» Sat Apr 23, 2011 6:30 pm Hello.
I would like to start by saying that I am a gigantic fan of the whole Fallout franchise in general. I [censored]in' loved the older games and I was very pleased to see that Bethesda had managed to make Fallout 3 keep the Fallout 'feeling' in spite of such a massive paradigm shift -- and the feeling is really what matters.
I really liked Fallout 3. I played it on the PC initially and then bought it later for the 360 and finished it a good few times all in all.
I love the open world games because they allow you to basically put 'saving the world'(or whatever the main objective is) on hold, do side quests as you wish, until you decide that your personal urge for fame, glory and insane lewt has been satisfied. This is exactly what I did in Fallout 3, and it worked out splendidly.
What is cool about Fallout 3 and other similar open world games, like Oblivion, is that even though you are off on some tangential quest for [censored] and giggles, you are always 100% sure what you are supposed to do next if you want to start following the main quest line. There really is little doubt.
I don't mind choices as such; it just makes the main quest line interesting. Like how you have to choose which factions you want to get along with and all that in New Vegas. It's fine.
The problem lies in the main quest line for new vegas being completely and entirely bugged. I'll get to the point and explain why before I digress further.
PLEASE NOTE, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.
After playing for a good while and doing a good deal of side quests, I eventually made my way to new vegas to confront Benny. I received an invitation to talk to House, but I ignored it until later(i'll get to it) because there was nothing at all that suggested that it would be advisable to talk to him before meeting Benny. That's fine; it's a 'choice' of sorts.
So I proceed to talk to Benny and he does what he does. Almost ambushes me but I talk him out of it. I got to his room to find the Yes Man robot and the long dialogue reveals a good deal.
This is where the whole strangeness starts.
As I progressed through the dialog, a lot of new quests popped up, all of which were named something with "Wild Card". Wild Card: Side bets. Wild Card: You and what army?, Wild Card: Change In management.
After talking to the robot, I had, all of a sudden, gotten a whole lot of quests some of which made no sense. Why was I all of a sudden supposed to "Kill or disable House"? I didn't express any desire to kill or disable house. I just talked to a robot and mid way through the dialog I receive this quest which had no relevance to the ongoing dialog. We were just talking about Benny and his plan and all of a sudden I'm basically doing the same thing?
Anyway, since I didn't want to finis the game quite yet I continued doing side quests. I found and talked to the BoS, and the boomers and did their quests as they were side quests, but still a part of the main quest line. I did a whole lot of other quests as well.
Some time before all this, I had received an invitation from Ceasar to visit his camp. There was absolutely nothing that suggested that this could be a vital part of the quest line so I didn't bother. I expected it was a choice that the game presented; that I could actually ally myself with Ceasar as a spy and help him win the battle at the hoover dam which is probably the game's finale, or some such. I didn't want to help the insane slaver so I continued doing what I wanted to do, which happened to include a side quest destroying camp Nelson, at which point I was the enemy of the legion once again.
When I finally decided to start doing the main quest line, I looked in my quest log and saw a few quests. One of them was to disable or kill house and another was to go find benny at the fort and so on. So I choose to go to Cottonwood Cove to find Benny. I enter the fort and they are hostile, as expected. I kill my way up to Caesar's tent and save my game, enter his tent and get destroyed utterly. I get a strange feeling that something has gone wrong; why is it that I am in Caesar's camp where I can potentially kill him and end the main quest line abruptly? And if I could kill my way through his camp, why is it that I can't kill him? This was all strange I felt like I was clearly doing something that wasn't intended.
Anyway, I notice that thankfully the quest marker didn't actually point to his tent, so I continue to the weather station. I enter it, kill the guards there only to find out that the slot to open some hatch there needs the poker chip. But Benny is nowhere to be found in the camp so I don't have the chip.
At that point I am almost certain that this is wrong. That I'm doing something completely wrong which I shouldn't be able to do wrong.
I quit playing and don't play it for a couple of days, only to go back to it just now. I decide to backtrack and go talk to House. I get told that he the point of talking to me was to warn me before talking to Benny, but now he's fled the strip and he's on his way to the Fort. I already know all of this. Now I have two quests in my log that are telling me to find Benny in the fort.
In some hope that this had fixed the quest line, I return to the fort once again to find nothing, yet again.
So, to sum this up, where am I now? Well, I am hostile to Ceasar. I have a quest called "Wild Card: You and what army?" that contained another objective once, but now only has the objective "(Optional): Find Mr. House's hidden bunker under Fortification Hill". "Wild Card: Change in management" which is telling me to get the chip from benny and then "kill or disable mr. house". "The House Always Wins, I" that's telling me to find the chip at the fort. And the same quest, just number II, telling me to use it to open the bunker. House mentioned that if I couldn't get the chip from Benny, Caesar would make sure I got it. But Caesar is hostile.
It is clear as day that the quest line is bugged. It may be because I did it in the wrong order, but the thing is: I shouldn't be able to do it in the wrong order. To me it seems like I, due to some bug, received several parts of the main quest at once which allowed me to jump ahead in spite of the fact that I wasn't supposed to be able to do that(i.e. jumping ahead in Fallout 3, skipping talking to Three Dog and going directly to the asian doctor on the ship works perfectly fine).
I am unable to continue the game. I am so frustrated that I don't really feel like trying. It's hard to explain, but it doesn't feel like I have a "whole lot of cool choices and a lot of different side quests" but rather "I am stuck in the middle of an intangible mess due to rushed, 1 year game development of what is basically a massive DLC on top of the original Fallout 3 engine with a new main menu."
Has anyone else run into this?
Thanks for reading this. I hope it isn't too 'messy', but if it is, go ahead and ask for clarification. Note that I may not remember every single detail of how stuff happened because this whole mess unfolded itself over the course of a good number of gameplay hours.
