Title says it all.
New Vegas is really bad. There's no point in siding with Yes Man or House or the Legion. Yes Man is just a fallback if you were a smooth-brain and failed every other faction's quests.
I disagree. Whilst yeah, it is there as the fallback option for grug-characters who bash everything, it has its own merits, namely through its amount of choice/agency and it even characters who support it ideologically. I do think it is one of the weaker questlines in that it has basically no structure at all, but the way it is "structured" does allow you to turn that around a bit by using the freedom to your RP advantage as you do everything on your own motivation, schedule, order and outcome. But still the point still stands it really needed more time in the oven cooking, as evidenced by the fact there are blatant holes in the endings, like Novac talking about "remaining independent of NCR" even though that makes no sense in Independent Vegas in general ,or the fact that a slide doesn't even exist if you went Independent, upgraded the Securitrons and spared the Brotherhood which is going to be one of the most likely outcomes for most Yes Man players.
House is almost exactly the same as Yes Man.
This is true in terms of the actual questline itself, gameplay wise. It's just Yes Man but with actual structure, but to be fair the entire premise of Yes Man is that you're hijacking what House was going to do to use to your own ends of anarchy.
The Legion would be worth it if it wasn't so lacking in quests and companions. Almost every single companion will despise you unless you choose NCR. Not to mention there's more NCR content than any other faction.
Legion is underbaked, correct. What is there is still enjoyable and well-done though, however. It's not true however about the companion thing. Both House and Yes Man are entirely companion friendly, the only time you lock yourself out is if you deliberately go Anti-NCR and start attacking them. Yeah the NCR has the most content, this is also another part of where the Legion needed more development time. I think it's also fair however that a good portion of NCR content isn't exactly you being a soldier, a lot of them are just jobs that happen to be within sphere of NCR and work just as fine for mercenary characters or Yes Man/House players.
Besides that, the world is very boring. Despite having a more locations than Fallout 3, New Vegas feels a LOT more empty
I both agree and disagree with this. I agree in that the literal game-map of the Mojave is less interesting to explore/traverse and dungeoneering content than say the Commonwealth or Appalachia (I won't concede on the Capital outside of DC itself, though. Even then, Subway tunnels.) but the Mojave feels infinitely more alive to me than the Capital Wasteland or the Commonwealth. Most of the content of the Mojave lies in its quests, factions and characters rather than exploration. In that regard, NV absolutely blows 3 and 4 out of the water so far it isn't even funny. Personally whilst I think the best of both worlds would be a map that is engaging to wander and explore that also has a map flush with communities, factions and quests, I'd prefer just having the latter over just having the former where I'm exploring very well made vertically layered factories or ruins that have nothing of interest in them other than shooting galleries of Gunners/Talon Comapny/Raiders/Ghouls.
And, unlike in 3, if you kill someone who has a lead on Benny, there's always a fallback. No consequence for killing Manny Vargas or Beagle. In 3, if you nuked Megaton, you would fail the main quest and get a new one without any quest markers. Why doesn't that happen in New Vegas?
This is one of the weirder arguments I've come across against NV. Considering Bethesda are the masters of essential NPCs . I had respect for Morrowind's "Doomed world" mechanic but even that is basically just a time-delayed version of the essential NPC. Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4 are rife with this. You've listed what is probably the only example of them doing otherwise, and Megaton isn't even that directly relevant to the story. What happens if you try and kill Dad before Todd says he has to die?
In actual RPGs, like tabletop, a good gamemaster doens't just stop the game and say "No, you can't kill that guy. It doesn't happen, nope." they roll with your character's actions and adapt the story to keep it going. Vegas is great design wise as an experiment in having as few narrative roadblocks or requirements as possible.
And why are the Enclave and BoS in this game? They almost never play a significant role in the story. They feel like they were shoehorned in there.
Again, this is a weird one. I can see the validity in that the Enclave Remnants aren't necessary but considering they are quite tucked away and the storyline/characters themselves are of good quality and the whole "Nazis in Argentina" take on the Enclave is interesting, I don't really accept that. As for the Brotherhood, I
absolutely disagree. In terms of West Coast Fallout, the only real Brotherhood content we get is in the first game, and that is in a very different time and place to where the Brotherhood are with the growth of NCR. The Mojave Brotherhood is a very interesting cut into their ideology, where it takes them as the world around them evolves, the ideological differences that might arise when the Brotherhood is put under do-or-die pressure and how even with that demonization or poor portrayal of their beliefs the conflict over the fact that there are plenty of good, normal people in the Brotherhood that due to their group's isolationism and troubled history, are now more like an extended family or tribe rather than a millitary order. Veronica's story is one of the better ones in the game, and you yourself really enjoy Elijah who is a direct product of the Brotherhood. One of Fallout 4's best aspects was its portrayal of the Brotherhood, and I don't believe that portrayal would have come about without the Mojave Brotherhood.
I think you literally just threw this argumentative point in because people say it about Fallout 3, where they absolutely are just shoehorned into the setting. Which makes me doubt how genuine you are in coming here generally.
Honest Hearts was just OK. Though there was not a lot of choice and a lot of scripted events.
Agree. Honest Hearts has excellent writing, characters, worldbuilding and concept but the actual DLC gameplay is very poor.
Old World Blues was the stinkiest shit I've ever sniffed though. I've seen a lot of complaints about Bethesda's Fallout being "le wacky 60s themed nuke game", but OWB fits that bill exactly. It feels like an episode of Rick and Morty. It's just too wacky to be in Fallout.
Again, agree/disagree thing going on here. I think Old World Blues goes too far with the humor and whilst I think the satire and humor was necessary to the DLC, it misfires in a number of places and could have done with being more sardonic rather than lolsomrandum. The humor/absurdity is necessary however as it's meant to juxtapose how horrific the Big MT is in reality (Human experimentation, war-crime tier weapons, concentration camps of dissidents and PoWs) and how the Think Tank's whole absurd spectacle is intentionally a farce meant to keep them in a delirious, dementia like state by Mobius. I think however, the humor itself could have been better. Still like the DLC, though.
In my honest opinion, this game is complete and utter garbage.
Here's the thing though, you have listed very fair (and some unfair) criticisms of the game that even huge fans like me would agree with, and then declared the whole game bad when you are deliberately ignoring the massive amount of quality content that New Vegas does have that you've not really negated. To draw a shitty comparison but the first that comes to mind, it's like watching The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and saying "The Civil War scenes in that movie dragged on a bit long and weren't entirely necessary. Shit movie." I would say the problems you've listed with Vegas aren't foundational or somehow detrimental to the core, or even the majority of the experience. They aren't nitpicks, but they aren't fundamental problems either.
