Been playing Fallout New Vegas for a few days (around 20-30 hours or more). The game is a big time sink. It’s fine, but there are many things I don’t like. Internals are very samey and uninspired.
The game is very empty. It’s full of uninteresting locations, where sometimes I end up thinking “why am I even here?”
Most cities are abandoned and small, much smaller than in Fallout 1 and 2. I have yet to enter New Vegas, which seems huge, I am approaching it.
It does have its good moments as well: places such as the vaults are cool. I love the weapons. I like the monster design and the externals are much better than the internals, from a graphic/artistic point of view. I love deathclaws (as usual) and cazadores. I love how certain huge electric plants look (again, from the outside).
But in general, even if the game is more than tolerable, I cannot understand why it is held up so highly. There are too many uninteresting encounters. Many uninteresting “surprises”.
The “hardcore” mode (survival mode) is just busywork and I ended up disabling it, and I don’t regret having done so. It’s extremly poorly implemented.
What do you think, guys? I still have to play more of it, obviously, and I also haven’t played the DLC which seems to be very nice, from what I read.
But still, the game has too many problems (design wise, not bugs) for the reputation it’s gained over time.
I think it’s better than its predecessor in some ways, but I wound up getting bored with it because the follower I recruited (the robot dog, I think) was so strong it wound up killing nearly all my enemies for me before I would even realize they were there. And there was otherwise not enough novelty to keep my interest after I’d spent 100+ hours playing Fallout 3.
I also hated almost all of the NPCs for some reason. I was sorely tempted at a certain point to just start killing them all to see how much the game could take before it was completely broken in terms of quests.
Been playing Prey on XB1 and it’s convinced me I should maybe one day buy a PC. I never had one growing up cause only rich kid shit heads could afford that shit but I NEED to play this game in 60fps. I want Resident Evil 8 to be more like Prey and less like RE7. I’ve heard so much praise for the art direction but I kinda think it looks like shit? The color palette is an eye sore and it’s way too kitsch at times. It really does have excellent atmosphere though and my heart drops every time I have an enemy encounter; perhaps I’ll have more thoughts later.
Yeah I mean it’s much better than the other modern Fallouts because it has actual quest design, interesting writing, legitimate choices & consequences Obsidian stuff, and considered world design (there are farms to feed New Vegas for example). So it has a lot more verisimilitude. But yeah it’s still in the terrible gormy Bethesda Fallout engine and it’s still hugely based on picking up junk one shelf at a time and that’s as unsatisfying as it’s ever been.
The good quest stuff really starts going once you hit the actual city of New Vegas. You may want to wait to quit until you’ve played in there for a while. But I never finished NV myself, just because it’s better doesn’t mean it’s good, really.
its ugly and too long and vats should be infinite (BUT NOT WITH THOSE SOUND EFFECTS) and the writing is only good in comparison to other fallouts (except tactics, the only good fallout)
its success i think was cuz people were so hungry for the iconography, and after how bland 3 was new vegas felt like The Next Great American Videogame or whatever. also it was well advertised!
dont force yourself or you’ll just resent the game more
Funnily enough, all the subsequent opinions on the same site (and their best lists) mention the game as wonderful, but that review was much colder (and realistic) about it.
The context of New Vegas matters a lot in regard to how it’s remembered as well – it came out directly after the execrable Fallout 3, which is awful and a standard-bearer for neu-Bethesda design principles, so dropping even a crumb of old-school CRPG sensibility gave a lot of people the warm fuzzies.
journey and uncharted trilogy are free on psn right now.
i just played through journey. glad it was free
it wasn’t bad, but like 90% of it was basically “watching an arty animated movie while holding up on the analogue stick”, and i can’t see myself ever wanting to replay it
regarding the 3d fallouts, most of what i want from them is the three Ses: Solitude in the wasteland, Sniping monsters, and Searching through abandoned buildings.
i appreciate that journey is a rarity in that it’s not a game designed for endless play, instead designed around one shared linear experience. i mean, i may have played through it twice since it’s so short and it’s quite pretty, but my first time going through with an anonymous partner was kinda magical and stands as an experience i would rather not try to replicate.
I didn’t realize that I was playing with other people until around halfway through Journey.
While ICO is still my favorite modern video game, Journey is up there. And now that I’m thinking about it I’m going to have to listen to the soundtrack again. Especially this part of the soundtrack:
there was only another person present for a few minutes of my playthrough as far as i could tell, though the end of the game told me i’d actually met 3 other players
I can’t stand that review, because it is still from that era where RPS was convinced that Fallout 3 was a masterpiece and hated New Vegas for not being as gormless and shitty as Fo3.
Anyway, I still like FNV. Here’s what it does well:
The quest design is better than you’re giving it credit for. Go do the quest at the REPCONN test site to get a feel for why the quests are interesting. They often apply 2-3 mutually contradictory routes through both the quest line and the physical space you’re exploring, such that it is impossible to see all of a quest in one play-through, and your choices have a permanence to them that is unknown in open world games at the time. The characters and factions are not exactly grounded but represent a sort of coherent pulp vision of a post apocalypse (as opposed to the clown fart monkey cheese random bullshit that defined fallout 3)
Like, it’s a cliche at this point to do this with ‘immersive sims’ but Fallout New Vegas is incredibly resilient to the standard ‘can I beat the game after killing all the npcs’ playthrough. It’s also incredibly resilient to the opposite, ‘can I avoid killing anyone’ playthrough. They have completely different feels both mechanically and in terms of roleplaying.
The game is still one of the few 3d open world RPGs that isn’t actually on rails at any point, though people have often mistook taking the obvious path for being railroaded when playing through the game.
I do agree with you to the extent that it’s one of few-to-no big budget videogame RPGs that comes anywhere close to having actually thoughtful RPG-qua-RPG design from the era of its release (and note that even the most widely admired CRPGs before and since still barely do this), but I think that’s diminished substantially by it still being a single player game and in bethesda’s engine at that. like, it has genuinely good plotting and world design in a format where that’s least likely to register. I would rather look at its spreadsheets than play it.
