what happens in new vegas...
Hi, Steam? Yeah. I really don’t need to know I’ve spent 90 hours playing Fallout New Vegas. At 100 hours, do I get a “basement-dwelling billy-no-mates” achievement?
So…this is one odd beast of a game. The easiest way to describe it is Fallout 3 (pause to genuflect), but more, both the excellent and the skin-rendingly annoying. Here’s the latter, first:
• Glitches…yeah, they’re as bad as advertised. Fortunately, I’m a PC gamer, so I was able to get around the worst ones with console commands. And some of them are interesting, if you’re a dork like me who likes random story elements. For instance, I liberated Nelson via the Camp Forlorn quest. A week or so of in-game time later, I run across an NCR commander who tells me that Nelson was taken before the NCR could set up and that they had several troopers crucified. Commander tells me I’ve got to snipe the dying hostages, Boone’s muttering behind me, “fuck mercy kills, we’re rescuing them,” I’m snarling, “god damn it, am I the maid? I just cleaned this!” We get to Nelson, and it’s full of peaceful NCR troops. I turn to the commander, who’s making an impressive grimace and demanding I kill all those Legionnaires. Oh, honey…you got the PTSD bad. No wonder you panhandled me for Psycho.
• Plus, my pre-order Caravan pack never showed up in the game despite much jiggerypokery. Boo.
• The mandatory cut-scenes glitch more often than not, leading to what the husband has dubbed the Ingmar Bergman effect:
• The missions can be…lacking. There’s a lot of fetch-and-carry, and even more acting as a verbal postman between characters - but this is partly my fault, as I went for a high-speech build.
• Also, a downside to having so many options for completing quests is that, say, you’ve got two objectives plus three optional objectives. That leaves you with five identical compass directions. One of them directs you to an elevator? Good luck identifying that path on the other side of the loadscreen. Is simple color-coding too much to ask? I…I just never want to see the bowels of Gomorrah again, ok?
• And the companions, wonderful as they are (will get to that once I’m done whining), are all descended from Leeroy Jenkins. Even set to “peaceful” mode, as soon as I start sniping at the Viper encampment from the opposite ridge, down goes Rex to get himself whomped by the entire camp of bad guys while Cass plants herself firmly in my shot, moving with me as I try to get around her.
And yet, I’ve spent 90 hours playing this game. Why?
• This game is ridiculously beautiful, particularly in incidental moments.
• The companions are awesome. They each have their own quest line, triggered by various events you stumble across (tho it’s bastarding hard to properly set off and complete many of them…sorry Raul!), as well as fairly rounded and humorous personalities.
The wit and wisdom of Rose of Sharon Cassidy:
Raul, so respectful:
Lily, best grandma in the world to ever sound like Tom Waits on a Psycho binge:
Ecstatic Boone, after dealing with his issues and helping me off Caesar:
Somehow I missed screencapping Arcade when he wasn’t kitted up in Raider gear and a cowboy hat, and Veronica perma-glitched before I went screencap-mad. Rest assured, they’re both deeply annoying fun to drag along, too.
• The King! Who you can’t Black Widow, dammit!
• Speaking of Black Widow, I enjoyed the hell out of that and Cherchez La Femme. Unlike Fallout 3 (pause to genuflect), the sexy perks actually lead to G-rated sex. At least one of which is in fact important to the plot. And there’s never any karma loss! “How ‘bout I convince you with sexy time?” is simply a valid way to move several plotlines along without shooting anyone.
• Speaking of karma, it’s still there, but is much more muddled up with reputation and capricious morality. Kill the Powder Gangers? Sure. Take their stuff afterward? Thief! I don’t actually mind that…the wasteland is supposed to be an unforgiving place. I should be facing the morality/survival conflict on a regular basis. And the paths are no longer a simple messiah/mercenary/baby-eating-monster choice. Many seemingly helpful actions turn out to be on behalf of nasty types who’d rather commit genocide than deal with the paperwork of diplomacy.
• That said, I still have the worst time doing anything but the messiah run, because I am a mealy little wuss who desperately wants to be liked and would probably try to cuddle a deathclaw.
• Finally, it may be my imagination or just the influence of the Fallout 2 crew, but this game seems deliberately fandom-friendly. It fills a lot of the yens players had for companions, sets up romance options, and has a pretty impressive array of endings. While F3 (pause to genuflect) had a singular endpoint before the expansion packs, this has three main paths that contain multiple potential threads and double-crosses. My only worry with this is that it’ll make DLCs for this version more difficult, particularly if they add on a free-play option.
So, that’s my off-the-cuff review, and I am sure to think of twice as much to say after I hit “post” (which I why I’m doing it before this gets any longer!). And what, you expected me to bring up Benny?
…nah, I’m gonna need a whole separate entry for the Ben-man.
Or possibly just therapy.
This entry was originally posted at http://mustinvestigate.dreamwidth.org/17017.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
So…this is one odd beast of a game. The easiest way to describe it is Fallout 3 (pause to genuflect), but more, both the excellent and the skin-rendingly annoying. Here’s the latter, first:
• Glitches…yeah, they’re as bad as advertised. Fortunately, I’m a PC gamer, so I was able to get around the worst ones with console commands. And some of them are interesting, if you’re a dork like me who likes random story elements. For instance, I liberated Nelson via the Camp Forlorn quest. A week or so of in-game time later, I run across an NCR commander who tells me that Nelson was taken before the NCR could set up and that they had several troopers crucified. Commander tells me I’ve got to snipe the dying hostages, Boone’s muttering behind me, “fuck mercy kills, we’re rescuing them,” I’m snarling, “god damn it, am I the maid? I just cleaned this!” We get to Nelson, and it’s full of peaceful NCR troops. I turn to the commander, who’s making an impressive grimace and demanding I kill all those Legionnaires. Oh, honey…you got the PTSD bad. No wonder you panhandled me for Psycho.
• Plus, my pre-order Caravan pack never showed up in the game despite much jiggerypokery. Boo.
• The mandatory cut-scenes glitch more often than not, leading to what the husband has dubbed the Ingmar Bergman effect:
• The missions can be…lacking. There’s a lot of fetch-and-carry, and even more acting as a verbal postman between characters - but this is partly my fault, as I went for a high-speech build.
• Also, a downside to having so many options for completing quests is that, say, you’ve got two objectives plus three optional objectives. That leaves you with five identical compass directions. One of them directs you to an elevator? Good luck identifying that path on the other side of the loadscreen. Is simple color-coding too much to ask? I…I just never want to see the bowels of Gomorrah again, ok?
• And the companions, wonderful as they are (will get to that once I’m done whining), are all descended from Leeroy Jenkins. Even set to “peaceful” mode, as soon as I start sniping at the Viper encampment from the opposite ridge, down goes Rex to get himself whomped by the entire camp of bad guys while Cass plants herself firmly in my shot, moving with me as I try to get around her.
And yet, I’ve spent 90 hours playing this game. Why?
• This game is ridiculously beautiful, particularly in incidental moments.
• The companions are awesome. They each have their own quest line, triggered by various events you stumble across (tho it’s bastarding hard to properly set off and complete many of them…sorry Raul!), as well as fairly rounded and humorous personalities.
The wit and wisdom of Rose of Sharon Cassidy:
Raul, so respectful:
Lily, best grandma in the world to ever sound like Tom Waits on a Psycho binge:
Ecstatic Boone, after dealing with his issues and helping me off Caesar:
Somehow I missed screencapping Arcade when he wasn’t kitted up in Raider gear and a cowboy hat, and Veronica perma-glitched before I went screencap-mad. Rest assured, they’re both deeply annoying fun to drag along, too.
• The King! Who you can’t Black Widow, dammit!
• Speaking of Black Widow, I enjoyed the hell out of that and Cherchez La Femme. Unlike Fallout 3 (pause to genuflect), the sexy perks actually lead to G-rated sex. At least one of which is in fact important to the plot. And there’s never any karma loss! “How ‘bout I convince you with sexy time?” is simply a valid way to move several plotlines along without shooting anyone.
• Speaking of karma, it’s still there, but is much more muddled up with reputation and capricious morality. Kill the Powder Gangers? Sure. Take their stuff afterward? Thief! I don’t actually mind that…the wasteland is supposed to be an unforgiving place. I should be facing the morality/survival conflict on a regular basis. And the paths are no longer a simple messiah/mercenary/baby-eating-monster choice. Many seemingly helpful actions turn out to be on behalf of nasty types who’d rather commit genocide than deal with the paperwork of diplomacy.
• That said, I still have the worst time doing anything but the messiah run, because I am a mealy little wuss who desperately wants to be liked and would probably try to cuddle a deathclaw.
• Finally, it may be my imagination or just the influence of the Fallout 2 crew, but this game seems deliberately fandom-friendly. It fills a lot of the yens players had for companions, sets up romance options, and has a pretty impressive array of endings. While F3 (pause to genuflect) had a singular endpoint before the expansion packs, this has three main paths that contain multiple potential threads and double-crosses. My only worry with this is that it’ll make DLCs for this version more difficult, particularly if they add on a free-play option.
So, that’s my off-the-cuff review, and I am sure to think of twice as much to say after I hit “post” (which I why I’m doing it before this gets any longer!). And what, you expected me to bring up Benny?
…nah, I’m gonna need a whole separate entry for the Ben-man.
Or possibly just therapy.
This entry was originally posted at http://mustinvestigate.dreamwidth.org/17017.html. Please comment there using OpenID.