt job. There's nothing interesting to see except for the New Vegas skyline at night.
This can be leveled at F3 as well, it's no less ugly than NV, but i would agree that it's ugly compared to anything coming out at the time.
Half of the fun of Fallout games for me is just picking a direction and wandering to see what I can find. In Fallout 3 it was fun exploring bits and pieces of the Capital Wasteland and coming across fun little tidbits and seeing some genuinely really pretty world design. In NV you pick a direction and it's very likely you'll never hit anything unless it's a quest location, or you'll accidentally cross the arbitrary Highway 95 threshold and wind up in some Deathclaw's dead nigger storage because we needed the first hour of our fucking open world game to be fucking linear. I hate Highway 95. I hate it. It causes so many problems for no reason.
Again, plenty of things to explore and find on the route to New Vegas through Highway 95, and those that manage to get through the dangerous route can explore basically everywhere.
Game still has technical problems even after years of patching. Saves just randomly corrupt so I'm constantly paranoid and making multiple saves all the damn time. New Vegas Strip has so many load zones that it totally kills the vibe of the area and makes it look like shit. Animation and voice acting (for most non-major characters) is total dogshit even for the time which kills a lot of scenes that are meant to be dramatic.
This is fair, it's by far the worst thing about NV. I'm not particularly bothered with Vegas having a lot of loading zones, it's more the map is so fucking obscure in pretty much all (post 3)Fallout games that i can't make heads nor tails of them, and i've had quite a few moments trying to find the right doorway to the other zone because the quest marker points to the wrong place.
Level design in dungeons sucks. No signposting or interesting landmarks. Shitty combat spaces with atrociously large sightlines. There are places outside of New Vegas where you can get harassed by enemies with plasma weapons that are OUT OF RENDER DISTANCE.
This is subjective, i personally prefer it when the location looks like a real place, not something designed to loop you back to the entrance like Skyrim does, it's illogical, repetitive designs that often lead to you getting the same map layout copy pasted over more than half of the locations, it's boring.
Getting shot by enemies outside of render distance is also a F3 problem, not excusing it, but not a NV exclusive issue.
Companions should not be able to die, it just makes you reload the game every time Veronica gets her dumb ass killed facetanking a Fiend with a missile launcher.
Skill issue, maybe don't use the dyke then.
I don't care that the game had a short development cycle. The developers agreed to 14-18 months and couldn't deliver, that's on them. They took Fallout 3 as a base -- a game that works totally fine -- and somehow introduced fucking constant save corruption into it.
Agreed, it's something they should've worked on it for longer, and not make deals that they couldn't deliver on.
Ultimately the love for NV over F3 is that the game is closer to the spirit of what Fallout was all about, where exploration and choices made by the player in a post apocalyptic world had effects on the people in it, rather than a murder hobo dungeon runner with "get me 5 bear asses or go to this dungeon and kill this and that" quests, which is more Bethesda's sthick, the npc's and factions are more fleshed out, they've got more realistic motives and behave normally, in Fallout 4 the people act weird, like they haven't been living or adapted to life 200+ years after the nuclear apocalypse, it's not normal to talk like a 21st century urbanite with the sensibilities of one when 200 years of wasteland life has gone by, they'd be closer to acting like tribals more than anything.
Like can you tell me what the point was for the Institute to make androids or synthetic humans with free will, just to treat them like working robots, when they already have those who could do EVERYTHING that these synths are made to do? for the EVULZ?
Bethesda's worldbuilding(Lorewise) is just shit, and Obsidian's was not, they put in the work to let their world make sense within the setting, the factions have goals you'd expect them to have in that setting, the npc's talk and act in a way that makes feels appropriate to the place they live in.
Fuck i could go on and on as to why NV, with all it's flaws, is still so much better than anything Bethesda made.