Altima
10-28-2010, 06:20 AM
I found this article on Ign.com.
It is a list of opinions from ign editors.
Link - http://ps3.ign.com/articles/113/1130886p1.html
Fallout: New Vegas Second Opinions
Want to hear more tales from the Mojave desert? Well, sit down and enjoy.
October 27, 2010
A joint Obisidan and Bethesda production, Fallout: New Vegas was released earlier this month. Set in the wastelands of the Mojave desert, much of New Vegas was ripped from Fallout 3, our game of the year in 2008. But it's 2010 now, and that's where the great divide lies. Seven IGN editors chime in to tell about their experience so far with the giant RPG.
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Having played the Fallout series for over a decade, from the 1997 original to Bethesda's Fallout 3, it's great to see there's still room to be impressed. Fallout: New Vegas is without a doubt Obsidian's best game in my mind, filled with an overwhelming amount of carefully crafted content that never fails to surprise.
There's a lot of ground to cover around New Vegas, and it doesn't take too much wandering to get tangled up in yet another web of quests. Oh how I wish I could stay focused on the main storyline, but there's just too much else to do. There's the narcissistic super mutant that commands a xenophobic outpost on top of a mountain, drawing in visitors with her hilariously crude radio broadcasts. There's the gang of ghoulish religious zealots hunkered down in a massive underground network trying to get a battery of rocket ships up and running (which, by the way, you can destroy). There's the gladiatorial combat arena buried in the sewers north of New Vegas, dens of Deathclaws stalking the landscape, tales of hidden Vaults overflowing with plants and grasses, a shifty cannibalistic order masking their villainy behind a veneer of wealth and style, and packs of insidious cretins roaming the countryside.
Everyone in New Vegas has a story; some charming, some depressing, and some brutal. They all need help, and it's up to you whether you accept the tasks, double-cross them, or simply plant a bullet in their leg and walk away. Such thrilling freedom and finely written storylines are hard to come by in video games. But I think the fact that a lot of the game's groundwork was already set in place when this project was started by Obsidian did a lot – it freed them up to concentrate on weaving together powerful stories and offer the player an incredibly diverse range of choice. New Vegas is a remarkably well-realized virtual world that feels appropriately dirty, lived in, and authentic. Though the mechanics may be familiar, it's a fascinating experience.
I'm thoroughly enjoying New Vegas so far. I've played for a little more than 20 hours, so I haven't finished the main plotline, yet. It's not the bundle of awesomeness I was hoping for, but it's still lots of fun. I've encountered plenty of little glitches, but they don't really affect the gameplay, and the game has crashed on me twice, which isn't so bad for a game of this scope. One of the things I loved the most about Fallout 3 was the sense of humor, and I'm thrilled that has carried over to New Vegas. There are quite a few lines of dialogue that have made me laugh out loud, and even more that made me chuckle. So far, I don't find the main story as intriguing as the story in Fallout 3, but the dynamic between the NCR and the Legion is more interesting to me than the battle between the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave in Fallout 3.
All that said, I don't think New Vegas has topped its predecessor, and that's disappointing. But then again, I loved Fallout 3 so much, it would have been really difficult for New Vegas to dethrone it. It also would have been nice if Obsidian had been able to fix at least some of the little glitches that have plagued Bethesda RPGs since Oblivion, but the game is interesting enough to make them tolerable. So New Vegas isn't quite as good as Fallout 3, but it's still a whole lot of fun.
After DC Universe Online slipped to next year, Fallout: New Vegas rose to be my most anticipated game of this year. However, when I got my copy a few days early, I found that I couldn't get motivated to play it. I watched Kristine and a few other editors toy with it, and it looked so similar to Fallout 3. When I finally sat down and gave it a dedicated chance, it just didn't hook me like Fallout 3 did. It felt like the same old stuff. I'm definitely going to get down to business in Fallout: New Vegas one day (as I loved Fallout 3 so much), but as of now, I find myself more excited for the "coming one day" DCUO beta launch on PS3 than putting on another Pipboy.
Unlike a majority of the gaming community, I didn't immediately recognize the brilliance of Fallout 3. I bought it day one, fired it up, and was promptly bored out of my mind for the first few hours. I consider myself a patient man, but I found my limits being pushed as I wandered the wasteland aimlessly, performing menial tasks for hours until, ultimately, my resolve had been broken. I traded it in and went on with my life.
And then IGN awarded it Game of the Year 2008. I couldn't understand it, but I figured that if it was worthy of such a high honor from IGN, I must be missing something.
So I borrowed a copy, endured a few more hours and became fully engrossed. I had finally seen the light -- I realized that Fallout rewards patience with compelling and immersive gameplay, you just have to stick it out through the slow introduction.
Needless to say, I came into Fallout: New Vegas from a new, enlightened perspective.
The game definitely still requires a sizable time investment, but the pacing overall felt a little faster, and the storytelling a bit more cohesive. I was up and running a lot faster and leveling a little more effectively. Of course, this could be attributed to my better understanding of the mechanics after completing Fallout 3, but there were definitely some improvements from the design perspective. I also never encountered many of the bugs that have since become highly publicized, which definitely made my experience a little more favorable.
Still, there are certainly some issues with Fallout: New Vegas; the graphics haven't been improved much since Fallout 3 and there aren't a lot of radical new concepts or elements to it either.
But as they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I welcome the familiarity of Fallout: New Vegas, and I consider it $59.99 well spent, but I won't deny the fact that developers missed a number of opportunities to fix some glaring issues.
When Fallout 3 came out in 2008, I was tasked with writing a strategy guide for it. The massive 750,000 word behemoth that I wrote ended up being a testament to just how gigantic the game actually is. Fallout 3 was huge, and nobody in IGN's office (and few people worldwide) ended up seeing the game as intimately as I did. And yet, I still adored the game. It was easily the best game of 2008, and one of the best games of the generation, period.
Now, when I spend that kind of time with a game, especially while writing a strategy guide for it, I tend to sour on the title until I'm outright repulsed by it. But when I finish a massive guide for a game that I spent a lot of time with, and I still like the game, that speaks volumes to me about how good a title actually is. This happened with Grand Theft Auto IV, Infamous, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and other games. And since Fallout: New Vegas feels, looks and plays identically to the masterpiece known as Fallout 3, I can already tell that when I conclude my journey writing my current New Vegas epic, it'll join the aforementioned list of tried-and-true classics.
There's no doubt that Fallout: New Vegas shares many of the technical shortcomings that Fallout 3 had. The game is occasionally buggy, will hiccup fairly incessantly, and even freeze from time-to-time. As was the case with Fallout 3, New Vegas seems to behave differently for different people, but even if it's performing in a top notch fashion, gamers are still bound to run into these same issues, at least from time to time. But I largely excused this problem with Fallout 3, and I'll do the same with New Vegas. And here's why.
Fallout: New Vegas is vast. There are very few games in the history of our industry that attempt to do what New Vegas does (or Fallout 3 before it). Not only is the physical world enormous -- far beyond the size and scope of virtually any console game -- but the character interactions within, the branching storylines, the myriad side quests, and seemingly random and organic enemy interactions complicate this vast physical world and make it something living and breathing. I could only imagine that testing a game with seemingly-infinite permutations possible anywhere you go is a difficult ordeal. And all things considered, it seems that Bethesda (and in this case, Obsidian) did a pretty nice job of doing what they could do to iron out the wrinkles.
Could more have been done? Of course. I'm not one that necessarily sides with developers who seem intent on pushing post-release patches in lieu of holding their games while they fix errors before going gold. Usually, the latter is much preferred. But it seems that a game like New Vegas could be held indefinitely while random bugs, glitches and issues are worked out. I'm sure that issues occur in New Vegas only if, for instance, person A is in position B at location C, only at nighttime and when you're equipped with a Laser Rifle, and have a follower with you, and your strength is below a seven. In other words, how many of these random issues do we really expect them to deal with? To me, it seems like a feat that a game like Fallout: New Vegas runs at all. And I think most gamers who enjoy this game agree with me. That's why Fallout: New Vegas, like Fallout 3 before it, will go on to sell millions of copies and achieve universal critical acclaim. Because despite some of its technical shortcomings, Fallout: New Vegas strikes me as being as brilliant as Fallout 3 was.
Of course, I've barely scratched the surface in New Vegas. Conventional wisdom deems that while writing a strategy guide you could potentially work through a game fifty times slower than a normal person would. After all, you're chronicling everything you see and do, taking screenshots and videos, and doing everything possible to help your readers find whatever they're looking for. But I've definitely seen enough to know that New Vegas is one of 2010's best games. And if not for BioWare's Mass Effect 2, which may very well be the best game of the entire generation, New Vegas could have vied for my Game of the Year vote. But even without that Game of the Year status on it, New Vegas is still a great game. And I highly recommend it to anyone who loved Fallout 3.
To start out, Fallout 3 is, was, and will be one of my favorite video games of all time. Mixing every gameplay component that I enjoy with a dark sense of humor, I lost more time to this game than nearly any other over the past decade. But, did that same feeling carry over into New Vegas? Sort of.
Having already lost nearly two days of my life to this game over the past week, I have no problem saying that Fallout: New Vegas plays like the largest expansion pack ever created. As a carbon copy of Fallout 3's winning formula it's hard to hate on the game considering my love for the original. I can only really liken my feelings towards this game to my feelings for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II (which was also developed by Obsidian) – as I absolutely loved KOTOR, and just liked the extremely similar KOTOR2.
I'm sure you've heard it from everybody else, but this game is buggy... really buggy. And it also features the same crappy visual problems from the first game. Still... I love the Fallout world, so it is hard for me to not like this game. Is it perfect? No. Is it worth playing? Very much so.
Bizarre load glitches that literally freeze my entire 360 for periods of up to 37 seconds (and yes, i've counted); companions that have vanished from the wasteland while I retain their companionship perks; quests completed that I've never received. All major issues I've encountered in Fallout: New Vegas, and all things that would cause me to rage in fury toward most games. And still... Fallout: New Vegas has me coming back for more. Maybe I'm a sucker for Obsidian's voice in games. I loved Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, after all. Maybe it's the tweaks to existing mechanics that make them all just a little bit deeper, kind of like what they did with KOTOR II. But really, Fallout: New Vegas has the same major strength that Fallout 3 did: an addictive, spiraling quest structure that has me fast traveling from one end of the Mojave Wasteland to the other until 2 or 3 in the morning muttering to myself "just one more quest..."
Also, it has a super mutant radio station. It's like Radio Fawkes all the time. Which is pretty sweet.
I never had any 37 seconds load times or not get experience or whatever for quests completed yet so I guess I have been lucky.
I have it on the Ps3 tho if that means anything.
It is a list of opinions from ign editors.
Link - http://ps3.ign.com/articles/113/1130886p1.html
Fallout: New Vegas Second Opinions
Want to hear more tales from the Mojave desert? Well, sit down and enjoy.
October 27, 2010
A joint Obisidan and Bethesda production, Fallout: New Vegas was released earlier this month. Set in the wastelands of the Mojave desert, much of New Vegas was ripped from Fallout 3, our game of the year in 2008. But it's 2010 now, and that's where the great divide lies. Seven IGN editors chime in to tell about their experience so far with the giant RPG.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Having played the Fallout series for over a decade, from the 1997 original to Bethesda's Fallout 3, it's great to see there's still room to be impressed. Fallout: New Vegas is without a doubt Obsidian's best game in my mind, filled with an overwhelming amount of carefully crafted content that never fails to surprise.
There's a lot of ground to cover around New Vegas, and it doesn't take too much wandering to get tangled up in yet another web of quests. Oh how I wish I could stay focused on the main storyline, but there's just too much else to do. There's the narcissistic super mutant that commands a xenophobic outpost on top of a mountain, drawing in visitors with her hilariously crude radio broadcasts. There's the gang of ghoulish religious zealots hunkered down in a massive underground network trying to get a battery of rocket ships up and running (which, by the way, you can destroy). There's the gladiatorial combat arena buried in the sewers north of New Vegas, dens of Deathclaws stalking the landscape, tales of hidden Vaults overflowing with plants and grasses, a shifty cannibalistic order masking their villainy behind a veneer of wealth and style, and packs of insidious cretins roaming the countryside.
Everyone in New Vegas has a story; some charming, some depressing, and some brutal. They all need help, and it's up to you whether you accept the tasks, double-cross them, or simply plant a bullet in their leg and walk away. Such thrilling freedom and finely written storylines are hard to come by in video games. But I think the fact that a lot of the game's groundwork was already set in place when this project was started by Obsidian did a lot – it freed them up to concentrate on weaving together powerful stories and offer the player an incredibly diverse range of choice. New Vegas is a remarkably well-realized virtual world that feels appropriately dirty, lived in, and authentic. Though the mechanics may be familiar, it's a fascinating experience.
I'm thoroughly enjoying New Vegas so far. I've played for a little more than 20 hours, so I haven't finished the main plotline, yet. It's not the bundle of awesomeness I was hoping for, but it's still lots of fun. I've encountered plenty of little glitches, but they don't really affect the gameplay, and the game has crashed on me twice, which isn't so bad for a game of this scope. One of the things I loved the most about Fallout 3 was the sense of humor, and I'm thrilled that has carried over to New Vegas. There are quite a few lines of dialogue that have made me laugh out loud, and even more that made me chuckle. So far, I don't find the main story as intriguing as the story in Fallout 3, but the dynamic between the NCR and the Legion is more interesting to me than the battle between the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave in Fallout 3.
All that said, I don't think New Vegas has topped its predecessor, and that's disappointing. But then again, I loved Fallout 3 so much, it would have been really difficult for New Vegas to dethrone it. It also would have been nice if Obsidian had been able to fix at least some of the little glitches that have plagued Bethesda RPGs since Oblivion, but the game is interesting enough to make them tolerable. So New Vegas isn't quite as good as Fallout 3, but it's still a whole lot of fun.
After DC Universe Online slipped to next year, Fallout: New Vegas rose to be my most anticipated game of this year. However, when I got my copy a few days early, I found that I couldn't get motivated to play it. I watched Kristine and a few other editors toy with it, and it looked so similar to Fallout 3. When I finally sat down and gave it a dedicated chance, it just didn't hook me like Fallout 3 did. It felt like the same old stuff. I'm definitely going to get down to business in Fallout: New Vegas one day (as I loved Fallout 3 so much), but as of now, I find myself more excited for the "coming one day" DCUO beta launch on PS3 than putting on another Pipboy.
Unlike a majority of the gaming community, I didn't immediately recognize the brilliance of Fallout 3. I bought it day one, fired it up, and was promptly bored out of my mind for the first few hours. I consider myself a patient man, but I found my limits being pushed as I wandered the wasteland aimlessly, performing menial tasks for hours until, ultimately, my resolve had been broken. I traded it in and went on with my life.
And then IGN awarded it Game of the Year 2008. I couldn't understand it, but I figured that if it was worthy of such a high honor from IGN, I must be missing something.
So I borrowed a copy, endured a few more hours and became fully engrossed. I had finally seen the light -- I realized that Fallout rewards patience with compelling and immersive gameplay, you just have to stick it out through the slow introduction.
Needless to say, I came into Fallout: New Vegas from a new, enlightened perspective.
The game definitely still requires a sizable time investment, but the pacing overall felt a little faster, and the storytelling a bit more cohesive. I was up and running a lot faster and leveling a little more effectively. Of course, this could be attributed to my better understanding of the mechanics after completing Fallout 3, but there were definitely some improvements from the design perspective. I also never encountered many of the bugs that have since become highly publicized, which definitely made my experience a little more favorable.
Still, there are certainly some issues with Fallout: New Vegas; the graphics haven't been improved much since Fallout 3 and there aren't a lot of radical new concepts or elements to it either.
But as they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I welcome the familiarity of Fallout: New Vegas, and I consider it $59.99 well spent, but I won't deny the fact that developers missed a number of opportunities to fix some glaring issues.
When Fallout 3 came out in 2008, I was tasked with writing a strategy guide for it. The massive 750,000 word behemoth that I wrote ended up being a testament to just how gigantic the game actually is. Fallout 3 was huge, and nobody in IGN's office (and few people worldwide) ended up seeing the game as intimately as I did. And yet, I still adored the game. It was easily the best game of 2008, and one of the best games of the generation, period.
Now, when I spend that kind of time with a game, especially while writing a strategy guide for it, I tend to sour on the title until I'm outright repulsed by it. But when I finish a massive guide for a game that I spent a lot of time with, and I still like the game, that speaks volumes to me about how good a title actually is. This happened with Grand Theft Auto IV, Infamous, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and other games. And since Fallout: New Vegas feels, looks and plays identically to the masterpiece known as Fallout 3, I can already tell that when I conclude my journey writing my current New Vegas epic, it'll join the aforementioned list of tried-and-true classics.
There's no doubt that Fallout: New Vegas shares many of the technical shortcomings that Fallout 3 had. The game is occasionally buggy, will hiccup fairly incessantly, and even freeze from time-to-time. As was the case with Fallout 3, New Vegas seems to behave differently for different people, but even if it's performing in a top notch fashion, gamers are still bound to run into these same issues, at least from time to time. But I largely excused this problem with Fallout 3, and I'll do the same with New Vegas. And here's why.
Fallout: New Vegas is vast. There are very few games in the history of our industry that attempt to do what New Vegas does (or Fallout 3 before it). Not only is the physical world enormous -- far beyond the size and scope of virtually any console game -- but the character interactions within, the branching storylines, the myriad side quests, and seemingly random and organic enemy interactions complicate this vast physical world and make it something living and breathing. I could only imagine that testing a game with seemingly-infinite permutations possible anywhere you go is a difficult ordeal. And all things considered, it seems that Bethesda (and in this case, Obsidian) did a pretty nice job of doing what they could do to iron out the wrinkles.
Could more have been done? Of course. I'm not one that necessarily sides with developers who seem intent on pushing post-release patches in lieu of holding their games while they fix errors before going gold. Usually, the latter is much preferred. But it seems that a game like New Vegas could be held indefinitely while random bugs, glitches and issues are worked out. I'm sure that issues occur in New Vegas only if, for instance, person A is in position B at location C, only at nighttime and when you're equipped with a Laser Rifle, and have a follower with you, and your strength is below a seven. In other words, how many of these random issues do we really expect them to deal with? To me, it seems like a feat that a game like Fallout: New Vegas runs at all. And I think most gamers who enjoy this game agree with me. That's why Fallout: New Vegas, like Fallout 3 before it, will go on to sell millions of copies and achieve universal critical acclaim. Because despite some of its technical shortcomings, Fallout: New Vegas strikes me as being as brilliant as Fallout 3 was.
Of course, I've barely scratched the surface in New Vegas. Conventional wisdom deems that while writing a strategy guide you could potentially work through a game fifty times slower than a normal person would. After all, you're chronicling everything you see and do, taking screenshots and videos, and doing everything possible to help your readers find whatever they're looking for. But I've definitely seen enough to know that New Vegas is one of 2010's best games. And if not for BioWare's Mass Effect 2, which may very well be the best game of the entire generation, New Vegas could have vied for my Game of the Year vote. But even without that Game of the Year status on it, New Vegas is still a great game. And I highly recommend it to anyone who loved Fallout 3.
To start out, Fallout 3 is, was, and will be one of my favorite video games of all time. Mixing every gameplay component that I enjoy with a dark sense of humor, I lost more time to this game than nearly any other over the past decade. But, did that same feeling carry over into New Vegas? Sort of.
Having already lost nearly two days of my life to this game over the past week, I have no problem saying that Fallout: New Vegas plays like the largest expansion pack ever created. As a carbon copy of Fallout 3's winning formula it's hard to hate on the game considering my love for the original. I can only really liken my feelings towards this game to my feelings for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II (which was also developed by Obsidian) – as I absolutely loved KOTOR, and just liked the extremely similar KOTOR2.
I'm sure you've heard it from everybody else, but this game is buggy... really buggy. And it also features the same crappy visual problems from the first game. Still... I love the Fallout world, so it is hard for me to not like this game. Is it perfect? No. Is it worth playing? Very much so.
Bizarre load glitches that literally freeze my entire 360 for periods of up to 37 seconds (and yes, i've counted); companions that have vanished from the wasteland while I retain their companionship perks; quests completed that I've never received. All major issues I've encountered in Fallout: New Vegas, and all things that would cause me to rage in fury toward most games. And still... Fallout: New Vegas has me coming back for more. Maybe I'm a sucker for Obsidian's voice in games. I loved Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, after all. Maybe it's the tweaks to existing mechanics that make them all just a little bit deeper, kind of like what they did with KOTOR II. But really, Fallout: New Vegas has the same major strength that Fallout 3 did: an addictive, spiraling quest structure that has me fast traveling from one end of the Mojave Wasteland to the other until 2 or 3 in the morning muttering to myself "just one more quest..."
Also, it has a super mutant radio station. It's like Radio Fawkes all the time. Which is pretty sweet.
I never had any 37 seconds load times or not get experience or whatever for quests completed yet so I guess I have been lucky.
I have it on the Ps3 tho if that means anything.