i hate killing a dude for his stuff and than finding out later if you kept him alive you would of gotten better stuff.

When I was a little tacker of around 4 or so, I was playing in my backyard and a frilly neck lizard (I'm australian), attacked me....It looked pretty much like the geckos in FNV, except that the geckos are a lot 'cuter'. Had the same end result though....my 'guardian' border collie kind of ripped it to pieces after it gave me a decent bite. Always brings a tear to my eye when Rex rips them a new one....

The thing you folks fail to understand about -some- of us out here in the 'I want to play after the game ends' encampment... is that some of us really don't give a damn about the stupid epilogue. I have played (and continue to, on occasion, play) through Fallout 1 and 2, and the biggest complaint I ever had was that when the game ended... it ENDED. Fallout 1 was infuriating like that, because I loved hanging around in Hub... running my shop I gunned some poor bastard down for while in sneak mode. But if I wanted to prevent the whole game from going MUTANTS EVERYWHERE HORRIBLE MISSION FAILURE DEATH or whatever, I had to complete the main quest.

In Fallout 2, they fixed that. There was a time limit, sure... and I adhered to it. Then, I spent the next 120+ hours running around the wasteland, running my gun shop and doing my duty as a proud NCR Ranger, hunting slavers and stopping injustice.


Fallout 3 came... and I ignored the main quest altogether. It frustrated me that it ended, again, after Fallout 2 had done away with the ridiculous gaming tradition. Give me the damn credits. Let me see what happened. Then, just freeze the damn progress of the world at a point -beyond- what you said, and let me play things out as I please. Broken Steel came around and fixed that, but it brought with it a mediocre plot development which left me dissatisfied with its effect.

Nothing I had done mattered.


New Vegas? I had hoped New Vegas would have learned from Broken Steel in a different way. I'd hoped they would learn that the PROPER way to handle a playing-after-the-MQ-experience is to make the things you did during the game have some kind of -effect- on the world afterwards. How hard would it be to code in certain places showing the signs of NCR control? How hard would it be to make the BoS bunker destroyed? How hard would it be to put Legion Soldiers all over the Mojave Wasteland, building Rome in a day on the backs of slave labor?

As a lover of the Fallout series... I'm satisfied with the world taking on a mostly-static state. I have an imagination. I'm perfectly capable of making the story carry itself however I want, and entirely without the help of the game hand-holding me.

But when a game which makes itself -look- like it's an open world with all kinds of things to do... tells you 'Nope, the story's done now... you don't get to play anymore'... then says 'Would you like to play on from -here-, where you haven't completed your mission and all that pride you feel from changing the face of the world is meaningless?'... it makes me want to scream.

Fallout 3 fixed it... and now, when New Vegas breaks it all over again, we praise them for it because the ending was better?

I didn't CARE about the ending in the first place! The ending is but the icing on the cake, for me! What I want is that feeling of having done EVERYTHING, and being able to rest and 'watch' as the world I created unfolds. Sitting up in my Penthouse suite, watching MY city as it flourishes and grows. Seated in my tent, decked out in my Legion armor, witnessing the birth of a True Empire. Watching the first NCR airliner enter into service, fueled by electric cells powered by the Hoover Dam.

I could -make- anything I want happen. It's my world, once the story is done.

Having that stripped of me... feels like being cheated.


That's why -my- hated thing to do... is beat the game, and not be able to continue.

Well put Colonel. You've changed my opinion on the subject. I guess I was just fooling myself about the Last chance save option, because ultimately it's really a work around to the game ending. I do remember the days of time limits and game ending after the MQ of FO1, and hated having to end the story. Your explanation of why the lack of post-MQ gameplay is frustrating actually reflects more of my opinion than I thought.

So, I agree, I also hate having to end gameplay after the MQ. Unfortunately, I think this was a fairly intentional decision on the dev's part, so I'm doubting it'll change, so second play through ignores the MQ entirely.

Circumventing the invisible walls. I also always end up carrying way too much stuff (even with companions!) and I hate to leave anything behind. Serves me right for not offloading on merchants enough
Also, Colonel Martyr: your sarcastic posts are a joy to read when combined with the "[censored], please" look House is giving in your avatar.

Here's a helpful tip:

Killing Coyotes, but alteast you can avoid that. They don't attack you if you keep your distance, same with Bighorners.

Quests that involve running from person A to person B and back, trough 5 different areas :swear:

And as has been mentioned, losing weapon quickslots. I got killed many times in Operation: Anchorage because of that.

And yes, the Deathclaw enforced traffic direction around the map too :stare:

They could follow what Mass effect does and have you either start new or load up the choices you do in mass effect 1 will effect what happens to mass effect 2 and what happens in ME2 will effect ME3

Right, but they still have to program all the results of those choices. That's my point. The amount of crap they'd have to make, to allow for all (heck, even just the major) choices' results to be shown in a "continue" DLC would be as much programming as the entire original game.

It's just not feasible.


And for the "But I don't care about the epilogue" guy - ok, so why do you even have to finish the MQ and get the epilogue then? Just wander off into the wastes and explore instead of going to The End.

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Really don't understand the problem. The vast majority of games have an "End". And that's been fine for decades.

FO3, I knew there was an "end", so I did a bunch of sidequests, explored, and then finally finished the MQ at ~25 hours to see the finale. Then said "Ok, that was kind of silly", reloaded my save and explored for another 50+ hours. It was fine. (And in the year+ since then, I've played five more characters. Four of them ignored the MQ completely. The fifth did the Broken Steel version of the MQ.... and I then promptly removed BS from my install because it screwed up the game with it's continuation, level cap increase, and annoying new monsters.)

FO:NV, I knew there was an "end", so I did a bunch of sidequests and exploring. Finally got into the endgame at ~40-50 hours. Saw the finale through, thought it was depressing as hell, realized that there were a billion other ways I could have gone though the quests to get a different result, and started making a new character to try again. (Also, I realized that FO:NV is so focussed on plot that it has barely a fraction of the "explore" potential that FO3 has, and there wasn't much point in reloading my old save again. FO:NV's replayability is in the massive number of ways to go through it.)

The thing I hate to do, but still have to, is to leave quests open because they are bugged and cannot be completed.