NMA Fallout: New Vegas Impression Piece

Tagaziel said:
It certainly isn't worse with them. Return To Sender resulted in an interesting take on the NCR/CL conflict from a vet.
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Garlic wasn't talking about the narrative, dude, he was talking about the quest design.

New Vegas does it, and then it does it way too much. Fetch/courier quests alternated by "climb through the vault mazes". It is very much to the detriment of the game's replayability, I'm just on my second playthrough and I can already not bear the thought of doing the BoS questline again.

Yes, it is intended as a tool to explore, in a guided way. That's unnatural to this game engine, like so many parts of this game, and it doesn't really seem necessary either. Fallout 3 got away with it and it didn't even have interesting locations.

Does it add anything? Not really. Fed-Ex quests never do. Good writing doesn't make them less lazy.
 
Brother None said:
Tagaziel said:
It certainly isn't worse with them. Return To Sender resulted in an interesting take on the NCR/CL conflict from a vet.
Click to expand...

Garlic wasn't talking about the narrative, dude, he was talking about the quest design.

New Vegas does it, and then it does it way too much. Fetch/courier quests alternated by "climb through the vault mazes". It is very much to the detriment of the game's replayability, I'm just on my second playthrough and I can already not bear the thought of doing the BoS questline again.

Yes, it is intended as a tool to explore, in a guided way. That's unnatural to this game engine, like so many parts of this game, and it doesn't really seem necessary either. Fallout 3 got away with it and it didn't even have interesting locations.

Does it add anything? Not really. Fed-Ex quests never do. Good writing doesn't make them less lazy.
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Exactly. That is such a long mission, it's going to be really annoying to do that again... At least it can be done in conjunction with other quests, so I'll try to get it early this playthrough.
 
I'm still surprised i keep hearing about all the bugs and crashes. I really haven't had that many. 3 crashes to the desktop after over 20 hours isn't horrible, obviously i would prefer not to have any but really much better in comparison to fallout 3. Also haven't had to many of the other bugs/glitches. Got stuck on terrain once, had a companion disappear once. And i have a huge lag issue in certain areas...although that could just be my vid card overheating due to its dead fan. I wonder if the bugs/glitches are being cause by steam since im not running mine through it. That wouldn't surprise me as steam always causes me problems when i use, which is why i searched online and found a way around it. I think the combat has definitely improved although it could certainly be better still. The writing is so much better. Graphics are a mix of bad and good and overall dated i will agree on that. Overall tho im pretty happy with the game so far and look forward to many more playthroughs
 
I can already not bear the thought of doing the BoS questline again.
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Frankly, that one's not so bad - the stuff's all at major, interesting locations. I have to agree with Return to Sender, on the other hand, it is tedious and I am not planning to finish it anytime soon if at all.

IMO, the most successful quests were the simplistic ones set in one-two locations with good writing on top. For example, one of my personal favourites is the NCR medic quest at Forlorn Hope. Having to saw off a guy's foot and arm really adds to the atmosphere.
 
Quest Design and Narrative aren't independent though. Quests like Return to Sender, IMO, can work because they offer you a ground-floor perspective that you wouldn't otherwise get into a facet of a larger, ongoing story.

Granted the narrative reward is not always worth it, especially if it's not very reactive to stuff you might do differently, but I think that that's still a narrative concern rather than a quest design one.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
IMO, the most successful quests were the simplistic ones set in one-two locations with good writing on top. For example, one of my personal favourites is the NCR medic quest at Forlorn Hope. Having to saw off a guy's foot and arm really adds to the atmosphere.
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:D
 
Or extremely low luck, I guess. Couldn't be the Medicine score, they don't let you do the quest if it's too low.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
Or extremely low luck, I guess. Couldn't be the Medicine score, they don't let you do the quest if it's too low.
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Actually it is the Medicine score.
[spoiler:2174c38a16]You need Medicine 20 to pass the first check just to be allowed to examine the patients. There are 3 patients with various skill requirements. IIRC, you can either pass the medicine skill checks (35 for the first, 50 for the second and 75 for the third one) or use the tools which in fact can be found nearby. If you choose to do that without tools and do not pass the skill check, you will make the patient feel worse or even kill him. [/spoiler:2174c38a16]
 
Actually, the description explains what's going on.

"Without thinking, you start amputating the leg..."

This feels like the quest designer worked on it without thinking as well.
 
I found most of the gameworld mechanic and politics well made even if some places are quite unrealistic ( especially the one where they welcome stranger with missiles ).
This part of the writing is good.
Quest are fine.
But the dialogue is quite poor, i mean your character really lack personality ( some fallout 2 answers was great, elaborated and interesting ).
NPC dialogue is better.
Another thing i dislike is the unatural way NPC change their mind ( like the scientist in Repcon ) or tell you things really important without knowing you ( Veronica NPC telling you she is a .... ). I can understand the necessity of that but it is not smooth enough.
With a more realistic tone and setting, better PC dialogue fallout NV would have been awesome and feel 100% like a fallout game.
Anyways i enjoy it and found it way better than fallout 3.
 
Regarding being 'greeted with missiles', the Boomers are sort of xenophobic gun nuts, you start to understand that once you talk with them and learn of their background.

What I perhaps found a bit strange is the adults almost childlike attitude to their weapons and outsiders, from kids I could understand, but for the rest it didn't bother me.
 
Stanislao Moulinsky said:
You mean you never heard of operations removing the wrong appendice/organ/limb?
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Of course I have, don't be silly. I was referring to it from the in-game POV where your character for no obvious reason cuts of the wrong leg. At least they could explain to you that it happened because of that or that. That's just lazy design and was put there only for the laughs which actually saddens me. :(
 
That quest is a bit lame. It's a doctor's quest so make it Medicine-specific. Don't give Medicine-noobs such an easy out. There's barely any thought involved.

DemonNick said:
Quest Design and Narrative aren't independent though.
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Nothing is independent in games. Doesn't mean they can be analysed independently.

Ausdoerrt said:
Great piece in general, but... Who was taking the screenshots? They look like they were taken on mid-low quality, with textures not fully popped in sometimes. Or is that on purpose, to emphasize the dated look?
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Mine. The quality settings are all default medium. Didn't tweak anything. It's how I prefer to play since, well, I don't care about graphics.

Only used em for the review because no one else uploaded screenshots.
 
Brother None said:
Garlic wasn't talking about the narrative, dude, he was talking about the quest design.

New Vegas does it, and then it does it way too much. Fetch/courier quests alternated by "climb through the vault mazes". It is very much to the detriment of the game's replayability, I'm just on my second playthrough and I can already not bear the thought of doing the BoS questline again.
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I was actually talking about this today, how there was a lot of quests... but it also felt like there were too many quests, as many of these were like the ones you described above. It is seriously impacting my desire to replay the game any time soon.

This is one of the reasons NV feels very much like Fallout 2 to me, in it's the number of quests, the pacing and how they are laid out on the world map. If I had to draw a comparison between titles I would say:

Fallout: New Vegas is like eating a 12 course meal, every single night. The quest content and the way they’re routed can be so filling, tedious and inconsumable that you want to stand up from the table shortly after sitting down. It can be great if you're hungry but unappealing if you are not.

Fallout 3 is kind of like a self-serve buffet, where everything is consumed easily in a manner and time of your choosing. I've actually been drawing some parallels between NV/F3 and F2/F1. Of the four games I have a much stronger preference for replaying F1/F3, where F2/NV seems tiring when taking some of the quest paths into consideration.
 
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