FNV story is not as good as the others : Fallout: New Vegas

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 12:10 pm

So you start as a Fed-Ex person who gets a package stolen from him and receives a bullet to the head...

There are a thousand different ways you could have stated this game better in order to draw the person into more of an Role Playing adventure.

I paid my $60.00 for this game. I bought it primarily due to the incredile game Fallout 3 was. I should have paid more attention to the reviews of "More of the same," then I did. Oh well.

New Vegas is not 'more of the same', except for the graphics. The writing is better across the board, and the world is far easier to get into. If you have a problem with the fact that you have to start the game as a courier, maybe you should have read the previews, we knew that was coming for over a year.

Are there better ways to start a story? Well, historically speaking there have been better starts to stories. I haven't seen a better start in the Fallout series yet (though I haven't played Fallout 2).

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:26 am

While I think you should play Fallout 2 because it's a good game, its start and premise is pretty dumb.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 7:34 am

Fallout 2 start - You're in front of a big stone temple in a cliff face. There's a guy behind you with a spear who won't let you go anywhere but inside. You have a crappy spear, and that's it. The place is swarming with giant ants and radscorpions. It's heavily trapped. Someone left some C4 in a pot that you have to use to blow up a door. Then, you have to fight (or talk the guy out of fighting) the guy with the spear who is somehow at the end...past the door you had to blow up. Must be a back entrance or something. Once you beat him (and he'll kill you if he can) you get the vault dwellers old beat-up jumpsuit, his nearly trashed pipboy, and are suddenly at the Elder's tent. You are then informed that you have to go to Klamath to find some guy named Vic who might know where a GECK is, because if you fail, everyone you've ever known in your entire life will starve to death.

You can linger in the village for a little while and do some newbie quests if you want (and you really should, because in the beginning, you need to run from every wasteland encounter.)

There you go, the Fallout 2 start. Actually more coercive than the other starts outside of Tactics. Almost impossible to complete if you made a physically mediocre or weak character and tagged repair, science, and barter. (The only skills that help in the temple of trials are unarmed, melee, traps, speech, first aid, doctor, sneak. You don't need explosives at all for the c4, you just set it to 5 minutes and run behind a wall. Never seen it go off faster than 30 seconds doing that, even with a negative explosives skill.) Yes, that's right, tagging a gun skill actually makes the beginning of Fallout 2 harder.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:16 am

You're missing the point. I'm only referring to the start of the game. Your character can say "screw this" to her initial goal in each of those games but still be compelled to move forward by fear of death via hunger/dehydration, which would occur if she just sat down and didn't move. The game assumes you probably care, which is reasonable, but you're still pushed to move if you don't.

Again: Characters require motivation to act. That doesn't change just because this is a game where you choose your character's rationale. The game should, and in just about every other instance does lay out different options so you can decide your character's course. To make it as open-ended as possible- to make the character as blank a slate as possible- the only assumption the writers should make is that your character doesn't want to die. Everything beyond that should remain open. And at the start of the game, that's not the case. The game assumes you want to find Benny and/or the chip, and gives your character no other reason to act. So if you decide that your character doesn't care about Benny, or the chip, or repercussions from the courier service, there's no character motivation. That's a flaw in design.

If you grasp this point, you still might say, well, then you just come up with a reason. My opinion is that's poor writing. We should not have to kickstart the character. There doesn't need to be anything deep or complex pushing them along, but there needs to be something. If you think it's perfectly acceptable, then we'll just have to disagree.

(For the record, even later in the other games you're still not necessarily compelled to care about the main quest as designed. I don't know if you can continue should the water chip not be retrieved in FO1, although the way the story plays out it should be possible. It would seem that, at minimum, you can hunt down the Master and the military base regardless. If that's not possible, it's disappointing. In FO2, you don't have to care about Arroyo one iota. Everyone gets kidnapped when you enter Vault 13, so you don't need the GECK for that to happen, and I don't think you need to return to Arroyo at all to access the Enclave base. Going back gets you the location of Navarro, but you can find that regardless. And in FO3, not only don't you have to care about your father- there are dialogue options that show you don't give a damn about him, and there are pragmatic reasons for hunting him down- the main quest is a fairly insignificant portion of the game. Granted, that's due to the atrocious writing, but you can still have a very full experience without ever touching the MQ. All you lose out on is the ending.)

So what is your character's rationale to act in FO1, 2, and 3 if you don't care about Vault 13/Arroyo/James? Heck, FO1 and 2 assume that you care about Vault 13/Arroyo enough that you lose the game if you kill people in 13/Arroyo.