Doesn't FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS deserve its own thread?

can we delete this thread and start a new one so that when Princess TamTam is dead and gone in a few days' time we won't have to put up with this tedious reminder for the next however many months?

The fact that so many fans of FO3 are talking shit on this makes me hopeful.

Not certain why you're being so cruel, Roberto. This is a place for discussion, not flaming.

I don't understand why you're HOPING that this will suck.

Sorry, I meant that it made me hopeful it would be a good game.

i'm actually gonna wait a bit on it and watch this thread

I have it in my hands. I'll give you first impressions when I get a chance to put a few hours in.

Supposedly its mad buggy, making it the true successor to fallout 2.

Eurogamer likes it, for what that's worth. The main thing they single out as a problem is companion AI that is- how to put this delicately- wicked retarded.

sounds like they mistakenly got a beta of fallout: new boston

so the consensus seems to be: pretty sweet as a Fallout 3 expansion pack, engine's showing its age, buggy as hell.

sounds like a slog that i don't need to spend 50 - 100 hours of my life on

yeah, think i'll be waiting for this to get patched and to come down in price.

Bought this and am installing it now. A few preliminary thoughts:

I loved the first Fallout, liked Fallout 2, and disliked Fallout 3. FO3 falls short of being what I'd call a 'bad' game, but it's not a good one. The Gamebryo engine is a mess and has no business being used for an AAA title, and as a consequence it's an extremely ugly puke-green game with awful animations and the same bugs that plagued Oblivion (eg., NPCs sliding through environments). It's extremely uninvolving as an RPG, with badly implemented quests, bad voice acting, bad writing, and a host of bad design decisions that mean it doesn't succeed as a shooter either, such as hard-coded weapon accuracy, bad AI (enemies that stand perfectly still and trade gunfire with you like it's a swordfight) and increasing 'difficulty' by pumping up enemy health. Exploration is interesting, but it's not a sustaining game mechanic. It's (wait for it) Oblivion with guns.

tldr: the NMA crowd was right

The worthless Gamebryo engine will limit how awesome F:NV can be, but I've been looking forward to New Vegas because it promises to be better as an RPG and better as a shooter. When Chris Avellone & co. fail, it's usually at least a noble failure. So yeah, that's my take on it. I'll be back with impressions after I've played it some.

with so many exciting and wrong opinions about FO3 i just can't wait to hear what you're wrong about on FNV too

Do you work for Bethesda or something? You don't think it's legitimate and completely factual to say that Fallout 3 had bad animations, ugly characters, bad voice acting, bad AI and bad gunplay?

And is the sniping necessary when I'm going out of my way to patiently articulate my point of view on the game?

very excited to start this

I think many of the animations/AI in fallout were not so good, the color palette was regrettable, most of the voice acting/character design was okay by me
gunplay was really secondary to the RPG elements which was the VATS love it or hate it conundrum
i could see where it could grind against you but the sheer oblivion DEPTH of the game outweighed technical faults for me.
that said, i dunno if i need to play the same game again with a new background.

I think what made me sad about FO3 was that my fps instincts kicked in once I got a decent gun and enough ammo and I never touched VAT again.

ha, that never happened for me

Has anyone tried hardcore mode yet?

Only a few minutes in

My first playthrough is going to be on normal. I'll do a later one on hardcore. I got a few hours in and haven't left the first location. So far so good - no bugs yet, it feels like the load times are shorter, and there are weapon and item crafting tables outside so you don't have to go in the store. Looks like I'll soon be having my first big encounter.

these geckos can suck my dick

anyone know how if there's a level cap in this one?

i bloody love fallout 3, at first I HATED it because the gameplay was unfamiliar to me. Now it's virtually one of my all time favourites. The only problem with it I found was that I couldn't just load it up for a quick go, I needed to reserve a full evening for it - and so I've still not completed it.

Am holding out for NV, I'm going to finish F3 first. At least the bugs should be fixed by then.

haha turned off hardcore already

Played some more and the only problem I've seen is a couple of "micro pauses" when you get close to a new populated area; it's a stutter as it draws in for maybe 1/2 second.

Otherwise this is great! And I think tougher on normal than F3 was.

bugs so far:

i've been trapped in hillsides
had various npcs get trapped in hills and the ground
npcs freezing / unable to be shot
occasionally the game will slow down after the killing montage

annoying

coming back in 3 years after the fan patches make this playable

Jeff, for reference whatcha playing it on? I have a choice of PS3 or 360 when it comes out here in the UK on Friday. I expect it'll be buggy no matter what though.

I don't pay much attention to people saying the engine is showing it's age, as it wasn't that long ago I finished playing FO3 and its expansions. It's not suddenly going to sicken me.

I'm looking forward to it, even if it is basically just an expansion pack.

I've played just over 6 hours on the PS3 and have seen none of the bugs jeff lists. Just the micro-stutter pausing thing I mentioned.

I basically had to force myself to stop playing and go to sleep last night. It's very good so far - this is the 'real' Fallout 3 for me. The bugs are there (mostly just crashes), but people are making too big a deal about it because lol Obsidian - every new game has bugs, whatever.

Playing on PC btw.

My copy came in yesterday. I haven't played it yet, but super excited.

i'm playing it on the 360. definitely not making too big a deal about it. i've never played a game that was so consistently buggy. i had a few bugs during fallout 3 but they were well spread out over the 100 hours or so I spent on that game. it's a very different experience when the bugs are condensed into like three hours.

i thought s.o.p. with these games is to wait a couple months until the patches get rolled out.

i only remember running into one bug/crash in fallout 3, but it had been out for a looong time by then. also was pretty impressed that i only ran into one in red dead redemption.

Got another hour in - none of these bugs yet on PS3. However, even though it autosaves all the time it does not seem to do so after you level up. Basically threw away that extra playtime and my two toughest encounters by thinking it had saved.

didnt fallout 2 never get patched by interplay and you had to use a fan patch to play the game 100%

no, FO2 at launch was buggy but very playable, and it did get a couple patches later. you're thinking of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which was pretty ridiculous

I have a ton to say about this game, but right now I'll just say that I was fully on-board when I walked into Nipton and the fucking Necropolis music from Fallout 1 started playing. Also, fucking JOHNNY GUITAR.

is it the same general old-style music? like f3? if not, i might not be happy about that.

Man, everyday I want to play this and everyday something comes up. At this point I may have to lock myself in my livingroom over the weekend and play an insane 48 hour marathon session.

There is the same old timey music like fallout 3 but seems like theres even less of it. Whoever made the last fallout3 comp that they linked to here should make another one. Loved it.

I played for a bit last night. I kinda think I screwed my character a little bit SPECIAL wise. I didnt know which stats were good so all I did was boost intelligence and agility a little bit. Are there bobbleheads in this one? I picked the glasses perk to get a permabonus in perception.. seemed like the others ones were shitty.

It's not the same old timey music - it's country-western and 50s/60s lounge music, as opposed to the 40s pop standards from FO3. I think the music is a lot better this time around, tho yeah the song selection is still limited. With FO3 it felt like they just said "hey its fallout we need some old timey garbage to throw in here" but at least now it's thematically appropriate - country stuff for the wild west theme, Dean Martin for the Vegas strip, etc.

This game just has so much more personality crammed into every nook & cranny. It's like when they were making FO3 they worked so hard on building this huge world that they forgot to work on reasons to compel you to explore and enjoy it. There's actual humor in this game! The funny kind! Primm Slim beats any character from FO3.

No bobbleheads, but it does give you a chance to re-do your build before you leave the first town.

lol

http://i.imgur.com/1E3Sp.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKIkw3LIoQ

major burn by RPS:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/21/wot-i-think-fallout-new-vegas/

Am I too huge a fallout nerd that I hear 'omg it sucks so hard but if you love fallout have another spoonfull of shit' and I say 'yes please'?

But something Bethesda were very aware of when they turned Fallout into a first-person game is that the wasteland is potentially quite a boring setting for the player to be set free in. I mean, you think wasteland, you think deserts, charred ruins and grumpy survivors wearing faded, drab clothes.

So, Bethesda went to great lengths to infuse their D.C. wasteland with colour. It was populated by kooky, occasionally even cartoonish characters- it’s no accident that super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel featured so prominently. Then you had the independant towns, which were all built in or around visually striking setpieces, and Bethesda even built a labyrinth out of the subway system. Whatever direction you walked in Fallout 3, you felt confident you’d find something interesting.

this guy's a fucking dipshit lmao

This is basically turning out as I'd expected - diehard FO3 lovers (a group i will dub 'idiot fucktards') are down on NV, while REAL fans of fallout 1/2 see this as the rightful heir to the fallout legacy, which is what it is.

http://i55.tinypic.com/2dqosv8.gif

you need to get a grip

I have a grip... on this excellent game! 10/10!

Did anyone else kill everyone in Caesar's camp or whatever?

yes, near the end i went there and wiped it out. those smug bastards had it coming!

I wasn't able to really get very close to Caesar. I started a mission where I was supposed to infiltrate the camp, but somehow simultaneously picked up such a negative reputation that any Legion dudes shoot at me on sight. I subsequently had no choice but to kill the quest giver, breaking the quest.

On a different playthrough I got into the camp, but at some point everyone starts attacking me for no reason, even though I had been walking around and talking to people just fine...

am now at the strip, wondering how to string out my new vegas experience - what's the path to the final mission? is it finding the guy who tried to shotted me, or is it going to meet Mr House? Avoiding both right now, and considering going in search of the super-mutants at black mountain to kill some time and see my new companion veronica in action...

I found the approach to Black Mountain very enjoyable. It's a winding mountain road with lots of hairpin turns and debris that act as natural hiding spots (for mutants) or cover (for you and yours). There are a fair amount of Super Mutants to keep you busy, and because of the way the level is designed, you can play it almost any way you like (sniping, explosives, melee, whatever you like). I felt this section of the game was nicely designed.

Awesome! That's my next location then...

Woah, vault 11. Amazing.

Finally finished this. What DLC should I try first?

i haven't played them all but the one that got the most love was old world blues. i've only played honest hearts because i picked based on which dangling plot thread (the burned man / brother elijah / courier five) i was the most intrigued by. it was okay. very pretty.

i guess courier five is more intriguing than the burned man since courier five is prob the most mysterious thing in the original game. did you ever find the mountain pass out west, a little south of goodsprings, with GO HOME COURIER and stuff graffitied on it? i assume that's what opens up in lonesome road. it's creepy but in kind of a lesser way than the burned man is creepy; it's much more of a video game hook than a lore detail. i like lore details :/

oh man, I never played all the expansions!

also! how'd you finish?

i played the crazy death fog filled lost casino expansion and liked it a lot. surprisingly hard actually.

i commented on all of the dlc's at some point

i'd rank Honest Hearts best: the burned man character was the most interesting, best written, best acted of the lot, and revealed the most about the world's backstory. the weapon and perk additions were the ones i liked best (ii even rc at this point). the landscape is a little more lush, woodsy and watery which is a nice change of pace.

all the rest are about the same in quality to me, all interesting but none totally stunning.

i made great use of the "sneering imperialist" perk.

I can't remember, did this game store your progress in the cloud or w/e? Not sure if I have my save directory and it'd be nice to do the DLC content without starting over

also! how'd you finish?

I went with the NCR, because I naively thought they were the "good guys" (this is always how I play). Was a bit surprised that Eureka! was the final mission as it felt a little anti-climactic - I kind of expected the last mission to be a real battle royale. Sure enough, the first time I played it I walked into the Legate's compound and, through some glitch somehow, spotted him before talking to him and proceeded to blow him to pieces with the Thump Thump (I'd mostly finessed my skills for laser and pulse weapons, but foolishly walked into this mission with massively depleted energy cells and couldn't BAMF! back to somewhere I could buy some more, and so was reduced to explosives). This kicked off a massive onslaught of Legionaries and it took a lot of stimpacking, drugging up and ammo to kill them all, especially with Veronica and the robot taken out of action so early on.

Was shocked when the Epilogue slide show kicked in, but my xbox hung during this and so I had to finish Eureka! again. This time I approached Legate before attacking him, and managed to talk him into retreating back East.

Am still bummed the NCR walked over the Followers, who were perhaps my favourite tribe in the game. Restarted from an earlier point afterwards to try playing the Liberated Vegas ending, but couldn't remember if that involved whacking Mr House or not. Gave him the coin and he activated all the killbots. I think I could have killed him then, but I held out and took a mission from him. He asked me to wipe our the Brotherhood... But I just couldn't do it; Veronica was my favourite sidekick. But maybe if I ditch her and get the Caravanner as my sidekick again... I don't know. I think I'll try the DLC before replaying the game. But what an amazing game... The Fallout games are definitely the best I've ever played, certainly at least since Vice City, the last game to so swallow me up into its world.

Ok so I will officially say that the ncr ending is pretty much super boring

― O_o-O_O-o_O (jjjusten), Thursday, July 12, 2012 7:16 AM (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why o why did i not listen :(

My two picks are Honest Hearts and Old World Blues for worth playing. For some reason, I couldn't grasp the motivation of the bad guy in Lonesome Road

I can't remember, did this game store your progress in the cloud or w/e? Not sure if I have my save directory and it'd be nice to do the DLC content without starting over

Think it did, I recently had a hard drive issue and had to re install everything, was surprised when I'd downloaded Fallout NV through steam again and there was my previous saves.

Thanks Kingfish!

For reasons that I cannot explain, I ended up getting Dead Money, which is really hard, and not much fun, and I've gotten to a point where, thanks to my impoverished health score, a lack of any food/stimpacks and a cloud of poison surrounding my current position, I cannot move any further. I think I'm about ready to give up.

Time to change the difficulty setting then. Certain builds in certain games have moments that are like this, where it gets so unbalanced and unfair that you just say fuck it, switch a setting, and move on. I did this playing Brutal Legend just to get past one of the bullshit RTS sequences.

That was my first thought, but even with difficulty dialed down to easy (which is usually my default setting, as I love games more than I am any good at them) I can't get past where I'm at, and its too much of a ball-aching grind to play from an older save point. Have dl'd Old World Blues now, will give that a go later...

http://distilleryimage10.s3.amazonaws.com/9ae4b3dea6d611e2a1c622000a1fbcae_7.jpg

Anyone heard about the Project Brazil mod for F:NV? The release date keeps getting pushed back but it sounds interesting - can't fault their ambition, at least.

An Alternate Start in Vault 18 with a New Player Character and Main Quest.
A New Intro Video to really give it that "New Game"feeling.
An Ornate Main Quest Line with Compelling Side Quests rich in Fallout & Character Lore.
Hours of Voice Acting recorded at pro-quality in Radian-Helix Media's Tucson, Az Studio.
A Very Large Worldspace in California - The Black Bear Mountain National Forest.
An Epic War between The Super Mutants, The Survivalist Raiders, and The New California Republic.
A Pirate Radio Station DETH 981 with 2 New DJs and Quest + Crafting + Perk Unlocking Segments.
A News Radio Station called NCRPR - New California Republic Radio - with quest updates in the News.
5 Potential Human Companions and 2 Robot Companions available depending on player choices.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fallout-3-project-brazil

lol dead money really was Actually Hard. a respectably brutal dungeon crawl but/therefore an exhausting grind. it's fun being in extremis in this game tho: the ex-crooner ghoul character taught me how to mix martinis with the "cloud residue" you can scrape off the walls in the town, and i drank them so much to keep my health up i became an alcoholic and had to knock them back nonstop as i descended into the vault.

too many giant infodumps divided into 5000 dialogue topics with that coyly optional adventure game vibe, but the story was still rewarding if you're into (certain corners of) the story of the main one (and remember it really well because you've replayed it a gross number of times). one of the characters is implied to be veronica's ex-girlfriend. lots of courier-five foreshadowing that made me wanna finally get around to owb/lonesome road.

more fun than the vault with the fucking plants.

I just started this a couple of weeks ago and I love it. I knew I would love it because I love Fallout 3 but I love this too.

I just started playing through the DLC for this and I'm currently painted into a frustrating corner in Dead Money. I don't quite have enough health left to barge my way back through hordes of bastards after setting off the gala opening in the belltower. I might have to go back to a previous saveg. Grr. I played through Old World Blues first and it was a lot more fun. Can't wait for Dead Money to be over...

and that's exactly when I gave up on dead money too.

Yeah, Dead Money was dire. I enjoyed the Mt Zion & OWB dlc tho

Just finished Dead Money. What a horrible piece of shit. I'm rich now but doubtful if was at all worth it. Just started Honest Hearts - it must be better, right?

i didn't think it was so bad but maybe that's because in the main game my current char only needs to fire one laser rifle shot from 500 yards to make someone actually explode, so having to whale on near-invincible demons with sticks for a while was a nice change

honest hearts is much, much prettier and the stuff w "the survivalist" is great but i don't remember there being any challenge at all

yeah HH seemed pitched to a lower-level character

I enjoyed the one with the robots with TV for heads, where you get lobotomised - which one was that? But I found with the DLC for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas that it was the game's central narratives that kept me chugging along, and didn't feel nearly as compelled to slog along once the mysteries of who shot the courier/where the dad was were solved.

def had that reaction to the f3 dlc but f:nv does a neater job of leaving loose ends (elijah's trip east, the burned man, the other courier) so that the dlc is about stuff i was already curious about instead of like oh, a spaceship

i guess the nv world just feels bigger than the game and f3 didn't to me

one thing that worked great in that respect is how the gameworld is being fought over by a power to the west and a power to the east and you hear about both of them constantly but never see their homelands

(f2 players have spent plenty of time in the ncr but you get the sense it was much wilder then)

NV's multiple minor factions make it seem like a more lived-in place. i really liked its treatment of the bro'hood of steel as this odd culty thing sitting sorta apart from the main conflict, where f3 just treated them as a default good guy group

xp yeah the evidence that california had become this more-or-less resettled state was a cool tip to, say, deadwood or something.

yeah otm about the BoS, who are in NV what they were in 1 and 2 (see also: super mutants)

dlh otm - I played a bit if Fallout 3's DLC but I didn't feel compelled to continue like I do with New Vegas. The breadcrumbs for the stories are laid pretty clearly through the main game and it's been fun putting the pieces together so far, even if Dead Money was a bust.

a post in this thread i think about every time i play this game is fields of salmon's:

One of the themes in the game is that these fucked-up little communities are somehow viable in their own way and submitting them to bureaucratic/managerial structures AGAIN negates the opportunity for exploring different modes of organizing groups of people that we haven't tried before...

because so much of the game is spent learning disillusioning things about the ncr that are all the usual disillusioning things about capitalist republicanism (government in the pocket of cattle barons, the momentum of doomed imperialist adventures becoming more powerful than the executives supposedly managing them -- pres. kimball's five minutes of hot air followed by a depressed hot-mic "ok, let's get the fuck out of here" a nice touch in this regard) and then caesar calls you into his tent to lecture you about the hegelian dialectic and argue that the only answer is fascism. the independent-vegas ending is a rebuke to this whole version of history but it isn't pat or feelgood and the ending slides imply you maybe haven't thought this through all that well yourself

unless there's a way to get it NOT to say that the followers of the apocalypse "struggle to provide even basic services" to the anarchic vegas you create. i've tried.

well child rearing has ground my horror and episodic tv to a halt, so guess who just picked up the legendary edition or whatever for the ps3. rolling out a fairly balanced female character with bumps in intelligence and charisma, curious to see if theres any difference based on gender. will still enjoy it if not, plus having all the weapons cache shit preloaded should make a difference. fuck the ncr this time around, also stoked to try all the dlc since all i did last time was the nightmare casino one.

I just ventured out of Goodsprings for the first time on my way to Primm and was confronted by a couple of coyotes. One of them lunged at me so I shot at it without killing it, so it backed off. Then the other one came at me, which I was able to one-shot, but when it died it made an oddly pathetic whimpering sound. I checked its corpse and it turned out to be a coyote pup and now I feel terrible, like the worst human being ever.

It was either you or them dude