Video Games Suck

(Score: 0)
by on Monday, July 09 @ 04:41:34 EDT

While I agree that this game is what Fallout 3 should have been, I still did not like New Vegas as much as the Capital Wasteland.

You claim that this map was more full and interesting. There are two marked locations on the map titled "Abandoned Shack." What the fuck? Yes, the locations were memorable, but some were memorable because of how boring and empty they were. Good loot is rare, which is more realistic, but it also removes a lot of the incentive to explore like there was in Fallout 3.

You mention how many people there are all over. That's a major problem I had with this game. There are too many people in this fucking post-apocalyptic wasteland. Enemies are scarce, even if they are tougher. I managed to befriend every faction except the Powder Gangers and BoS, so nobody even bothered fighting me except for all the fucking insects.

The main focus of the game: "New Vegas," the post-apocalyptic sin capital, was fucking boring. It's smaller than a woman's dick, and only has one actually interesting casino: The Tops. It's like the whole first act of the game is setting up this fantastic city in the sand, a glorious oasis of crime, greed, and sex, but once you actually get there, you find out it's just a place to play a few gambling minigames and run around talking to either broke or rich assholes. Compared to the National Mall in DC, this was a much bigger let down, simply because of how greatly it was built up.

That said, Obsidian definitely improved on the RPG elements of this game. While I would have preferred slightly more and better perks to choose from, I did like the SPECIAL system much better than in Fallout 3. The importance of Strength for defining your character's weapon load outs was very well implemented. They also prevented you from becoming a completely overpowered jerkoff by the end, unlike in Fallout 3, where you could kill any enemy in a couple headshots by level 10. The restructuring of Speech and Skill checks in dialogue was well done and felt better, and the importance of wearing different apparel for the right situations made good inventory management feel more rewarding.

As you said, the Damage Threshold system was much better and more sensible. The weapons were more varied and a lot more fun to use. I especially enjoyed placing C4 in doorways and choke points, and I liked how the weapons you start out with in the beginning of the game aren't made completely obsolete simply because you levelled up too high. I used a 9mm SMG and Suppressed Sniper Rifle almost the entire game, and I'd found both of those before I even got to Novac.

I think that if there is going to be another Fallout game in the future, probably developed by Bethesda, they really need to strike a balance between the tone and gameplay style of the game. They should definitely stick with darker and grittier subject matter, but they also should implement the loneliness and depressing futility of struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I think they should move away from the NCR, like they tried to with Fallout 3. I know that most people who played the original games jizzed their pants when they finally got to play in the Southwest again, but the presence of the NCR in the Mojave removed a lot fro the sense of lawlessness and chaos that had been present in the Capital Wasteland. Yeah, there were raider gangs and legionaires in certain pockets and settlements, but there were also tons of friendly NCR patrols walking about, and I rarely felt tense wandering around in old decrepit buildings or out in the wastes, because I always had a sense that the NCR had already taken care of whatever enemies I might have otherwise encountered. There were barely any Ghouls in the Mojave, compared to DC where the droves of zombie fuckers in tunnels, offices, caves and vaults added a lot more tension to exploring, even at levels where they weren't really a threat, simply because of how disturbing they were. Bethesda needs to make the next Fallout game scarier and more disturbing, and this means no NCR, no friendly, organised governing presence, and instead more ghouls and raiders, more dark offices and unlit corridors that require a Pip-Boy light to even see, more skeletons and bloody corpses littering the wastes, more deadly radiation threats, and better dungeon design with larger atrium chambers filled with enemies on all sides.

But Bethesda also needs to incorporate the better RPG elements introduced by Obsidian. Apparel, Weapons, SPECIAL, skills, perks, and dialogue checks should follow the same rules as in New Vegas. However the economic system of New Vegas was badly designed, with prices hardly reflecting value or rarity, and considering how important trading should be in a wasteland, the economy needs to be reworked and better balanced. The skills could also benefit from some changes, seeing as the Survival skill didn't really introduce anything useful when your main health supply is Stimpaks. Enemy difficulty should be ramped up even more, and AI needs to be vastly improved. Keeping hardcore mode in the next game would also be a good idea, since this mode added a lot more strategy to surviving.

And of course, the number one thing Bethesda needs to do to really make this series great is to test the fucking game before they launch it. The number of glitches and bugs in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas is fucking absurd. There are quest glitches that can break your entire game in New Vegas, and though I never encountered them in Fallout 3, I'm sure they were in there as well. I know they released patches later on, and you can fix some problems with the console on PC, but the fact is that this shouldn't happen in the first place. The developers should test and fix their game before they release it, not after. Bethesda has a much improved engine now, as evidenced in Skyrim, but this engine is still pretty glitchy, especially with vanishing textures and breaking animations.

I want another Fallout game very badly, but I also want the developers to take their sweet time with it. This is definitely my favourite series of video games, and I want to see it done justice by Bethesda. The next Fallout game could become the best AAA RPG out there, but they need to really work on these issues first, or else the series will die off in a sputter like so many others.

I hope my criticism doesn't come off as an attack on the review. I like these reviews a lot, I just know that I had a different sort of experience with Fallout New Vegas than you seem to have had, and I think that there are some real flaws with this game that you failed to point out. I'm not accusing you of overlooking problems or turning a blind eye, but I think maybe you were still wearing your rose coloured glasses when you wrote this. I spent a very long time on New Vegas and I had a lot of in-depth discussions with friends who've also played this game, so I think I've gained a pretty valuable perspective on it. If you disagree, that's fine. I just hope we can all conclude that there were both strong and weak points to this game.