Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money Review @ GameOver

GameOver has a review of Dead Money for the PC. The reviewer is "conflicted", so the resulting score is 70%:

I’m really conflicted about the first DLC for Fallout New Vegas – Dead Money. On the one hand there is the ancient and honorable custom known as milking it. The same thing that gave us seven Police Academy sequels and the however many books were written in the Dune series after Frank Herbert’s death has apparently resulted in not only four DLC packs for Fallout 3, but Fallout New Vegas (which isn’t all that different from Fallout 3). And now (Wikipedia informs me) there are to be eight, count ‘em, eight DLC packs for New Vegas. Oy. Seriously? On the other hand, given the somewhat limited possibilities of the Fallout gameplay engine as a whole, Dead Money, while not actually breaking out of that mold, manages to bring some fresh tension. It forced me out of the comfortable pattern – meet a creature, activate the VATS, blow its head off, wash, rinse, repeat – that served me pretty well up until now. Then it takes that innovative gameplay mix and smashes it flat with an enormous repetitive sledgehammer.

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More information.

Fallout 3 had 5 DLC, not 4.

I just finished it. I rather enjoyed it. But with some of the DLC it doesn't feel like your playing the main game, sure this one had a tie-in with one of the Vanilla companions but that is more on the story front.

When the DLC that has you give up all your vanilla items it means you will get a corded off experience with it's difficulty being unique to the DLC. In this DLC you need a lot more tactics to get through it.

I found it to be challenging but enjoyable, but only for the lenght of the DLC. If Vanilla New Vegas was full of this gameplay I would be dissapointed since it has a lot of trial and error with me deliberately dying just to survey the next room. That's something I rarely had to resort to in New Vegas.

I was watching a video playthrough of Dead Money and the player at one point commented that he was annoyed the speakers and radios weren't marked on your pip boy map. Then later in my last conversation with the dead money villain, the villain said that people were lazy in blindly following markers. Was it a slight sneer towards the quest system in Fallout 3 and New Vegas?

Rant:
It reminded me that in New Vegas Obsidian added small quests that didn't show in the pip-boy journal. It shows a slightly different approach by both BGS and Obsidian. In Fallout 3, all quests were in the journal with markers guiding the way. In New Vegas, in addition to the journalled quests, there were also very minor quests/tasks that you get only through the notes or conversations but that are never mentioned in the Quest Journal. These non-journal quest obviously also don't include the markers. When playing it feels a bit like you deal with multiple personalities, on the one hand a very handholding approach, while the minor tasks ask you to flip a switch in your mind that you suddenly have to read (and remember) and not rely on your bulletted asignment list and gps markers. Who do I have to talk to? What items do I need to have? Where do I go again? Questions you never have to ask when using the bulleted assignment list since the only thing you have to do in that system is to go to the gps location and click on whatever activator it pointed to or await further assignments and markers. When I tried to do the minor tasks I at first felt frustrated because you get used to the luxury of gps/bulleted assignments but after completing a minor task you feel so much better since you didn't just follow an assingment and marker blindly.

I really liked Dead Money; while it was indeed annoying that you got I felt I got above and beyond my $10 worth of gameplay - and the story was quite cool as well - a bit tragic even. I'm looking forward to the upcoming content hinted at by the achievements. Who knows, maybe we'll even see The Burning Man.

My main issue with Dead Money was that the villa was fucking ugly and no fun to explore at all. Looked the same throughout, nothing really interesting to look at, nothing visually appealing. That kind of ruined the DLC for me.

Story wise though it was good, Dog was awesome. Combat was good... new weapons were cool, casino was alright.

I was about to click "accept" after filling in my credit card when I clicked cancel instead. I decided to wait until summer.

JuliusMagnus said:

It reminded me that in New Vegas Obsidian added small quests that didn't show in the pip-boy journal. It shows a slightly different approach by both BGS and Obsidian. In Fallout 3, all quests were in the journal with markers guiding the way. In New Vegas, in addition to the journalled quests, there were also very minor quests/tasks that you get only through the notes or conversations but that are never mentioned in the Quest Journal. These non-journal quest obviously also don't include the markers..

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Not true at all. Fallout 3 also had miscellaneous quests that weren't marked in your journal, and in which you weren't given any extra guidance.

JDR13 said:

Not true at all. Fallout 3 also had miscellaneous quests that weren't marked in your journal, and in which you weren't given any extra guidance.

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Yep... I just finished one like that, "Agatha's Song". But MOST quests do have quest markers (and paths) on the map...

Thrasher said:

Yep… I just finished one like that, "Agatha's Song". But MOST quests do have quest markers (and paths) on the map…

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Actually, Agatha's Song was a marked quest.. once you found her anyways. There were some pretty cool unmarked quests though, like the Keller family transcripts.

??? The quest doesn't start until you find her. When you get the quest from her, nothing is marked on your map when you select it as the active quest. Yet Agatha tells you where to go but she didn't mark my map. Strange, eh? When you determine where you need to go to do the fetch, the map marker comes back and stays until you deliver to Agatha. But there is that gap in the middle where I had no idea where to go... Could have been a bug.

I have all but one of those transcripts. Strange how they are spread all over the wasteland. It's like 5 needles, in a giant haystack...

He means unmarked quests as in it does not add it to your journal as a quest, or do that cool thing where the quest name fades in on the screen.

Sure. The thing is that JDR used the name "misc quests" rather than "freeform quests". The guidebook definition of these is that the first has quest logs, while the second doesn't.

And there is also the distinction of showing location markers on the map for misc quests. Some misc quests have them, some do only some of the time.

Anyway, I think we all know what we are talking about.

Thrasher said:

Sure. The thing is that JDR used the name "misc quests" rather than "freeform quests". The guidebook definition of these is that the first has quest logs, while the second doesn't.

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Please tell me you were joking. Nobody is really that anal. jk

And yes, Agatha's Song is a marked quest. After she gave me that quest, I had a map marker for Vault 92(?) that showed me exactly where to go. Also, what DN mentions above.

She didnt me a marker where Vault 92 is. In fact, in conversation she said she DIDN'T know where it was.

Hmm.. Well you played it more recently than me, so I might not be remembering that particular quest correctly. I could have sworn she mentioned Vault 92 with the right dialogue choice.

the vaulut 92 marker shows up if you have already been to vault-tec headquarters. otherwise she mentions checking there as she's not sure where the vault is exactly. fallout 3 and new vegas do this often when you have bypassed some of the quest scripted. for the most part both games have few bugs in this department, new vegas i'd say has slighty less. though despite that the quest system is still quite good in my view compared to the lack of complexity in many other games.

Yeah, the map marker behavior changes depending on where you have been already. That probably explain's our different experiences. It didn't show on my map until I got the vault locations from the Vault-Tec HQs computer. The funny thing is that I don't remember the HQ location showing up on my map after talking with Agatha. But my map was so crowded with markers already I could have missed it.

back to new vegas dlc
i can't wait for the rest
enjoying dragon age 2
but after the 2 days or so i spent
back with new vegas
i miss the mojave wasteland
i hope at least one of them has a nice
open area you can return to like
point lookout