Not saying that you're lying but I don't believe that they couldn't have created long unique quest paths.
And for the "most people will only play through it once", well, isn't that their own fault?
As I said, I feel like they didn't give the full truth about it pre-release when they were hyping it.
"You can choose to join Legion, NCR, House or be independent", yeah, that's true, but it's a vague truth.
They didn't bother saying "Oh by the way, no matter which one you choose the quests will be the same."
It's more than any earlier game did for us that's for sure so it is a step forward, but it wasn't even remotely what I expected.
But that doesn't mean the game is bad.
It's a step forward.
Even though it's just a tiny tiny tiny step.
I agree I'd like to see more meaningful branching. I may not LIKE it, but it's sort of the state of play that until games don't require everything to be written out piece-by-piece (IE procedural generation), true multipath branching is economically inefficient for developers.
I agree more could have been done, giving legion enough locations and vendors to reduce the massive NCR bias would have been enough to satisfy me, mostly anyway.
I do have to give them credit though for varying enough in the mission order and factions needed that it isn't *identical* each playthrough. I think a lot of the samey-ness comes from the game-world logic: If you're going to take over the Mojave you're going to have to deal with the resident minor factions that could become a thorn in your side when you're in charge, either by making them allies or smoldering piles of ash.
If you want to control the massive robot macguffin army you have to go through the same steps no matter who ends up holding the reigns.
My real issue with the way they implemented branching is that 2 of the major high-money-capacity vendors (that stock high-end items as well) are NCR-only, more than half the followers in the game go byebye if you're doing a low-karma legion run at some point in the story, and legion doesn't have half the quests NCR does. In fact I counted like 3 or 4 times the NCR quests as legion.
One side in any two-sided game always feels less developed, or less interesting to some people. But this isn't just a case of the fact I like NCR more therefore find more to do. Being hated by the NCR cuts you off from a majority of the game content without ceasar giving you other things to do to make up all that lost stuff.
But I'd have rather it come out more like megaton Vs Tenpenny tower (seperate but equal, able to do all quests for both if you are a conniving bastard and know the right order) rather than locking you out of half the game to do the other half, or rather locking you out of 7/8th of the game to do the 1/8th.
» Sun Mar 06, 2011 7:16 am 
