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Fallout: New Vegas

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From the twitters of one Fuck N. Breckon:

I originally put the 'awesome face' in here, but instead, I'll just say this.

In the wasteland, flying off a bridge. . .

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8QY8MjsnC_g



lol, I love the visual of him dragging the items into the bucket in front of the shop keeper and guards.

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I think I'm wrapping up Novac and the surrounding area. There was so much cool stuff to do!

Powering up Helios One and seeing the sunlight blind you was a great gasp moment, and sending ghouls into space to Ride of the Valkyries was hilarious. I especially loved the unconventional way that you could load their spaceship up on rocket fuel.

Its great how detailed the zone was and all of it was entirely optional, just there to discover.

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What a bunch of fuck ups. Am I the only one around New Vegas that can solve the problems? This has been an issue in all of Bethesda's games (and now this Obsedian game), they always seem to forget to include non-screwups as NPCs, or maybe just have them as stories. It's always about me me me. It would have been fresh if one of those quest givers would simply say once in a while that person X just completed the stuff they had left to do.

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The many little quest bugs start to annoy me. I already have some crap in my inventory I cannot get rid off because I already completed that quest through other means (yay for alternative solutions). My ED-E quest started broken, but I could fix that. And it looks like I have a quest item in my inventory (worth a shit load of money) but according to the wiki it's now useless because I found it while the quest wasn't active. So it's still dangerous to wander of in the desert because it could ruin things. But not as bad as FO3 when you could skip a large portion of the main story.

It's also nice that there are competing quests. But some don't make sense, like

the Gomorrah casino takeover

and the escape of some of their whores

.

Lack of fast travel on the strip is really a pain.

And, speech seems a bit unbalanced in the game. It will become quite easy if you make sure speech is really high. A lot of quests can easily be completed with high speech.

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Gamestop dropped the price of a new copy of New Vegas to $20, so I bought the game this weekend.

I held out until now partially because I still had so much Fallout 3 to play. I also was put off by the Rock Paper Shotgun review, in which Quintin Smith complained about the half-hearted voice acting and world-building.

And while I can understand the complaints (Sunny Smiles is distractingly bad), so far I'm enjoying the game.

My favorite improvement is in enemy logic. Fallout 3 was terrible in this respect; any enemy within line of sight would chase you halfway across Maryland. But in New Vegas, single Geckos and Coyotes will leave you alone unless you approach them, and injured animals will run away. I know some people don't care about this, but dumb enemies make some games unplayable for me.

I also enjoyed the first mission in Goodsprings; a sort of "round up the town and have a shootout". If the quest quality stays high, and the human enemies aren't too terrible, I think this will be a good game.

I am terrible at Caravan, though.

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I am terrible at Caravan, though.

I never played a single game.

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i'm playing this now. Just reached my level cap with the majority of the main quest to go. As a completionist, it bugs me that

most of the main questlines are split into seemingly mutually exclusive factions that promote playing a 60hour game 4 times

but thanks to the wiki I can avoid too many unhappy experiences. I do appreciate the sheer number of things to do but because there are so many possibilities i think that my conversations have many options where i don't really understand why I'd want to say that.

the great khans are a good example of this. Just because I went to Red Rock Canyon, that means I want them to not support Ceasar's Legion?

. I'm having a lot of fun with it though, when it works.

The latest patch actually broke my game. I had some weird bug that made me crash every time I opened my inventory or went to VATS. Turning off anti-aliasing seemed to have fixed it although it still crashed on maybe 1 out of every 30 loading screens. Oh well.

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Oh hey, Fallout: New Vegas is a game i played.

Generally really enjoyed the game, it was well written and well designed. The way the core game systems were rebalanced makes a lot of sense, and addresses a lot of the issues i had with FO3. I don't think the quest design was as strong as in Fallout 3, where it often seemed like Bethesda had accounted for every possibility, and i felt like there was kind of a dearth of actual combat after a while. (Particularly in trying to do a completist run. It feels silly making this complaint, but when you're walking around with twelve weapons in your inventory and you realize the game hasn't made you shoot anything for like ten hours, it feels really weird.)

A lot of my love for the game was squandered when i had to brute force through the

dam sequence in the finale

because the game kept crashing every two minutes. (Which was really just the last straw after having to save scum around so, so many broken quests.)

Fallout 3 had a lot of issues, but it wasn't egregiously broken like New Vegas was. (I find it silly that people around the internet seem to think New Vegas is Bethesda's fault though. It's not even their game, it was developed by Obsidian.)

The latest patch actually broke my game. I had some weird bug that made me crash every time I opened my inventory or went to VATS. Turning off anti-aliasing seemed to have fixed it although it still crashed on maybe 1 out of every 30 loading screens. Oh well.

So they actually issued a recommendation that people not download the latest patch, but i guess then they didn't even bother to pull that patch? Kind of crazy.

Edited by Sno

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I don't think the PC patch had the same issues as 360 (corrupted saves ;( ), or at least it didn't corrupt anything for me. i'm currently deciding whether to go through the DLC or not. I pretty avidly went through all the FO3 stuff (and had a good time with most of it), but on the other hand i'm not sure i'll have any interest left after finishing all the Strip quests that just got dumped on me.

i felt like there was kind of a dearth of actual combat after a while

yeah, isn't that strange?! I spent so long on the Strip talking to people that I fast travelled to Primm just to shoot some deathclaws for a while. I guess I had similar experiences in Vivec/Imperial City/Rivet City but for some reason it didn't feel as uneven as Freeside/The Strip does here. Especially that

King's quest where i had to basically run back and forth between King HQ and the old mormon fort 5 times in a row

.

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Yeah, I played this awhile ago. At it's best, it reminded me of Fallout 2, where you'd have huge cities with lots of interactions between characters and options for solving problems. The Ultra-Luxe quests were the most memorable for me. The faction interaction was also really neat - I liked having lots of options for how the end-game would play out. (I just wish the story amounted to something more than "Pick which side you want to win in a fight over a dam." For an RPG, these are really low stakes.)

Fundamentally, though, it was still a frustrating experience because I hate using the Oblivion engine for Fallout combat. It was painfully boring in Fallout 3 and none of the changes Obsidian made improved it. Combat basically amounts to backing up while targeting and shooting while you wait for VATS to refill. Or you can just fire. The only strategy is which guns to carry around with you and how many stimpaks to buy.

Also, I *hated* the end-game. (I guess because it was so combat-heavy.)

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(I just wish the story amounted to something more than "Pick which side you want to win in a fight over a dam." For an RPG, these are really low stakes.)

I find this an odd comment, because the story makes it pretty explicitly clear that your actions on the dam are deciding the fate of the whole region and will have implications beyond. You're setting the balance between the two emergent superpowers of the wasteland, changing the whole power structure of the Fallout world. I mean, that's not exactly a stroll down to the mailbox.

Why should every finale devolve into a fate-of-the-world scenario, anyways?

In Fallout 3 it was so forced and dumb, none of the characters were doing anything that made any sense.

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I find this an odd comment, because the story makes it pretty explicitly clear that your actions on the dam are deciding the fate of the whole region and will have implications beyond. You're setting the balance between the two emergent superpowers of the wasteland, changing the whole power structure of the Fallout world. I mean, that's not exactly a stroll down to the mailbox.

Why should every finale devolve into a fate-of-the-world scenario, anyways?

In Fallout 3 it was so forced and dumb, none of the characters were doing anything that made any sense.

I mean, I get that, and in theory that sounds great. But in practice, the game - previously very good at handling different sorts of decision-making - makes it clear that you are being funneled to "the big battle" one way or another without any ability to, say, sit it out or talk the various sides into a peace agreement. And since the game doesn't continue past that point to let you see the consequences of having one side or another in charge, it doesn't matter all *that* much to me who wins. I guess my real complaint is not about the story as much as the fact that the endgame was the one part where I felt very railroaded down a particular path.

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Well you have four separate paths through that endgame, which is a lot more than you can say about most games, but yeah... Alright, i guess you're always going to be fighting on that dam, no matter who you side with.

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All the DLC talk lately, as well as this game being $15 during the Steam summer sale a couple of weeks ago, persuaded me to drop into this game. Holy shit, why didn't I play this earlier? I'm more than 12 hours in and I still haven't even seen the strip. I was really worried before that the survivalist aspect of Fallout would be reduced because of the proximity to a relatively unharmed city, but that hasn't been true at all. In fact, between things like harvesting plants and being able to make my own ammunition, it's been increased a fair amount. Reading some of the earlier posts on this page, it seems that I completely missed some cool stuff around Helios One, but finishing the "Fly Me To The Moon" quest plastered a huge smile across my face. I'm doing a bunch of stuff around Freeside right now, with my current save at the door of a run-down robotics facility where I'm going to try and find a sex-bot to sell to a casino/whorehouse. I really like how this game has managed to combine the bleak, desolate world of Fallout with the debauchery of Vegas. It makes more sense to me than Fallout 3, which despite everything still seemed a bit too clean for a post-apocalypse. New Vegas is more of the mind that: Hey, if shit goes down and society is all fucked up, the need to blow off steam, get real drunk, and lose yourself for a while will probably go up, not down. The way that you see people embracing that and making a huge profit in caps while they're at it is really cool to me. I never thought of it at the time, but the majority of people that I dealt with in Fallout 3 were just so damned noble that it's refreshing to see this side of it.

Since the first 2 DLCs were on sale for about $2 a piece with the game, and the third is only $10, I have now purchased all of the expansions for this game that are available. This gives me the complete experience for less than $30. When the last pack comes out, I will have had the complete experience for less than $40. At 12 hours in and the end nowhere in sight, as well as not having touched a single piece of DLC yet, I'm very happy with the value this game is giving me.

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I put 60 hours in the bare game (according to vaporized water).

Haven't done any DLC.

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Yo, it's $15 on Steam again today. Given the hours that I've put into it so far, I'd say definitely give it a look if you were anywhere near the fence before.

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I would strongly recommend waiting until Sunday to take advantage of that. Since this is a Bethesda thing, and they've already done Quake/Doom and TES, Fallout will probably be on an even bigger sale.

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I came to a point in New Vegas where I don't know if I can keep playing.

I've given my loyalty to Mr. House, obeying each of his commands. However, in his latest mission, he's commanded me to

massacre the Brotherhood of Steel. The "good guys" from Fallout 3! I haven't killed every last anybody in Fallout. I certainly don't want to start with the friends of people I've spent so much time with like Sarah Lyons and, uh, Liberty Prime.

I'm ethically opposed to this quest! I've also ruined my reputations with the other factions by choosing Mr. House, so I'm not sure if it's still feasible to switch sides and get to any sort of an ending.

So I might just pick up Deus Ex tomorrow and stop playing New Vegas, a game I have been playing for three months straight.

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I'm ethically opposed to this quest! I've also ruined my reputations with the other factions by choosing Mr. House, so I'm not sure if it's still feasible to switch sides and get to any sort of an ending.

It's definitely possible to get an ending without being allied with any of the factions. I haven't done the House quest line, so I'm not sure what options are available to you at the point where you are, but I recommend talking to

Yes Man

if you haven't already. He doesn't care about your reputation.

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That's actually quite a nice part of New Vegas, you really have to make a few tough decisions. From the start I quickly knew I didn't want to side with the Legion. But for the other factions I eventually had to make the tough decision and pick one. I liked how they did that. It's only a shame that the outcome doesn't matter a lot for the non-legion endgames.

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