Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas

Ironically, this is the worst game in the franchise.
This, unlike many Obsidian fanboys might lead you on to-- is a genuine argument for why this is the worst entry on it's own. We are not accounting for mods, only for the base first release or DLC. I'm going to open this very strongly, and I'm going to use a lot of examples from Fallout 3 to prove my point. Also, it'll make the fanboys angry and that pleases my inner core.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel had a more solid release than this game-- Brotherhood of Steel. It only took numerous patches and two years for the game to finally get "noticed" as a competent videogame when Fallout 3 was at least playable. This isn't entirely Obsidian's fault, I understand-- but it was disasterous. Everyone seems to forget how awful this game was when it first was on sale, almost literally unplayable due to it's constant crashes, game breaking bugs which even to this day still require people to mod the game in order for it to work functionally.

It's one huge joint-operation of just a bandwagon of unnessecary bashing, not to mention how people were busy gargling the toes of Obsidian's directors. Just in general, spouting "hurr durr fallout 3 is bad" even though they probably didn't even make another playthrough of the game, despite the fact that New Vegas' has a clear amount of open flaws in it.

  1. The map is never courageous enough to let you find areas on your own, and just about every area in the game that isn't just a shack with a box inside of it you can get the location for by a quest and not your own valor.
  2. There's not enough actual content in the space of the map to occupy enough interesting posts, despite having even more locations than Fallout 3-- there are 11+ locations on the map that are entirely useless or irrelevant with the smallest handfuls of loot.
  3. There's no incentive for actual difficulty, the game boils down to you playing on Very Hard where enemies become the Juggernaut or any difficulty lower and you could breathe in the general direction of somebody and they drop dead.
  4. New Vegas is not very subtle on where it wants you to go, and the "linear" argument falls flat on it's face. The Sloan Deathclaws and the Cazadors after heading past Goodsprings' Northern Roads clearly indeciates that it wants the player to go where the game wants.
  5. Fallout 3 is chastised for not having morally ambigious options, where New Vegas has few and far between. Rarely is there a choice where you can have a moral compass involved without some outside factor.
  6. Additionally, to follow up on the last point-- the Reputation system is it's own greatest weakness, meaning that you will always do something to appeal your faction in choices-- but not for yourself.
  7. Fallout 3 is chastised for having the Brotherhood of Steel be "too open to newcomers", despite the fact that their resolution to continue as a faction is to expand or die out. In Fallout 1's canonical ending, the Brotherhood chapter opens up to help the wasteland and settle as an R&D settlement. While in New Vegas, they don't open up at all, in fact-- they remain completely flat about their choice to stay isolated the entire game.
  8. Fallout 3 has many elaborate mazes and worldbuilding elements that make it's interiors unique for each one, New Vegas fails to compare by having all of their interiors blend together into "go upstairs, shoot bad guys, etc". Nothing is particularly interesting or notable outside of The Strip itself. The Bomb in Megaton, the scale of Tenpenny Towers-- the broken streets of the DC city. Everything is very drab and lifeless in Fallout 3, but it added something to it's horror factor. The feeling of being hopeless or that everything is gone.
  9. New Vegas sets itself up in a "post-post apocolypse" scenario, meaning that civilization is rebuilding itself, but you do not see the same atmosphere of "the world putting itself back together after destruction"-- all of the major portions seem static and flat. The atmosphere is a discourse from the fact that it's a wasteland and not a glorified desert.
  10. Continuing the point on morals, in the standoff between the Kahn's and the NCR, there are several ways to resolve it-- but there is one solution that the game gives you fame towards both factions and nobody dies, the perfect resolution. Why would you not pick that? That isn't the "moral choices" other Fallout titles get yelled at for.
  11. The game suffers from it's lack of proper progression, rarely do rewards grant you more than just a few extra caps, a gun and XP, that's a given, but I felt as there was no real reason to do side missions you can just run to New Vegas and finish the game just as you leave the gate. Again, proceeding itself to the lack of exploration.

I'll give more criticism if needed, but as for now I believe these are valid reasons, of course if you'd like to argue back-- I'm open for the debate.
Legutóbb szerkesztette: bug; 2018. jún. 17., 13:29
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4660/213 megjegyzés mutatása
Chinfu1189OG eredeti hozzászólása:
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
Okay? That doesn't actually refute any of my arguments-- especially if you don't have any proof to show for it, or at least a statement about them? Nothing at all? You're just saying "NV is better". For what did it improve on-- anything?
Aiming,story,DLCS,Factions,Actually good companions beside having fawkes only,
New and actual helpful perks

You're being vague-- and that doesn't help you. Do you have any comparisons if you're going to use Fallout 3 as a precedent? I'm not going to baby you to fix your own composition, so. . .
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
Chinfu1189OG eredeti hozzászólása:
Aiming,story,DLCS,Factions,Actually good companions beside having fawkes only,
New and actual helpful perks

You're being vague-- and that doesn't help you. Do you have any comparisons if you're going to use Fallout 3 as a precedent? I'm not going to baby you to fix your own composition, so. . .
Vague? I gave you many points of how they improved the game
Chinfu1189OG eredeti hozzászólása:
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:

You're being vague-- and that doesn't help you. Do you have any comparisons if you're going to use Fallout 3 as a precedent? I'm not going to baby you to fix your own composition, so. . .
Vague? I gave you many points of how they improved the game
"Many points" including-- "the game, but with a few extra buzzwords". Still not helping your case.
I just want the game to not hard-freeze my computer. So I agree with you, this game sux. But really just because I can't play it anyway.

edit: for those curious, it spontaneously freezes and refuses to minimize. So all i can do is restart. My rig runs fallout 4 without problems... (wish the load screens weren't 20+ seconds)
Legutóbb szerkesztette: Proxy Kaizen; 2018. jún. 17., 18:33
The constant crashing without mods is entirely Bethesda's fault for using a garbage engine, the emptyness of the wasteland some players feel is because of the obserd 1 year only Obsidian was given, and let me make a list to make this not a hot mess of a paragraph.

The fame or infamy you get for quests has nothing to do with morality, it does with what a faction thinks of you, and people choose what they want based on what they believe in or if they want to roleplay, so if you or your character hates the khans, you'd just kill them all.

The side quests are still worth it for the xp other stuff you might need for a specific build, and there is no reason to not do them anyways, because its basically free rewards for doing something you want to do, for yourself or your character.

The other fallout games get criticized for not having a grey moral area because let me list the games' antagonists in a nutshell: The evil super mutants and their master, which have their reasons but are ultimately another "oh look im the bad guy with no reasons why you'd want to side with me besides its fun", we have the enclave in both fallout 2 and 3 which are again, one sides bad guys with no reason you'd think helping them is a good idea, and of course you have the Institute in fallout 4, which TRIES to have justification but fails horribly at it. All 4 of the factions in new vegas have reasons you'd want and wouldn't want to help them. The Legion, may be ruthless slavers, but they may actually have a way to save the mojave and make it safe with their known fear and lack of self preservation. The NCR is a democratic republic that lets people live free, but can't for the life of them keep their own citizens safe in their own territory from fiends, raiders, the Legion, etc. Mr. House has the intellect to revive Vegas as it once was and keep it's people safe with securitrons, but he's a dictorship, or "autocrat" in his words, while regulated by programs, still unpredictable. And their is Yes man, where God knows what you will do to the mojave.

The start of the game is made as a literal tutorial so people don't get overwhelmed when they start up the game, and you can still use whatever you can to make your way through the "blocked off paths" if you so choose.

The reputation system gets a person to strive for the most fame they can get with a faction, yes, but for their own benefit. You wouldn't do anything for the Great Khans if you could buy their guns without any rep, you wouldn't do ♥♥♥♥ for the NCR if they didn't open up THEIR armories and quest options for you later on. Or you just strive to get fame because you wanna be that "Elite Legion Idol that is feared by all". It comes to the roleplay most times.

There is a wide assortment of locations you while have to find yourself on the map, while some are in fact boring shacks just sitting in the waste, there are other places packed with challenge, story, or just dumb eastereggs. The arguement that you find everything with guidance worth finding comes from a person who has never heard of "The Survivor" in Honest Hearts, or literally any of the side story in Dead Money.

To number 8, there are plenty of places of interesting worldbuilding in the New Vegas map, like Camp Searchlight, Nipton, Camp Forlorn Hope, Bitter Springs, etc. Take the time to look around and you'll find some pretty interesting things hidden in the cracks. And if you still don't think there is enough of these sorts of places in the map, blame Bethesda for giving Obsidian only a year to make the game.

The Brotherhood in NV is a different blend from Fallout 3's group, and is stuck in isolation because their leader is traumatized after Helios, the rest of the bunker really wants to just get out of the bunker. There is an ending still to get them out of the bunker and active, btw. To say they are flat about why the brotherhood ends off most playthroughs isolated is to admit you didn't look around and explore the lot of what you could do with the Hidden Valley BOS.

For number 3, all of the Bethesda era Fallout games have had a difficulty problem, so no use in pointing fingers at only NV. If Very Hard is a bullet sponge heaven to you, maybe you just didn't make your build right ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The point i can agree with is 9, as New Vegas does feel a little less like "everything is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dead" than the game before. This was, I feel, in a way intentional, to remind you that you don't live in a dead world, but a world trying to put itself back together, and those people fighting like animals for who gets to "make the lego set".

I think the reason you had a problem with some of these is because you weren't thinking in a roleplay stance, just a "finish the main quest once and leave it forever". You don't seem to have done everything you could to research or experiment with some of these problems, as if you just jumped to conclusions on your first playthrough. The Bethesda era games were meant to be modded at some point btw, and helped to make the games popular, so if you still feel the game could use improvement people, just install nvse and get started. It's as easy as dropping a file into a folder.
Btw mantis, you'd help by giving us your total playtime on NV, as I can't seem to be able to find your missing games button in your profile to check.
§QualityButt eredeti hozzászólása:
Btw mantis, you'd help by giving us your total playtime on NV, as I can't seem to be able to find your missing games button in your profile to check.
500+ hours, did I not turn that on?
Proxy, the game wasn't exactly made to be played on advanced systems, so you may have to try to install a couple of performance mods, nvse for starters, 4gb etc.
Just look up a thing on youtube and get started.
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
§QualityButt eredeti hozzászólása:
Btw mantis, you'd help by giving us your total playtime on NV, as I can't seem to be able to find your missing games button in your profile to check.
500+ hours, did I not turn that on?

oof
Legutóbb szerkesztette: a quality meme; 2018. jún. 17., 19:06
§QualityButt eredeti hozzászólása:
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
500+ hours, did I not turn that on?

Your profile seriously doesn't have a games button, and i didn't know that was an option, if it is.
It is, everyone defaults to not letting them see their games now, my apologies for not ticking it to public.
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
a common theme with a lot of game devs is to let go all of their star talents go-- borderlands 1 is a pretty good example of replacing a new sports car with a long-lasting automobile.

sure the shiny coat of new paint is fun, but when the crippling debt comes to bite you you'll want to get rid of it. kinda like how borderlands 2's meme humor backfired now and is just incredibly cringeworthy.

I really enjoy all the fallout games, each game has a point where we can gripe over this and that, fallout 4 with it's lack of diversity and role-playing elements, fallout New Vegas being unstable and being linear, and yet giving you the ability to go non-linear (but it is very hard), fallout 3's loooooooooong intro that we would like to skip the second or third time playing it, and not being a ble to run on current PC's without a lot of help. The point is we love these games enough to criticize them. Fallout New Vegas may be my favorite personally (and yes that is with mods) but that should'nt divide our community just because we like a certain game over another. We should be talking about the parts of the games we like.
Lester The Terran eredeti hozzászólása:
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
a common theme with a lot of game devs is to let go all of their star talents go-- borderlands 1 is a pretty good example of replacing a new sports car with a long-lasting automobile.

sure the shiny coat of new paint is fun, but when the crippling debt comes to bite you you'll want to get rid of it. kinda like how borderlands 2's meme humor backfired now and is just incredibly cringeworthy.

I really enjoy all the fallout games, each game has a point where we can gripe over this and that, fallout 4 with it's lack of diversity and role-playing elements, fallout New Vegas being unstable and being linear, and yet giving you the ability to go non-linear (but it is very hard), fallout 3's loooooooooong intro that we would like to skip the second or third time playing it, and not being a ble to run on current PC's without a lot of help. The point is we love these games enough to criticize them. Fallout New Vegas may be my favorite personally (and yes that is with mods) but that should'nt divide our community just because we like a certain game over another. We should be talking about the parts of the games we like.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ legendary.
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
Sure, it does effect the ending (which has no post-game and thus has not as much weight-- because at least you could play after finishing the main plot in Broken Steel, and Fallout 2, hell even Fallout 4 let you play post-game) but where a hint in the direction that it mattered if you don't distinctively go around and ask for it? Missing the "better" ending just because you didn't spam interact on every person you walked by seems a little redundant.

Well, a couple of things here.

1) Making an impact on a game's ending is kind of the point. It's the entire reason you interact with a story in different ways in the first place. It doesn't matter if there's a postgame or not; you're rewarded for your actions by getting to see how everything you did affected the various communities across the wasteland, and overall what kind of impact your character had.

2) Developing a postgame with so many different permutations would've been a difficult and possibly even futile task. Think about it. New Vegas has a ton of endings that would need to be more or less individually parsed out. They'd have to take the time to do that, which would probably take more dev time than the game itself, and even then, they still not may capture the complete scope and end up making things seem artificial.

Overall, I don't think there's a right or wrong way of doing this; I've seen people argue that having an ending to the game allowed them to feel closure, like their time in NV with that particular character had come to a definitive close. Some people genuinely like that. Others, like you appear to, prefer there to be a postgame where you can explore ad infinitum until you get bored. As long as either ending parses out the consequences of the player's choices, I don't think there's an issue.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
"Because you may consider the NCR or Khans scum and legitimately think one or the other—or both—is better off dead."

Yes, but the game will still reward you in-game brownie points for doing it, making the "universe" favor more towards picking that resolve, and at this point in the game you've seen the Khan's minimally if you followed the main story route.

This is a fair point, but the in-game karma system is so thoroughly broken that it really doesn't matter. Let's take for instance killing fiends. They're automatically hostile towards you, but killing them nets you a ton of karma, even if you're only doing it for money or out of self-defense. I think a flaw of the game was actually that they left the karma system in, but the game's own mechanics render it arbitrary anyway in the end. As for not knowing about the Khans, New Vegas does not run into the same problem as Fallout 3 in giving your character a relatively rigid backstory. There's nothing inherently strange about assuming your character has encountered them before.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
"I don't understand this. What you do can both benefit your reputation with a faction and benefit you, particularly if your character wants that faction to win. They aren't mutually exclusive."

But you mentioned that specifically with "faction-based" runs like 'pro-NCR', but I feel like the moral choices are absent because of the faction system driving you to pick choices that benefit whatever faction you're rooting for, and not by what the characters moral compass is. I just mean I feel there's more emphasis on doing things for factions and not for yourself, you aren't even independent when you pick the Yes Man ending, you're still with Yes Man.

Well, I ask this: don't you think that your character's moral compass will have a direct impact on the faction he or she decides to support? For example, if your character's moral compass says that authority is corruptible and generally immoral, your character would likely find helping the Followers and Yes Man more morally acceptable than the Legion, NCR, or House.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
A little low-hanging, but I can see where you come from-- but there's many more situations to resolve different problems. What about Hubris Comics, a random part of the map in which if you grab some info from a terminal inside there, leads to an entirely new option to the AntAgonizer and Mechanist quest? You would only get that if you explored and got information to make the choices about it.

Oh, don't mistake me. Fallout 3, as I said, does have some good quests, and that in particular was a good alternate for that one. It was creative. But my point was that the game's main story—the one in which everyone will participate in some way—is plagued by moral binaries, as well as a few of the serious quests, like deciding the fate of Megaton.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
What about how in Tenpenny tower, the Ghouls seem like the obvious choice to go with until you see that everyones corpses have been moved into the basement and you have to make a concious decision on if you're going to stop the rest of the Ghouls or take the final assault and earn the Ghoul Mask, a powerful item early on.

Roy Phillips does not give the impression of being a diplomatic individual, or at least I never perceived him that way. I could see the whole "kill all the human residents of Tenpenny Tower" thing coming a mile away, honestly. But let's explore the quest a little more, because I did like this one quite a bit. The premise obviously begins with the residents of Tenpenny Tower being emphatically wrong. Only a rock-banging moron would listen to a ghoul speak and genuinely think that they weren't sentient and humans—mutated, but still "human" in the sense that they're capable of advanced reason, dialect, understanding, emotion, etc. It's a very obvious play towards racism. So the Tenpenny residents are in the moral wrong. Roy Phillips, insofar as he wants to "coexist peacefully" with the Tenpenny residents, is not in the wrong. So, you do the quest, but as it turns out, Phillips actually is just as bigoted as the Tenpenny residents. But it's not clear 1) if you can convince the other ghouls to stop him from murdering the Tenpenny residents, or 2) if you can convince Phillips himself not to do it. So, what seems like it could very well be a moral choice goes awry because options that should be there just aren't for some reason, and you're a monster either way, if we use an outcomes-based morality system. But if we use an intentions-based one in which the player desires the clearly morally good choice of ghouls and humans coexisting, there's an obvious moral binary here. So we either have two morally bad choices or one good choice and one bad one. I guess if you argued in favor of the outcomes-based one, there's moral ambiguity there.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
What about the slavers?

Slavery is a morally ambiguous question? We aren't talking about people like the Legion who may have some very obvious downsides but could be good for long-term stability. The slavers just buy and sell people for personal gain. That's pretty black-and-white imo.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
No, I know there are some barren areas, but areas are also very scattered out as most of the main storyline is condensed into one portion of the map, so understandably when spread out it looks a little empty.

But-- what about the Metro Systems being tight and claustrophobic against the open flat lands near Vault 111 and The Super Duper Mart, the dense areas of the DC Outskirts with placed super mutants at an elevated area with a feeling of unknowing as to whats to come?

This emptiness combined with how land is distributed makes the world feel artifically a lot larger than it actually is, and have you gone to the Tacoma area before through the metro? Going back to the choices in mind, you could just artillery strike the Super Mutant Behemoth there rather than take him on yourself. But, it's a secret reward along with unique items for a player who explores.

The metros are one of the most universally hated thing about Fallout 3, though. They're less dungeons and more underground areas leading from one interesting location to another. They're dark and, for the most part, not really fun for people to explore. They exist almost solely because of engine limitations. But my point here was that you said there wasn't enough content in the space of New Vegas's map as a whole, whereas large portions of Fallout 3's map are totally barren. Yeah, it may be to give the feeling of vastness, but it doesn't change the fact that F3 also has a ton of empty/unused space and is guilty in this regard as well, provided you consider that a bad thing.

As for the atmosphere, I think the tense atmosphere of impending war of NV is good, but I think Fallout 3 does atmosphere very well.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
What about having to put the exploration effort to get Lincoln's Rifle and the Unique Chinese Assault Rifle? A lot of the unique items in New Vegas you have to buy or obtain via quests, only 11 of them are actually in the wastes.

Eleven is a pretty decent number.

fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
Upon thinking about it, the world probably does change a bit more-- but the presentation of it with Mr. New Vegas constantly reporting on it made my brain hurt since all he does is just give the most bland, natural opinion on it.

Well, if, for example, you kill the NCR troops stationed at Helios One, the Legion comes in and takes over after a while. But a lot of the "movement" is political and discerned through dialogue.
Legutóbb szerkesztette: Zeno; 2018. jún. 17., 21:36
Just my two cents; a good role playing game hinges on good quality writing. New Vegas is easily the best written of the Fallouts. It isn't dumbed down in the way Fallout 3 and 4 are. I thought about my dialogue choices in a way I rarely felt compelled to in Fallout 3 and, well, pretty much never felt in 4.

It's rough around the edges for sure, and the world map itself is bland as ♥♥♥♥. But in terms of just the quality of the writing, it's exceptional where Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are pedestrian. That, to me, is what makes it the best of the series.

To each his own, though.
fruity mantis eredeti hozzászólása:
We are not accounting for mods, only for the base first release or DLC.

No can do.
Haven't ever played it Vanilla simply as I started modding with Fallout 3 and wasn't even interested in New Vegas until some proper mods arrived.

Possibly because the first few tries of playing it (pre-Ultimate edition), made me run into various issues and bugs.
So yeah, upon release it was horrible, but I am not living in the past.


After starting to play and mod it properly it's the best in the whole franchise for me.
Even if it still has similar clunky animations as F3, the modability is thanks to NVSE and JIP LN NVSE plugin way better than F3.
F4 brings new technologies, but as the Creation Engine sucks, when it comes to modding (mod content is saved into the savegame) I rather stick with gamebryo.
Simply as that engine is very forgiving (even though not that stable with too much plugins).

Yet, New Vegas is so easy and joyful to mod, that it will always be funny to come back to it.
I wouldn't have been able to write my Dynamic Pipboy Light mod, if that statement won't come from the bottom of my heart.
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Közzétéve: 2018. jún. 17., 13:09
Hozzászólások: 213