Watching my wife go through one of the vaults today reminded me of how they cater to some of the weakest parts of the game. Whatever’s next in the series had better get us a Pipboy V 2.0 that has a fullscreen map, does multifloor levels competently, and provides a lot more info with quest markers. Either that, or they need to go to single floor levels exclusively, because this shit is really getting ridiculous.
olaf
3102
The vaults sure do suck to navigate. I never leave one feeling like I explored the whole thing, they are all over the place.
RedHerb
3103
The only one I had a problem finding my way around was vault 34. Overall i felt that the vaults were similarly structured to the vaults in Fallout 1 or 2.
The King’s place on the other hand, was a maze.
It’s reminiscent of the problem with places like Camp McCarran, where I guess they tried to go for a feeling of size but merely reinforced what a slow walk across a giant empty area you were taking, again and again. With the vaults, they’ve lost some of the visual coherence (in terms of in game signs and cues) and added a lot of stupid adventure-gamey obstacles (is there a mod to remove every locked with a key door yet?). There’s also the fact that they feel more awkwardly compartmentalized, like the person designing the flow of each vault mission had no idea where the programmers were putting the gate to the next loadscreen, and neither of those two guys were talking to the guy plotting everything out on the map. I just feel perpetually irritated in a way that none of the F3 levels ever provoked, like there’s some Lovecraftian incoherence to the design (the horrible angles). It’s not a gamebreaker, but it means I will definitely avoid the worst offenders on a replay now that I know about them.
Sarkus
3105
The odd thing is that the vaults should be pretty simple single floors. Fallout 1 and 2 did that and even the BoS base is pretty basic (though that second below the walkway level crap was annoying as hell). I don’t know why they thought they needed to have stairways and multiple levels on each “level” or load area. I agree that it’s ridiculously complicated and confusing when you are trying to navigate. Particularly when you have stuff like the quest telling you to go out a door you can’t go out on that level, something I struggled with in one particular leafy green vault.
Radiation vault was the closest I came to quitting the game altogether, and since I did that one first the others felt easy in comparison. But yeah, the guy who let those pass into the finished product should be drawn and quartered, or at least given a stern talking-to.
Teiman
3107
showing my appreciation for new vegas :-D
Party Mentats are the best.
Potentially mild spoiler
Indeed. I found it especially fun when I showed [redacted] how to make Party Mentats, and using the buff from the freebie was able to convince him to rather use his skills for good.
Hah that’s funny considering Fallout 1/2 had multilevel maps on the pipboys.
You chumps would never finish Eye of the Beholder.
And that was an easy one!
Why is that funny? I’m supposed to treat it as an homage?
I played and finished a number of games that had more difficult maps to negotiate back in the day, including notable events like the postgame level of Pools of Darkness. Currently, I like SMT: Strange Journey on the DS as well as Etrian Odysseys and Dark Spire. They all featured difficult navigation, but it’s purposefully done and the game mechanics, in fixed movement first person increments, allow it to be a flexible and challenging way to handle environments without it being a needless source of frustration. In the older games, it was as much intentional as it was a product of real limitations in what people had developed up until then, and they get a mulligan on a lot of things that should be off the table today.
In NV, it’s just sloppy design and poor handling of the engine’s limitations, along with a very limited graphical palette that make it challenging. Some locations are split by floor in the pipboy, some locations are one big mash of the floors, and most are somewhere in between. The map function itself is functional in the overworld, but strangely inconsistent when it comes to areas like New Vegas or vaults, and that’s not a question of e-peen. I often complete easy quests just to have the quest markers turned off, since it’s easier for me to manually navigate if I’m not distracted by a marker of questionable use.
Oh I’m not arguing that the vault design/mapping is terrible. Not in the least.
I just wanted to go on my “back in my day, we walked to school uphill both ways and had to contend with blizzards in May!” pedestal.
You can turn off the markers in your PipBoy, or make a different quest active. They only mark the quest you’re currently on.
My point isn’t that I can’t figure out a workaround (although I appreciate the tip), it’s that I want useful quest markers and am annoyed when they malfunction in very basic ways. Also, being able to just turn off quests rather than switch would be nice. I’ll have to check out turning them off altogether, though.
One big annoyance is that in Vegas itself the quest markers usually point most immediately to…an exit from Vegas. Really helpful.
I can’t play the game at the moment, but I believe that you can un-mark your current active quest, and your PipBoy won’t automatically switch to another.
But yeah, the quest markers could use some beefing up. I’d like to see a distance modifier, for example --the game already does this with points of interest, and even indicates if you’ve already visited that POI – and/or an indicator that the destination is within your “zone,” rather than just pointing to a door that leads to a tunnel that goes elsewhere, as TheWombat mentions.
olaf
3118
I want to say I read about a mod that adds an active quest with no markers that you cant ever complete, to achieve complete disabling of quest markers.
That they couldn’t do some easier to read maps, FO3 maps were really confusing.
Got it. Thought you meant something else.
