Or simply that it is less worse?
(yes, worse, not bad, 'cause I like the sound)
DeepT
3257
Fallout 4 is a lot better if you never played any fallout game. As a standalone game viewing it from a vacuum with no prior fallout experience, ill give it an 8 out of 10. As a proper fallout game, it is an abomination. To me it is just a game set in the fallout universe. The big thing for me about fallout games is your impact on the world and its people. That is almost totally missing from this game. The lack of a summary & companion quests, and the almost pointless conversation system is a kick in the balls.
Also the ending choices suck and you can’t make sensible decisions.
Actually, it hit his “Most Disappointing Games of 2010,” and here’s what he said on that list:
- Fallout: New Vegas
I’ve heard it’s great. I wouldn’t know because it remains egregiously broken for me. Fallout: New Vegas, which I literally cannot play, is hands down the worst experience I’ve ever had with a console game. Read the review here. The aborted game diaries started here.
Not that Tom needs any supporting on his own site, but he bashed it in his 2010 review because he couldn’t play it all the way through.
Here’s a link.
Here’s a quote that summed it up:
<Tom says a bunch of nice stuff about the game and how it’s largely improved from Fallout 3, and then …>
But I can’t talk about those things, because Fallout New Vegas simply doesn’t work. I’d estimate my Xbox 360 locked up maybe once every two hours. The problems started to progress from occasional freezes to recurring freezes in the same place. My last ten hours with New Vegas have been spent troubleshooting, or going back to replay from earlier saves in the hopes that I can somehow work around a crash. But my last problem has effectively brought the game to a screeching, inglorious halt. After investing forty hours in Fallout New Vegas, I’ve come to a point where there is no possible way to finish the game. Let me repeat that: There is no possible way for me to finish the game. The latest technical error locks up the game whenever I try to enter the Strip, which is not only where my companions are kept, but also where the story quest leads. This happens from more than ten separate saved games. Fallout New Vegas is dead.
I’m guessing after all the patches, mods, and what not, it finally got running at some point.
I believe Tom finally picked it up on PC, where it worked for him.
Ah - makes sense
Sounds like a game that was deliberately designed for a large number of DLC installments.
Granath
3261
It would appear so. Playing NV with many mods, fully patched and with DLC is not the same as playing the base game. Thus comparing a heavily modded version of NV is not a good or fair comparison to the base game of Fallout 4. As evidenced by the thread I am not the biggest fan of #4 but then again when I am comparing it to #3 I am doing so from a perspective of the base game (with the one exception being the Fellout mod to get rid of the green tint in FO3). I do not compare the quests in FO4 to something like The Pitt from FO3 even though I loved that area.
Can not we like both equally? :-)
I definitely get this sentiment, but my take is that each does very different things and achieves very different goals within the Fallout universe. New Vegas certainly does dialog and narrative agency and consequence much better, but when I go back to play that I will be missing sorely the gun handling, gun modding, settlements, visuals, content density, power armor system, verticality, usefulness of junk, legendary loot (and better loot in general), and the rich Boston setting from Fallout 4 to name only some of what I love.
Side note: After Fallout 4 I don’t think I can ever go back to play Fallout 3 now.
-Todd
Good point. For me, Fallout 4 has been the best out of the box experience that Bethesda has released. I am still playing without mods and don’t really have a compelling desire to add any at this point.
-Todd
Bateau
3264
That’s true, but I’d wager that Tom was talking about the skeleton of the game, the quests, choice and consequence, mutually exclusive factions, etc. Mods generally don’t change those, at least not in the original content. Full blown addons like Falskjar are of course another matter entirely, but they are also very rare.
That’s also the reason I don’t agree with Dan’s statement:
You cannot simply patch in c&c and other proper RPG mechanics to the content that’s already there, they’d basically have to change entire game for that. At best we might get a few more branching quests in one or more of the dlcs that will get released but that will not change the fact that the base game simply isn’t a good roleplaying game.
Tom talked about this on the podcast. He specifically had a game-breaking bug when he was trying to review the game. A hat in his character’s inventory (thanks, Gamebryo) was causing his game to die, and Obsidian/Bethesda was unable to fix the issue before the review post. That’s a pretty valid reason to not like a game, I think.
The bug was fixed and Tom was subsequently able to play through NV, and he found that he liked it specifically due to the way the quests interacted with one another.
Just to clarify, my statement wasn’t an excuse. Rather, it’s a critique of that style of development. It seems like it can easily lead to poor decisions in setting up that skeleton.
I wandered through F:NV last night just to compare the two games. Then I uninstall F:NV (again) because it is a crashy, bitchy mess even with a boatload of fix mods.
The biggest difference between the two games, the one design choice that snowballs down is player agency. In F:NV, the player is a blank cipher and can play that way. FO4 is a Hero Quest and does not allow the player to deviate from that. Bethsoft wanted to tell a specific story and funneled the player’s choices down to that story… pretty much just like FO3.
Once I accepted this, I pretty much shrugged my shoulders and felt much less butthurt about FNV being the better game. At least Bethsoft stole some good ideas from FNV for use in FO4.
(From a purely technical side, can you imagine FO4 designers trying to deal with “player is a right arsehole” quest branches in a game already stuffed with content?)
Leinad
3268
Bethesda on the other hand always offers more in regards to little set pieces. NV felt too “small” to me and too much like a wacky Western and not a Fallout story. It might be true that you have a typical “Hero Quest” in FO4 but that’s just the main story and outside of that there is a lot to do which doesn’t really matter in regards to the main story. That’s where Bethesda games imo shine while NV sometimes wanted to tell a story too much.
Also FO4 didn’t still anything from NV. You could argue that NV already took a lot of ideas from the modding community (or features which people were asking for since FO3) and Bethesda did obviously the same with FO4 (the whole settlement thing is certainly inspired by modders).
To me NV is a bit overrated nowadays and I’m saying this as someone who had a big NV mod going on but it seems like all the talk about FO’s mediocre story and the praise of NV’s has led to a point where this aspect of the game gets a bit too much emphasized.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what Obsidian did with NV but at the same time it also had it’s downsides which tend to get glossed over.
New Vegas is much closer to the classic Fallout feel. May not be what you want from the ongoing franchise but totally it’s spot on as a follow up to 1 and 2.
To say that New Vegas doesn’t feel like a Fallout story is to suggest that you have never played the original Fallout games - I. E. 1 and 2. Tonally New Vegas is much closer to the classic franchise than Bethesda has ever gotten. But certainly you are free to prefer their approach.
Uhh… yeah, no. You may not like it, but telling a story in a RPG is not a downside or a flaw.
I love all the Fallout games, but not necessarily all for the same reasons. Mostly I love combat, exploration, and loot. I like the setting, but in a general way, as the details are so bizarrely implemented and illogical, especially the chronologies. The stories are sometimes interesting, but again, mostly in a general way. Emerging from a closed vault society to find a water chip was kind of cool, but it was the stranger in a strange land vibe that did it, not the details. Fallout 2’s strength was in world-building and a sort of social context for you to play in, and giving you the freedom to do so however you wanted. Three’s transition to first-person shifted the perspective down a notch and simultaneously opened up different avenues of game play while closing off others; you had fewer places to go in many ways but each one was more viscerally experienced. New Vegas is one of the best; I still play it occasionally. It offers a great mix of controlled storytelling and freedom on action, marred by bugs, glitches, and sometimes having its reach exceed its grasp. It also IMO doesn’t do companions well, as tooling around with ED and Boone is sort of overpowered to the extreme. Four is the triumph of stuff–more places, more items, more characters, more of everything, but actually fewer bugs and glitches I think. It’s also a great example of how nothing comes for free. You pay a price for all the content, and that’s in your ability to affect the world, and really chart your own course. You’re shackled with a heroic quest even if you don’t want to play a hero, and you’re severely limited in your ability to play the different factions for your own ends. Whether that bugs you or not is up to you, of course.
Overall, I’m finding four to be heaps of fun even before the DLCs and mods start flowing. As I’m no longer in the reviewing biz, I am thankful I don’t have to slap a score on it, because that would be tough. It really is something that depends on where you’re coming from. I truly understand how many Fallout fans are appalled by the way the game handles some things, and I’m also fully on board with the folks who celebrate the way the game handles other things.
Of course, my relationship with Fallout is built more on kitsch and nostalgia than any hard-core RPG obsession. I loved the original game’s intro, and stylized faux-Fifties wrapper, but I never took it seriously. It was at the start a great isometric tactical RPG, and later morphed into a really cool RPG-ish FPS. Both work for me.
JonRowe
3273
That isn’t what he is saying. New Vegas funneled you into the main line story a lot more than other Bethesda RPGs, and that was a bad thing. It didn’t feel as open as Fallout 3 or 4. Besides 90% of the fun in the games isn’t the main quest, but the little stories you find along the way.
For me it’s the little scene details that stick. For example, the skeletons embracing on a bed, or sitting on the floor of a toilet stall with beer bottles strewn about. Skyrim and Oblivion were good for those little bits as well.
The main stories are always garbage in these games. I do them to open up areas, and not screw up NPCs and items that are supposed to be used for the quests.
Fallout 2’s strength was in world-building and a sort of social context for you to play in, and giving you the freedom to do so however you wanted.
Also: Myron, baby, Myron!
