Was in the first batch of games i bought for SNES along with super metroid and super mario allstars :'> Anyway when i said ff is a linear game i compared it with every other game out there. For example i consider Hellgate London or Planescape torment (my favourite rpg) semi linear when compared to Gothic 3 or Risen.



Yea i've been playing it... If i was a designer i admit i would do the same, but... as a player i'll always try to and should rant about it in order to keep some kind of balance.

Anyway I'm not against a series of quests that guide you in a certain direction in a game and don't want absolutely everything to be abstract, but in a game such as this i would also like a lot of free roaming as well. Free roaming as the one you could do if you were there for real. It greatly adds to my feeling of immersion.

I did notice how the U-bend was completely optional and more of a guided introduction to the NV world. I found tons of ways to skip all of that stuff if I wanted, but I still like to do it anyway. I liked how in FO 1 and 2 you could head straight to the water chip or G.E.C.K. from the start but you risk confronting enemies that your character would not be prepared for. In that way NV feels much more like the first 2. FO3 kinda disappointed me when I cut corners yet had no trouble with opponents between me and my objective.

Well I suppose in that sense all games have some form of linearity. I get what you're saying tho.



True, which is why I think they left the option in game to toggle it on or off. Some people don't mind being guided around like a sheep, while others would rather go out and explore themselves. Gotta cater to both, but you're right. If there weren't people on both sides of the fence games would tend to sway in one direction. Diversity and differences of opinions are good. With New Vegas I do feel the invisible walls do more harm than good, it'snot like if you die it's permanent game over. So if a player stumbles into an area they shouldn't be it's ok, let them make that mistake. Maybe they'll get away,maybe they'll somehow kill the oppressing enemy (Deathclaw? yeah, not very likely haha), hell or maybe they'll figure out how to sneak by. But yeah if you take that choice away from the player, I can see how you'd feel it causes the game to be a little linear.

Really? I don't know if you noticed, but most of the population of the Washington DC area was wiped out. Now, thinking about how many people were alive then and how much food was available at that time to feed all those mouths, I don't think the couple hundred people in the wastes would be able to consume all of it, even in 200 years or so.

But if you need maximum realism maybe they can whip something up for you where you wander endless nothing and never find anything and then die.

nvm

Ok, I'm going to ignore the fact that even a thinned-out populace would have gone through the whole of whatever preserved food stores there were in a lot less than 200 years. So, they have a basemant full of food somewhere and they don't need to source more from somewhere? How come the settlements are scarcely aware of each other, if at all? Why don't they interact...even if it's just as a static part of the story? How do they defend themselves from the raiders? They're just disconnected rides in a theme park...they make no attempt to seem real. I'm not saying this is bad...it wasn't a design priority for Bethesda's people.

The point is that it's a lot easier to make things feel big and varied when you completely ignore continuity. I like continuity. Maybe you don't, but I do. :shrug:


There's a difference between realism and believability within the context of a fictional setting.

This is one of the things I wasn't happy about with F3, too. You could tell the developers had a number of cool ideas (town run by children, settlement inside a beached ship), but didn't fully think through the way they were implemented. They felt as if dropped onto the map randomly, simply for the sake of having... well, random cool things the player could discover. Little Lamplight was founded shortly after the war, and the kids soon decided to toss out anyone above a certain age. How did they replenish their population numbers? It was never mentioned. Everyone who leaves gets sent out to live in Big Town - which is a quite bit away from Lamplight. Why trek through half the wasteland to found a settlement near Super Mutants and Slavers? Why wasn't Big Town located around the entrance to Lamplight, which would have made more sense?

In camparison, NV settlements seem to be placed a bit more logical. Goodsprings has clean water sources, Novac lies along a major trade route and near Repconn, and so on.

FNV is anything but linear. What linear is the simple minded people trapped in their own mindset and thinks free roaming equal to non-linearity. What I don't understand is people say they like free roaming game but they decided to follow the straight path designed by the developer and then calling them making the game not free roaming? You can go anywhere you want FFS. You can go straight to the Strip if you decided to. You can detour from the U-bend highway if you decided to.

There are enough stealth boys around Goodspring to let you make a run in any direction you want. You can easily get to Vegas by level 2 or 3. In my second play through, I got banned from all the Casinos except the Tops, got all the SPECIAL implants, got a Reinforced Combat Armor and a Ballistic Fist, all before I got to level 5.

Apologies in advance if I'm re-stated something that's already been discussed. I'm still playing the game right now, but I need to take a frustration break and get something outta my system...
*spoilers...if that's a thing here*

I think there's point to the issue of linearity in the game, not purely in the storyline, but how the main storyline effects overall gameplay. I've been playing it semi-obsessively, lots of hours in, past level 30 etc. My strategy from the get-go has been to apply the same technique that emerged from FO3: explore and the narrative will basically fill itself in. The first time I played FO3, I kept close to the main story and it was all over by level 17. Forcing myself away from the narrative really made the game open up, so subsequent plays have been really rich and interesting. However, applying that tactic to FO:NV is messing thing up.

Early in the game, while I searched, I took care of the Helios One mission (That Lucky Old Sun) and, without really caring about it, made a few enemies. Now (and by "now" I mean this morning), I opened up the Restoring Hope mission and it's completely unplayable. I need to find some lost NCR troops by either Pip-Boy-ing to Helios One for info (although everyone is now dead) or "following the main road" which doesn't help. Using the latter approach, I was led by some NCR soldiers to a camp where some troops had been crucified. Not the right mission, but I took care of it anyway. Then I tried that route again and that crucifixtion mission was simultaneously triggered and ended by a roadblock I came upon. But still no caravan of missing NCR. The game still says the mission is open...it just appears to be unsolvable.

Also, I've been trying to complete the infamous Oh My Papa mission (which I opened yesterday). But because I completed Don't Make a Beggar Out Of Me weeks ago, a crucial contact for the mission is nowhere to be found. Again: the mission is still open, but not completable.

My point is this: I don't necessarily believe these problems are bugs, in the conventional sense. Yes, when the missions became unplayable I should have received a "fail" notice. But I don't think it would be an issue at all if I'd just followed the main story arc and opened those missions as they emerged from the narrative. I've noticed that a lot of the locations I discovered early, like mines, caverns and buildings, only to be disappointed in terms of booty to loot, actually become important sites of exploration for some of these main missions (complete with more stuff to ransack) later on. In these regards, NV appears to be more linear than FO3.

Or maybe what I'm saying is this: every successful game teaches you how to play it as you go along. Sometimes it's easy; sometimes not. FO:NV is counter-intuitive to how FO3 encourages gameplay. I told a friend this the other day: with both Fallout 3 and Fall Out: New Vegas, it seems like the first 50 hours of gameplay, maybe even the first run-through, is purely tutorial. The game I'm playing now, especially in the area of narrative, is almost completely different from the one I started a month ago. But I'm so defeated that I feel I should just kill Mr. House, put the game up and start again is 3 or 4 months...

I feel exactly the way you do about the game. I am tired of people talking at me and wanting me to do stuff for them. I look at those big empty areas on the map and wonder why I can't get to them. Last night the game froze on me because I was trying to get over a plateau, a plateau! and it wouldn't let me do that! So frustrating. So I took New Vegas out of my PS3 and started playing Fallout 3 again. So satisfying being able to roam and discover places I've never found before. In all honesty, I think New Vegas is fine, but I much prefer Fallout 3.

my only big problem with this game was that because of the amount of quest alot of them became boring. yes if you look at the basics of most of the quest in a fallout game its a go from point a to point b and do something kind of set up. in fallout ,to me, they were alot more interesting with regards to the story, atmosphere, events and wacky random things that ended up happening while with new vegas it seemed very dull, half the quest pretty much resulting in one group or another hating you. the whole reputation system isn't my problem and is not what i ment by the last comment but the fact that half of the quest resulted in the same exact thing happening just a different paint job over it. now i wouldn't have this problem if say more happened as a result of beating a quest or maybe i got something more than just caps for it but it just felt like driving through the desert and theres nothing but one lone tree out in the middle of nothing and that was the only really interesting thing. plus the weapon modding system was a disapointment. but fallout new vegas did update alot of the wrong things with fallout 3 such as the major problem with repairing unique weapons and armor to 100% condition, besides using the haley glitch or what not. the fix for that was nice, being the weapons repair kit, jury rigged perk and the abundance of high repair level NPCs. the addtions they added to the fallout 3 template were very nice upgrades and over all the game was good, just alittle bland here and there. i hope they rock some socks off with the upcoming DLCs and there not just alittle bit of the same thing PLUS i hope they enable playing after beating the final quest of the game with an upcoming DLC like they did with fallout 3 because i think these kinds of games shouldn't have an ending you can't play past because it's kind of be fun to see how some of your chooses effect some of the outcomes after the final quest.

I think, ironically, it feels smaller because it's way better laid out.

There's less pointless "here to there" trudgery.

And the main quest chain moves you around the whole map in a circle ensuring you have quick-travel points to make branching off and exploring less a matter of a massive tedious cross-country trek. FO3 was the same size but had massive hauls over wasteland for quests, like megaton to rivet city and anywhere to the Republic of Dave.

I think the layout of NV is brilliant, and it flows so smoothly. The quest chain moves you naturally through the surroundings, eventually even to the corners of the map, making the most of all available real estate, where FO3 was concentrated in a band starting at Little Lamplight and going diagonally southeast to Rivet City, you just went back and forth and back and forth in that band more or less. Literally if little lamplight was 10 and rivet city was 1, on a ruler running that direction the quest orientation was 4. 5. 7. 10. 8. 10. 1. 10. 9. 10. more or less.

The convoluted system to get around the DC ruins, having to take sewers and train tunnels and fight through waves of ghouls made the map seem interminable at times, but I'm not sure it added any additional content.