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Topic	Exdeath Plays Every Game in the GotD 2020 Contest Part 2 (ft FO:NV, Ghost Trick)
Evillordexdeath 12/14/20 3:05:11 PM #42:	azuarc posted... ftfy. Haha, I've never played Fallout 4 so anything I said about 3 could be much worse in that game for all I know. Since it has such a rough reputation, it's one of the games I'm not looking forward to so much, but I have heard that the combat mechanics are improved a little bit, at least. ctesjbuvf posted... I allowed myself to use the sheet for checking how much I've played and it was surprisingly few of the games. Might use this list to try to complete more of it, though I will not attempt for the full thing, that'll never happen. Yeah, I definitely wouldn't expect anyone play all 129 games with me. That's a huge commitment. I'll be happy if the list is helpful to you in some way, though. - Final Analysis: Fallout: New Vegas What I thought of New Vegas: A great RPG trapped in the engine of a Bethesda game Would I play New Vegas again? Yes, and probably soon. Did it deserve to lose in round 3? I would still vote for it over GoW. Fallout 3 is a very popular game on this site, probably even more so than you'd expect. It won its division in the first GotD contest, and held above 45% on Brawl in the semifinal. There are a few different reasons for that, but brand recognition for the originals isn't among them. Fallout 3 might as well be the first game in its series for most people. 1 and 2 are ancient. If people try them, it's usually because a site like GoG gave them away for free - and they only play for an hour or two. It's interesting, then, that so much of the series' identity is still based on elements from the very first game, but that's a conversation for another time. I think Fallout 3 was a hit first and foremost because it was a huge game. Lots of open-world games that dwarf it have come out over the past 12 years, but at the time it was one of the most gigantic game-worlds around that wasn't procedurally generated like that of Daggerfall, a game where no one in the entire world actually bothered with the absurdly massive and empty open world and which would have been completely unplayable without fast travel. Fallout 3 was big and it had a certain personality. Vault Boy is a really good mascot. He's cute, recognizable, and extremely versatile, and using him in the icons for equipment and quest progress lends a lot of charm to the game - this more than anything else might be where Bethesda got their money's worth for the license. If you compare Fallout 3 with another large open-world game like GTA IV, there's a much greater variety of things to do. Besides the combat, there's scavenging and weapon modification, character customization, inventory management, dialog trees and speech checks, lockpicking and computer hacking, and more. That size and variety comes with its own problems, though. I've always felt like Bethesda were making games that were, in a way, too ambitious for modern technology. With such a huge world and so many NPCs, there's not enough time or money to build convincing AI behavior for them, so it's inevitably immersion-breaking when you go into towns in Bethesda games. Their melee combat engine is kind of abysmal, and the gunplay in Fallout 3 is vastly worse than a game like Halo or even Mass Effect. Their games tend to be notoriously buggy. I hate the hacking minigame, too. It's popular to bash FO3 and praise New Vegas in comparison, these days, but all the problems I just went over are, if anything, even more pronounced in this game. Obsidian may be saints, but saints tend to take oaths of poverty, and NV is filled with generic, unbelievable NPCs, bugs, fragile or uninspiring quests, lacklustre areas, and shallow mechanics. I don't mind things like characters falling partway through the ground or running into walls for all eternity, at least they're kind of funny. What does bother me, however, is a game that not only crashes all the time, but also suffers from severe framerate loss forcing a restart to resolve it. And yet, it's probably the most absorbed I've been by a game since I started this project. I guess it's a game of extremes. The real problem with its overly huge world is that it makes the best parts of the game harder to find. What those saints at Obsidian really excel at is choice-based RPG game design. Some of the quests in New Vegas are just phenomenal, because they're closely integrated with its complex multi-faction game world. A good example is I Put a Spell on You, where the player has to expose a Legion spy working in the NCR's army. You can find out who the spy is and stop his plot, or you can help him get away with it, even pinning his crimes on a prank-loving NCR private. For either of those goals, there are a lot of different ways to make them happen depending on your character's skills. You can sneak around at night and catch the spy in the act, you can confront him directly and take him out, and you can disarm the bomb he plants and stop his plans that way. That's the good side of the game's huge scope: there are tons of quests like that, and they're worth playing multiple times to see the different methods and outcomes. I played this game for longer than any of the others for this project so far, but I only saw a tiny fraction of what it has to offer. New Vegas doesn't necessarily have a great story, but it's story is great for the format of a video game. It's interesting to think about the conflict between its four main factions, and there are a few valid perspectives on which is best for the wasteland, but that kind of discussion is brought to focus by each player needing to decide who to side with. That's one of a few ways in which it uses its medium to ask philosophical questions about humanity and what it takes to survive in a world gone mad. It plays quite well off Fallout 2: one of my favorite moments is when Caesar likens Tandi's ultra-long presidency from that game to a dictatorship, and then takes it one step further by pointing out that the NCR has been less effective without her. I complained about Red Dead Redemption being perhaps too cynical when I played that game, and I think New Vegas makes a good counterpoint to that. It's set in a truly horrific world and all of the major players are flawed in huge ways, and there's no way to make everything right: some people, you either have to kill or allow to continue hurting others. But it balances things out with humor and a lot of people who are honestly doing their part to try and make the wasteland a better place. Both this and Fallout 2 carry humanitarian moral messages implicitly through their game mechanics: you can role-play as a truly despicable person, but people will band together against you if you do that. It's actually much more practical, most of the time, to help people. It is kind of a limiting format for a story though. The only dialog is between your player character and exactly one NPC at a time, for example, and no matter how important a character is, most of their in-game presence will be one long dialog dump the first time you meet them, and then a few lines every time you turn in a quest with them. Most of the time, it can't help but violate the old "show, don't tell" rule, and for all the emphasis that's given to the ideological differences between people like Mr. House and Caesar, it's too bad we don't get to see them argue with each other. When I finished Portal I talked about the idea of perfection and how hard it is for games to attain it. New Vegas doesn't even come close. It might be the most flawed game I've played all year. Even so, it's also one of my favorites. --- I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 12/129 Currently Playing: Super Meat Boy <cite>Evillordexdeath posted [p:948328516] in Exdeath Pl... [t:79138705]...</cite> <quote>azuarc posted... </cite> <quote>ftfy.</quote> Haha, I've never played Fallout 4 so anything I said about 3 could be much worse in that game for all I know. Since it has such a rough reputation, it's one of the games I'm not looking forward to so much, but I have heard that the combat mechanics are improved a little bit, at least. ctesjbuvf posted... </cite> <quote>I allowed myself to use the sheet for checking how much I've played and it was surprisingly few of the games. Might use this list to try to complete more of it, though I will not attempt for the full thing, that'll never happen.</quote> Yeah, I definitely wouldn't expect anyone play all 129 games with me. That's a huge commitment. I'll be happy if the list is helpful to you in some way, though. - Final Analysis: Fallout: New Vegas What I thought of New Vegas: A great RPG trapped in the engine of a Bethesda game Would I play New Vegas again? Yes, and probably soon. Did it deserve to lose in round 3? I would still vote for it over GoW. Fallout 3 is a very popular game on this site, probably even more so than you'd expect. It won its division in the first GotD contest, and held above 45% on Brawl in the semifinal. There are a few different reasons for that, but brand recognition for the originals isn't among them. Fallout 3 might as well be the first game in its series for most people. 1 and 2 are ancient. If people try them, it's usually because a site like GoG gave them away for free - and they only play for an hour or two. It's interesting, then, that so much of the series' identity is still based on elements from the very first game, but that's a conversation for another time. I think Fallout 3 was a hit first and foremost because it was a huge game. Lots of open-world games that dwarf it have come out over the past 12 years, but at the time it was one of the most gigantic game-worlds around that wasn't procedurally generated like that of Daggerfall, a game where no one in the entire world actually bothered with the absurdly massive and empty open world and which would have been completely unplayable without fast travel. Fallout 3 was big and it had a certain personality. Vault Boy is a really good mascot. He's cute, recognizable, and extremely versatile, and using him in the icons for equipment and quest progress lends a lot of charm to the game - this more than anything else might be where Bethesda got their money's worth for the license. If you compare Fallout 3 with another large open-world game like GTA IV, there's a much greater variety of things to do. Besides the combat, there's scavenging and weapon modification, character customization, inventory management, dialog trees and speech checks, lockpicking and computer hacking, and more. That size and variety comes with its own problems, though. I've always felt like Bethesda were making games that were, in a way, too ambitious for modern technology. With such a huge world and so many NPCs, there's not enough time or money to build convincing AI behavior for them, so it's inevitably immersion-breaking when you go into towns in Bethesda games. Their melee combat engine is kind of abysmal, and the gunplay in Fallout 3 is vastly worse than a game like Halo or even Mass Effect. Their games tend to be notoriously buggy. I hate the hacking minigame, too. It's popular to bash FO3 and praise New Vegas in comparison, these days, but all the problems I just went over are, if anything, even more pronounced in this game. Obsidian may be saints, but saints tend to take oaths of poverty, and NV is filled with generic, unbelievable NPCs, bugs, fragile or uninspiring quests, lacklustre areas, and shallow mechanics. I don't mind things like characters falling partway through the ground or running into walls for all eternity, at least they're kind of funny. What does bother me, however, is a game that not only crashes all the time, but also suffers from severe framerate loss forcing a restart to resolve it. And yet, it's probably the most absorbed I've been by a game since I started this project. I guess it's a game of extremes. The real problem with its overly huge world is that it makes the best parts of the game harder to find. What those saints at Obsidian really excel at is choice-based RPG game design. Some of the quests in New Vegas are just phenomenal, because they're closely integrated with its complex multi-faction game world. A good example is I Put a Spell on You, where the player has to expose a Legion spy working in the NCR's army. You can find out who the spy is and stop his plot, or you can help him get away with it, even pinning his crimes on a prank-loving NCR private. For either of those goals, there are a lot of different ways to make them happen depending on your character's skills. You can sneak around at night and catch the spy in the act, you can confront him directly and take him out, and you can disarm the bomb he plants and stop his plans that way. That's the good side of the game's huge scope: there are tons of quests like that, and they're worth playing multiple times to see the different methods and outcomes. I played this game for longer than any of the others for this project so far, but I only saw a tiny fraction of what it has to offer. New Vegas doesn't necessarily have a great story, but it's story is great for the format of a video game. It's interesting to think about the conflict between its four main factions, and there are a few valid perspectives on which is best for the wasteland, but that kind of discussion is brought to focus by each player needing to decide who to side with. That's one of a few ways in which it uses its medium to ask philosophical questions about humanity and what it takes to survive in a world gone mad. It plays quite well off Fallout 2: one of my favorite moments is when Caesar likens Tandi's ultra-long presidency from that game to a dictatorship, and then takes it one step further by pointing out that the NCR has been less effective without her. I complained about Red Dead Redemption being perhaps too cynical when I played that game, and I think New Vegas makes a good counterpoint to that. It's set in a truly horrific world and all of the major players are flawed in huge ways, and there's no way to make everything right: some people, you either have to kill or allow to continue hurting others. But it balances things out with humor and a lot of people who are honestly doing their part to try and make the wasteland a better place. Both this and Fallout 2 carry humanitarian moral messages implicitly through their game mechanics: you can role-play as a truly despicable person, but people will band together against you if you do that. It's actually much more practical, most of the time, to help people. It is kind of a limiting format for a story though. The only dialog is between your player character and exactly one NPC at a time, for example, and no matter how important a character is, most of their in-game presence will be one long dialog dump the first time you meet them, and then a few lines every time you turn in a quest with them. Most of the time, it can't help but violate the old "show, don't tell" rule, and for all the emphasis that's given to the ideological differences between people like Mr. House and Caesar, it's too bad we don't get to see them argue with each other. When I finished Portal I talked about the idea of perfection and how hard it is for games to attain it. New Vegas doesn't even come close. It might be the most flawed game I've played all year. Even so, it's also one of my favorites. --- I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 12/129 Currently Playing: Super Meat Boy</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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