War...never changes

[sigma7]

Finished Fallout: New Vegas. Torn. Loved the new locales. Hated the arbitrarily-placed invisible clipping planes. Loved the weapons mod system. Hated that they ganked the idea from a popular F3 mod. Loved the idea of Caesar's Legion. Hated that the option to play the bad guy was critically watered down. Loved the new companions (Felicia Day!). Hated that your level of interaction with them was superficial at best. Pretty much everything that's awesome about FNV is inertia from the old code, with only two things added: weapons mods and a nest of bugs so formidable as to give even the vicious cazadores pause. VATS values go to zero, even with a brand-new character. NPCs and enemies are spawned inside architecture and landscape. Rotisserie necks (Now playing: The Exorcist, starring Colonel Saul Tigh). But it's nice to know that we've moved beyond the point where you had to have social connections or luck to be a beta tester -- now anyone can be a beta tester for Obsidian Entertainment, provided you're willing to pay for the privilege.

In other news, Sherlock's video card is arriving today. (Expecting the mobo to handle Blu-Ray all by its lonesome was a bit too ambitious, in retrospect.) The tricky part will be getting it in and unscrewing everything...I'm really not looking forward to that.

In other news...there is other news. Later.

Comments

[manekikoneko.livejournal.com]

Wow, the bugs in the videos (i.e. the ones non-gamer me immediately understands) are hilarious. Distracting, I imagine (and I can see where NPCs half in walls would interfere with gameplay), but hilarious.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

There's quite a few others that're just...baffling. Two quests interconnect on the same character, and if you have him fulfilling one part, he disappears for an indeterminate period -- while the compass marker for the *other* quest unrelentingly points toward this bare patch of floor space where he should be. Or completing quests in a certain order makes another quest unfulfillable (but isn't recognized as "quest failed," just stuck and insisting that you need to redownload the data you've already downloaded). And other, more grievous, inexplicable bugs I can't get into without heavy spoilers. But trust me, they're there.

If this was a studio's original work (and didn't have to live in the shadow of its much more engaging and narrative predecessor), I'd be much more charitable -- but considering it's recycled content with little (and nothing original) brought to the table, I'm much less enchanted with it.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

The rotisserie neck thing cracked me up - if it'd been Valve, I would've thought it was a bug they intentionally left in thanks to the release date being right around Halloween. (But it desperately needed a creaking-door sound effect to accompany it.)

[erica-roo.livejournal.com]

Adam started it last night, but decided he was over it the third time it froze and he had to restart from his last save point. He had the same problem with the other one. So on to killing zombies in Red Dead Redemption.

[samson-of-5.livejournal.com]

How in the name of all that is gamey did they think this was ready for release? If this is engine hiccups then I find that curious as I haven't seen any of this in F3.

I may need to go lie down now. And never buy this game.