New Vegas wasn't made by Bethesda. It was made by Obsidian.

Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, and I thought New Vegas was about 10x better than Fallout 3.

> Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2

To be fair, Fallout 2 (my entry to the series, and a game I still love) is famous for being utterly bug-ridden and full of incomplete/broken quests. Disappearing car, anyone? :P

While Obsidian "made" it, it used the same engine/code/technology as Fallout 3.

It did, and Bethesda had time to iron out the kinks in the code that Obsidian used.

But Fallout 3 used the 3rd party Gamebryo engine anyway, so the engine wasn't really developed by Bethesda either.

New Vegas used the same engine as Fallout 3, and it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They fixed all the bugs in the engine, and a better development studio handled creating the game. I believe that Fallout 4 used the engine developed for Skyrim, so they had more than 5 years to work out all the bugs.

To this day I get a kick out of the fact that the best Fallout game was made by Obsidian.

Why? Remember, Bethesda was the outlier. They purchased the Fallout IP from Interplay after Black Isle Studios went under. And many of the former Black Isle Employees went to go work at Obsidian, so New Vegas was much closer to being under the stewardship of the original team than Fallout 3 was.