What did New Vegas DO WRONG? / Would isometric New Vegas with finished content be GOAT?

[Bio Force Ape]

It's too linear for a supposedly open-world game.

The Obsidian guys, at heart, are too focused on being wanna-be novelists or filmmakers rather than game designers. it wasn't just the wall of high level monsters to the north of the starting town, it really pushed you through a very linear line with the story unfolding one "chapter" at a time, with you heading to that town with the roller coaster and discovering a bit about the courier guy and the chip or whatever, then you go to that outpost, then the town overrun by Caesar's soldiers, then north to the dinosaur and FINALLY to New Vegas proper. It's all too calculated and laid out, which can really kill replayability.

There's also just too much damn stuff. This is true of all of Bethesda's open-world games as well. There's absolutely no concern regarding resource management as you are absolutely drowning in stuff after an hour or two into the game: healing, food, water, bullets, crafting ingredients, etc. You never worry about running out of any of these things which makes many of the quest rewards ("Here's some healing and a couple beers for helping me kind stranger!") feel completely worthless. But what's the solution? Make most of the containers, most of the corpses, empty? You'd get bored and frustrated by that, so they put shit in everything to make it feel worthwhile opening stuff, lockpicking, killing people and looting their corpses.

 

[Baardhaas]

-Bad UI. Inventory clutters up real quick.
-Gun Runners Arsenal is badly implemented. Instead of replacing the original guns it expands on, you get a "GRA-edition" of those weapons. Exacerbating the inventory clutter.

Sure, mods can fix it. But Obsidian should've done it right in the first place.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Well, yeah, but that last part about the robots, I think it's important to remember that there's supposed to be a full fucking army of them. They're not just heavily armed, but they're literally legion and can be repaired. The long-term effect is extremely debatable, but if you're suggesting that they wouldn't be effective in carving out House's ancap utopia for the foreseeable future, I don't know what to say. The derpy robots might not seem much, but compared to the average NCR jarhead or a run-of-the-mill raider-turned-legionnaire, they are durable and pack quite a punch.

You have a point. However the House robots just don't seem as menacing as the Super Mutant army or the Enclave. The stakes seem a lot lower too.

 

[undecaf]

The Obsidian guys, at heart, are too focused on being wanna-be novelists or filmmakers rather than game designers.

There is some truth to that I suppose, but it's much more fitting a description to someone like CDPR.

 

[Menckenstein]

It's a schizophrenic, unfinished mess that's overloaded with that patented Chris "I think foreplay is honking a girls tits really hard" Avellone humor. Being anchored to the outhouse that Bethesda built obviously did them no favors, they should've made their own offbrand post-nuclear role playing game instead.

Oh yeah, Veronica is awful.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Game world being too big and too empty.

No, if anything it's too small.

It's supposed to be a desert yet instead it's a bethesda-sized themepark ride because god forbid you play for 1 minute without there being something to shoot at or loot.
How the hell are people asking you to look in on the nextover settlement that they haven't heard from in days when it's a 1 minute jog from where they are? They have fucking binoculars to boot.
It only gets better when you somehow tack on a survival mode where food and drink are supposed to be concerns in a gameworld where you're never more than a minute walk away from a fresh supply of both and then compensate by having you need to drink something every 30 steps you take.
Truly

You could easily have had coherent distances while still keeping the ADD crowd happy with FO1-2-ish map travel, in fact they'd rather teleport right over to the next town to start with and get the action started rather than waste time 1 minute running there, while adding public transport systems(joining caravans to fast travel along the roads with random encounters, train between some key locations), vehicles or even mounts for everyone else.
I understand why they went with the themepark route, after all most players simply won't notice or care about game world size coherency, let alone its gameplay implications. I'm sure none but a negligeable part of its 12 million players used the hardcore mode and chances are Bethesda wouldn't even let them make a non-themeparkish map that deviated from their own formula.

Yet I believe the map size had another consequence that those gamers cared about & did affect Obsidian's bottom line(remember the bonus debacle?): the way they condensed the mojave desert into such a small area made it ugly:

vs

or even, before you blame it exclusively on bethesda:

Honest hearts did seem to put some thought into improving the environment visuals at least.

It's too linear for a supposedly open-world game.

The Obsidian guys, at heart, are too focused on being wanna-be novelists or filmmakers rather than game designers. it wasn't just the wall of high level monsters to the north of the starting town, it really pushed you through a very linear line with the story unfolding one "chapter" at a time, with you heading to that town with the roller coaster and discovering a bit about the courier guy and the chip or whatever, then you go to that outpost, then the town overrun by Caesar's soldiers, then north to the dinosaur and FINALLY to New Vegas proper. It's all too calculated and laid out, which can really kill replayability.

Do you still need to go to Nipton, Novac and Boulder City when you did go north?
If so the design is bad. You should still be able to get the quest somehow.
The blocking by strong encounters isn't the problem, but the unability to get the main quest.

You don't need to go to any of those places, you can go straight up north to new vegas to get your revenge, the game takes everything into account, its strongsuit.

 

[ColCol]

A little too much forced combat.

 

[Sigourn]

Another major one: there's no POKER in the casinos.

I mean, shit, it's the one game that shouldn't be missing in a casino. Also, NO CASINO HEISTS.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Revenge isn't as a good a motivation as a whole tribe/vault hanging on your success and the lack of a time limit or much of a sense of urgency further impedes this. And everyone else is just tertiary. You're "whoever" with a second lease of life who at some point in the game is invulnerable enough to do whatever the fuck he or she wants. And when you're invulnerable and don't really have ties to anyone, who cares? I'll just go over there to that random point in the map and dick around for a bit. Maybe try to get a deathclaw to jump on a pile of landmines.

You felt strong ties to the vault npcs? To the tribals? Revenge against someone who just shot you and left you in a ditch seems like as good a motivator as any, although they could've made Benny&co more detestable to further motivate the player. Perhaps would've worked better as a playable first person segment(since it's before chargen) with the gang humiliating you, torturing you, allowing the player the dialog option to beg for his life before he's shot and left in that hole. Some of the game files suggest it was originally planned as an in-game sequence rather than a CGI cutscene.

Only start dicking around once you've had your revenge.

 

[Sigourn]

I have to admit I felt sorry for Benny when I had to kill him at the Fort. Because even when he is about to die, he encourages you to make his dream come true.

That's more personality than any random Vault Dweller or Tribal from Arroyo will ever have.

 

[wyes gull]

You felt strong ties to the vault npcs? To the tribals?

The tribals are a clear step ahead as you exit the temple and get a chance to piss around for a while, listen to the wise woman and the old coot and do a couple of quests for the locals. And they treat you like one of their own. Vault not so much but then in both cases, you are left with a responsibility that goes beyond yourself/your character. It's something you need to address because others are depending on it, not something you could do when and if you feel like it. Especially in a game where you become so powerful that the result of your attempt at retribution, should you decide to enact it, is never even at stake.

 

[canakin]

Open world bullshit, I can't think of a way New Vegass benefits from open world, or any other game for that matter.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

A little too much forced combat.

Ya that's all I can think of. Combat is trash but you're fighting all the time. IDK what they could have done to really fix combat tho with the engine they had.

It's always funny when Obsidian steps in to make a sequel to something because their writing makes the previous developer's look super childish by comparison. Try playing KOTOR2 and then going to KOTOR1 and it's like the most basic black and white bullshit dialogue you've ever seen. I mean wtf, it's not like technology was holding back literary arts so what gives biowhore?

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

[...]in both cases, you are left with a responsibility that goes beyond yourself/your character. It's something you need to address because others are depending on it, not something you could do when and if you feel like it.

....if you play as a nice guy, otherwise the character's motivation would just be that it's his home and thus supposed to be useful to him. The player doesn't really have the chance to grow attached to those locations and characters or even see the character's home as a mechanically/gameplay useful resource and thus worth preserving/saving. Not that far removed from saving the princess just because she's the princess.

 

[azimuth]

The combat is horrible, but that's par for the course in almost every classic RPG.

Nothing feels worse than unloading clips into lightly-armored Caesar's Legion troops and watching their HP bars barely drop at all. If you're going to make a shooter, the combat can't keep imitating the isometric games -- it needs to feel like a shooter.

Anyway, it's a rare kind of goober who plays CRPGs for the combat.

 

[Average Manatee]

Never actually played New Vegas for long without Mod, but vanilla definitely had HP bloat problems. Sawyer fixed things pretty well.

Other balance/gameplay stuff:
- Too many skill points. Feels like the skill system is designed with the assumption that you are spreading out amongst everything, but if you focus even a little you'll skyrocket past what the game seems to expect from your character. Especially if you just pick a single weapon and get it to 80 or so early. NV should do like Fallout 2 did and have skills above 50 cost 2 points apiece and skills above 75 cost 3. Track the base skill before skill books of course so players aren't forced to metagame. This would also make magazines actually important.
- The TES-style stealth attacks are still way too powerful. Nerf like hell for guns.
- Crafting is just a general PITA, and I hate the "take everything not nailed down and shove it in a box at goodsprings" playstyle that it encourages you to do. Inventory management has always been horrible in Bethesda's games and managing crafting materials just makes it worse. No UI mods can fix it, only make it suck slightly less. Delete.

Design stuff:
- New Vegas itself was way too small and insignificant. It's supposed to be some massively important city that could single-handedly contest the NCR/Legion with its military might, while also being super affluent and economically strong. In game it's a dump with a few nice casinos that have confusingly/annoyingly different architecture that you'll have one or two quests each in. You can do around 90% of the content, and you'll probably walk past 80% of the content, before entering the city, which should not happen in what is supposed to be the focal point of the whole game. NV should have been its own half of the game in terms of time spent, stretching across the pre-war cityscape with a healthy population and lots of content. Like how BG 1/2 do with BG/Athkatla. This would also provide a different setting to explore than endless brown desert, which is obviously too much of the game. I'd happily trade a third of the overworld content for much improved NV content.
- All the factions in general felt too contained in their regions, cordoned off with little influence into each other beyond talking about the next area over. You don't see any Legion raiding parties venturing up north, you don't see securitrons guarding NV supply wagons coming in from the NCR. Stuff like the Boomers and the Mutant town are literally written as "places with weird people that don't interact at all", which is already fulfilled just fine by the Brotherhood and feels nonsensical. Mutants being out there and maybe accepted in a human town or two would be neat, just having them plopped down in a corner of the map like an amusement park attraction is wasting the concept. Stuff like Vault City and Mutant Town in Fallout 2 managed to be weird while still feeling like they occupied a real position in the game world. This also ties into the quests, which are too often "go to a nearby dungeon of baddies and do something" rather than "go to a nearby city of people and do something".
- As CrunchyHemorrhoids states, the game really needs just a distance expansion to make more sense. Fast travel already exists, Map travel existed in pre-F3 games, and some kind of vehicle should be reasonably accessible (yes, I know, Bethesda's engine would fuck it up, maybe just have them as buses between towns like Morrowind's Silt Striders). Things are way too close and the game flat out relies on the player randomly bumping into them with their magical location detection radius for a huge portion of its content.

This is one complaint I definitely don't get. Codexers are always complaining about level-scaled encounters, but the one game that dares to put high level monsters to block player early gets shit on for it?

It's not that there were high-level monsters, but the way it was done. Level-scaled encounters are shit, but putting a wall of high-level monsters and a sign GO THERE INSTEAD is shitty and ham-fisted. It didn't feel organic or reasonable at all, just artificial and forced. Part of the reason for this was probably that the area was largely devoid of meaning and content OTHER than existing as an awkward early-game blockade.

Just walling it off would've probably have made the flow better, but I suspect that they wanted to make it possible to "go south" and make it back to Goodsprings that way, even though the game is built all around fast-travel anyway.

The other problem is that very clearly dangerous wildlife living right next to towns is bullshit. Both the wasps and the deathclaws. If anything that bad appeared next to a real-life town you'd be calling in the military to clean them out with napalm. In-game you'd expect Goodsprings to be a ghost town, or there to be some guard posts with HMGs ready to shoot them down, or some massive quest bounty on clearing them out, complete with gangs of raider-types who think they are about to get rich heading off to their doom. Basically some acknowledgement that the town has a serious problem, rather than just being OK with super deadly creatures right next to the town that could kill them all at any time. Also the fact that these two enemies are basically the only ones in the game that are faster than the player is a bit too on the point.

 

[wyes gull]

....if you play as a nice guy

They might be nice guy things to do but not it's not "if you play as a nice guy". More like "if you want to get the ending instead of a game over".

The home bases could be a bit more home base-y, sure. Although I do take exception in the case of Arroyo. The relationships apparent in your interactions with the people in that village set a familial tone. Everywhere else you go, tribals are always looked at sideways and there's even a couple lines of dialog with Cassidy regarding how shitty the reputation people like you have. That establishes who you are to the people of the rest of the world (at least before you go hands-on and start solving quests and building your own rep). You're free to ignore it if you want to, the game lets you, but it's there.
But yeah, an imperative that involves the lives of others (even if it is a princess in a castle) is a better motivator than one guy in a list of hundreds, not including critters, that has tried to kill you and failed.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Real Time combat instead of turn based combat.

 

[agentorange]

Hardcore mode was not well thought out. It is only a minor inconvenience. Food in general should be far more difficult to find--the idea of finding edible food in a pre-war gas station is moronic, I think you find 1 TV dinner in Fallout 1 and 2 and they are inedible--making the Survival skill integral to playing on Hardcore.

Combat is still far too easy (although this was also a problem in Fallout 1 and 2). Though I don't think it's possible to fix this while still using the Gamebryo engine, the problems like terrible AI, unsatisfying gun physics and so on are too ingrained in that engine. New Vegas did well to mask the shortcomings in combat through the sheer variety of weapons and ammunition the game offers. Other complaints are roped into these engine problems, as well as the multi-platform nature of the game, such as the lack of size and activity in both The Strip and Freeside.

Caesar's Legion did not get nearly the attention it needed, making it easy for people to write the faction off as "evil dudes." Should have had a Legion companion as it was originally planned.

The Boomer questline sucks. Though at least you can skip parts of it with the right stats and skills.

 

[Mark Richard]

Revenge isn't as a good a motivation as a whole tribe/vault hanging on your success and the lack of a time limit or much of a sense of urgency further impedes this. And everyone else is just tertiary. You're "whoever" with a second lease of life who at some point in the game is invulnerable enough to do whatever the fuck he or she wants. And when you're invulnerable and don't really have ties to anyone, who cares? I'll just go over there to that random point in the map and dick around for a bit. Maybe try to get a deathclaw to jump on a pile of landmines.

You felt strong ties to the vault npcs? To the tribals? Revenge against someone who just shot you and left you in a ditch seems like as good a motivator as any, although they could've made Benny&co more detestable to further motivate the player. Perhaps would've worked better as a playable first person segment(since it's before chargen) with the gang humiliating you, torturing you, allowing the player the dialog option to beg for his life before he's shot and left in that hole. Some of the game files suggest it was originally planned as an in-game sequence rather than a CGI cutscene.

Only start dicking around once you've had your revenge.

Revenge could've been my character's motivation, but my motivation as the player was to solve a mystery, and there's enough information in that intro to invite a good deal of speculation. I found it refreshing to catch up to an antagonist only to find he wants nothing to do with me, kind of like Letho from The Witcher 2. Portraying Benny as a standard sadistic killer wouldn't be in keeping with the original Fallout games.

 

[Daemongar]

Eh, some simple gripes:
* Gays and Lesbians of the apocalypse. Ok, so Veronica is gay, and everyone at the Atomic Wrangler takes it up the ass, and there is FISTO and that Gay sniper gal, and Arcade, and all the legionaries are supposed to be gay or something. Just got to be a little over the top after a while. Hey, it's an RPG. Why can't I tell them that the gayness should be stopped?
* INT/Speech is king. Just like in every Fallout, you not only get the best options for high INT, you also get bonus points at level up. Without knowing anything about the game, I set INT high and so it goes...
* Too easy to kill Mr. House. Thought his defenses were shit, even at low level. Once you are in, he's at your mercy which felt a little odd.
* Benny wasn't used enough. He figured so much into the first half of the game, then he's pretty much gone in an instant. Thought he should have factored into the game more. He's a catalyst and someone you want to find, and when you find him, well, it's disappointing.
* Legionaries were the most interesting, and had the best dialogue, but as others said, they didn't feel completed. The Great Kahns needed more quests as well.
* Way, way, WAY too many feats and perks designed around VATS. Fuck VATS.
* The Brotherhood quests were mostly underwhelming.
* Not enough NPCs in most locations. Goodsprings was ok, then Primm was almost completely empty, then Nipton only had like two people there, and then Novac had only a few. Just have some Morrowind type NPCs or whatever. The emptiness was a little over the top, but it could be an engine problem.

Eh, I can bitch about all kinds of things, but this game was about as close to perfect as almost any game I've ever played.

 

[Scruffy]

the writing for the legion was shit
"we are what the wasteland needs and we are all evil and slavers and self-righteous and shit"
it would have been easy to make them a survivalist group with some "good" inclinations, or some kind of anarchists who though NCR's mindset of "big government" was what brought for the apocalypse or some shit that made sense, the cookie cutter "evil guys" really cheapened the experience for me...

 

[Taskityo]

It uses Gamebryo, which is poop from a butthole.

Indeed.

 

[Akratus]

Perhaps this is the best game ever made, in a relative sense. Considering the engine they had to deal with, considering Bethesda, considering the market, considering Fallout 3, I doubt they could ever have done better. Not only that, but it was financially successful too. I don't care what people say, I enjoy seeing new Vegas being praised by mainstreamtards.

 

[shihonage]

Imagine a family of inbred rednecks living in the middle of nowhere, a real horror show, propagating over several generations. Then a stranger walks in, his car is broken, he's stranded with no money, and mingles with the family in order to survive. A monstrosity covered in boils, with a nightmare clown face and tits thrown up her shoulders, gets impregnated by him. A year later, having scrounged enough junkyard parts to fix his car, the stranger drives away, scarred but not fully broken, leaving behind all of it, including his child: Fallout New Vegas.