That's just flat out wrong, just wow. New Vegas doesn't even look like the 1950s retrofuture in a lot of its setting. What the fuck are you talking about?
You are right, but this is actually a point in Fallout 3's favor: Fallout 3 in its pre-War architecture and styles is a mix of the 1950s retrofuture, and the 1950s itself. New Vegas, on the other hand, looks almost entirely like a parallel 1950s Las Vegas. This is a massive failing of New Vegas's visual design, Fallout 3 came closer to getting it right. Really it's the closest of any of the 3D games.
New Vegas does the literal opposite, what the fuck are you talking about? The theme of New Vegas is let go of the past, to move on from it and certainly not invoke it. How could you get this wrong? House and the other factions all talk about building for the future, forgetting about the great war and the nukes and everything else in the past.
Absolutely nothing you said was New Vegas building from Fallout 3, it's the actually the opposite. Obsidian really did everything they could to separate its game from Fallout 3. Again, New Vegas builds from Fallout 1 and 2, not Fallout 3.
You can't have a theme of letting go of the past, of re-shaping the old into something new, without
the past being present as the object to be negated. Fallout 3 elevated the prominence of the pre-War world in the minds of Wastelanders and indeed of the design of the Wasteland itself. The manner in which this is deployed was, in my view, largely obnoxious, unnuanced, and uninteresting, but it does lay the groundwork for what we got in New Vegas.
Just look at it like this: Fallout 3, both in its setting of audience expectation and in the software handed over to Obsidian, provided the framework of 3D Fallout meaning "Large ruined urban area and surrounding countryside, with a lot of cool set pieces and remnants of the pre-War World." That's what the new Fallout fanbase wanted, and that's what Bethesda's Gamebryo engine most easily lent itself to. Otherwise Obsidian probably would have wanted to make a top-down RPG, or perhaps an Outer Worlds-style series of smaller worldspaces spread over a large overworld map if they decided to make the shift to 3D themselves.
The sensible folks over at Obsidian (I don't know who can be credited more with the conception, Chris or Josh or someone else) thought, "Well, if we're to have an interesting pre-War urban landscape, it shouldn't really be that nuked. But why would a major urban area not be nuked?" From there arises Mr. House. And from Mr. House, we get this really interesting interplay between past and present - He's literally a mummy of the pre-War World, attempting to preserve old Vegas, but professes to want to build something new. There's an interesting contradiction there to be teased out, how can a new future be built on the model of an old world? And doesn't that kind of apply to the NCR, who we'd want to have in this game anyway? And then, for antagonist, what about those Caesar's Legion guys we toyed around with for Van Buren - they're not really like the pre-War world, but they're LITERALLY cosplaying as one.
The themes of New Vegas, Old World and New, How Can We Avoid Ancient Mistakes, Letting Go, these arise naturally from the constraints and example of Fallout 3's design. Probably the game would have been quite different (if sharing some similarities since it would have the same writers) to the New Vegas we got. I'm fairly sure it still would have been a good game, probably just as good, but different.
I think the argument "We only got FNV because of FO3!!" is a bit of a silly argument on it's face, but there are absolutely some interesting ways that Fo3 informed the building of FNV. Are those to FO3's credit? I don't really think so, but they are there and they are interesting.
You can see it as unintentional jab at Bethesda, how it mercilessly just over-relied in pre-war bullshit in Fallout 3 (and it hasn't stopped).
I do also agree with this, I think it can also be read as a
critique of Fallout 3 (probably unintentional, I don't like to entertain notions of interstudio-drama)
Most perks aren't boring damage increases to specific skills, they can do weird shit like in Fallout 1 and 2.
I'm always a bit puzzled by this: While I think it was a great design decision of Obsidian to remove skill-boost perks, these weren't invented by Fallout 3, they existed in Fallout 1 and 2. They were bad in those games, they were bad in Fallout 3, and the GOAT Josh Sawyer made the wise choice of removing them.
- A speech system that isn't crap. Skill checks beyond just speech and base stats.
This isn't really a problem with the
system, it's a problem with it's deployment, or perhaps quest design. Fallout 3's speech system has skill checks other than Speech and SPECIAL, they're just not used that often.
No reason to quibble with any of the other points you list out, though.
