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

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!

great gif

Princess TamTam is cankles?

is anyone playing with the Wacky Kooky Wasteland trait or whatever..

http://i55.tinypic.com/25k4ck4.jpg

nice.

i actually still gotta play FO3, but if you're saying this is closer in spirit to the originals i'm still intrigued

lol @ "Lord Death"

reviews are all over the place. not in the rating, but in the reasons. but everyone is saying it's buggy as hell.

wow that RPS review just hit all the possibilities i was worried about. looks like ill be waiting for the price drop then

even ppl who like say it's more like Oblivion, which is not really a good sight imo

this is the most damning part of the GI review, but i've seen others that seem to say the opposite (or at least that the generally higher level of scripting makes it more fun):

Now, the bad news. I was never once blown away by a single moment. Sure, I laughed when I ran into a cross-dressing super mutant, and thought to myself “what have I done?” when I deployed an orbital laser directly above an NCR military base – but none of the missions or battles stand out as memorable. Most of the action and plot points are enjoyable, but I never once said "Wow. That was great." By comparison, this is a stark contrast to Fallout 3, a game that I felt delivered big moments all the way through.

That's an interesting point, except the only 'big moment' in FO3 for me was Liberty Prime. I'm not far enough into the game to say either way, but it hasn't really mattered yet because I'm having so much fun doing stuff like breaking down ammo into casings, powder and primer and reconstituting it into other kinds of ammunition to notice the dearth of big moments.

jjj, that RPS review is just... grotesquely stupid and wrong. I can't even read a sentence like this as anything but a troll:

So, Bethesda went to great lengths to infuse their D.C. wasteland with colour.

Yes, one color: sewage green. I just can't wrap my head around the idea that NV is less colorful... nobody I know who's playing it right now would agree at all. YMMV but I'd recommend at least reading some other reviews besides that one.

Also I love this choice excerpt:

There is just nothing interesting about them, except for the fact that they all pronounce Caesar “Kai-zar”, a mystery I never got to the bottom of.

you mean like in real life, retard? They even reference it in-game, about how they take their creepy cosplay to the extreme by using the antiquated pronunciation.

No bugs, still lovin' it (almost 10 hours in), playing with Wacky Kooky Wasteland but haven't seen anything kooky or wacky - just radscorpions, ghouls, molerats and the like. I'm enjoying it more than F3 at the beginning, and the humor seems less LOOK! FAN SERVICE FUNNY! than Fallout 3.

I really liked Fallout 3, too. It's just a fun apocalypse to play around in.

Wacky Kooky Wasteland

vas ist das?

there's a trait in character creation you can take that increases the number of 'wacky' Fallout 2-style pop culture referencing encounters you find in the wasteland - stuff like finding some skeletons named Owen & Beru, internet meme references and that kind of stuff. Turning it into a thing you can turn on or off seems like a good decision, since that stuff can rub people the wrong way.

also: just realized that Mr. New Vegas is Wayne Newton

it's just called 'Wild Wasteland' btw

I did find Owen & Beru! I didn't realize that was because I had that trait. It made me laugh because they really looked to be in the right poses and burnt just so. Tasteless and awesome moment.

i see. if i get around to this i will not be selecting that stupid option then. knowing that they built in a content-changing humor on/off switch when bugs apparently went unfixed is not filling me with anticipation. it speak of a dis-unified development team and bad leadership, imo, but others have played and i haven't yet so eh

i don't remember if the humor in FO3 was fan-servicey, but i don't remember any of it being especially funny either...

xps

I still haven't played NV yet but F1&2 were notoriously buggy- not crash-buggy but easily disturbed gameworld buggy (esp w stuff like hour long combat rounds as every bum in the game takes a turn running away from you) plus Bethesda is famous for buggy shit (going back to daggerfall!), so bugs aren't a huge shock.

goole the 'see a bunch of crazy shit' perk has been in the game since fallout 2 when it was called explorer - 'Higher chance of finding special places and people in random encounters '

huh. i've only played FO3 tbh. didn't know it had a history!

star wars jokes are not really my thing tho

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