Fallout: New Vegas - Review Flood #3

wolfgrimdark said:

Amazing how reviews and taste vary across the board.

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They don´t vary much as, bugs aside, most of the public recognizes the game as at least good, but more often great.
The only more notable variance seems to be stemming from how much the game´s level of polish is counted towards the overall opinion and how much bugginess is experienced.

So far I´ve played the game for 50 hours, had 3 crashes, one minor bug in quest logic, scorpion-y creatures stuck in terrain and few rare instances of dialogue lines not being voiced. On my medium rig the game runs completely smooth on max settings. Given how complex the game is, nothing dramatic I´d say. And I´ve played the majority of the game with two companions tackled along. At least when it comes to playing it on pc, this seems like an average experience, at least judging by this poll on Qt3:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=61820

Even though it may be more bugged for some, imo what really matters is we finally have a worthy modern successor of first two Fallouts and optimization issues aside, a great game on its own. No doubt it will receive more patches and it´s moddable on top of that so hopefully everyone will be eventually able to play it without issues.

So far I think the game is at least on par with Fallout 2.

RPS review is embarrassing.

dagoo7 said:

Skill system still seems a bit wonked as it appears to be very easy to max every skill by endgame just like FO3.

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Not surprising, but that's what mods are for. I'm about 60 hours into my current playthrough of FO3 now, but I'm still only level 14 thanks to the mods I'm using, and the game is quite challenging on the hardest difficulty.

Unfortunately, joinable NPCs are completely overpowerful, and I hear it's the same with New Vegas.

JDR13 said:

Unfortunately, joinable NPCs are completely overpowerful, and I hear it's the same with New Vegas.

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I think that´s mostly the case in a non-hardcore game because they can´t die there.
From my experience, on hardcore they´re balanced quite well as, at least on higher difficulties, they can die quite easily. I´ve mostly played with the same duo and one of those is indeed too effective, but compared to others I´ve tried for a while, he´s more of an exception, at least with the settings I play with.
However, I wouldn´t mind some perk for a player who plays without companions or, alternatively, some kind of penalty for one who plays with them.

Nothing beats Fawkes of FO3. Fawkes is amazing. And I'm not talking about the fact that he's cool (which he is), I'm talking about battle prowess.

DeepO said:

From my experience, on hardcore they´re balanced quite well as, at least on higher difficulties, they can die quite easily.

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Gotta agree with this. I'm playing on Very Hard (I was playing on hard, but that was too easy) + Hardcore and it is a challenge to keep them alive sometimes. I leave them outside anytime I go in a cave or enclosed space because they have a tendency to just run off willy nilly. I have no idea where they've gone until I get the "*insert name* has died*"

I've kept the same two I found at first because one is just too cool and the other I want to help.

As for Tom Chick and the RPS turdball, they're nuts. Completely nuts. Tom I maybe….MAYBE could overlook because of all the problems he had playing it (he should of played the thing on the PC ), but I never experienced anything like what he wrote about.

As for that trudball he needs to get off his "kill Obsidian" high horse. I've liked what he has written in the past, but he is so biased in this review it's not even funny. I don't get where he goes after the writing. That is the single best part of this game…..Did he play Fallout 3 instead of NV?

Epic Fail for RPS

EvilKoala said:

Also, I may be totally on my own here, but is experiencing a crash every 2 hours really that bad? I mean seriously, I've barely got the time to play a game two hours straight. And what if it crashes? "Whoops, let's reboot that Xbox." Wait 20 seconds for your Xbox to restart and you're good to go. It's a minor annoyance. Or perhaps I've become to tolerant towards bugs over the years?

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Yes. That is *totally* unacceptable *especially* on a closed platform. All the hardware is the same so there is no excuse for it. Ever since they started making patching easy on console games the companies have gotten just as sloppy/lazy as many (though not all) of the PC game companies.

Maylander said:

Nothing beats Fawkes of FO3. Fawkes is amazing. And I'm not talking about the fact that he's cool (which he is), I'm talking about battle prowess.

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Even Dogmeat is overpowered imo, although I suspect he might be a bit bugged. I've stopped bringing him on most quests because it was making the game too easy.

Dogmeat is like a tiny little poodle in comparison to Worthless Mutt from Arcanum

EvilKoala said:

I used to read a lot of Tom Chick's articles, but I've come to really dislike him over time as well. I agree that he's become to greedy for attention.

Also, I may be totally on my own here, but is experiencing a crash every 2 hours really that bad? I mean seriously, I've barely got the time to play a game two hours straight. And what if it crashes? "Whoops, let's reboot that Xbox." Wait 20 seconds for your Xbox to restart and you're good to go. It's a minor annoyance. Or perhaps I've become to tolerant towards bugs over the years?

Game-stopper bugs are more serious though. I've heard reports of people being unable to progress any further in the game's main storyline. Not sure if any of that is actually true, though.

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Well, I play on PC so I can't really comment on the experiences for a console player. Having to restart could be a hassle, especially if the saves don't work anymore.

But on PC, sometimes the crashes (once in a few hours) helps me with stepping away from the game for a while, otherwise I would sometimes be playing from 8 in the evening untill 8 in the morning. If it crashes every fifteen minutes it would get me very annoyed.

I myself have had 2 crashes in 6 hours.

I always save often, on a Fallout 3 playthough at least 150 hard saves. I do it (1) because of past experiences with bugs in games (not limited to Bethesda games), the only times I don't (can't) do it is if there are limited save slots. And (2) because if there are multiple solutions to a quest or the posibility that I might anger a NPC I'd like to go back and "fix it". Eventually I never go back and use the old saves. It's become an automatic behavior for me, also has to do with not liking trial and error. So if I die (or Crash) I don't want to lose 2 hours of playing time because I didn't save.

But, if saves got corrupted I would not be pleased, the same with patches that don't work with old saves.

This sounds strange but I hope they truly are gamestopping bugs. Clarify: I hope people who messed up reputation by doing the wrong quest or killing the wrong individual won't go shouting "BUG!". That's what happened when a questgiver was killed in Morrowind and resulted in the Dev introducing the immortal NPCs we see in Oblivion and Fallout 3/NV to hold the gamer's hand so he can't mess up. The same reason Oblivion suddenly got clinically clean faction questlines so as to not complicate things by questlines between factions overlapping. Eventually it means a loss of sandbox gameplay. That was one of the reasons I was happy Obsidian tried their hand at a more reputation oriented faction system.

I've been lucky I guess. I've had two crashes in over 20 hours of playtime. Once when I pushed continue and another one when I hadn't stopped playing in over 7 hours.

I think I've had a half dozen in my 65 hours of play. Once every 10 hours is acceptable to me.

I'm kinda getting overwhelmed by the number of references to the Hub, Modoc, New Reno etc as I haven't played the games in a little while. It is appreciated tho... VERY appreciated.

This is a really interesting discussion for me. I play games on a (now) five year old PC, which wasn't state-of-the-art even back then, and typically have few problems with bugs. I played Gothic 3, Oblivion and Bioshock with no problems. I was going to give NV a pass because F03 was more or less awful.

But now I'm unfortunately getting swayed...

I've only had it freeze one time. ED-E got stuck, when I went to investigate and click on it, the game and xbox just froze. I've played like 30-40 hours. Then there has been a few times when the game got a bit choppy. Otherwise it has been relatively free of bugs.

countingdown7 said:

I'm kinda getting overwhelmed by the number of references to the Hub, Modoc, New Reno etc as I haven't played the games in a little while. It is appreciated tho… VERY appreciated.

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I'm loving that about this game. They keep referencing places I knew. It's little details that is making this Fallout kick F3s butt from here to the Washington Monument. Plus they have my favorite companion with the same voice actor from Fallout 2 in this one.

What if they didn't use Washington, but Berlin instead ?

Or Athens ? Or London ? Or Rome ?

So, it looks as if it was rather a "U.S. game".

Alrik Fassbauer said:

What if they didn't use Washington, but Berlin instead ?

Or Athens ? Or London ? Or Rome ?

So, it looks as if it was rather a "U.S. game".

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Said completely tongue in cheek:

What if Drakensang and Divinity used names like Jim, Fred, and John instead of Thorvald and Ogledottir? I think it's natural and expected to use the places and lingo of the area you live in. I don't expect German games to have American places and believe me they definitely don't have American lingo at all. It's Euro-English not American English, and most of the time not even very good Euro-English.

Okay, back to serious:

I'd love to see a European developer get a shot at a Fallout: Berlin or Fallout: Shanghai, etc. That would be uber cool. Since the war was supposedly between the US and China-Fallout: Shanghai would be especially fun. I'm curious as to why there hasn't been a non-American post-apoc game done. It seems there is interest in the setting. What developer would you all pick to attempt such an undertaking?

Fanboi Rant

There is a lot of bashing of Bethesda from non-Americans. Why hasn't your country's developers made something better? Show us Americans your awesome coding, animation, AI, and unbuggy games of sandbox size. Talk is cheap. Oh yeah, and make sure it can be modded by the world modding community too. Because a lot of the bugginess in these games is because the engine is open to modification.

Alrik wrote:

Why do there have to be optimized drivers for single games anyway ?
Why can't they fix it in the first place ?

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NVIDIA has different driver settings / combinations of settings. Some work good for game A - some work good for game B. NVIDIA has a built-in feature to regognize games (when they start) and enable the best driver setting (=profile) for this specific game.

If you want to generate your own game profile - use nHancer.

crpgnut said:

Said completely tongue in cheek:

What if Drakensang and Divinity used names like Jim, Fred, and John instead of Thorvald and Ogledottir?

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Acknowledged.

Divinity 1 used all sorts of names, by the way.

@HiddenX : I just wondered why they couldn't just build in a generic kind of "framework", which game developers just could use ?

A "framework" that would be kind of static, and could therefore be used throughout different "generations" of cards ... ?

I retract my earlier positive comments. Save files corrupted on crash- ALL saves from that playthrough were corrupted. 24 hours of gameplay lost.

*sigh*

Backup saves also corrupted.

One thing I had almost forgotten to try that DID work was volume shadow copy- using built in backup capabilities of windows to revert to previous versions of the files. That did work- but still cost me about 4 hours of gameplay. I really don't understand how this bug can corrupt both the autosave, quicksave, ".bak" backup saves as well as normal saves simultaneously. Someone did something VERY stupid when they coded something there.