The best and the worst in FNV

Pros:

+ Excellent writing for the most part. Fun quests, interesting people, very rich game world.

+ Tons and tons of weapons, especially with GRA. There is always something new to find and try, you never feel stuck with the same weapon for too long and one weapon skill doesn't feel vastly superior to the others.

+ Crafting.

+ Enemies don't scale with your level.

+ Iron sights.

+ Pretty much all little tweaks they did since FO3, such as skill point calculations, weight for ammo and most supplies.

+ Some very nice and interesting locations. No two places feel or look the same. No more endless subway tunnels.

+ Great atmosphere.


Cons:

- Horrible engine.

- Easily becomes too easy, even on the hardest difficulty.

- Too easy to stock up on ammo and supplies.

- Writing and presentation often feel a bit skewed. The writing talks about farmlands, what you actually see is a few rows of maize and a handful of greenhouses. The amount of escaped convicts is such a problem that the NCR with all their military might can't handle them, but one lone courier can easily take them out. And so on.

- Survival skill not being useful enough. More useful crafting recipes would have been nice.

- Despite a lot of interesting locations, there are also a lot of very uninteresting locations. Several marked locations on the map offer absolutely nothing. I'm all for an abandonen shack here and a prospector campsite there, but unless they actually offer anything else than common loot, there's not much reason to have them as marked locations. When I see an unexplored marker on my radar I want to feel like there will be something worth exploring when I get there.

- The Strip and Freeside lack a bit in scope.

- NCR being too dominant in amount of quests. Don't side with them and you'll miss out on A LOT of quests. Become an enemy of the NCR and you make completing the main quests very bothersome.

- Bloodthirsty companions that will start combat and hunt down enemies even if you tell them to be passive.

- Lack of some extremely dangerous enemies. Deathclaws are tough, but by the time you have an Anti-Materiel Rifle you can easily pick them off (much thanks to the bad AI). Would have loved to see some huge murderous robots, or hell even a behemoth or two. Think bosses.
 
Writing and presentation often feel a bit skewed. The writing talks about farmlands, what you actually see is a few rows of maize and a handful of greenhouses. The amount of escaped convicts is such a problem that the NCR with all their military might can't handle them, but one lone courier can easily take them out. And so on.
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I hate this argument.
Do you realize, that in every game player character can take out entire universes?
If you wouldn't be able to kill someone, I'm sure you will complain about such limitations.
In every rpg, gameplay is over realism, when it comes to killing hundreds of enemies.
 
So why is it that the Courier is unable to take out the NCR military at that same level? A couple of Republic troops are a much bigger threat than a large gang of 20 guys armed to the teeth.
 
I think he can.. One of my playthroughs, I killed Moore, Kimball, Crocker, every single NCR trooper I saw and they didn't appear again.. (Except the respawning one's, of course)
 
Languorous_Maiar said:
Writing and presentation often feel a bit skewed. The writing talks about farmlands, what you actually see is a few rows of maize and a handful of greenhouses. The amount of escaped convicts is such a problem that the NCR with all their military might can't handle them, but one lone courier can easily take them out. And so on.
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I hate this argument.
Do you realize, that in every game player character can take out entire universes?
If you wouldn't be able to kill someone, I'm sure you will complain about such limitations.
In every rpg, gameplay is over realism, when it comes to killing hundreds of enemies.
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Yes, I realize that and I don't like it. Just because it's the norm doesn't mean it's not bad design.

Why making a big story point of how threatening and dangerous something is and then make it pretty much a pushover for a low level character? There's no getting around it, that's an awkward design choice.

I don't like killing hundreds of enemies in an rpg.
 
Same. I try to roll non-combat as often as possible and take perks like Animal Friend because the less killing I'm doing the more I can get immersed. I had less than a dozen combat encounters in my entire Fallout 2 playthrough, and they were all grueling and memorable.

Combat is used well a few times in New Vegas (Freeside Thugs are a great way to sell how desperately poor everyone in that place is) but mostly it's just "kill, loot, walk away, forget it ever happened".
 
ludisonmandela said:
the thing i disliked was that you could get a crap load of money in no time
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Actually, that is problem for all Fallout series. Weapon is expensive and easy to get. and for gamble.... don't cheat with Save/load!! :lol: :lol: :lol:
 
Fallout 2 - Goto San fran at the beginning - loot Navarro - sell everything you don't need = Gaus Rifle + 100 EC ammo + 15000.
 
What New Vegas lacked (which was YET ANOTHER carryover from FO3) relative to "too much money" was... Just bad prices, really. FO2 addressed the easy money issue in several ways. For one, shit was more expensive, and Barter was slightly tweaked so merchant prices were much more merciless. Ammo was also INCREDIBLY expensive to stock up on, so if you found yourself buying bullets (though once you became accustomed with how to roll through FO2, looting for ammo wasn't very difficult) you chewed through your cash reserves remarkably quick. FO3 and FONV had no real concept of what to do with the in-game economy, the prices were completely off, and as a result, we're left with a game that just felt like we got money "too easily". Once you reach the Gun Runners, if any of their particular wares catches your eye, its extreme expensiveness is a buge barrier between you and obtaining it, regardless of how much money you can have, but then an item vital to your survival (food and stims)- that should be difficult to come by and important for everyone -is a pittance for the price.

Money wasn't a problem because it was too easy to get (though that certainly contributed) but because the world wasn't designed with enough forward-thinking and cohesive prices to make the money you DID get feel weighty and measured in how it ought be spent...
 
in new vegas it is a lot easier than in fallout 3

anyways you guys seem to dislike the engine so much what could have made it better?
 
Isometric view and non-fps combat in the beginning?
In gamebryo engine you can defeat anyone using 10mm pistol at 1 lvl, using arcade methods...
 
ludisonmandela said:
that is kind of true but it doesn't mean the engine is pure crap
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But the engine IS pure crap! When i first saw F3 i was looking forward to trying it out but the more i play F3/nv the more i hate it.

Languorous_Maiar said:
Isometric view and non-fps combat in the beginning?
In gamebryo engine you can defeat anyone using 10mm pistol at 1 lvl, using arcade methods...
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Well In F1 and 2 you can actually kill anyone "?" with a shot to the eye even with 0 damage!

SnapSlav said:
What New Vegas lacked (which was YET ANOTHER carryover from FO3) relative to "too much money" was... Just bad prices, really. FO2 addressed the easy money issue in several ways. For one, shit was more expensive, and Barter was slightly tweaked so merchant prices were much more merciless. Ammo was also INCREDIBLY expensive to stock up on, so if you found yourself buying bullets (though once you became accustomed with how to roll through FO2, looting for ammo wasn't very difficult) you chewed through your cash reserves remarkably quick. FO3 and FONV had no real concept of what to do with the in-game economy, the prices were completely off, and as a result, we're left with a game that just felt like we got money "too easily". Once you reach the Gun Runners, if any of their particular wares catches your eye, its extreme expensiveness is a buge barrier between you and obtaining it, regardless of how much money you can have, but then an item vital to your survival (food and stims)- that should be difficult to come by and important for everyone -is a pittance for the price.

Money wasn't a problem because it was too easy to get (though that certainly contributed) but because the world wasn't designed with enough forward-thinking and cohesive prices to make the money you DID get feel weighty and measured in how it ought be spent...
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By the time you hit NCR or even New Reno in F2 you will probably have more cash than you need. Heck when i hit SF i usually buy PA for any companion i have and this is without "farming" for cash.
 
Yeah, I wasn't shy with spending money in F2 and I still reached the endgame with over 10,000 caps. I think the Sierra Army depot alone set me up for life. Part of that was having plenty of extra storage space due to the car, though.

Having vast amounts of money is something that happens eventually in every single RPG; I don't get why in New Vegas it's suddenly a crippling flaw.
 
2house2fly said:
Yeah, I wasn't shy with spending money in F2 and I still reached the endgame with over 10,000 caps. I think the Sierra Army depot alone set me up for life. Part of that was having plenty of extra storage space due to the car, though.

Having vast amounts of money is something that happens eventually in every single RPG; I don't get why in New Vegas it's suddenly a crippling flaw.
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Actually i think F1 didn't have this problem from what i remember. But that may be due to it being shorter.
 
It was neither absent from FO1, nor was the reason it seemed like less of a problem because it was shorter. It was WORSE in FO1, which is why the methods used to limit the issue were undertaken in the first place, in FO2.

There was an abundance of exploits in FO1 that gave the player an excess of caps to spend. People you'd shoot up would drop their armor for looting, and that added up to a lotta cash FAST! FO2 (and subsequently, FOT too) reasoned that if you shoot someone up, their armor shouldn't be lootable, and so armor became much more scarce. With a moderate level of Barter, you could buy any item at any vendor, and sell it back to them in the SAME transaction and reap a profit (the Gun Runners being the most infamous case), so long as they were carrying caps for you to swindle. So in FO2 they changed the formulas that Barter influenced to prevent this from being possible, and the rate at which NPC merchants restocked on caps was also far more strict, so ripping them off was no longer possible. There was the Gambling exploit in FO1 that enabled a player with JUST 51% Gambling to infinitely stock up on caps in a short amount of time just by going up to any slot machine and weighing down 2 buttons on your keyboard. Like they did with Barter, the formulas that Gambling governed in FO2 were changed so that this was no longer so exploitative, AND they had NPCs you gambled with change the order of their dialog periodically, as well as involve more branching between bets, so weighing down 2 keys wouldn't work in creating a cap-generating loop. Your companion NPCs in FO1 could carry UNLIMITED quantities of items, so carryweight limitations was never a problem as long as you had Ian with you. No matter who you recruited in FO2, or whether or not you obtained the car, you couldn't exceed their carryweight limits, so depending on how much looting you did, this WOULD become an issue, so FO2 wasn't nearly as capable of allowing hoarding as FO1 was.

FO1 had so many exploits related to cashflow alone that anyone who thinks otherwise clearly didn't play the game for long. FO2 just seemed worse because Black Isle wisely increased the maximum for certain numbers. You weren't limited to moving 999 caps at a single time, and your inventory would display more than 9999 being carried at once. But those were just aesthetics making a much-more-muted problem look worse than an ACTUALLY worse problem that was harder to distinguish from the first game. FO2 was by no means the worst in the series, as far as money was concerned. You had to have ample experience with the game to know the "tricks", and even then they weren't "tricks", considering their FO1 counterparts.

Take off those rose-tinted lenses, people. FO3 had it worst, not FO2, not FONV. That's not saying they were great, just "not as bad" as FO1 and FO3 in terms of abundance of wealth.
 
The problem here is carry weight and overabundance of loot, combined with weak enemies and rewarding combat. When a game forces you to kill, and then makes it super easy to take all their stuff and sell it, why be surprised when you end up owning a majority stake in the universe?
 
Exactly. If you have the ability to strip down any raider you off, and collect EVERYTHING, it's just ridiculous to assume you can do the same to 10 others and be able to carry it all without issue. EVEN if you had a "backpack" to store it all in. 10 sets of full clothes just will not fit on any one person without encumbering them to some degree. On the other hand, if the game made it incredibly difficult to scavenge the possessions of your defeated, that works much better. Random drop tables are fine for randomly generated enemies, but really just limit what enemies are capable OF dropping. For all its disappointments, a game like I Am Alive had a pretty nice inventory system, because you were extremely limited on carry space, and you had to be insanely conservative with your ammunition. Finding out that the game generates too much rewards for its players and shoots itself in the foot in terms of difficult is something that's supposed to be weeded out in playtesting...
 
SnapSlav said:
It was neither absent from FO1, nor was the reason it seemed like less of a problem because it was shorter. It was WORSE in FO1, which is why the methods used to limit the issue were undertaken in the first place, in FO2.

There was an abundance of exploits in FO1 that gave the player an excess of caps to spend. People you'd shoot up would drop their armor for looting, and that added up to a lotta cash FAST! FO2 (and subsequently, FOT too) reasoned that if you shoot someone up, their armor shouldn't be lootable, and so armor became much more scarce. With a moderate level of Barter, you could buy any item at any vendor, and sell it back to them in the SAME transaction and reap a profit (the Gun Runners being the most infamous case), so long as they were carrying caps for you to swindle. So in FO2 they changed the formulas that Barter influenced to prevent this from being possible, and the rate at which NPC merchants restocked on caps was also far more strict, so ripping them off was no longer possible. There was the Gambling exploit in FO1 that enabled a player with JUST 51% Gambling to infinitely stock up on caps in a short amount of time just by going up to any slot machine and weighing down 2 buttons on your keyboard. Like they did with Barter, the formulas that Gambling governed in FO2 were changed so that this was no longer so exploitative, AND they had NPCs you gambled with change the order of their dialog periodically, as well as involve more branching between bets, so weighing down 2 keys wouldn't work in creating a cap-generating loop. Your companion NPCs in FO1 could carry UNLIMITED quantities of items, so carryweight limitations was never a problem as long as you had Ian with you. No matter who you recruited in FO2, or whether or not you obtained the car, you couldn't exceed their carryweight limits, so depending on how much looting you did, this WOULD become an issue, so FO2 wasn't nearly as capable of allowing hoarding as FO1 was.

FO1 had so many exploits related to cashflow alone that anyone who thinks otherwise clearly didn't play the game for long. FO2 just seemed worse because Black Isle wisely increased the maximum for certain numbers. You weren't limited to moving 999 caps at a single time, and your inventory would display more than 9999 being carried at once. But those were just aesthetics making a much-more-muted problem look worse than an ACTUALLY worse problem that was harder to distinguish from the first game. FO2 was by no means the worst in the series, as far as money was concerned. You had to have ample experience with the game to know the "tricks", and even then they weren't "tricks", considering their FO1 counterparts.

Take off those rose-tinted lenses, people. FO3 had it worst, not FO2, not FONV. That's not saying they were great, just "not as bad" as FO1 and FO3 in terms of abundance of wealth.
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Every game can be exploited in one way or another. I never used any exploits so this was not a problem for me! But the i did forget the armor part but it was not every armor if my memory serves me right.
 
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