Wallach said:
Right, but that is accomplished via the ending itself; whether or not the player would want to continue after that point winds up being totally irrelevant. But yet there are still players that would want to just carry on even knowing that fact, and you still close them off from it even when the weight of the ending has already been delivered in the exact same way as it was to the player who wouldn't have wanted to go on past the ending conclusion. They understood this perfectly in Fallout 2, but somehow it escapes them this time.
Fallout 2 was not a fully voiced game, and it allowed the developers to do a lot more with completely optional and niche options for players. I do not dispute that Fallout 2 is a far superior game at offering a wide range of choices for any sort of player, and not falling victim into having to pick and choose what sort of content to offer over another sort of content. But that is because games were cheaper to make back then, and it is harder for us to ever return to that period.
Another example would be low INT characters. Fallout 2 totally nailed the roleplaying aspect for that. I was almost as if you were playing a different game as a low INT character. New Vegas doesn't offer the same sort of experience, and as a fan of that option in FO2, I find that it is a pity. But I also understand why, because to record the huge number of optional lines to create the same sort of experience FO2 offered, would be extremely expensive, and ultimately very few players would ever actually make use of such content.
This isn't really encouraged, it's outright forced. If it encourages something, it is probably encouraging players to not finish the story at all so they can continue to play a particular character without having to think about it.
Which leads me to this. Yes, it is forced. But why is it forced? Because they probably believe (rightly so imo) that there is little value in continuing on after the ending slides. If they did offer such an option, they would have to budget at the very least a bunch of lines and slight changes to each community area to make the post-ending gameplay meaningful even in a minor way. But what is the value in paying for this extra cost when the bulk of the actual gameplay in terms of quests and any factional or regional plotlines, would basically be closed/failed after the ending slides anyway?
It might seem like an easy thing to do in theory, but in practice, I am completely convinced that if they offered a half-assed post-ending play experience, most of the people bitching about but being able to continue after the ending, would be bitching anyway about not being able to do [insert whatever here] after the ending, or the post-ending being boring, or the post-ending not making sense, or whatever else. Just slapping on post-ending play isn't going to suddenly make everyone happy.
The real solution to making everyone happy, or at least most people happy, would be a much costlier option - to create a convincing and rewarding post-game epilogue section of the game, with unique content and quests, but would also basically "last forever" in terms of game time, because there is no longer an immediate pressing matter in the game world. This would be closer to the Fallout 2 experience you mentioned. But the budget of the game clearly does not support this, and I feel that not having such an option, instead of having a half-assed one, is a better decision overall.