This.
Have an ending but don't have the game end.
All the MQ is done, you can finish up sidequests/collect items if you wish.
Or simply explore areas you haven't been to before.

Well it's 1 month until the game is released, I'm fairly certain that they aren't going to change it.

Sorry, would've responded to this before but I lost track of it among the posts. Yes, the New Vegas MQ seems to start out fairly relaxed but do you think it's going to remain that way? We know the NCR's situation is getting rather desperate and that the army is having some bad morale issues. I'm guessing we'll even end up seeing some superweapon on the verge of deployment eventually.

Not doing MQ while it's fairly calm and relaxed is fine with me. It's what I'm doing in FO3 as well. It just isn't always possible.


No, Gabriel, you didn't just explain why it was preferable to have a forced ending. You merely acted all smug as you ranted off some fluff about how forced endings could possibly be made to work if role-players merely stopped giving a damn about their characters. That does nothing to explain why a forced ending is the better option. Oh and yes, I could stop caring about my computer game characters but that would make RPGs rather redundant to play in the first place, wouldn't it?

I was acting smug? How?
And yes, when the ending comes, you should be able to let go of your character.
Everything comes to end. Accept that.
If you care about your character you would want it to have a proper ending and not wallow around aimlessly around the wasteland being nothing more than what you were as you started.

And if you want an explanation you could very well use the search function to find great posts in earlier threads instead of waiting for it to be handed to you on a silver platter.

Here are some threads for you to read through.
Do that.
If you still think it's a bad design decision then post so after reading them.
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1116859-is-anyone-else-as-disgusted-as-i-am/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1114501-ah-this-really-dissapoints/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1112863-spoiler-alert-ending/page__p__16325962__hl__definite%20ending__fromsearch__1&#entry16325962
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1112036-definitive-ending-to-new-vegas-poll/page__st__160__p__16321054__hl__definite%20ending__fromsearch__1&#entry16321054
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1108363-ending/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1106753-fallout-new-vegas-ends/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1103030-does-it-bother-anyone-else/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1098428-ending/

Well, to be anolytical, you DO come off as a bit arrogant and overly important in your opinion at times, even if you don't mean it.

On Topic: Just come to live it, learn it, and embrace the ending like I have. Life moves on, the story ends. :shrug:

Damn...
Well, some things one can change about themselves, like when I heard overpowered is not what I thought it meant, so I stopped using that word and started saying too powerful instead.
But being smug...
I guess it's from repeating all these threads over and over again. Or it might be the Fallout Elitism in me.
Gonna try to stop doing it, but rome wasn't built in a day.

One explanation could be that definite ending can offer bigger artistic freedom to craft an ending that really feels like you've actually completed something, and that your multiple different choices during the game carry an impact. A better sense of accomplishment with multiple outcomes, instead of ultimately redundant series of quests.

You're telling me that I'm essentially a moron who simply needs to let go in about as patronizing a way as you possibly can and then you ask me why I think you're being smug?


I can let go just fine. I just don't like the concept of blocking any further gameplay for no good reason. Keyword being "good". If the game isn't a sandbox game then you certainly expect less freedom with respect to choice. If the game is a role playing game then you expect elbow room to actually roleplay. If the game is a sandbox RPG then you expect free form exploration and wiggle room to role play. Running into some over-the-top ending that the developers couldn't implement in the game and therefore decided only to describe in text is a bit... cheap, in this day and age. I don't care much whether the ending is in FMV sequences or just Doom-style screens with text, but I really hate doing massive changes to the world in a sandbox game and then not even being around afterwards.

Speaking of sandbox games, have you ever played Escape Velocity: Nova? It's a Mac game that is PC compatible and while not exactly an RPG, it does have quite a story. The story has branches that you activate without really knowing it. Eventually you beat the main storyline and believe me, some of them are rather intense. We're talking one faction being annihilated or taking over the known galaxy or the player character essentially becoming a god. Fairly big things. Then the game ends, you're at a unique space station, and then you take a wormhole back to Earth. And are free to sandbox away for as long as you please. Without the epic game changes being properly reflected in the galaxy, mind you.

Remind me again why that's an inferior option to seeing the end cinematics (or the slide show, as you might call it) and then nothing?


Kindly refrain from telling me what I would and would not want, will you? Goes to enforce that whole smug thing. I would indeed like to have a solid ending, but I also want to choose that ending for myself as much as possible, just like we probably all would in real life.


You know, I've actually just read through the first half of all those topics and I'm still not seing anything that refutes what I'm saying. I've read the dev quote, I've read how people hated the old FO3 ending as well as "Borked Steel" (talk about being whiny), I've read how a proper ending is awesome, I've read how people really don't want to continue with their char past the point of no return arbitrarily decided by the omniscient gods of game developing (who refer to themselves simply as Obsidian), and I've read way too many complaints about Broken Steel's effect on gameplay balance.

The thing is, all that stuff doesn't touch much on my point, does it? If you're role-playing (do you know this term?) then you can't just take a break from what is apparently impending doom and world-changing events to do misc quests. It doesn't make sense. It ruins immersion. If you do that, no longer are you a protagonist with a certain personality, you're a sad geek staring at his monitor, wanting to finish a quest at the 11th hour, at a point where it really shouldn't matter too much to your game character.

I am indeed that geek, I know, but I don't want to have that bludgeoned into my face by a super mutie behemoth armed with a damn Prius. I want to be immersed in a cool world with lots of choices to make. Problem is, I can't, because reason would still guide my game character and then said character is extremely likely to get himself caught up in a situation where the only sensible choice is to finish the MQ ASAP.

I can give up characters just fine when the situation calls for it, but generally sandbox games aren't supposed to do that and an Obsidian dev stating that the game unfortunately expects players to simply do just that is to me an admission that the story writers got a bit carried away and forgot what kind of game they were working on. And no, the slides by themselves aren't a good excuse to have a forced ending. As I stated previously, the slides really just show data collected by some scripts. Those scripts can really be run at any time, which means they're not an excuse for a forced ending.

In other words, you can skip most of those former topics because people in those aren't focusing on the actual issue, that the story writers wanted more change than the coders could accomodate. It's going to have to be a really [censored] awesome story to win me over to thinking that it's worth the sacrificed open-endedness. If it's simply the usual clap-trap cliche fluff about restored super weapons and a threat to regional peace and optional enslavement of everybody then what's the big deal? It's all so terribly old and if I am to choose between seeing that crap in a slide show or exploring remote corners of a wasteland with a character I've spent hours building up, it's not exactly a difficult choice, is it?


Repeting yourself over and over generally has a bad effect on your manners, but even so, you might want to consider the tone of your replies. If you spend 12 lines essentially repeating "just get over losing your character" then you'll quite probably be perceived of as patronizing by people not familiar with you.

Finally, a comment from UnDeCafIndeed

Not just "could be", this is indeed what one of the devs said. I think the dev is to a large extent right, except the big thing here is that the MQ has so far-reaching and immediate consequences that it can't be reflected by the game engine. I can respect that Obsidian wants to really make stuff have an impact. It just annoys me that they'd rather force me to end after having show me the closing slide show than let me make the choice myself.

Wall of text, I'm not reading it. Not because I don't want to know what your opinion on my reply is but because wall of texts hurt my eyes too much no matter who's written it.

this is the point your argument always trips on the line, the fact we know the MQ doesn′t start of this dooming "you need to save the world" kind of stuff, that means in turn it′s easy to sett the MQ aside, do all the side stuff and then pick it up when you think it′s time to end it all and role again.

Sorry spider but right now your just sounding more and more like someone who complains for the sake of complaining. Not to prove a point.

No, you didn't say anything about sandbox rpgs.



You seemed to say that because of "action gamers" the "rpg" player has fewer options. I named a few rpgs that all ended. None of them were "action games", imo. Why did they end? And it seems you noticed what happened in the rpgs if you didn't build up your characters. Poorly equipped and too low a level from not doing the side missions/development quests usually ended in a reload from an earlier point to improve your character before continuing. No matter how impending the impending doom might be.

I can't actually think of too many "sandbox" rpg games besides Morrowind and Oblivion. Until I played Morrowind every single game I played had an ending.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever saw anything that said New Vegas was a sandbox game. Open, yes, in that you can go places where you will end up dead because you aren't leveled enough to go there. Open ended like Morrowind and Oblivion? No. There were a lot of threads complaining from the start that the game will have a definite ending. If you play the game's story, what goes on after the end of the story? That particular story is over.

I also can't think of any game that doesn't have a main quest. The only way to let people play indefinitely without being pressured by story requirements is to not have a story.

Now this, is smug

It's smug that my eyes hurt when I read a wall of text?
Am I smug because I can't walk long areas because one leg is a couple of centimeters longer than the other on too?

Eh, you're on a forum mate, expect to read a lot. I don't see the difference between tons of little posts and one big one. Same amount of text, and Word can cut it down if that's the problem. And I don't doubt that you have an eye problem, but I'm certain that you're not the only one. Whatever your reason may be, you're still on a forum, reading.

Well I know I'm going to read a lot but I still think some forum dwellers should utilize the enter key more.
Maybe I should go test myself to see if I need glasses.

lol I have to admit I did skip his post too....all you have to do is make it short and sweet.


Let the game end. Do all the stuff you want to before the MQ ends and stop complaining....

True, true

Anyways, letting your eyes get tested is never a bad idea And contact lenses aren't that bad either, if you don't like the look of a set of glasses

Dude, I'm a beast in glasses. :disguise:

Ever since I got glasses I've been getting women faster then ever! I got them when I was 2 :hubbahubba:

Anyways, ending for F:NV. Personally, I don't care that much. If I don't like it, then I just won't do the MQ again. Plenty enough game left to do other things. I've had 27 FO3 playthroughs, and 5 completed the MQ

When I played the originals I almost never finished it. Mainly because I kept dieing in the beginning of FO2 That's not to say I didn't complete it, just not often

Again, this might get a bit long. I'd split into multiple posts but the anti-spam feature around here makes that annoying.


High school must've killed you.

Seriously, you could do better than that.


I'd put in more linebreaks if my paragraphs looked longer in the post editor. Unfortunately the editor and the preview window is a fair bit wider than the text area of the forum, which means that paragraphs that look 4-5 lines long end up covering maybe 8 lines.

---------------------------------


You're making a valid point, but the problem is that we also know the scope of the MQ is going to be massive. That's why Obsidian is ending the game right after the MQ, after all. This means that the MQ is indeed going to develop into something with massive ramifications. At some point, all that doom is going to have to show up or it will be a really odd MQ. I know the start is fairly calm, but what happens if you accidentally get yourself involved slightly further than that? What happens if you stumble into knowledge that forces your hand?

It could be that Obsidian has actually handled this whole thing very well. It could be that it's mostly like in Morrowind where you're seeing the signs of something big going down, but for a long, long time it's mostly not really any of your business to deal with it. It could be, but we won't know for a little while yet, will we?

Even so, the fact remains that you'll eventually figure out what the score is and what your role is meant to be. At that point a good, honest, life-preserving do-gooder will have to try and finish the MQ if at all possible. You could do just that in most sandbox games, but in New Vegas? It's not going to work, is it?

You're quite correct that I don't yet know that Obsidian has dropped the ball on this one. It's all speculation until we know more, just like any game detail actually is, but speculation is (part of) what a forum is for, isn't it? To me it simply seems like there's a lot more room to screw up this approach than if they'd kept things slightly more low-key and then focused on providing free-form sandbox gameplay.

---------------------------------


Aren't we talking about FO New Vegas? Are you saying it idoesn't aim for the sandbox concept of you being able to literally go almost anywhere you want at any point, assuming you survive, and not be forced to do any quests you don't want to do? Because if we are talking about New Vegas and it essentially is a sandbox game then why would I need to be that dang explicit?


I don't know what I seemed to say, but I do know that I meant to imply that simply running into an end of a story without much wiggle room fits much better into an action game than a role playing game, even if 99% of all game devs out there do their utmost to avoid most of said wiggle room because it makes their work immensely more complex. How many ways did you have to defeat Irenicus in BG2? How many ways did you have of defeating the Twins in IWD2? How many branches were there in defeating the lizard lady during the endgame of NWN? PST is in fact the only game on your list that actually had multiple ways of winning the game.


If you think NWN or IWD weren't action games then we have an communication issue due to conflicting definitions.

That aside, those games you mentioned would reasonably end because they weren't meant to be open-ended. They were meant to tell a story, some in a more linear fashion than others, and of course there's little to do once the story ends. What would be the point, for instance, of the Bhaalspawn ending back in Amn once the ToB MQ is completed? There's by and large nothing more to do there anyway, is there?

As far as character building is concerned, yes, I learned that there's more to solving the impending crisis than rushing along with your head up your [ahem], but that's a rational consideration. Compare that with being all fired up to end the crisis and still having to not finish the crisis and not saving all those lives just yet, because that NW corner of your map is still rather unexplored. Does that seem reasonable?

well duh...den dont′do anything on the MQ at all that′s what I did the first playthough of Fallout 3 and that′s what I′m gonna do in F:NV, I′ll be doing the tutorial, do some quests in the starter town then flip the middle finger at the current MQ entry and go exploring.

Ya see, not that hard to do.

Black spider said:
I can let go just fine. I just don't like the concept of blocking any further gameplay for no good reason. Keyword being "good". If the game isn't a sandbox game then you certainly expect less freedom with respect to choice. If the game is a role playing game then you expect elbow room to actually roleplay. If the game is a sandbox RPG then you expect free form exploration and wiggle room to role play. Running into some over-the-top ending that the developers couldn't implement in the game and therefore decided only to describe in text is a bit... cheap, in this day and age. I don't care much whether the ending is in FMV sequences or just Doom-style screens with text, but I really hate doing massive changes to the world in a sandbox game and then not even being around afterwards.

Key words MASSIVE CHANGES it would like be doing another game and I'm not waiting another [censored] month

I like how people say the gameplay stops for no good reason. THERE ARE SEVERAL GOOD REASONS! THINK ABOUT IT!

Your choices can actually have impact, it'd be impossible to implement them in a way that wouldn't require way too much effort. Plus, THE GAME IS MEANT TO BE REPLAYED MULTIPLE TIMES! and, they will warn you before the endpoint so you can go finish up quests before anything gets too serious.

Some people just can't understand this is a good thing, and DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE YOU CAN RELOAD A SAVE BEFORE THE FINAL PART, IT DOESN'T BREAK IMMERSION THAT MUCH, GET OVER IT.

Yes it should have an ending

And *gasp* a good ending at that

And maybe even a good storyline

And non cookie cutter NPC's that have more than a few lines!

In other words don't make it Fallout 3 make it a good game

Spider. Keep in mind that many of the sidequests are either directly or indirectly linked to the ending. If you do not do them, you'll likely don't see their effective outcomes. So even storywise they are worth doing before ending the MQ.

Then there was the thing with New Vegas itself. To my understanding, getting in has pretty hefty requirements, so you need to do sidequests to up a certain skill or to collect enough money (or what ever ways there was in). At this point, there (IIRC) is no urgency whatsoever as you are trying to find the guy who shot you. Even after being granted the entrance... no hurry. You'll likely know where to go and to whom to talk to at that point. Plenty of time to do sidequest and roleplay what ever you wish.