Fallout: New Vegas

[Glaedr]

Basically, i rented Fallout: New Vegas to give it a once through to see if it was worth my money to actually buy it. So far i've progressed quite a bit in the MQ as well as having completed quite a few side quests and am at roughly lvl 11. Of course, since it is a Bethesda game, its not perfect, though it is fun and engaging, which is what a game should be. One major thing that that had annoyed the fire out of me since i started the game though was the length of the side quests. In Fallout 3, the side quests were a rather apporpriate size. Mind that some were much too short, but they weren't incredibly long either, with the exception of one or two that i can recall. They were always fun though, or so i thought so. My major complaint with FO:NV is that it seems that every time a accept a new quest, there's a million little ones interlaced into that one quest, making it almost impossible to finish any one quest quickly. One that comes to mind is one that you do for that energy weapons store in Freeside. im suppose to find this chick for the brother of the owner of the store. Well, in order to do that i have to head all the way to the other side of the map, talk to her, then find out that i need to head all the way back to where i just came from and do another quest or two there before i can head all the way back and grab her. Now mind you that fast travel negates a lot of that time, but still, i think its a rather long quest to have to do. Maybe I'm too impatient, but running back and forth from one side of the map to the other is not my idea of a fun quest. =\

another thing that annoyed me is the inability to repair certain weapons with ones that are almost identical to them. In Fallout 3 there were items that could be repaired with seemingly unrelated items, well in FO:NV that quirk is gone, in the total opposite direction actually. Now it seems like there is too much restraint on the repairing factor. One would think that they could repair a Desperado hat with a similar black cowboy hat. Not so, even though the two have the same character model. The apparently are two totally different items and are not compatible in any way, shape, or form. The Jerry-rig per does try to improve on that factor, and i quite like its concept actually. it gives the illusion that the player must have spent countless hours repairing their gear in order to understand how to make due w/ the parts from other, similar weapons. Still, though i guess it adds a bit of diversity to the game, it can still be rather annoying when i cant repair my Caravan shotgun with a single shotgun. I mean, there must be SOME parts that are similar between the two. Maybe they could have made it so that a single shotgun can still be used to repair a caravan shotgun, but it doesnt repair it as much as another caravan shotgun would. I dunno, just my speculation.

Well, there's two things that annoyed me. What are some things that you think that could have been improved in the game before release?

[vometia]

My own feelings are that I enjoyed it a lot, but it was certainly an imperfect game. To address what you said, the quests are something I have mixed feelings about: I like long quests sometimes, but bite-sized chunks are more my sort of thing, what with having a short attention span and all. By which I don't mean the likes of Morrowind's "go to the shop next door and buy me a plate" quest, but things where you don't feel driven to complete stage after stage for hours on end. Sometimes it's nice to be able to wander off and do something else, even if (or maybe especially if) the wandering off is just for a spot of exploring. The sort of quest that involves travelling from one side of the map to the other and back again and doing it several times like "that" part of Oblivion's Fighters Guild quest is just annoying, too. Especially if you prefer to avoid fast travelling, but it becomes soul-destroying to trek across that much terrain unless there's other stuff to be getting on with, though that means that the original quest rather loses its purpose.

The sheer number of bugs was another thing that spoiled it quite a bit: I think FNV breaks all records for the number of floating rocks, visible seams, landscape tears and so on, but worse than that is the fragility of its quests, many of which are extremely prone to going wrong. And looking at them in Geck it's easy to see why: though the Oblivion/Fallout quest and dialogue system doesn't really lend itself to good design principles, some of FNV's quests are almost impenetrably written and very hard to debug. On the plus side, they seem to have at least enough conditional checking to avoid too much in the way of unintended consequences, though I guess that's also what causes a lot of them to fail to progress as they should.

For me, however, the most disappointing part was the lack of attention to detail. In FO3 you had a feeling that the characters around you had their own lives going on: they had just enough interaction and packages where you could believe there was other stuff happening behind the scenes, but that just didn't happen in FNV. I can't quite put my finger on it; some stuff is obvious like characters who don't even have basic sandbox packages, and boarded-up buildings with no interiors where there should be homes, but there seems more to it than that. Maybe it's also just the sheer number of generic names, or maybe a number of small things in combination conspiring to make it feel a bit lifeless. There was also just a lack of stuff waiting to be found: picking through the ruins in FO3 often yielded a whole variety of stuff: sometimes utterly useless like an old iron, sometimes boring but useful like Stimpaks, other times you'd find a rare or unique item. But in FNV there were seldom even any containers to find at all. On the other hand, at least it didn't have endless virtually identical caves, sewers, dungeons and the like, and the Vaults waiting to be discovered did feel a little more unique, so I can't really say "FO3 good, FNV bad"; but more detail, or just "fun" random things to discover would have been nice.

I think with all that in mind, and the fact that it was essentially "v1.8" of the FO3 software and assets, it was a bit of a cheek to charge full price for it. But I can't really finish on that line since I opened with "I enjoyed it a lot". It was an awful lot of fun, I got 150 hours out of one game (admittedly with the mod that opens up free-play after the MQ ends - why did Obsidian not learn from that after the widespread unpopularity of FO3's ending that meant they had to undo it with Broken Steel? ) and if I'm going to make a slightly dismissive comment about "v1.8" of the engine, it is actually a big improvement, or at least it has been for me: it crashes less often: it's still too often, but not as bad; it runs much more smoothly, with far less stuttering than I had with FO3, and most importantly from my perspective I didn't run into the dreadful "dead cell bug" that I encountered many times with FO3.

In spite of my gripes, I have to say it's a good game and I did have a lot of fun with it; and, of course, it's endlessly moddable. It's just a shame it didn't go through a proper QA phase prior to release.

[Arthmoor]

Well, maybe the reason it crashes less often, stutters less, and runs more smoothly is because it also has much less AI going on?

[Nihternnes]

yeah im not going to list my grievances but ill just say for the price and fun time with steam its not worth it and im going to go buy FO3 because i never played it and all of the mods and so on make it worth it

[vometia]

Well, maybe the reason it crashes less often, stutters less, and runs more smoothly is because it also has much less AI going on?

There is that possibility! Talking of which, I discovered an interesting thing possibly related to FNV hanging in a few places such as the Ultra Luxe bath house: I reinstalled FO3 a few days ago and was getting the same thing in several places there, which was solved by turning on threaded AI (which I'm a bit dubious about as that was something I'd wondered about as a possibility for savegame corruption). I should really try the same thing with FNV to see if it fixes the hangs there also.

[Glaedr]

lol. yea vom. FNV doesnt seem quite as unique as FO3 did, now that i've gone through at least 18 levels on one character. I loved the little random things that you could find in FO3, like the plunger room in the DC area or the chess board with all the gnomes on it. Little things like that made the game much more unpredictable and enjoyable to explore.

There are quite a few things that i like about the game, such as iron sight aiming. that i absolutely LOVE. I love being able to scope in on a big horn at an impossible distance w/ my cowboy repeater, pop off a shot or two, and kill it when its just barely within rendering distance. I also liked how that the play only gets perks every couple of levels instead of every level. That makes it MUCH harder to make an uber character which was SO easy to do in FO3. My current character in FO3 is mid 20's in level and carrying around Fawks and Dogmeat. I've played it on Very Hard from the beginning and it just doesnt seem like that much of a challenge anymore. heck, even w/ the DLC's i didnt end up finishing the game before I went back to Gears of War 2 and eventually rented Fallout: New Vegas. New Vegas takes away that Uber character and make the player much more vulnerable. I like how that you can find deathclaws right off the hospital bed if you know where to go. I ran into a quarry of them at level 3, and even on Very Easy I couldnt defeat them. Its little things like that that makes these games much more enjoyable to me. Whereas everything in FO3 eventually becomes trivial to kill and almost not worth the ammunition, things in FNV are to be paid attention to, if you want to live that is. You can't just take on that radscorpion anymore and expect to come out on top. There's now a very real possibility that its much stronger than you are at that point in time and that you WILL die, even on Very Easy. Even a hardcore level 30 character is still very capable of being killed by a few Giant Radscorpions if he/she's cornered and trapped by them.

I also like that now they have a set amount of experience points that the player will receive for killing enemies, while this does give the player less of a reason to up the difficulty, ppl that play on the easier difficulties wont be stuck at low levels simply because they're not capable of taking out a Deathclaw with a baseball bat on very hard.

One major thing that I ran across recently that almost makes the game not worth buying to me are the ungodly long loading screen. I swear i've spent at least 25% of my time playing behind a loading screen. I bought the game to have fun and enjoy it, not to have to sit there and read the helpful little tips that they have, which by the time I was level 5 I had read a thousand times over. The NPC's themselves also seem to have quite the range of programming to them. Some it seems the programmers where either falling asleep in their chairs or high off of SPEED or something. Some NPC's are incredibly annoying and way over-excited about things while others are rather boring and monotonus. Now that may just seem like variety, which it would be if the boring and monotonous NPC's weren't virtually every other person you come across and didnt sound like those machines that answer the phones at companies. They seem like robots, which is NOT how NPC's, even though "boring" in nature, arn't suppose to sound like that. They have not "life" to them. Even a boring natured character can have "life" to them if programmed right, which Beth or Obsidian, whichever one did it, seems to have missed this time around. As annoying as she might have been to some in FO3, Moira Brown from Megaton is a good example of what a well programmed character is. Morearty is another good one. Those two are exactly what they were programmed to be: a rather ditzy redhead and a [insert word to be censored here].

One thing that I actually noticed last night while at an all-nighter that i approved of was that the wild dogs in the wasteland actually looked like "regular" dogs, meaning that they traded out the old, decrepit textures for the dogs of FO3 for some actual dog skins. Mind you that the coyotes now seem to have that decrepit look, though w/ a sand paper texture. Well they're coyotes, they're suppose to look worn and malnutritioned.

All in all, Bethesda did indeed create another fun installment for the Fallout series, but they have to learn to set aside the time and money needed to put a solid game onto market. Sooner or later their fans will grow tired of the sheer number of bugs and game-breakers that seem to be present in all their games. Its like they dont hire anyone to test them out before they slap a label on them and ship them out. They pay attention to things like not releasing the game in India because the Brahmin are similiar to cows, which are worshiped in India, and the "cows" can be killed and such which they might find offensive, but yet they cant seem to release and good AND unbugged game. Mind you that unbugged is rather impossible since there will always be something in these games, but I would appreciate not having to get out the can of RAID every time I get one of their games.

[DaMage]

There is too much 'unfinished', but considering the seer scale, ill accept that not everything can be done.

If you travel off the beaten track there is some fun stuff to find, and the level scaling is much better. THe game both rewards and punishes exploring, at time you'll go off and find a sweet looking animal den full of coyotes....but another time you'll find another cave....full of Deathclaws or a radiated hole full of high level ghouls.....and this can all be found just off the beaten track on the road for the MQ (all in the south part of the map).

Personally, this game is the closest game I've played to morrowind....despite it not being a classic fanasty RPG. The bugs are a problem, and I really want this to get patched, but playing on the PC the game is much better, ive heard there are some bad loading time on xbox360, but on PC that issue doesnt come up. Any bugs can mostly be fixed by the console to

The fact you cant play after the ending gets me, that is a bad decision because you dont want to punish the player for following the most important quest in the game. A system like in Mass Effect 2 (where you are put back outside the ending zone and told anything you do now is presumed to happen before the final quest) would be much better. At the moment you have to manually do this, you lose all the experience and special items you get at the end (I mean, what is the point of giving me experience after killing the final boss? considering the moment I levelled up there was a little bit of unchangeable dialogue and the game ended), and then when you relaod you are stuck with the MQ in your log book and people telling you to go see some person.

I admit it would be hard to make a proper afterending situation (because of how much happens), but the Mass Effect 2 solution would have been just fine.

[vometia]

Didn't ME2 effectively continue after the culmination of the MQ? Though before would make more sense as the dialogue is a bit odd otherwise; I know that was supposed to be the case with DA:O, though there were some continuity errors there also IIRC, especially with the likes of Witch Hunt.

I'd prefer the game to simply carry on after the completion of the MQ and installed a mod to that effect. I saw no particular issue with going and wiping out Caesar's camp after the battle for Hoover Dam, for instance. So I did. As far as I've noticed, there's been no really obvious issues with doing this, either technically (though admittedly it's hard to tell considering the number of other problems!) nor with dialogue continuity. Which makes the forced ending seem a bit pointless.

It does say a lot about the game that I'm still scraping the barrel looking for things to do with my current play-through (now at 160 hours!) as I don't really feel ready to wave it goodbye just yet. But I think I may have to concede that however many times I traipse around the wasteland, it looks like that's my lot.

Still, at least once I do call it a day I won't have to endure that interminable loading carry on that Glaedr mentions: the actual loading screen with the roulette wheel isn't too bad (at least in my case) but having to wait sometimes several minutes for Steam to come to life (usually it's only a few seconds, but often it's unacceptably slow) and then go through the tedious array of unergonomically-arranged menu screens is very tedious. The FO3 start-up was similarly idiotically arranged; you'd think they'd have fixed it by now. At least there's no longer GFWL to endure, I suppose; didn't slow things down much but the way it blinked and flashed and buggered up the shaders for its duration was especially annoying. Kind of like the spirit of Clippy lives on.

[jaggedbubbles]

I've never encountered the lag issue with Steam starting up, but sometimes I do get the roulette wheel loading screen for a few minutes after a day of heavy gaming.

[DaMage]

How do people feel about the level cap again being raise, this time to 35 for the DLC....

While this has been a complaint by some who reached the level cap early...its no where near the amount of complaints about the ending of game.

Whats your take on it? I havent even reached the level cap yet (and I did do a fair bit of out of MQ exploring)....I could see it as a problem if you did everything but the ending of the MQ...but it does take a fair while to reach 30...its quite an achievement.

DO you think they needed to raise the level cap for the DLC?

[vometia]

It's one of those things where I'd prefer it not to be there, but it didn't bother me too much. I'd rather see an official resolution to the MQ ending the game; as it is, there are user-made mods to do both, but it'd be nice if it was a "designed in" feature rather than what is essentially a kludge.

But raising (or better still removing altogether) the level cap isn't unwelcome.

[jaggedbubbles]

I'd love to see the level cap raised! I hit the cap before I even got to Novac.

[HeyYou]

I'd love to see the level cap raised! I hit the cap before I even got to Novac.

There are a couple mods that already do this. One raises the level cap to like 100.... the other, which is necessary... alters the levelup screen so that you can bump skills over 100. I think there is yet a third.... that actually makes skills over 100 useful.