One of the first things I noticed, pretty much instantly after creating my character, was the awkward movement and animations. It was comically bad, the character moving backwards and side to side at running speed, as if moving around not on legs but on some sort of hovering disc. This isn't really a new thing with Bethesda games, but still was disappointed to see very little if any improvement. Detracted a lot from the game, particularly combat, especially since NPCs are just as bad.

The game world was huge, as is usual again with Beth games. Tons of places to explore, tons of quests. You could almost get lost in it, except for...

Fast travel which, while convenient, completely ruins the hardcoe mode. I never once was at risk from dehydration, hunger, or sleep. Mostly an inconvenience instead of an additional element of danger/survival. Could have been handled much better - even just something like risk of random encounters when fast traveling, and/or having fast travel only usable on safe® roads and not from just anywhere.

Quests had too much of a 'hand holding' element to them. Quickly got so used to just following the arrow instead of paying attention to what NPCs said that occasionally I'd find myself in the middle of a quest with no idea what is even going on since I'd just been following the arrows. Would have been nice had there been a bit more sleuthing involved, although I can understand not wanting players to get completely stuck. Some quests were also pretty buggy or overly convoluted. There were definitely some fun quests however.

Dialogue was good for the most part, really enjoyed some of the more comic characters and the voice acting was good. Minor problems though, NPCs using different voices for common/recycled phrases than their regular voice and NPCs acting completely oblivious to situations they should obviously be reacting to, etc.

Combat was pretty meh, the novelty of the gory explosions wears off while there's not much to keep it interesting otherwise. The jerky and unnatural movement, the awkward/off iron sights, several guns(revolvers in particular it seemed) effectively jamming due to a bug(I think). The more challenging enemies simply kill you in 1-2 hits while your best bet for killing them is killing them in 1-2 hits. Not to say fast paced/deadly combat is bad, but in New Vegas there just wasn't anything all that fun/challenging about it. I also felt the game could've used a lot more options as far as weapons and armor, although part of that is probably because over half of the existing ones felt near useless - not because I wasn't @ high skill levels but because they were awkward to use, their ammo was too scarce, or they did pathetic damage. I went for a long time before upgrading from certain items. Weapon mods were nice, but not numerous enough in terms of availability and variety.

I didn't use VATS other than on rare occasions when feeling lazy. Not being able to use VATS to target body parts with melee, and it's very short range before your real time accuracy is better are a few of my issues with it, but mostly I just didn't like the system. Didn't really feel like an interesting hybrid of turn based and real time, but more like VATS was just there to make dealing with fast moving things in close range easier.

Skills were handled fairly well, as usual some arguable duds but the various dialogue checks and ways to avoid conflict with non-combat skills was nice.

SPECIAL was sort of the same deal, with perk requirements being the main reason to take certain ones. Charisma was pretty worthless though, I went through the game with 6 but felt like it would've made almost no difference had I only had 1 and min-maxed more. Perception other than being required for better criticals was also pretty lacking IMO.

Perks were a mixed bag, I felt reducing the total number of perks ended up being a bad limitation - I ended up simply skipping the more fun/flavor perks for more combat effectiveness. Certain perks were overpowered while others were simply useless - particularly the experience increasing ones dude to level scaling and level cap.

UI was pretty bad, luckily this was something modders were on top of quickly, but the default was just so awful for PC with very few customization options I felt it worth noting.

Reputation was definitely an improvement over karma, however they should have just removed karma completely - it really got annoying. A lot of the karma gains/losses were pretty much nonsense. For example killing a certain "evil" faction gives you good karma pretty early on, but you'll notice taking the items near them after they're dead gives you negative karma.

Good read, pretty much everything about new vegas

But you forgot to mention prosttutes so this is a bad review!

hardcoe mode is a joke to be honest. There's nothing really "hardcoe" about it, unless you count *annoying* as a hardcoe gameplay element. Sure ammo has weight and you need to carry some food and water with you, but that's never a problem. Short on supplies? Never, because you can find it everywhere.

Bugs with followers annoy me, for no reason at all a follower will just suddenly sprint off. Bugs with guns, the few second lapse between finishing reloading and being able to fire is frustrating, especially when in a firefight and low on health. Some items in you inventory seem to stack on top of each other and are not avaible to equip/repair untill you have literally dropped one on the floor. Strange NPC behaviour, for example one of the promotion dancers that stand outside the Gomarrah(sp?) glides across the floor whilst doing her exotic dance like some kind of preverted moonwalk.

But what about stims and broken legs that made combat a bit more interesting. And I didn't mind the water,sleep, food it just made you get to find a bed and a water source, it be nice if you could turn certain options off and on though.


Only thing I have to complain about is the lack of CL camps theres were like what? 3 maybe 4 if you count a small camp. I know it represents the NV area but I felt there weren't enough of their camps.

I think maybe "hardcoe" mode could have been called something else, frankly. I rather enjoyed it, but I think people were expecting something a bit different with it, due to the name. Myself, what I'm finding added most to the experience was how healing took time, and how crippling was handled. The survival bars - yeah, I'm finding I'm never really in danger of starving or anything lime that.

Maybe tying frequency of supplies and speed of survival bar degradation to difficulty a bit more would have been nice.

Overall, though, I'm enjoying playing with hardcoe mode on just for the gameplay wrinkles that non-instant healing brings to the table. I have noticed that before long i've got enough doctors bags to get me around the crippling effects, but you never know - I could easily run out of those pretty quickly.

I forgot about this being specific to hardcoe mode, I have to say was a good change over the instant healing stims and such.

Ammo having weight was also good, though I still found myself capable of lugging around an arsenal that no one could realistically move at a reasonable speed with.


On my second playthrough, initial was an all out guns character, trying melee now, and I'm really feeling like unarmed and melee should have been one skill. Needing 70 unarmed for piercing strike is just mean when I don't even want to use unarmed at all. I might just mod the perk. :/

Agree, animations are simply ugly, human ones more exactly. They lack "character" and look unnatural. One of the worst aspects of this game. I got distracted by them since I made few steps in Fallout 3. I see they designed it so that animation adapt to various slopes of terrain/steps/rocks and it sure took some programming time to design but I rather have good animations made by animator not programmer and can accept legs struck in to terrain on higher slopes.


I don't use fast travel at all. And hardcoe should have been more "survival challenging" but is still improvement aver standard play. Definitely step in to right direction.


Agree, markers spoil the fun. There are mods which remove them but than quests are not really designed to be done without them. Quest dialogues are lacking as are quest logs in pipboy. You even can not revive dialogues so if you did not catch something during speech, you out of luck. Some quests would simply be nearly impossible to finish without them.


True, I often looked in to wiki to find out how to do the quest as sometimes if you do not follow certain order, quests get screwed. That of course removes great deal of fun from game. I prefer to do quests and "find" on my own rather to know ahead what I should do and in which order to prevent quest get bugged.


With exception of "skill tests" which results mostly in to very idiotic dialogue reactions.


Agree, some stats should get more love, perception in particular. They are useless except as some perks requirement.


Except that reputation in general seems to be bugged. Sometimes when you kill faction member you get modest reputation hit. Other time you get outright vilified for no apparent reason. You can save/load and have different results killing same person. Unless way one die have some influence on this, like blowing head off been more vile for some reason than some other way of making somebody die.
Also people report to get attacked even if their reputation is good.
Personaly I had reputation with certain factions get some surprising twists which are hard to explain. For example my reputation with Legion suddenly disappeared from pip boy after been neutral for some time. Since then Legionaries attack me on sight. reputation with Powder Gangers also disappeared once jut to appear later and reset to neutral -as a result of quest.

I didn't kill any people of factions I had good rep with so didn't notice this. I did however notice that you'd lose rep for killing solo NPCs, when no one could have possibly seen and reported you. Would've also been nice if disguises and headgear that covered your face would've prevented rep changes.

So yeah, reputation system wasn't refined, but it was still a better system than just karma by far.

Try playing on hard core, very hard difficulty with only a BB gun and knife (plain knife, not the OP combat knife). Also only wear the boomers prison uniform for the whole playthrough. Only drink and eat radiated food/dirty water. Hope this helps

Character animations? Seriously....people play this put of 1st person mode? Why?

Agree.

Simple trick for fast travel making the game too easy... Don't use fast travel. I agree that a better system should have been in place, but to say you were never in real danger is wrong; just don't use it. The game won't let you fast travel if your H20 or hunger level is too low anyway.

The guns jamming is not a bug, it's in relation to the condition of the weapon


you can't say you think playing the game with a charisma of 1 would be the same until you actually tried it; I'm constantly running into situations where I needed to be able to talk people into/out of things, but would fail because charisma was too low. Also, Perception isn't just for criticals, it also governs how close landmarks/characters/creatures need to be in order to show up on your compass, among other things. A lot of the stats are behind the scenes and affect things you probably weren't even aware of.

It sounds like you were conflicted about how you wanted to play... you say you skip the more fun perks for combat-oriented ones, then complain that the combat isn't much of a challenge. Also, "Quickly got so used to just following the arrow instead of paying attention to what NPCs said" sounds like a problem with ADD more than a game issue; if you're in too much of a rush to listen the dialog, that's not really the game's fault. Also, there is a quick and easy fix for that, choose another quest in your PipBoy, that way the compass doesn't point directly at the mission you're working on, leaving you to 'sleuth' to your hearts content.

Don't get me wrong, I do agree with some of your points, it just seems to me like you ddn't play Fallout 3 first, and seeing this stuff for the first time.

EDIT: also the fact that you completed the game so early leads me to believe you didn't really take the time to enjoy all the side stuff there is to do, and just rushed through just to finish the game, which prevents you from fully experiencing what the game has to offer.

I totally agree..Reputation is a great addition but the logic behind some of the karma is rediculous. Kill an evil NPC and get good Karma. But afterwards, take his stuff and get negative karma for stealing???? Really???? :shakehead:

NPCs say hi.

I lol'd

Nope, I realize this happens at lower condition, but with some weapons it'll happen when they're in perfect condition. I'm pretty sure it's a bug.

Party time mentats, alcohol, etc. can get your charisma as high as you'll ever need it. Plus charisma only boosts speech, you can have high speech without it. In fact, a high intelligence would probably be better overall for a more dialogue based character, as you gain extra skill points to put in speech.
As for seeing creatures on the compass, I never found this a particularly useful bonus, maybe others got more out of it than I did.


I wasn't in a rush or skipping through the dialogue, I just got overly used to just following the quest arrow because getting information from dialogue wasn't needed for most quests. So I didn't pay attention to the details as much. The quest arrow would also point you to items and places you'd probably not have found from just dialogue, it was pretty unrealistic, and probably crossing the line between good convenient and 'dumbing down' convenient. Suggesting anyone complete quests without the quest arrow when the quests were designed with the quest arrow as an assumed resource is not reasonable. A lot of information simply isn't there to gain from the dialogue because of the quest arrow.

I played Fallout 3 and completed it and most of the side quests. I completed most of the side quests in New Vegas as well, was level 28 when I completed the main quest. I'm not saying it's a bad game and I enjoy most games bethesda releases, I'm just pointing out the flaws that I see.