First impressions.

[lmao]

12 hours into the game. I've done more named quests than the entirety of named quests in Fallout 3, and there's still many more to do.

- The voice acting is awesome. There hasn't been a single person I couldn't stand to listen to.

- The writing for NPCs is really good, or maybe that's just a reflection of the good voice acting. There have been some amusing moments, but it's short on the pop culture references I know some people were dreading. In fact, there hasn't been a single one I've seen so far.

- The writing for the player character ISN'T that great. They just don't make em like they used to. There are no grand chunks of dialogue and [speech]/[intelligence] options just aren't that intelligent. In most dialogue, you'll just ask questions rather than make statements or observations. That's a step above having single word options like Oblivion, but it's not Fallout 1 or 2 either.

- The landscape is beautiful. People actually FARM. There's agriculture!

- It actually feels like a video game. I didn't enjoy any of the quests in Fallout 3; I enjoyed exploring the wasteland, but that was it. There's less to explore in Fallout: New Vegas (although I'm starting to really get in the adventuring groove as I get stronger and better able to stay off the path), but the game itself is really engaging, and I don't feel like I'm playing Myst or some shit like in Fallout 3. The world is populated with quests and characters.

- It's not necessarily post-apocalyptic. There's still a feel of ruin, but there's a lot of civilization. That's fine too. It's been 200 years. It's kind of like a blend of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2... the feeling of civilization is more like FO2, but the lack of a joke a minute and the more serious theme of the game feels like Fallout 1.

- Get Boone. He makes life worth living. Plus, he is voiced by the same dude who voiced Myron.

- The actual city of New Vegas is lame. I know some people hated New Reno, but at least New Reno was gritty. I saw one huge-tittied hooker on the streets of New Vegas. Big deal. There's supposed to be a sense of danger in Freeside, but I'm not feeling it.

- Skill points seem leaner, especially because you can't reload when you fail a speech check. Stat points are DEFINITELY leaner. There are no bobbleheads. I definitely miss the Gifted trait. Perks are kind of weak. You only get one every other level, and they aren't very good.

 

[Falloutsurvivor]

Yeah im Disappointed by Freeside lack of Danger........

 

[volperossa]

To start off id like to say i was a big fan of Fo3 , but most of the NPC's sucked , third person seemed to be there so you could go "woo look at my guy" no use for combat ect , and all the copy and paste metros pissed me off i was glad when i i dident have to use them again XD

The Good --
Nice start I love the game, not the same messed up wasteland of Fo3 but the new story line and setting deffo pulled me in
glad thay dident start as a child for this one.. wouldent have made sence to do it on both f03 and FNV

i feel my self hooked in and listening to the NPC's instead of skipping threw it all

the 3rd person is much better , but its still a bad choice if u want to do well in combat

I liked the new aiming thing does feel much nicer then before and i have been pulling off some nice shots with it

Vats is improved and fighting overall is more challenging

The sound engeneering on this is Brilliant there was so much work done and it really shows
the background sounding for freeside was very autentic

in one of the casinos walking around the hotel rooms listening to hookers at work nextdoor was very amusing XD


The (not so) Bad----

Before i even got close to freeside i was walking around with a massive wepon shooting fireballs at everything in my path (and the ammo still hasent quit on me much later in the game )
It was fun .. but i dident get the feeling of working for it
and took out all the survival aspect and turned it into "lets fk shit up" wich is usualy saved for the end of the game

I Think that the actual Vegas and freeside was a little bit underwhelming then it apeard in the videos
The Casinos wer very nice, still havent seen a show yet but looking forward XD

Freeside starts of promising but within 5 minits all of the thugs have been killed and then seems very unpopulated and dull

Vegas was quite small ... they actualy made the impression that it was bigger then freeside in the interviews .. but its almost the same size but choped in 2 by a fence

The hooker was cool and the drunk people falling over there own feet, but there seems to be a lack of life... and being vegas it should be filled with lots of different people (mod needed )

 

[Anarchosyn]

Before i even got close to freeside i was walking around with a massive wepon shooting fireballs at everything in my path (and the ammo still hasent quit on me much later in the game )
It was fun .. but i dident get the feeling of working for it
and took out all the survival aspect and turned it into "lets fk shit up" wich is usualy saved for the end of the game

Well, this could be a legitimate complaint. However, it will take a replay for you to really tell.

I remember once I played a session of Fallout 2 and rolled up a extremely feeble character with a luck of 10. Immediately after leaving Arroyo I ran into a random encounter which gave me a super weapon which stayed with me for almost the full game (it was the crashed spacecraft encounter). It was really dumb luck on my part and the whole situation could have played out differently.

 

[Nalano]

+1 for agriculture.

Actually, +1000 for agriculture.

FO1 and FO2 were great for immersion for, above all else, one very simple reason: You could tell how people survived out in the wilderness!

You could wander and say, okay, this town is a trading post. This town is a farming community. This town is a mining town. You could track who trades with whom for what. It made sense how people ate on a regular basis. You could break it down and say, "this person does this to survive."

Dear LORD did that not make any sense in FO3: Entire communities surviving on one brahmin. Stores that, despite being ten feet from thriving communities, have never once been looted. "Communities" that were either all of two people, or two dozen people with no visible means of income or ability. Raider camps of fifty people who lived by raiding towns of eight or ten.

Pretty much everybody in DC should have died due to social Darwinism. Hell, with the absence of a larger economy, even slavery made no sense in FO3: In an environment where you're struggling to feed yourself, how in the hell are you going to maintain a slave?

FO3 suffered heavily from characters who existed solely as setpieces and not as actual people, or from places that looked interesting as concept art but totally nonviable in practice.

Having now spent some 16-odd hours and just now making it to New Vegas, I'm happy that every place I've visited made SENSE, on its own and within a grander scale.

EDIT: Actually, come to think of it, even more than the goofy nuka-cola collector or the battling superheroes, THAT's what killed FO3 for me. FOs 1 and 2's entire storylines were based on the local economy: Your vault needs water and water comes at a premium. Your town's suffering a drought and needs relief. And you must travel far and wide because those things are hard to come by and heavily fought over (water merchants!). FO3 tried to make water important but NOBODY NEEDED IT. And without motive, everybody was acting out of character - the BoS especially so.

By contrast, the whole idea of FONV is that you're caught in the center of two major empires looking to make a very important claim on electric power, and a third looking to nose its way in. Their resources, capabilities and motives are easy to understand, and it's clear how the result would affect everybody in the region.

 

[lmao]

Nobody even used slaves at all in Fallout 3. Was there a single slave in the whole game outside of Paradise Falls? I never played The Pitt and I guess slaves were being sent there, but that still doesn't explain how and why Paradise Falls exist. Or Evergreen Mills.

I have to say that now that I'm able to travel off the main road without basically dying immediately, the game definitely does have a post-apocalyptic feel. Especially north New Vegas - awesome area.

 

[Anarchosyn]

I just read the Rock Paper Scissor's review and now my anticipation for this title dropped to about 3/10.

Does this game feel as poorly imagined and hollow as they make it out to be?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/21/wot-i-think-fallout-new-vegas/#more-42293

?

(to save you time here's a relevant bit)

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking that a more bleak and empty and therefore a more “realistic” vision of the wasteland would suit you just fine. Trouble is, it’s more than that. It can be hard to tell the difference between a lack of content and an authentically barren wasteland, but sometimes New Vegas is so impressively bold in its laziness that the distinction is clear.

Look, here’s a shot of the incredible NCR sharecropper farms, the “pride” of the state! One of the guards working here told me that they have to keep the place well-defended, just so every wastelander walking past doesn’t come in and stuff themselves. This isn’t actually a joke. It’s just a disconnect between the scriptwriter and the whoever designs the actual areas.

More frustrating are the absences where you know there’s meant to be an actual feature, but it was evidently forgotten or abandoned somewhere along the brief road to getting this game on the shelves. I had a long conversation with a bartender about the etiquette for hiring one of her prostitutes, before discovering after three increasingly confused laps of the bar that there were no prostitutes in the building. Later, I encountered a man tied to a pole, begging to be cut down, but there was no way to do so. And in one awesomely surreal instance, I had a chat with a character about their impressive snowglobe collection when there wasn’t a snowglobe in sight.

This isn’t another Vampire: Bloodlines, where an ambitious game’s been left unfinished, because there is no ambition here. Imagine for a second that the above problems didn’t come about because of a lack of time, but because of carelessness, and apply that carelessness to the entire game- most importantly, to the quest design and the dialogue. Now you’re getting close to imagining New Vegas.

 

[Anarchosyn]

I can't comment on that because I haven't seen it yet. I will say that the other communities in the game that I have seen (Goodsprings, Primm, Novac, Nipton, along with some NCR outposts) are all designed in a very realistic and plausible manner.

What about the second portion of text where he basically describes a litany of similar disconnects between theme and presentation.

I guess, in essence, I'm curious if the presentation feel hollow...

 

[Nalano]

Oh man - the comments EXPLODED on RPS for that post.

They're ripping on Quinns something awful for mentioning Little Lamplight in a positive light and daring to compare the writing in FO3 favorably to FONV.

 

[Anarchosyn]

Oh man - the comments EXPLODED on RPS for that post.

They're ripping on Quinns something awful for mentioning Little Lamplight in a positive light and daring to compare the writing in FO3 favorably to FONV.

You know, I just thought to look at the comments myself (I tend to tune comments out on most blogs/news sites/etc). It made me feel better that this guys opinion was severally an outlier though nobody has directly contradicted any of his claims (besides vague ones about the writing).

Still, I think this will get purchased sooner than later.

 

[Nalano]

Oh man - the comments EXPLODED on RPS for that post.

They're ripping on Quinns something awful for mentioning Little Lamplight in a positive light and daring to compare the writing in FO3 favorably to FONV.

You know, I just thought to look at the comments myself (I tend to tune comments out on most blogs/news sites/etc). It made me feel better that this guys opinion was severally an outlier though nobody has directly contradicted any of his claims (besides vague ones about the writing).

Still, I think this will get purchased sooner than later.

What's to argue?

He shows a screenshot of a lone guy on a dusty farm and an underpopulated casino floor and says the game is dull.

I passed by the NCR sharecroppers' area. It's actually rather large, with several greenhouses. And while the casino floors are indeed underpopulated, there's both mechanical and lore reasons for such:

- Bethesda's game engine can't handle but so many people.
- The casino populations rise and fall depending on time of day.
- Hello, this is a post-apocalyptic world. One would think he'd realize post-apocalyptic would insinuate massive population loss.

The biter is when he compares the feel of it to Fallout 3 unfavorably. Fallout 3's handling of the lore of the Fallout series was atrocious, its voice acting was horrible, its characters were cartoonish, its plot made no sense, and its world didn't have any internal logic. Fallout 3 made Fallout Tactics look half-decent by comparison. And while New Vegas may undercount the number of crops necessary to feed the population of a large settlement, THEY AT LEAST SHOW CROPS BEING GROWN.

 

[Anarchosyn]

Well, like I said before, his entire post was really just an elaborate commentary on a disconnect he saw between the vision of the script writer and the execution of the design team. The casino and farm where merely examples of this trend which he implied enveloped this game.

However, my failing is that I try to give everybody's perspective a chance and it's now gallingly obvious this guy must be some kind of mouth breathing retard. To his credit, he did seem to have experience with the original Fallouts and his criticisms, though overshadowed by his quizzical respect for Fallout 3, speak to a deep seated fear regarding Bethesda styled games made in this engine (due to those aforementioned issues you brought up above).

 

[Brother None]

- Hello, this is a post-apocalyptic world. One would think he'd realize post-apocalyptic would insinuate massive population loss.

But it can contain several huge casinos? The town of New Vegas is a joke.

The biter is when he compares the feel of it to Fallout 3 unfavorably. Fallout 3's handling of the lore of the Fallout series was atrocious, its voice acting was horrible, its characters were cartoonish, its plot made no sense, and its world didn't have any internal logic. Fallout 3 made Fallout Tactics look half-decent by comparison. And while New Vegas may undercount the number of crops necessary to feed the population of a large settlement, THEY AT LEAST SHOW CROPS BEING GROWN.

People got bogged down on his comparisons to Fallout 3. Yes, the locations and writing in New Vegas are better than Fallout 3. Does that invalidate his points? I think not.

Oh, also, PS:

- Bethesda's game engine can't handle but so many people.

Don't design locations the engine can't handle. Basic game design.

EDIT: Alright guys. This is an impressions thread. Discuss the RPS review in the appropriate thread.

 

[Jammet]

I've just had my first look at it, and, well ... yeah. It's still the Fallout 3 engine, and it's still a 1st/3rd person shooter. But of course I knew it would be the same. The only parts where this game can stand out is it's plot, the writing, humour, design.

As of now, I won't play it. When I can really bring myself to resume, I'll probably enjoy some of it a great deal. But to me, Fallout died when Bethesda took over. Please don't kill me, fans.

 

[Hartigan]

I'll probably enjoy some of it a great deal. But to me, Fallout died when Bethesda took over.

Still, if you liked the originals, you *can* enjoy this one, as long as you look past the crummy mechanics and the lousy Beth content that still appear in this game. The original content in NV, however, is far better in any respect. I agree with you, the original franchise was literally raped and left for death by Beth. You can try to make a Fallout game out of this mess (New Vegas), but all it can be is just a "spiritual successor to Fallout 2". It is hard to wipe out that bad taste the previous game left not using any newer technology/game mechanics but it is still possible to find the original Fallout feeling in this one.

 

[Batcha]

When the immersion is strong enough to get you hooked up and not mind (or notice at all) the mechanical issues you MIGHT have with a game, you know it feels right.
I have just reached New Vegas last night, and so far im really enjoying the game.

So many good things about this game, some things are so-so if you want to nitpick, and some are as expected bad due to the engine..

Overall a damn good rpg, way above than expected fallout experience, and imo a must play for any old Fallout fan who played FO3 and wants to wash away that dreaded experience.

Ofcourse its not better than FO1, because even if the entire old crew got together and teamed up with some kind of a fallout messiah, they probably couldnt make a sequel thats better than the original.

Im actually thinking of possibly replaying NV sometimes whereas thinking of replaying FO3 gives me a stomachache.

 

[Jammet]

Yeah, I'm dead set on ignoring everything I just don't like about the game to enjoy what Obsidian has cooked up. It may just take a little while to muster up the will to do that, but now that I have it, I will definitely play it. If it feels anything like you both describe, then I enjoy it a lot.

 

[FolcoTook]

I knew this was a better game when...

[spoiler:41293495a1]I was on the way to Primm when I came across a guy (forgot the name) who said his girl was trapped on the ridge by geckos. Playing a "good guy" character, I said I'd go get her. About 2/3 the way up the ridge it hit me that this was possibly a trap. And that was when I realized things were going to be much better this time around.[/spoiler:41293495a1]