Thursday 6 January 2011

Third, fourth and fifth impressions of Fallout: New Vegas

Alright, so I've now played Fallout: New Vegas even more, and I'm getting somewhere. I've reached the Strip, killed Benny and gotten the chip back, and now I'll start just exploring the wasteland for all the side stuff I missed, because seeing the way NCR,  the Legion and Mr. House are acting and looking at the quest details and which quests reward trophies, something tells me the main questline is coming closer to an end, or at least a point of no return regarding faction loyalty, and I believe the game just ends with the last quest so... yeah. Punisher Blues will continue to bring scum to justice until I feel like it can all end. After this first playthrough is done, I'll be playing an evil female character and see what the other side of the coin in New Vegas has to offer.
This is pretty much what I do, but wearing a Sheriff Duster

I have to say, the game hasn't turned into Fallout 3 yet, but glitches it's had a plenty. Glitches I forgot to mention or hadn't encountered yet when I wrote the last post include absolutely horrendous textures where stuff, mostly the ground, is partly a blurry mess. Like when in games, like Fallout 3 for example, the "close-up texture" loads a little slow and all you see is the "distant texture" for a few seconds and then see it suddenly change, but instead in New Vegas it stays permanently blurry. In some places it's REAL bad and looks like if you just woke up and still can't quite focus on anyhing.
Creatures have also dropped through the ground a couple of times and gone to hell, especially visible when the kill cam follows. I suppose you could say that they... fall out in New Vegas.
There's been occasions where the quest marker on the map has pointed me to a wrong spot, and it's not a that I would've been on a wrong floor, since it has been outside.
People have been turning hostile against me despite the fact that I haven't worn any faction armor since the first session. First the NCR tell me I'm doing a great job and suddenly every one of them, in a blink of an eye, start shooting at me. I thought that maybe they just have something against my companions, but when the attack companions THEY ATTACK COMPANIONS, not leave them alone to attack me. They would also attack companions immediately upon setting their eyes on them, not wait around for a while.
Sometimes people have been knocked unconscious by nothing. Nobody attacked them, they just fall on the ground. I guess even NPCs like to have a bit of a kip sometimes. Maybe they're narcoleptic.
The game has frozen on me several times. Several. Most often in Freeside, but a few times elsewhere and during loading screens. Freeside has also been extremely choppy.
Companions have gotten stuck a few times. It's always fixed when I reload a save, whether they were stuck already when the game saved or not (I suppose the game just checks whether I have companions or not and teleports them to me at load), but still. It's good, though, that reloading any save unsticks them, because in Fallout 3 when companions got stuck they were permanently stuck.
In the Kings' mission when the Kings' member tells the King about what Pacer is doing, the gang member appears from thin air next to the King and gets stuck, and since it's in the "talking mode" the game gets stuck. This happened several times in a row despite my best efforts in making Rex move out of the way. Why does the messenger have to teleport in so close? Every other time anyone is teleported in for a conversation, they teleport further away so that you don't usually see them drop in.
The game has also gotten stuck in a few transitions out of conversations, allowing me to move the camera and press start and little else. Usually this has happened when two characters have tried initiating a conversation with me at the same time.
The 10th NCR ghoul never spawned in the sidequest "We Will All Go Together" and now I have a quest permanently incomplete. By the time I gave up and read about the quest to find about this problem, I had already saved over every one of my safety save while looking around the entire southern portion of the map for the little shit and couldn't go back in time to the moment before talking to the one sane ghoul.
I have also gotten stuck in the terrain a few times, luckily mostly outside so I've been able to use quick travel as a method of fixing the situation, but one time it also happened indoors and all I could do was to reload an autosave.
Yesterday night I quit playing because the game quit playing. I thought that I hit the remote for my TV or something when the screen went crazy, but it was just that the game, on it's own in the middle of a fight, quit itself and returned to the PS3 main menu. So now the game is telling me when to quit? It was 2 AM and I was getting headache, alright, but I decide when I go to bed, not you game! I'll die playing you if I want to and you can't stop me!

But, for some good points, the game's quests have been quite a lot of fun for the most part. I've liked the snooping around for the culprit type of stuff, and some of the quests have brought to mind the Hitman series with stuff like sneaking into hotel rooms to silently kill a guy, drugging wine bottles, killing cooks and dragging their bodies into freezers out of sight, smuggling in weapons past security checks and dressing up in faction clothing to fool people a bit. Hitman games are some of my all time favourite video games, with the exception of Hitman 2, so... I like. You know I am a fan of sneaking games in general, in fact out of the four new games I bought last Tuesday three have stealth gameplay in them (yes, I bought more games again), so the fact that in New Vegas I actually get a lot out of the sneak skill is great. In Fallout 3 the sneak skill was mostly just to get sneak crits indoors against unavoidable mobs of enemies or for pilfering everything in stores, but in these New Vegas quests stealth has some actual use.
I, suprisingly, like playing Blackjack and Caravan in New Vegas. Going for the few trophies related to these games doesn't hurt, which is good.
I also like being able to carry a fucking deadly "one-hit-kill" arsenal for once. It took me quite a while of playing before I could feel safe trading away my more common good weapons and ammo, but now that I dared to spend some caps and sell all the junk I've been hauling everywhere I feel a bit better, and lighter. I dropped my precious modded .357 magnum and my precious suppressed Varmint rifle and my precious shotguns and my precious repeaters and bought an Anti material rifle with 111 damage. Doesn't matter that the ammo is a bit more scarce and expensive, it'll kill everything with less bullets. I'm also carrying my Hunting rifle with 45 damage for "smaller" kills that need a rifle, a Hunting revolver with 50something damage for close-up death and .44 magnum with around 40 damage for all the tiny critters whose brains I splatter just for kicks. In comparison, most other regular guns widely available do only 35 and less damage, so I'm well prepared. I'm also wearing the 1st Recon beret for +5 crits.

So the game is even more broken than it was in the beginning, but although the scales between fun and glitches have turned slightly more even towards the end, I am still having enough fun to play on.

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