» Mon Mar 14, 2011 4:35 pm I headed over to the nVidia booth and they had it up on two PC's. Both were in use, so I watched some kid play for a while. There was an extra pair of 3D glasses so I could watch. He didn't have a clue as to what he was doing. He kept trying to kill the first guy he came across. I think he was a casino guard, because when he attacked him, 4 others came out and attacked him. He would die, restart and try to kill them again. I finally told the kid to try talking to the guy since he wasn't hostile. He did, and the guy in the game confiscated his weapons and let him enter the building. When the kid got inside, he realized he didn't have any guns, so he went up to a guard and punched him. :rolleyes:
The guy on the other computer left, so I went and played on it. No one else was waiting behind me so I got to play it for quite a while. After I set up my keys, I started exploring the town. If you wandered too far into the "bad" part of town, there were thugs that would come out of alleys and attack you. All they had were melee weapons and easily went down or fled if you injured them. If one of the other citizens saw, they'd help out by shooting at them.
There was a quest when you started which was to find and question some guy (I guess the main quest). I went into a casino, talked to a guy at the desk. I asked what the casino had to offer, and you could gamble, exchange currency and rent a room with or without "companionship." I asked if he had any jobs, and he enlisted me to hunt down and collect some debts. I did complete that quest, then played the casino games. This particular casino didn't confiscate my weapons either.
I went to another building which I couldn't go in without handing over my weapons. I don't know what was in there because once I got inside there were 4 guards that would open fire on me if I walked past them. You didn't get any dialogue options when speaking to them, but they did say something. I couldn't hear what they said because the volume was low and there was a lot of noise in the exhibit hall. After I got killed, I loaded the auto save and left the building. The game crashed and I had to restart it. When it restarted, it turned off the 3D, which was fine because it was giving me a headache.
The 3D turned out to be a separate device, and all you had to do was push a button on it to switch it on and off. The game looked good in 3D, but the Pipboy was hard to use. The Pipboy looked like it was outside the monitor, but the mouse cursor looked to be behind it and I saw double cursors which made it hard to click things. I had to close one eye just to use the Pipboy, but once I got the 3D turned off, I left it off. I also noticed the game got dimmer when you turned the 3D on.
I finally left the nVidia booth to go look at other stuff. I found that the Alienware booth had two more PC's running FNV. One was the same 3D setup like at the nVidia booth, the other was on three monitors turned 90°. The people at that booth did time you and kicked you off after 20 minutes even though nobody was waiting. This time rather than explore the town of Freeside, I turned around and went out into the wasteland. After I got kicked off the first one, I just went over to the other one for another 20 minutes. I found a few other little settlements, some farms (even a molerat farm) and what looked to be a labor camp. It was a fenced in area with armed guards around it, and people inside working fields. It looks like there might be more children in the game this time. I saw 3 or 4 kids with sticks chasing a rat looking thing. The rat thing wasn't hostile, so I don't know if it was a pet or something they were trying to catch. I don't know if you can kill them because I didn't try.
From what I could tell in the two 20 minute periods I got in the Nevada wasteland and from the map on the Pipboy, the overall "wasteland" part looks to be smaller than in Fallout 3, but with larger city/town type places that you enter. I hope there are areas at the edge of the wasteland where you can travel to other outdoor wasteland places like the way you get to The Pitt and Point Lookout.
I did speak to a character about getting into The Strip. I don't remember the details, but there was something about needing a passport or something before being allowed into The Strip. He told me to speak to the security bot guarding the entrance for details. The security bot said I had to submit to a credit check before I could get a passport, which cost 2000 caps, and from what I understood, that didn't guarantee you access. I guess there will be some kind of requirements to pass the credit check, which will cost 2000 caps each time you apply. From what I could tell, this was early at the start of the game. I looked at the Pipboy stats, and you were only level 2 and just inside the gate to Freeside.
The kid playing that I mentioned earlier when he died once, rather than wait for it to load the auto save, he hit ESC and selected New Game. I got to see the intro of you waking up in the Doc's house and him handing you something. I didn't get to read the dialogue because the kid kept clicking through it rather than listening to it. Then he took you over to the machine to set your SPECIAL stats. The kid didn't know what to do, he just put all of the points into strength then moved on to the next part. Just then the guy attending to the Fallout part of the booth noticed and came over. He said they weren't supposed to be showing that part and reset the game back to the demo save.
There are a few things that I didn't like, and hopefully will be fixed by the time the game ships. Like in Fallout 3, you can customize the weapon bound to the number keys. The the default key to switch ammo types is 2, but even after I changed the switch ammo key to something else, I couldn't assign a weapon to the 2 key. I had a nice system with Fallout 3, I used 1 for melee weapons, 2 for pistol type weapons, 3 for close weapons like an SMG or shotgun, 4 for medium range weapons like the assault rifle, 5 for grenades, 6 for long range weapons like the hunting rifle or laser rifle, 7 would differ depending on what I was doing at the time and 8 was for big weapons if I was going to use them, otherwise I put mines in its slot to drop if I needed to flee a fight.
I didn't like how the casino games were done. I know it's not a casino simulator, but it is in Vegas and the casinos are a big part of the game. I went over to a black jack table where there were 4 other people playing and chose to play black jack. It switched to the black jack game, but now I'm alone playing an invisible dealer. It would be nice to get a first person view sitting at the table with the other people and having them actually play instead of you playing an invisible hand dealing cards. I gave roulette a try, and either it's not fully functional or I was doing something wrong, because I could only select the spots I wanted to bet on and select a total bet amount. In real roulette you can bet different amounts on different things, for example you could bet one chip on 0, ten chips on even, and four chips on 13. There was an interview video from not to long ago where they said that the developer in charge of the casino games had just finished working for a company that developed online casino games, so I expected them to be better. The slot machines were the only thing that worked like the real thing. You set your bet amount and go. Tons of fun.
The NPC's all looked too similar. There was a gang called the Kings or something that all had Elvis hair and looked the same, but the other people elsewhere looked like people taken right from Vault 101 and Megaton. I saw a few that looked like Butch, and I swear I saw Moira Brown. :blink: I was hoping the NPC's would have a larger variety of hair types and different facial features this time around.
Overall though, I liked what I saw. This looks like it's going to be a solid Fallout game. I was worried back when I read about the all of the dialog options being shown, but I liked how it was done. It would show the speech option like "Barter (39/40): Dialog text here." Since you didn't have the proper barter skill to pass that speech option, it would be red when you put your mouse over it. You could still click it, but you'd fail. I love the iron sights, but I hope they put an option to make the iron sight key a toggle rather than having to hold it down constantly.
