Too many quests in NV feel unfinished: I rescue a group of enslaved powder gangers and they offer notsomuch as a line of dialogue in recognition of the fact; I directly disregard Fantastic's instructions and siphon power to the entire wasteland and he offers no acknowledgement of this; I spread word of legion atrocities to no obvious effect beyond one soldier having a panic attack; I renege on a promise and doom a farmstead and none of its inhabitants have any thoughts on the matter...

Too many quests in NV feel overly fragile and easy to break without following a step-by-step walkthrough: President Kimball gets stick to the podium and never starts making his speech; I give Veronica a dress but because I've already completed her personal quest the reward is unobtainable; I try to broker a deal with the Great Khans but a vital NPC has disappeared from the gameworld due to my meeting her earlier in my travels, rendering a non-violent solution impossible through no fault of my own; I am locked out of an end-game scenario if I happen to venture into a certain, entirely unrelated Vault...

Too many quests in NV are pure fetch quests of the worst kind; even those in Fallout 3 at least had you fighting through monster-filled dungeons to reach whatever package it was you were supposed to be acquiring. In NV it's too often literally a courier's life, with quest after quest consisting of nothing more than "go talk to this guy/push that button/deliver this package", as you traipse over the same empty ground over and over for little reward. I get sent time and again to the same locations; I had to revisit certain Vaults at least three times at the behest of various quest-givers, I'm sure the devs were proud of the Vaults but come on...

This is just my two cents of course, but I'm not sure there's anything in New Vegas that's as entertaining as The Wasteland Survival Guide, Tenpenny Tower, Trouble On The Home Front, Tranquility Lane to give a few examples. Hell even the tutorial was a crapload more engaging in 3.

(I do like the game though, honest. Just don't think the quest design is anything to write home about.)



Uh-huh...

It depends how you define "content".



How can a building be empty if it's full of "the same three enemies.."?

But broadly, and without the perjorative caricature, yes, that's what I mean. Stones to unturn. Most every place in Fallout 3 had something about it, whether you cared for or could even see it or not.

Hmmm I had NWN2 with MOTB and had zero issues

All I want for future FO games is them to finally get rid of the "legacy" Oblivion mechanics and really focus on returning the Fallout ones that made it great. I want to see critical failures along with critical hits. With lots of effects when they happen. More balanced rules will also help even up the playing field and not give the PC "super man" head start in the beginning.

Sure, there are plenty of quests that are just face-value "do this" quests. The thing is there are a LOT of quests, and many of them are more than that. FO3 didn't have a lot of quests, and a lot of them felt tacked-on to me. Perhaps the level of detail in the characters and factions invovled in the quests in NV made them feel deeper to me, I don't know.


I guess I see what you're saying. Tranquility Lane was neat, but it was really short. It really reminded me of Finster's Head from Wasteland. I really didn't find The Wasteland Survival Guide (multi-parts, but not much to any of them) to be all that engaging, but that's going to be opinion. I liked the idea behind The Wasteland Survival Guide more than its execution. Tenpenny Tower was a stand-out quest, though. It's too bad it was the one they showcased the most before the game was released. I would have liked to have done that one without knowing anything about it ahead of time.

I think the thing I like about the quests in NV isn't so much the design of individual quests as much as the picture that all of the quests, characters, factions, locations, and dialog paint when taken together. It feels a lot more detailed and inter-connected to me somehow where a lot of what was going on in FO3 left me cold because it didn't feel like it was part of a "big picture." Hard to put into words.

There wasn't anything in FO3 like Vault 11 or the "Legend of the Star" quest. While I loved FO3, I think NV is even better, in spite of the bugs.

People who complain about the bugs in KotoR2 and NWN2 are exaggerating. KotoR2 had more bugs than KotoR1 but nothing significant. NWN2 barely had any serious bugs. NWN1 was much buggier. It even had a game breaking bug where 2da files weren't loaded in the right order that wasn't fixed until the first expansion came out.

Can people even name the big bugs that KotoR2 and NWN2 had? I played both games on a crappy Pentium 4 with a Radeon X1300 and the only bugs I experienced was occasional lag and graphical weirdness.

Personally, played KOTOR2 on the xbox and could never even beat it, got the black screen bug...twice. NWN1 and 2 were buggy for me but 2 gave me a corrupted file glitch that corrupted all of my saves...I had like five saves, all at different points and they all glitched up.

KotOR II is unfinished, plain and simple. I've put more than 200 hours into it and I can tell you that there are A LOT of questlines that weren't finished and dialogues that led to nowhere. NWN 2 was just horribly unoptimized. AP wasn't buggy at all, I had maybe 3 bugs which were graphical glitches. F:NV has a horrible memory leak but other than that it's about as stable as Fallout 3. Once they patch the memory leak which is causing the long loading times and crashes the game will be fine.

It's undoubtedly true there are more quests in NV, but I can't help but think that the average quality of individual quests has suffered as a result. Fallout 3 was perhaps less ambitious in that most of it's quests existed in isolation of one another, but they were generally better executed. A lot of the NV stuff feels like a good idea on paper... imo.



I avoid previews and pre-release hype for exactly that reason. I am eternally grateful that I hadn't seen so much as a picture before I played 3 for the first time.



No, I can definitely see where you're coming from. For me, Fallout 3 was essentially a story of one man versus a lifeless environment - or rather, an environment whose life is now a shadow painted on a wall. The wider plight of the world is just window-dressing. It's a pretty solitary and egocentrical experience in some ways, and New Vegas certainly has a... wider perspective. The world doesn't revolve around you so much. This is commendable in its ambition, even if not always in execution.

The black screen bug is a problem caused by the xbox gpu overheating. That's a design flaw within the console. Either that or your xbox wasn't getting proper ventillation.

The corrupted save sounds more like a hard drive issue than a problem with the game.



KotoR 2 was unfinished but it wasn't extremely buggy.

I think Beth should give obsidian the numbered fallouts and Beth should do say fallout: commonwealth or they can all get together and make one badass fallout game.

Read it, and while it's overall a very fair and balanced review, the fact that the reviewer spends a rather large chunk of the article moaning about how it's not the 1990's anymore really lets it down. Sure, games aren't as unforgiving and RPGs aren't as complex anymore, but criticising a single game, while neglecting to mention that that's how the entire industry works is a little short-sighted.

Also, I found this paragraph a little odd:



And then the reviewer immediately moves on to cover the Legion. Hello, there's your early society, mate!

So it's overall a good review, but it has some fairly glaring flaws and missteps in logic.

I read that as seeing a faction through the processes of being created, early stages, while CL has already been established for a while.



Aren't quests like, for example, gathering the Remnants, finding entertainers for the Tops similar to Moira's? And Tenpenny (the only really C&C quest) and Trouble on Homefront force an ending on you, though. However, Tranquility Lane, I think was the most interesting/best quest in the game but was too short. And I'm not seeing how shooting targets and radroaches versus being immediately let out into the wastes is better.

Nah, those games are known to be buggy period. There was nothing wrong with my rig/console. That's not even mentioning all the other bugs I experienced, just the game breakers.

I haven't done the Remnants quest but the Four Tops quest is exactly the kind of "go here, talk to this guy, rinse and repeat" quest that irks me. Sure, they're fun characters, but there's nothing more to the quest than just finding each of them, picking the right line of dialogue and returning to the quest giver.

The opening section of Fallout 3 is so great because is doesn't throw you out into the wastes immediately. There is much more to Vault 101 than shooting radroaches, it is so intricately drawn that when it all goes to hell and you are tossed out on the wastes it is actively distressing, you are ripped out of the womb and thrown to the wolves.

I really do think that Fallout 3's opening section did an outstanding job of introducing me to its world, and that New Vegas' opening was a much more perfunctory effort.

Polar opposites in my standpoint as to how the character is presented. In my view of Fallout 3's intro, its practically trying to one up Beth's Oblivion intro to the extreme case of background and formality. I am fine if the intro begin with me getting kick out of the Vault, but no, they went out with the fact I saw my own birth, already establish my mommy dead, made me Christian, made Liam Neeson my dad (good actor though, but I don't like the NPC he is acting for that much), show me my school days, and put me in a position that would not make sense that I can overtake many armed guards with a baseball bat.

In the case of wolves, its seem more like puppies, to be honest.

New Vegas handle it like this: Your a courier and that platinum chip ya suppose to deliver was part of ya job. Much more open for me to mess around in my toon's background and better way to mingle myself into different path of the main quests as a result.

You're only passing on hearsay and rumors. Heck, plenty of people believe that humans only use 10% of the brain and that Columbus discovered that the earth was round but none of that is true.

If you actually look at the KotoR2 and NWN2 tech support forums and all the patch notes, you'll see that while they have bugs, they're not significantly buggier than other games released around the same time.

This is off topic in this discussion. Please use the PM system.

I think those were bad examples, what about "Bleed Me Dry?." Combine that quest with the dozens of challenges (Cripple your own limbs x/10, etc.) and you've got Moira's quest, and much more.

Also, it's probably unfair to compare the openings since NV doesn't have one..besides your evaluation with Doc Mitchell. FO3's opening is great, exciting and memorable but also silly, your father irresponsibly causes the deaths of several people in the vault. There must of been a way to have exited without causing mass chaos and death, but of course, it has to be dramatic and exciting. Plus the security being unable to tame radroaches when they have guns.

A great review despite the author's numerous jabs at console gamers.

Context is often important to the meaning of words. In this case 'empty' is referring not to a literal void, but to content. A cut and pasted building with the same enemies recycled over and over does not count as 'content', it's filler. Thus, the buildings are empty.

Maybe it's because I have the luxury of playing on a PC, but if I want to kill endless super mutants I can get a mod for that. Modding to add a generic building with generic monsters is easy, and adding 200 more locations like that shouldn't be something a high budget studio is wasting time on. On the other hand, high quality quests and voice acting are a lot more difficult for someone to just mod in. Voice acting especially requires high end equipment and professional actors to get any sort of quality.

That, by the way, is why New Vegas is far and away the superior title. The best of Fallout 3 (the many buildings full of nothing) is something an amateur can replicate, the best of New Vegas (story, dialogue, moral depth) is not.



Some of the locations had points of interest, most didn't. Most had raiders, mutants, and empty tin cans.


Edit- To comment on the original topic... I like the review, though I don't agree on every point.

This.

The review was definitely too lenient.

Many of the things they complained about in FO3 are in NV. NV captures more of the post post apocalyptic feeling of FO1 and 2 but it still falls short. The caravans are still small and scarce. The towns don't seem populated or well protected. You could say that this is due to engine limitations but that's clearly not the case for certain sparsely populated areas that definitely could have had more people. They could have done things to give more of an illusion of a larger population. Replace some of those nameless NPC's with armed guards and instead of just having boarded up houses, put signs in front of them that say "crops burned by Legion, moving west" or have houses with doors that are barred from the inside.

I'm also surprised that they liked Caesar's Legion considering how much Legion backstory from Van Buren was left out. The Legion were supposed to be a lot smarter and more powerful. They didn't just enslave and pillage, they brought civilization to the tribes they conquered. They educated people in their territory. They had a specialized caste of women who spread the Legion's propaganda. They preferred not having to rely on technology but they weren't Luddites, they still built and used technology when they needed it. The Legion in NV is only a shadow of what they should have been. The NCR also got hit with a nerf bat but they got off in much better shape.

Alot of your problem is that you're treating Van Buren as though it were Canon. Really, all VB did was lay down a few tracks of rail for the story train to ride on.

For another quite nice review in much of the same tone as the NMA one http://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/100493-fallout-new-vegas.html provides one. Again pretty accurate review - and not without criticism.

After I've bought the game and sunk over 100 hours into it, a review - unless it comes with a time machine, is of precisely zero use to me. I know what I think of Fallout New Vegas already, in detail.