Sigourn
uooh afficionado
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2016
- Messages
- 5,686
I just finished Dead Money for the first time today. I was going to make a rant post, but it's best if I just make a much shorter comment here.
I really enjoyed the setting as an idea, the NPCs, and the backstory around those long dead, particularly Vera. I feel like the ending would have left me much more sad if I had actually enjoyed the DLC, but the gameplay was... awful. The deserts of the Mojave were a welcomed sight.
My issues with the DLC were purely from a gameplay point of view. I feel the DLC did literally nothing well when it came to gameplay.
Overall, I consider it to be a fantastic story and setting overshadowed by bugs, oversights, bad design decisions and awful gameplay. Is the story worth it? Not really, I would have been better off looking at the character's pictures on a wiki and reading the story, imagining better looking locations in my mind, because what I got was a samey-looking reddish villa for the first half of the DLC, sort of nice looking casino for the second half, and finishing with the archetypical Bethesda "huge factory" level at the end. What I expected was much, much more. If this is truly considered to be one of the best New Vegas DLCs, I fear for Old World Blues. So far it's the only DLC I've left to do, everything else has just been "good characters, terrible DLC" material.
I love New Vegas, but I feel Obsidian fucked up with this one. It's like one of those long movies where the story was nice, but you won't sit through 3 hours of that shit again just for the ending.
What are your thoughts?
I really enjoyed the setting as an idea, the NPCs, and the backstory around those long dead, particularly Vera. I feel like the ending would have left me much more sad if I had actually enjoyed the DLC, but the gameplay was... awful. The deserts of the Mojave were a welcomed sight.
My issues with the DLC were purely from a gameplay point of view. I feel the DLC did literally nothing well when it came to gameplay.
- The radio signals, for starters. When I first got to the police station, I thought "cool, I have to be on the lookout for these!". What I got instead was "fuck, I need to savescum in order to find where the signals come from". And sadly it got old pretty quick, I died countless of times because they were so hidden you weren't meant to find them on the spot (for example, they were behind a wall).
- Traps having no consequences. Bomb goes off, reload the save and try again. Wow, the possibilities!
- The Ghost People and New Vegas' awful gunplay. Now, I don't want to blame Obsidian for the gunplay since it's pretty much Bethesda's fault. But if you know the gunplay in your game is bad, why make an enemy type that jumps around from place to place, forcing you to spam V.A.T.S. to him them? I was playing with VATS Alternative - A Comprehensive Bullet Time Mod, and fighting them was infuriating. Even with time slowed down by 50%, it was HARD to land a shot on them, or hit them with their own spears (which quickly became my favorite way to hunt them down). Even worse is that the fights themselves weren't tough; the real difficulty came from them swarming me because I kept missing my shots.
- The DLC discouraged thorough exploration. And this happened because of the Cloud draining your health all the time, and the lack of of supplies in Hardcore mode. If Obsidian had truly wanted this, then they shouldn't have littered the DLC with Dean Domino's Stashes, playing cards, and the elusive Snowglobe.
- Even without the Cloud busting my balls there's still the samey-ness of the entire Villa. I get it, the place has the same artsyle all over the place because it is a villa. That still doesn't excuse how it is near impossible to orientate yourself without the map. It's ridiculous and unforgiveable. Even during the day I had to rely on the map because it was a nightmare to traverse. And kudos to Bethesda for that garbage they call a "local map" and that's still being used in Fallout 4.
- The repetitiveness of the quests. "Find the companion", "Now do it two more times", "Now deliver a companion to a location", "Now do it two more times", "Now find the companion in the casino!", and so on...
- Then there's the mindblowingly stupid idea of having the player face Dog on his own, who is ridiculously overpowered in comparison to any other enemy in the DLC. Seriously, I was about to kill him through console commands before he started speaking to me. And even then, I had to savescum just to stop him from fighting by reading a Meeting People magazine.
- The bugs and the oversights. New Vegas is buggy, no surprises there. What I didn't expect was having bugs when using Yukichigai's Unofficial Patch. And perhaps most annoying of all are the oversights. I'm talking Christine's voice being near silent and suddenly shouting when talking to her in the Suites, or Father Elijah dropping the "speakers" act and talking as if he was next to you during the Vault sequence. I was unable to shut off the gas valves in the kitchen, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do it, Dog sets off his collar way too fast before I can even turn off a second gas valve, let alone three.
- Oh, and the nightmarish FPS drops in the villa. Can't forget about those.
Overall, I consider it to be a fantastic story and setting overshadowed by bugs, oversights, bad design decisions and awful gameplay. Is the story worth it? Not really, I would have been better off looking at the character's pictures on a wiki and reading the story, imagining better looking locations in my mind, because what I got was a samey-looking reddish villa for the first half of the DLC, sort of nice looking casino for the second half, and finishing with the archetypical Bethesda "huge factory" level at the end. What I expected was much, much more. If this is truly considered to be one of the best New Vegas DLCs, I fear for Old World Blues. So far it's the only DLC I've left to do, everything else has just been "good characters, terrible DLC" material.
I love New Vegas, but I feel Obsidian fucked up with this one. It's like one of those long movies where the story was nice, but you won't sit through 3 hours of that shit again just for the ending.
What are your thoughts?