Fallout: New Vegas - the actual Fallout 3 game

April 17, 2011

I should have picked up on it when the reviews tended towards forced "balance" against Fallout 3, the "predecessor"..

So as you may or may not know, Fallout 3 was the biggest gaming disappointment I've had since.. The Amiga was canned. Whether it was the foot-less power-armor, generally the utterly careless use of the source-material, the endless mutants, or the writing - all sterile and skeletal as if dipped in a vat of bubbling acid. The writing only having visible teeth, because all the flesh is gone.

True, Fallout3 has promising elements - but none of the quests are written in a way that force you to think about your role in the wasteland, etc. None of what you do actually affect the world. In other words, it was just a game, and nothing else. Where the mechanics of walking around the game-world was the entire point with the title - instead of the game-world being a vehicle for telling a story. Which the game didn't have.

On top of this, the actual exploration is very simplistic. You're not rewarded with interesting locations that explain more about the world and the setting. You never discover a place that invites you back at a later time.

New Vegas changes that, and shows how it should be done. I didn't pick up this game at first because of how abysmal Fallout3 was.. That was a mistake. I should have dropped Fallout3 and just bought New Vegas. Would have saved me from having to play the console-equivalent of: "Final Fantasy point and click adventure! Explore the world with random characters from the other games put in, while using repetitive attacks that remind you of the other games in the series!".

..also - what in the world is going on with reviewing right now? How in the name of .. did New Vegas score lower than the leaking bag of offal that is Fallout 3? I don't get it.

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honestgamer - April 17, 2011 (09:29 AM)
At the time Fallout: New Vegas was released, fleinn, it was so glitchy for most reviewers that some literally couldn't even finish it. That's a pretty big strike against the game and explains the scores. Even Fallout 3 wasn't that horrific a mess, though it wasn't without glitches of its own. New Vegas merely magnified them tenfold, and that was a big enough problem to outweigh--at least in the minds of critics--the more ambitious and worthwhile things that New Vegas did during those rare instances where it wasn't corrupting save files and the like. I would imagine that a lot of patching went on between then and now.

fleinn - April 17, 2011 (09:39 AM)
:/ no, they've had two patches, I think. The game still has the engine-bugs. The kind of problems that turn up when too many paths turn up. But the scripting bugs in the missions and so on were negligible from the start.. Now they're completely gone. The rotating head, etc - not an issue on the launch-day/disc-version of the game.

No, doesn't fly. I couldn't finish Fallout 3 because of a botched save-game - twice. The save-file grew in size and eventually broke if you had too many side-quests collected (this is a scripting problem - Bethesda would know about this. And that's a problem that never was there in New Vegas).

But outside of that.. it's just not a comparable game, is it.. Sorry.. just annoyed, I guess..

Halon - April 17, 2011 (02:29 PM)
I thought Fallout 3 was pretty good but never played New Vegas. I'll probably try it when the GotY edition is available. Most people that I've spoken to who have played both tell me that Fallout 3 is better, though.

zigfried - April 17, 2011 (04:26 PM)
Some people tried to finish New Vegas, and literally couldn't. As in, they tried to do something that was necessary to make the game progress, and it crashed. And kept crashing, no matter how often they tried. For those people, New Vegas was a videogame that could not be won.

Since those people were able to actually complete Fallout 3, it was obvious in their minds as to which game was better: the one that had a proper ending. In other words, not New Vegas.

That being said, those people are wrong. Fallout 3 was so horrible that I had to stop playing... and my displeasure had nothing to do with bugs. Even if New Vegas crashes near the end, it's already proven to be a far better game.

//Zig

jerec - April 17, 2011 (04:31 PM)
One of those two patches was pretty big, as I remember, and it must have fixed quite a few problems. I'd heard about the glitches so I didn't buy it for a couple of months, but when I did it was a great game, easily eclipsing Fallout 3.

fleinn - April 17, 2011 (06:22 PM)
..anyway.. So here's the status so far. One hang about each five-six hours. No glitches, one pruned dialogue-path (that unlocked from another optional path - probably intended). Occasional slow-down (this is the stuck node-traversal - happened twice). Initial loading of areas sometimes stall (this is the placing objects, which generates node-traversal again, most likely). No save-game crash, etc.

..I just visited the "Boomers" up at an Airfield north of Vegas. They have this thing about blowing people up. But they're kind at heart. Their story-keeper invited me to their museum to see a mural depicting the story of their people. Awesome Mad Max reference. But I seriously like the writing going on here :D

JoeTheDestroyer - April 18, 2011 (03:43 AM)
I enjoyed FO3 myself, so I'll probably love New Vegas. As sportsman said, I'll probably wait for the GOTY edition.

fleinn - April 18, 2011 (04:42 AM)
Doubtful there'll be any more patches or add-ons, but yeah - a version with Dead Money and the patches on the disc would be neat.

On the other hand, New Vegas goes for almost nothing right now if you look around. Something to do with the PC version selling very slowly, I think.

CoarseDragon - April 18, 2011 (01:04 PM)
I did like FO3 but I thought F3: NV was better as it included the faction aspect of the wasteland which seems to be natural in a post-apocalyptic world. Some of the add-ons for FO3 were very good and those enhanced the play of the game. Overall New Vegas was slightly better that Fallout 3 but I did enjoy them both in different ways.

darketernal - April 19, 2011 (04:31 AM)
Didn't yet play New Vegas, but heard only good things. Still, if it was so bugges as you people say it was, then it deserved bad grades, no matter how good the world was pulled off or the story was told. There is absolutely no excuse what so ever to put a buggy product out on the market. Sure, some will always find their way through, that's why we have patches, and I understand that. However, when they are of such great magnitude that the game crashes, or that you can't do something that won't break the game until the patch is released, it deserves all the scorn.

That's why I gave up on the Gothic series. The first one was great, the second one was phenomenal(though I have to admit I didn't finish it yet due to trying out Gothic 3 to see how it looks), and the third one was horrendous. Glitches, awful optimisation, incredibly lazy programming just to push the product as soon as possible to the market. That deserves all the negative marks on that point alone.

fleinn - April 19, 2011 (07:04 AM)
..good sentiment in general. But when the game has.. you know.. significantly less bugs than Fallout 3.. Where you still can manage to break just about every quest where you can make any sort of choice... if you actually play the game, rather than just play until the first (and only) cinematic set-piece, you will inevitably discover that.

If you're lucky, the path-finding in Fallout 3 also will hang the game multiple times (and forever bork your quest) in the first town. This too is impossible not to find out if you ever played Fallout 3, and then returned to the town during night-time (which one of the quests require).

So how to explain the sudden attention to bugs in a game that has unbelievably much more content, and still has /massively less/ if not none of the scripting bugs that are present in the other game..?

I'm not questioning whether some people had fun with Fallout 3 or not, I'm just saying that objectively it does not make sense to say New Vegas was or is unplayable because of bugs - and then somehow not have a seriously larger problem with Fallout 3 (..even though it has a tiny, tiny amount of branching quests .. I mean, are there others than the dialogue path in the "vampire" quest, and the accept/no/wait in the android quest in the shipyard? But both of those are bugged if you try to pick some of the "other" conversation options, or even listening to the dialogue. You then get a double check or a broken quest. The scripted events when people move around also often caused serious slow-downs and hangs. My savegame got borked on completely random places - twice - after it suddenly grew in size for a while. The first time it didn't even happen far into the game..)...

..Honestly.. I suspect a lot of people who say Fallout 3 is pretty good hasn't played Fallout 1, didn't play Fallout3 longer than to the radio-tower, and have simply run through it in 20 minutes, and then never played the game again. Because if you have played the game - whether you're a fan of Oblivion and Morrowind, or another RPG game or other.. you notice that the game is fucked if you play longer than that. The way the skill-system is used, the way the quests are pieced together - it doesn't appear finished.

I mean, I really liked the capitol and the ship-wreck - great locations. But when there are no quests there, and the Capitol is basically a long shooting gallery with super-mutants..? There's no content there whatsoever. The Vault-museum is great - but again, a completely linear piece. No way to stop the presentation, or halt it and ask questions, etc. Nothing.. and most of the game doesn't even have the locations.. ..it's just randomly spawned stuff where you can kill things.

darketernal - April 19, 2011 (08:51 AM)
I played the first and second Fallout to the end, Fallout 3 as well, playing through Oblivion these days and played Morrowind back in the day. Maybe I was a late comer who got the GOTY edition of the game, but I never had a single corrupt save or broken quest in Fallout 3. So yeah, maybe I just started playing it after it was all fixed up...as much as it was possible to fix at the very least.

fleinn - April 19, 2011 (08:59 AM)
..I guess it could be I ran through the same choices that created the problem..

But... you know.. there are several of the "don't accept quest now, quest doesn't trigger correctly later" bugs left in Fallout 3 after the patching.. Not the biggest problem the game has, but still..

CoarseDragon - April 19, 2011 (11:10 AM)
I think you might have really bad luck with Fallout 3. I did not run into any of the problems you mentioned. I had trouble completing one quest and that was Lincoln Monument but probably my fault for wiping the place before I was supposed to. I bought both Fallouts new and other than clipping and collision bugs no real problems. I played Fallout 3 on a PC with Windows Game thing which updated automatically and that may have been a big help. New Vegas did not give me any problems with quests of course Steam updated that game as well.

fleinn - April 19, 2011 (12:53 PM)
..actually... the Washington monument has a trigger that gets overwritten depending on another quest. More people than you have had that one. But this is an "obscure bug" that only people who talk to the other characters will see, of course.. *cough* And then notice that the end of the quest isn't flagged, so they can get the three word debrief.. No one saw that..

fleinn - April 19, 2011 (02:24 PM)
"I've never played Fallout, but I don't see what that has to do with my enjoyment of Fallout 3."

..nothing? ..everything? :p

I also liked Oblivion (and Morrowind).. so sure, I can see the appeal of the entire open wasteland in that setting, etc. And I'll easily admit that I hate the game because of the way it deals with the source-material..

One example. In Fallout 3 the Brotherhood of Steel - the guys with the power-armors - suddenly have sub-divisions who share tech. And they wear power-armor without the actual legs on them. That's.. the first thing I see when I get into the game. The reclusive cult the Brotherhood of Steel run around drumming up an insurgency in the wasteland while working on political stump weedroot operations. And their powerarmor is now just a symbol, etc.

But suddenly we figure out that it's not any more than that. They did write a story-segment with these armors. But they're just there because they look cool and awesome. And there's no other story that actually looks at what is going on beyond it. That's bad enough.

But then they pile on it by simply letting every area be a random dungeon where these fictional steel knights without legs run around killing super-mutants by the dozens.

So even if I did let the entire "Tarantino does Doctor Who" thing go - the game is a huge random dungeon. That's what annoys me. Oblivion - that I could excuse to some extent, because the entire story revolves around you and your evolution. Just like in Morrowind. So then you actually get away with not having very substantial dialogue and so on.

Still - even those who do like Fallout 3 admits that the dlc are the best parts. Where actually something happens. Where they have actual writing..

So - my second problem. If that's a good thing, to have writing. Then why does New Vegas score lower?

In the same way - objectively.. not making things up here.. objectively, when you have a large project with substantial amounts of writing.. not needing to prune more than 200 dialogue-paths in some way or other after patching is complete.. that's nothing. Unless it was 200 noticeable crashes (which it wasn't), that's not very much. Either it's proof of absolutely no writing, or it's a sign of successful playtesting. Both Fallout 1&2 had several times more fixes to dialogue paths, or placement nodes than that..

It's just so annoying. The truth is that Bethesda had three quests with branching in them, and they all had game-breaking bugs from the start. New Vegas had three quests with branching in the first town without bugs, and they still got the short end of the stick in the reviews. They even had someone write an article that circulated around about the "quest flag" in games, and how difficult it was. Anyone remember that? Came up right around the Fallout 3 release.

Here we go from having games with substantial writing and complex branching quests. ..Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale 1&2, Baldur's Gate to some extent, Bloodlines, Fallout 1&2, Kotor 1&2, NWN - these guys invented the way this works, and have highlighted the limitations and boundaries of interactive fiction from that perspective long ago.

There's very well known technical limits, and how they need to be structured for how to do voice-acting effectively, and how to avoid needing to re-record similar dialogue, as well as create ambiguous conversation replies to fit with the player-selected context. This isn't new. Mass Effect to some degree, and definitively Dragon Age 2 is the other end of that spectrum - where the writing gives you choices, but has short segments that always conclude in the same way no matter what your choices really are.

..so then Bethesda comes around with Fallout 3, and boldly declares that the solution is to have no plot at all. Wohoo.

Still - regardless of my views on all of that. New Vegas has more content and interference between different characters in the first town than Fallout 3 has throughout the entire game. In fact, the main quest in Fallout 3 is entirely linear, and you can count on one (badly mutated) hand how many quests with branching there is in the entire game. So it's very natural that New Vegas would have more hanging dialogue-options, or alternative paths that don't unlock the right way. Or a check that didn't work the right way, etc.

Example: In vault 21 (which was placed under the Airstrip that New Vegas is built on - and where all disputes were settled on a gambling table :D), there's a quest where you can end up bringing vault-gear to the owner. That quest can unlock for several different reasons, and depend on at least four different specific conditions. It doesn't actually show up as a quest - it's just part of the talk - you promise to come back to the.. extremely adorable inkeeper with some vault-gear if you find it (because it sells really well on the Strip in Vegas). Once it unlocks, the game gives you an extra option in the dialogue whenever you meet her. Once you trade in enough of the gear, and enough time goes by, new options unlock again.

The core mechanics should not be extremely complex. But they've wrapped it in a relatively large amount of dialogue, to hide the computer-language interface from you almost completely. You talk to her, make some comments about leather, change clothes, and go on your way for now.

This way of aiming towards building quests is something that Bethesda doesn't even try to do.

..just to explain what I expected in Fallout 3 came out. Against what reviewers at the time thought was acceptable for Game of the Year..

hmd - April 19, 2011 (03:10 PM)
The moral of this story is to just play more King's Field. It's everything Bethesda's games wish they could be.

fleinn - April 19, 2011 (04:40 PM)
*shrug* ..we're mixing things now, aren't we..?

If we're specific, then the dialogue paths, etc, is one part of the game. A large part in New Vegas, a non-existent part in Fallout 3. New Vegas had a few orphaned and out of order dialogue paths, but nothing critical. I've spotted a couple of places where you see they've cut paths in order to force you to set the flags right, for example. I know that's been done on a patch. And... it's simply the case that on a large game like New Vegas, having 200 objects and dialogue string prunes after launch is extremely low. If we could get some numbers on the amount of fixes from Fallout 1&2, Baldur's Gate, that kind of thing, you'll get specific fixes in the range of 10 times that, at least. Fallout 1 had several bugs that broke the sidequests, and hangs, and so on. But we accepted that then, because it wasn't in the main quests. And because the game was large. When you have a large number of quests, bugs like that rise.

So from a technical point of view, if there really were 200 separate dialogue/continuity/placement fixes done in New Vegas, then that's a small number. It doesn't fly to say: "Fallout 3 had a smaller number of bugs, therefore it had less bugs", etc.

Terrain problems, getting stuck inside objects, objects spawning in wrong places, etc. These are part engine bugs and part scripting problems. Both Fallout3 and New Vegas have those. Some of those bugs in Fallout 3 happen in any of the places there are paths people walk on, since they do triggers randomly along the way. So triggers go out of place - these are possible to reproduce, no problem. There's really no excuse for having bugs like that in the first town, for example. Bethesda had that - but got no comments on it in the reviews.

Animation glitches, stilted movement, carelessly textured objects, some geometry out of place, a corner on a house hovering in the air, monsters escaping into the ground - things that make the game look a bit less smooth than it should. Fallout 3 and New Vegas both have those.

Logical problems - the AI doesn't jump fences. So a military camp with sandbags put all around it makes your companion, monsters, AI get stuck, etc. Fallout3 and New Vegas have those. If you know where to look, it's easy to find.

AI pathfinding - this is the major problem in Fallout 3. They have several areas where they spawn a large number of objects at the same time, who walk on opposing paths. And then they walk into places where the AI is hostile - and suddenly a plot-essential character dies, and you don't know why, etc. Those happen in the first city in Fallout3. They happen rarely in New Vegas - you can see that the designers have been careful about using long paths like this, to avoid that issue. For example, you have rooms where card-players rotate one by one, or where the plot-essential characters don't start to walk until another character has actually sat down in a specific place. So you don't get the "AI runs around town forever to reach their destination", and so on.

AP also had those.. unfinished looking animations, or somewhat "unsmooth" finishes in certain areas. But the game actually had few real bugs, as in unintended animation appearances, facial-expressions out of sync, or dialogue out of place.

So, you know... I'm just saying that if you feel the game is "buggy" - that's fine, and all. I'm not denying that the game doesn't look smooth, etc. "I think the game looks unfinished" - no problem. But if what you really mean is that there's a blocky texture in the first house somewhere, and a radio that doesn't work - then those are... relatively minor. And they're also present in other games (such as one that was made on the same engine, and set in a similar universe with similar rules, etc) - but then there's no comment, and it's not a problem.

Bad perspective, imo. And we've kind of.. seen that with way too many titles so far.. Where the general line is that "ooh, the bugs are nasty, there shouldn't be made and published so buggy games, it's abhorrent to the buyers!". But where the solution to that - which we see reflected in reviews - is that games with no plot, no bugs, and no content are "better" than more complex games.

And I think that's a sad development. Specially since I don't think that's what we really want to demonstrate to the publishing houses either.

..still.. I mean.. I didn't write reviews of for example Mass Effect (..I wrote one eventually), Bioshock, Black Ops, Fallout3, etc - because I knew someone would dislike it. So I picked other games to review instead.

But the tendency we're seeing is that the simpler games we get - the less the games challenge you and engage you - the more universally positive reviews we see. And the more you can just surf through the first two hours on automatic, and "basically" know everything about the game - the more likely you are to get a positive first impression, even though the rest of the game is horrible..

I don't know.. take it for what you will. But please note: I don't claim people are objectively wrong. I'm saying many people are not specific enough to be wrong or right. That's the problem.

darketernal - April 19, 2011 (06:06 PM)
People who didn't think Mass Effect 2 was awesome are just plain wrong.

Still, going off topic. I usually like Bethesda's games for one reason, and that's that they know how to create a setting. They know how to make awesome scenery. However, story tellers they are not. That is why I expect good things out of New Vegas in the end, because they had the engine offered to them on a silver platter and the original Fallout team just had to put the good stuff they were known for in it. It was a win-win situation, which is why I expect only the best when I get around to playing it.

CoarseDragon - April 20, 2011 (12:19 PM)
Having played both games to completion I have to say New Vegas was a better game story-wise. The friction they created between the different factions was really good. The interaction between yourself and your companions was also very well done and it that respect New Vegas was a much better game even though both games used the very same engine.

To get an idea of New Vegas I invite you to read this review by jerec. I think it exemplifies what new Vegas was about.

Fallout: New Vegas

fleinn - April 20, 2011 (03:38 PM)
"People who didn't think Mass Effect 2 was awesome are just plain wrong."

:p The dialogue-paths in both Mass Effect 1 and 2 are more or less completely linear. The concept is that you role-play your intentions, and then the game responds once in a while to what you say. But the choices you are given actually are few. Or they are resolved by the end of the segment. That doesn't make it a bad game, I'm just saying that it's one (good) way of solving the branching in dialogues. Specially if you can still keep Hackett commenting on your progress for the actual choices you made, or if the council confronts you on not committing genocide on the Rachni, etc. It doesn't have to be much - and it could even have the same "cynical critical generic question to your actions on [planet x]". And then create the actual branching from "generic positive feedback", or "generic dismissive" feedback, etc.

Dragon Age 2 goes one step further - they have no branching whatsoever. Everything is completely linear. But you can pick responses between... you know.. Jesus, Jay Leno and Hitler. Without that actually affecting the outcome of the segment, even if the game responds to what you say with one or two lines after every comment.

The point was that one of these (Mass Effect, Rise of the Argonauts, etc) have that dialogue path development because it's simplified for the viewer, and because it helps create a more cinematic feel and easier pacing. It's much less difficult to get the pacing right in Mass Effect during the Normandy Launch (with the great "optional" speech you can make, where the music ramps up and down depending on how high your Patriotism is, and so on), than it is to get the final confrontation with "The Master" in Fallout to last just long enough.

If you compare these two, and imagine some music and spoken dialogue for all speech turning up in Fallout 1 - then what you see is that large parts of it isn't actually used on any single playthrough. It also lasts different amounts of time, it doesn't have a perfect high point. The game relentlessly hounds you for some comment you made early on - and there are at least four completely distinct endings that all have to be written and directed separately. That's not something you would see in modern games with the entire cinematic treatment with dialogue and so on..

On the other hand - is it possible to do it? If you actually looked at the separate dialogue, and found out that the difference between a completely linear path where the only change in what's said between the playthroughs is by picking your perspective as the player is, say, 40% extra speech.. is that really an impossible problem? Or, isn't it worth it? If it helps the actors understand their characters better, because they need to respond to different things - is that really going to be a problem.. etc?

Just saying that it's easy to see the difference between a developer that chose simpler dialogue progression out of sheer laziness, or to cut down on the writing - and a developer who picked it in order to more easily direct the sequences and keep the flow going..

I mean - if you play Dragon Age 2, you'll most likely get to some point or another where you choose an "alignment" choice because you thought that was a more clever response than the others - and you'll suddenly see that this doesn't actually fit with the rest of what you said. I.e., the parallel paths the writers have made don't actually mix, even though the segments all resolve to the same event every twenty seconds or so. ..things like that...

So here you have another great theory on how to cut down on voice-acting - but where the writers don't have enough structure to actually pull it off in practice.

And... well.. no one minds, really. And the solution seems to be that: whatever can be done to make the story smaller and cheaper to produce.. is good..

"because they had the engine offered to them on a silver platter and the original Fallout team just had to put the good stuff they were known for in it. It was a win-win situation, which is why I expect only the best when I get around to playing it."

The artists still have to work, you know. Statues, artwork, specific sequence of lights that don't exist in the template. A sheet of cloth for a variant that doesn't exist in the toolset. ..that's why I like Obsidian, you know. When something isn't there, they either design it, or there's a freaking black hole there instead (..all right, exaggeration). But you don't see an Obsidian game where you can tell they dropped a scenario, or simplified the mechanics in it, because the toolset didn't have the right assets. Lots of places in New Vegas you see a neon-sign, a street-corner, some gate, or a wall, a piece of pavement, etc - once.

..It's not that they're not showing it off, either. It seems it's more that they don't have their producers running around prepping people to look out for the scenic moments, or something.. The Lucky 38 in the distance in New Vegas.. the Airfield base.. The NCR "friendship memorial" or whatever it was. The Hoover Dam. You have a lot of these in New Vegas..

I mean, most of those examples in Fallout 3 aren't even designed as some sort of set piece.. You get to Washington DC, and it's just a building there. You don't see it in the distance, because you bounce out of a sewer before you get there. You don't see the memorial. The pool isn't there (not even goo instead).. The broken ship - this is taken straight out of Fallout 2 - the entire base, even the "lurkers in the basement", along with the guy you rescue there (if you're lucky enough not to fall to your death off some geometry, or can find your way through the fifteen-stage exit/enter network of level-transition points).. You know, it's easy to go through a lot of these and find they're nothing special, or done better in other games. That's.. the problem, imo.

It's awesome what's there when you get to Washington. The memorial over the sunset, etc - great. The entire thing is really cool. But it still was a fetch-quest that got you there in the first place. And the entire game isn't made up of moments like those. That's.. my problem with all of this.. One game has one cheap cinematic sequence that lasts exactly 30 seconds (not counting the loading times). And this somehow makes the entire game.

The other game has fifty of these, along with a real skill-set that is integrated into the game-flow on several different levels. It has writing, it has plot, it has interesting sub-characters and companions. It has comments on your performance, it has faction relationship that affects the story. It has sidequests that tear your heart out, etc. :p And it gets "nothing to see here"..

CoarseDragon - April 20, 2011 (05:24 PM)
I guess a lot of what we see in games today is because bling sells and story just does not sell any more. Look we have all these great particle effects and awesome graphics for this game and we need some kind of story...I know lets say aliens are attacking and you have to kill them all...close enough for most games these days.

People comalain there is no story in games any longer but yet continue to play those games. So what happens is developers keep making them.

It is nice to have pretty graphics to look at while you play but it seems to be beyond the reach of most companies today to bring with that meaningful story that actually makes the gamer care about the world they are in.

I am much more picky about the games I play these days. Fallout 3 was for me a no-brainer pick-up but what happen to the game I liked so long ago was torn apart. I still enjoyed the game for what it was but it was not what it could have been.

And there is the problem for me. To many games are could-have-been. As fleinn mentioned Dragon Age II happens to be one of those games for me anyway.

Feedback
	honestgamer - April 17, 2011 (09:29 AM) At the time Fallout: New Vegas was released, fleinn, it was so glitchy for most reviewers that some literally couldn't even finish it. That's a pretty big strike against the game and explains the scores. Even Fallout 3 wasn't that horrific a mess, though it wasn't without glitches of its own. New Vegas merely magnified them tenfold, and that was a big enough problem to outweigh--at least in the minds of critics--the more ambitious and worthwhile things that New Vegas did during those rare instances where it wasn't corrupting save files and the like. I would imagine that a lot of patching went on between then and now.
	fleinn - April 17, 2011 (09:39 AM) :/ no, they've had two patches, I think. The game still has the engine-bugs. The kind of problems that turn up when too many paths turn up. But the scripting bugs in the missions and so on were negligible from the start.. Now they're completely gone. The rotating head, etc - not an issue on the launch-day/disc-version of the game. No, doesn't fly. I couldn't finish Fallout 3 because of a botched save-game - twice. The save-file grew in size and eventually broke if you had too many side-quests collected (this is a scripting problem - Bethesda would know about this. And that's a problem that never was there in New Vegas). But outside of that.. it's just not a comparable game, is it.. Sorry.. just annoyed, I guess..
	Halon - April 17, 2011 (02:29 PM) I thought Fallout 3 was pretty good but never played New Vegas. I'll probably try it when the GotY edition is available. Most people that I've spoken to who have played both tell me that Fallout 3 is better, though.
	zigfried - April 17, 2011 (04:26 PM) Some people tried to finish New Vegas, and literally couldn't. As in, they tried to do something that was necessary to make the game progress, and it crashed. And kept crashing, no matter how often they tried. For those people, New Vegas was a videogame that could not be won. Since those people were able to actually complete Fallout 3, it was obvious in their minds as to which game was better: the one that had a proper ending. In other words, not New Vegas. That being said, those people are wrong. Fallout 3 was so horrible that I had to stop playing... and my displeasure had nothing to do with bugs. Even if New Vegas crashes near the end, it's already proven to be a far better game. //Zig
	jerec - April 17, 2011 (04:31 PM) One of those two patches was pretty big, as I remember, and it must have fixed quite a few problems. I'd heard about the glitches so I didn't buy it for a couple of months, but when I did it was a great game, easily eclipsing Fallout 3.
	fleinn - April 17, 2011 (06:22 PM) ..anyway.. So here's the status so far. One hang about each five-six hours. No glitches, one pruned dialogue-path (that unlocked from another optional path - probably intended). Occasional slow-down (this is the stuck node-traversal - happened twice). Initial loading of areas sometimes stall (this is the placing objects, which generates node-traversal again, most likely). No save-game crash, etc. ..I just visited the "Boomers" up at an Airfield north of Vegas. They have this thing about blowing people up. But they're kind at heart. Their story-keeper invited me to their museum to see a mural depicting the story of their people. Awesome Mad Max reference. But I seriously like the writing going on here :D
	JoeTheDestroyer - April 18, 2011 (03:43 AM) I enjoyed FO3 myself, so I'll probably love New Vegas. As sportsman said, I'll probably wait for the GOTY edition.
	fleinn - April 18, 2011 (04:42 AM) Doubtful there'll be any more patches or add-ons, but yeah - a version with Dead Money and the patches on the disc would be neat. On the other hand, New Vegas goes for almost nothing right now if you look around. Something to do with the PC version selling very slowly, I think.
	CoarseDragon - April 18, 2011 (01:04 PM) I did like FO3 but I thought F3: NV was better as it included the faction aspect of the wasteland which seems to be natural in a post-apocalyptic world. Some of the add-ons for FO3 were very good and those enhanced the play of the game. Overall New Vegas was slightly better that Fallout 3 but I did enjoy them both in different ways.
	darketernal - April 19, 2011 (04:31 AM) Didn't yet play New Vegas, but heard only good things. Still, if it was so bugges as you people say it was, then it deserved bad grades, no matter how good the world was pulled off or the story was told. There is absolutely no excuse what so ever to put a buggy product out on the market. Sure, some will always find their way through, that's why we have patches, and I understand that. However, when they are of such great magnitude that the game crashes, or that you can't do something that won't break the game until the patch is released, it deserves all the scorn. That's why I gave up on the Gothic series. The first one was great, the second one was phenomenal(though I have to admit I didn't finish it yet due to trying out Gothic 3 to see how it looks), and the third one was horrendous. Glitches, awful optimisation, incredibly lazy programming just to push the product as soon as possible to the market. That deserves all the negative marks on that point alone.
	fleinn - April 19, 2011 (07:04 AM) ..good sentiment in general. But when the game has.. you know.. significantly less bugs than Fallout 3.. Where you still can manage to break just about every quest where you can make any sort of choice... if you actually play the game, rather than just play until the first (and only) cinematic set-piece, you will inevitably discover that. If you're lucky, the path-finding in Fallout 3 also will hang the game multiple times (and forever bork your quest) in the first town. This too is impossible not to find out if you ever played Fallout 3, and then returned to the town during night-time (which one of the quests require). So how to explain the sudden attention to bugs in a game that has unbelievably much more content, and still has /massively less/ if not none of the scripting bugs that are present in the other game..? I'm not questioning whether some people had fun with Fallout 3 or not, I'm just saying that objectively it does not make sense to say New Vegas was or is unplayable because of bugs - and then somehow not have a seriously larger problem with Fallout 3 (..even though it has a tiny, tiny amount of branching quests .. I mean, are there others than the dialogue path in the "vampire" quest, and the accept/no/wait in the android quest in the shipyard? But both of those are bugged if you try to pick some of the "other" conversation options, or even listening to the dialogue. You then get a double check or a broken quest. The scripted events when people move around also often caused serious slow-downs and hangs. My savegame got borked on completely random places - twice - after it suddenly grew in size for a while. The first time it didn't even happen far into the game..)... ..Honestly.. I suspect a lot of people who say Fallout 3 is pretty good hasn't played Fallout 1, didn't play Fallout3 longer than to the radio-tower, and have simply run through it in 20 minutes, and then never played the game again. Because if you have played the game - whether you're a fan of Oblivion and Morrowind, or another RPG game or other.. you notice that the game is fucked if you play longer than that. The way the skill-system is used, the way the quests are pieced together - it doesn't appear finished. I mean, I really liked the capitol and the ship-wreck - great locations. But when there are no quests there, and the Capitol is basically a long shooting gallery with super-mutants..? There's no content there whatsoever. The Vault-museum is great - but again, a completely linear piece. No way to stop the presentation, or halt it and ask questions, etc. Nothing.. and most of the game doesn't even have the locations.. ..it's just randomly spawned stuff where you can kill things.
	darketernal - April 19, 2011 (08:51 AM) I played the first and second Fallout to the end, Fallout 3 as well, playing through Oblivion these days and played Morrowind back in the day. Maybe I was a late comer who got the GOTY edition of the game, but I never had a single corrupt save or broken quest in Fallout 3. So yeah, maybe I just started playing it after it was all fixed up...as much as it was possible to fix at the very least.
	fleinn - April 19, 2011 (08:59 AM) ..I guess it could be I ran through the same choices that created the problem.. But... you know.. there are several of the "don't accept quest now, quest doesn't trigger correctly later" bugs left in Fallout 3 after the patching.. Not the biggest problem the game has, but still..
	CoarseDragon - April 19, 2011 (11:10 AM) I think you might have really bad luck with Fallout 3. I did not run into any of the problems you mentioned. I had trouble completing one quest and that was Lincoln Monument but probably my fault for wiping the place before I was supposed to. I bought both Fallouts new and other than clipping and collision bugs no real problems. I played Fallout 3 on a PC with Windows Game thing which updated automatically and that may have been a big help. New Vegas did not give me any problems with quests of course Steam updated that game as well.
	fleinn - April 19, 2011 (12:53 PM) ..actually... the Washington monument has a trigger that gets overwritten depending on another quest. More people than you have had that one. But this is an "obscure bug" that only people who talk to the other characters will see, of course.. cough And then notice that the end of the quest isn't flagged, so they can get the three word debrief.. No one saw that..
	fleinn - April 19, 2011 (02:24 PM) "I've never played Fallout, but I don't see what that has to do with my enjoyment of Fallout 3." ..nothing? ..everything? :p I also liked Oblivion (and Morrowind).. so sure, I can see the appeal of the entire open wasteland in that setting, etc. And I'll easily admit that I hate the game because of the way it deals with the source-material.. One example. In Fallout 3 the Brotherhood of Steel - the guys with the power-armors - suddenly have sub-divisions who share tech. And they wear power-armor without the actual legs on them. That's.. the first thing I see when I get into the game. The reclusive cult the Brotherhood of Steel run around drumming up an insurgency in the wasteland while working on political stump weedroot operations. And their powerarmor is now just a symbol, etc. But suddenly we figure out that it's not any more than that. They did write a story-segment with these armors. But they're just there because they look cool and awesome. And there's no other story that actually looks at what is going on beyond it. That's bad enough. But then they pile on it by simply letting every area be a random dungeon where these fictional steel knights without legs run around killing super-mutants by the dozens. So even if I did let the entire "Tarantino does Doctor Who" thing go - the game is a huge random dungeon. That's what annoys me. Oblivion - that I could excuse to some extent, because the entire story revolves around you and your evolution. Just like in Morrowind. So then you actually get away with not having very substantial dialogue and so on. Still - even those who do like Fallout 3 admits that the dlc are the best parts. Where actually something happens. Where they have actual writing.. So - my second problem. If that's a good thing, to have writing. Then why does New Vegas score lower? In the same way - objectively.. not making things up here.. objectively, when you have a large project with substantial amounts of writing.. not needing to prune more than 200 dialogue-paths in some way or other after patching is complete.. that's nothing. Unless it was 200 noticeable crashes (which it wasn't), that's not very much. Either it's proof of absolutely no writing, or it's a sign of successful playtesting. Both Fallout 1&2 had several times more fixes to dialogue paths, or placement nodes than that.. It's just so annoying. The truth is that Bethesda had three quests with branching in them, and they all had game-breaking bugs from the start. New Vegas had three quests with branching in the first town without bugs, and they still got the short end of the stick in the reviews. They even had someone write an article that circulated around about the "quest flag" in games, and how difficult it was. Anyone remember that? Came up right around the Fallout 3 release. Here we go from having games with substantial writing and complex branching quests. ..Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale 1&2, Baldur's Gate to some extent, Bloodlines, Fallout 1&2, Kotor 1&2, NWN - these guys invented the way this works, and have highlighted the limitations and boundaries of interactive fiction from that perspective long ago. There's very well known technical limits, and how they need to be structured for how to do voice-acting effectively, and how to avoid needing to re-record similar dialogue, as well as create ambiguous conversation replies to fit with the player-selected context. This isn't new. Mass Effect to some degree, and definitively Dragon Age 2 is the other end of that spectrum - where the writing gives you choices, but has short segments that always conclude in the same way no matter what your choices really are. ..so then Bethesda comes around with Fallout 3, and boldly declares that the solution is to have no plot at all. Wohoo. Still - regardless of my views on all of that. New Vegas has more content and interference between different characters in the first town than Fallout 3 has throughout the entire game. In fact, the main quest in Fallout 3 is entirely linear, and you can count on one (badly mutated) hand how many quests with branching there is in the entire game. So it's very natural that New Vegas would have more hanging dialogue-options, or alternative paths that don't unlock the right way. Or a check that didn't work the right way, etc. Example: In vault 21 (which was placed under the Airstrip that New Vegas is built on - and where all disputes were settled on a gambling table :D), there's a quest where you can end up bringing vault-gear to the owner. That quest can unlock for several different reasons, and depend on at least four different specific conditions. It doesn't actually show up as a quest - it's just part of the talk - you promise to come back to the.. extremely adorable inkeeper with some vault-gear if you find it (because it sells really well on the Strip in Vegas). Once it unlocks, the game gives you an extra option in the dialogue whenever you meet her. Once you trade in enough of the gear, and enough time goes by, new options unlock again. The core mechanics should not be extremely complex. But they've wrapped it in a relatively large amount of dialogue, to hide the computer-language interface from you almost completely. You talk to her, make some comments about leather, change clothes, and go on your way for now. This way of aiming towards building quests is something that Bethesda doesn't even try to do. ..just to explain what I expected in Fallout 3 came out. Against what reviewers at the time thought was acceptable for Game of the Year..
	hmd - April 19, 2011 (03:10 PM) The moral of this story is to just play more King's Field. It's everything Bethesda's games wish they could be.
	fleinn - April 19, 2011 (04:40 PM) shrug ..we're mixing things now, aren't we..? If we're specific, then the dialogue paths, etc, is one part of the game. A large part in New Vegas, a non-existent part in Fallout 3. New Vegas had a few orphaned and out of order dialogue paths, but nothing critical. I've spotted a couple of places where you see they've cut paths in order to force you to set the flags right, for example. I know that's been done on a patch. And... it's simply the case that on a large game like New Vegas, having 200 objects and dialogue string prunes after launch is extremely low. If we could get some numbers on the amount of fixes from Fallout 1&2, Baldur's Gate, that kind of thing, you'll get specific fixes in the range of 10 times that, at least. Fallout 1 had several bugs that broke the sidequests, and hangs, and so on. But we accepted that then, because it wasn't in the main quests. And because the game was large. When you have a large number of quests, bugs like that rise. So from a technical point of view, if there really were 200 separate dialogue/continuity/placement fixes done in New Vegas, then that's a small number. It doesn't fly to say: "Fallout 3 had a smaller number of bugs, therefore it had less bugs", etc. Terrain problems, getting stuck inside objects, objects spawning in wrong places, etc. These are part engine bugs and part scripting problems. Both Fallout3 and New Vegas have those. Some of those bugs in Fallout 3 happen in any of the places there are paths people walk on, since they do triggers randomly along the way. So triggers go out of place - these are possible to reproduce, no problem. There's really no excuse for having bugs like that in the first town, for example. Bethesda had that - but got no comments on it in the reviews. Animation glitches, stilted movement, carelessly textured objects, some geometry out of place, a corner on a house hovering in the air, monsters escaping into the ground - things that make the game look a bit less smooth than it should. Fallout 3 and New Vegas both have those. Logical problems - the AI doesn't jump fences. So a military camp with sandbags put all around it makes your companion, monsters, AI get stuck, etc. Fallout3 and New Vegas have those. If you know where to look, it's easy to find. AI pathfinding - this is the major problem in Fallout 3. They have several areas where they spawn a large number of objects at the same time, who walk on opposing paths. And then they walk into places where the AI is hostile - and suddenly a plot-essential character dies, and you don't know why, etc. Those happen in the first city in Fallout3. They happen rarely in New Vegas - you can see that the designers have been careful about using long paths like this, to avoid that issue. For example, you have rooms where card-players rotate one by one, or where the plot-essential characters don't start to walk until another character has actually sat down in a specific place. So you don't get the "AI runs around town forever to reach their destination", and so on. AP also had those.. unfinished looking animations, or somewhat "unsmooth" finishes in certain areas. But the game actually had few real bugs, as in unintended animation appearances, facial-expressions out of sync, or dialogue out of place. So, you know... I'm just saying that if you feel the game is "buggy" - that's fine, and all. I'm not denying that the game doesn't look smooth, etc. "I think the game looks unfinished" - no problem. But if what you really mean is that there's a blocky texture in the first house somewhere, and a radio that doesn't work - then those are... relatively minor. And they're also present in other games (such as one that was made on the same engine, and set in a similar universe with similar rules, etc) - but then there's no comment, and it's not a problem. Bad perspective, imo. And we've kind of.. seen that with way too many titles so far.. Where the general line is that "ooh, the bugs are nasty, there shouldn't be made and published so buggy games, it's abhorrent to the buyers!". But where the solution to that - which we see reflected in reviews - is that games with no plot, no bugs, and no content are "better" than more complex games. And I think that's a sad development. Specially since I don't think that's what we really want to demonstrate to the publishing houses either. ..still.. I mean.. I didn't write reviews of for example Mass Effect (..I wrote one eventually), Bioshock, Black Ops, Fallout3, etc - because I knew someone would dislike it. So I picked other games to review instead. But the tendency we're seeing is that the simpler games we get - the less the games challenge you and engage you - the more universally positive reviews we see. And the more you can just surf through the first two hours on automatic, and "basically" know everything about the game - the more likely you are to get a positive first impression, even though the rest of the game is horrible.. I don't know.. take it for what you will. But please note: I don't claim people are objectively wrong. I'm saying many people are not specific enough to be wrong or right. That's the problem.
	darketernal - April 19, 2011 (06:06 PM) People who didn't think Mass Effect 2 was awesome are just plain wrong. Still, going off topic. I usually like Bethesda's games for one reason, and that's that they know how to create a setting. They know how to make awesome scenery. However, story tellers they are not. That is why I expect good things out of New Vegas in the end, because they had the engine offered to them on a silver platter and the original Fallout team just had to put the good stuff they were known for in it. It was a win-win situation, which is why I expect only the best when I get around to playing it.
	CoarseDragon - April 20, 2011 (12:19 PM) Having played both games to completion I have to say New Vegas was a better game story-wise. The friction they created between the different factions was really good. The interaction between yourself and your companions was also very well done and it that respect New Vegas was a much better game even though both games used the very same engine. To get an idea of New Vegas I invite you to read this review by jerec. I think it exemplifies what new Vegas was about. Fallout: New Vegas
	fleinn - April 20, 2011 (03:38 PM) "People who didn't think Mass Effect 2 was awesome are just plain wrong." :p The dialogue-paths in both Mass Effect 1 and 2 are more or less completely linear. The concept is that you role-play your intentions, and then the game responds once in a while to what you say. But the choices you are given actually are few. Or they are resolved by the end of the segment. That doesn't make it a bad game, I'm just saying that it's one (good) way of solving the branching in dialogues. Specially if you can still keep Hackett commenting on your progress for the actual choices you made, or if the council confronts you on not committing genocide on the Rachni, etc. It doesn't have to be much - and it could even have the same "cynical critical generic question to your actions on [planet x]". And then create the actual branching from "generic positive feedback", or "generic dismissive" feedback, etc. Dragon Age 2 goes one step further - they have no branching whatsoever. Everything is completely linear. But you can pick responses between... you know.. Jesus, Jay Leno and Hitler. Without that actually affecting the outcome of the segment, even if the game responds to what you say with one or two lines after every comment. The point was that one of these (Mass Effect, Rise of the Argonauts, etc) have that dialogue path development because it's simplified for the viewer, and because it helps create a more cinematic feel and easier pacing. It's much less difficult to get the pacing right in Mass Effect during the Normandy Launch (with the great "optional" speech you can make, where the music ramps up and down depending on how high your Patriotism is, and so on), than it is to get the final confrontation with "The Master" in Fallout to last just long enough. If you compare these two, and imagine some music and spoken dialogue for all speech turning up in Fallout 1 - then what you see is that large parts of it isn't actually used on any single playthrough. It also lasts different amounts of time, it doesn't have a perfect high point. The game relentlessly hounds you for some comment you made early on - and there are at least four completely distinct endings that all have to be written and directed separately. That's not something you would see in modern games with the entire cinematic treatment with dialogue and so on.. On the other hand - is it possible to do it? If you actually looked at the separate dialogue, and found out that the difference between a completely linear path where the only change in what's said between the playthroughs is by picking your perspective as the player is, say, 40% extra speech.. is that really an impossible problem? Or, isn't it worth it? If it helps the actors understand their characters better, because they need to respond to different things - is that really going to be a problem.. etc? Just saying that it's easy to see the difference between a developer that chose simpler dialogue progression out of sheer laziness, or to cut down on the writing - and a developer who picked it in order to more easily direct the sequences and keep the flow going.. I mean - if you play Dragon Age 2, you'll most likely get to some point or another where you choose an "alignment" choice because you thought that was a more clever response than the others - and you'll suddenly see that this doesn't actually fit with the rest of what you said. I.e., the parallel paths the writers have made don't actually mix, even though the segments all resolve to the same event every twenty seconds or so. ..things like that... So here you have another great theory on how to cut down on voice-acting - but where the writers don't have enough structure to actually pull it off in practice. And... well.. no one minds, really. And the solution seems to be that: whatever can be done to make the story smaller and cheaper to produce.. is good.. "because they had the engine offered to them on a silver platter and the original Fallout team just had to put the good stuff they were known for in it. It was a win-win situation, which is why I expect only the best when I get around to playing it." The artists still have to work, you know. Statues, artwork, specific sequence of lights that don't exist in the template. A sheet of cloth for a variant that doesn't exist in the toolset. ..that's why I like Obsidian, you know. When something isn't there, they either design it, or there's a freaking black hole there instead (..all right, exaggeration). But you don't see an Obsidian game where you can tell they dropped a scenario, or simplified the mechanics in it, because the toolset didn't have the right assets. Lots of places in New Vegas you see a neon-sign, a street-corner, some gate, or a wall, a piece of pavement, etc - once. ..It's not that they're not showing it off, either. It seems it's more that they don't have their producers running around prepping people to look out for the scenic moments, or something.. The Lucky 38 in the distance in New Vegas.. the Airfield base.. The NCR "friendship memorial" or whatever it was. The Hoover Dam. You have a lot of these in New Vegas.. I mean, most of those examples in Fallout 3 aren't even designed as some sort of set piece.. You get to Washington DC, and it's just a building there. You don't see it in the distance, because you bounce out of a sewer before you get there. You don't see the memorial. The pool isn't there (not even goo instead).. The broken ship - this is taken straight out of Fallout 2 - the entire base, even the "lurkers in the basement", along with the guy you rescue there (if you're lucky enough not to fall to your death off some geometry, or can find your way through the fifteen-stage exit/enter network of level-transition points).. You know, it's easy to go through a lot of these and find they're nothing special, or done better in other games. That's.. the problem, imo. It's awesome what's there when you get to Washington. The memorial over the sunset, etc - great. The entire thing is really cool. But it still was a fetch-quest that got you there in the first place. And the entire game isn't made up of moments like those. That's.. my problem with all of this.. One game has one cheap cinematic sequence that lasts exactly 30 seconds (not counting the loading times). And this somehow makes the entire game. The other game has fifty of these, along with a real skill-set that is integrated into the game-flow on several different levels. It has writing, it has plot, it has interesting sub-characters and companions. It has comments on your performance, it has faction relationship that affects the story. It has sidequests that tear your heart out, etc. :p And it gets "nothing to see here"..
	CoarseDragon - April 20, 2011 (05:24 PM) I guess a lot of what we see in games today is because bling sells and story just does not sell any more. Look we have all these great particle effects and awesome graphics for this game and we need some kind of story...I know lets say aliens are attacking and you have to kill them all...close enough for most games these days. People comalain there is no story in games any longer but yet continue to play those games. So what happens is developers keep making them. It is nice to have pretty graphics to look at while you play but it seems to be beyond the reach of most companies today to bring with that meaningful story that actually makes the gamer care about the world they are in. I am much more picky about the games I play these days. Fallout 3 was for me a no-brainer pick-up but what happen to the game I liked so long ago was torn apart. I still enjoyed the game for what it was but it was not what it could have been. And there is the problem for me. To many games are could-have-been. As fleinn mentioned Dragon Age II happens to be one of those games for me anyway.

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