Why is Fallout New Vegas considered good?

[agris]

There's always been a great appetite for a good Bethesda style game that didn't feel like it was made by Bethesda

Pretty much this. It's an appealing style of game, but it's slim pickins out there, especially if you want one that's good.

List of non-Bethesda "Bethesda style" RPGs made in the last decade:

* Kingdom Come Deliverance
* The Outer Worlds
* Cyberpunk 2077

Am I missing anything?

It’s a bit of a stretch, but Gothic: Archolololos fits

 

[eXalted]

It insists upon itself.

 

[Just Locus]

He changes his mind on a dime, just because you pass a speech check. Oh, actually, the dam is completely irrelevant, and we can't conquer shit. So anticlimactic and feels like it was put in the game solely so reviews could say "This game is so cool and groundbreaking, you can talk your way out of a boss fight!". You don't have to roll for this incredibly unlikely option, don't have to choose the right dialogue to convince him (unless picking "I want to talk" instead of "Uhh me kill u" counts), no prerequisite quests/items for you to do/find. You just click [speech 100] a few times and that's it.

No? You go through a string of speech checks to convince him, and you're not saying "Dam is irrelevant, go home homo." You're basically telling him that he's making the same mistakes that the NCR is—spreading themselves too thin. You can also make a completely different argument regarding logistics if you have Barter 100 instead. You're not telling him to fuck off and never come back, You're delaying him. And no, at the end of the dialogue tree, where there are no more speech checks to automatically select, if you tell him "So... You'll retreat?" He'll instantly go hostile.

Plus it just works on a logical level, Legate was propped up throughout the game as some ruthless brute who kills everything in his path when that's more or less just a scare tactic spread by legionnaires to scare NCR troops. Psychological warfare. When in reality, he's just an intelligent AND ruthless tactician, Yeah it's easy for us to go "What a retard, he didn't realize that he's biting off more than he can chew, territory-wise!" but when all you're ordered to do is conquer, conquer and conquer- It's easy to make this kind of mistake, and as Ulysses said, he wouldn't fight if he thinks even for one moment, that he's going to lose. And this is not to mention if you go by Ulysses' advice and "bluff" Lanius into thinking he's going to fall into a trap, he retreats instantly out of paranoia. Hard to see which part is anti-climactic when it all logically makes sense.

 

[Lemming42]

It's the culmination of the problem that's been running through the rest of the game; you pick the option(s) that has the [Speech] tag and everything just immediately ends in your favour. Gameplay-wise you just click an option five times, story-wise a total stranger walked up to the commander of the enemy army and suggested, in about 100 words, that he should leave, and he did as he was told (bonus points if you similarly command the entire NCR to leave five seconds later and they just shrug and agree).

It feels like playing against the world's most lazy and permissive DM, perhaps one named Josh Sawyer, who can't be arsed with the campaign. "Can I just tell the enemy army to leave?" "Uh... yeah, fine." You could suggest it's an abstraction of the conversation that's taking place and that Lanius/Oliver aren't actually abandoning everything based on a few pithy lines that could fit on a fridge magnet, but that's part of what gives it an anticlimactic feel for a lot of people, and it still has the weirdness of the player being a godlike figure who everyone, including the most powerful figures in the game, ultimately kowtows to in a matter of seconds.

I don't know what the way around that is with Fallout's very flawed Speech system, especially the way it's deployed in NV where it's fixed checks and typically used as an auto-win button for quests. Fo1 had you find the physical data disk that proved the Unity would fail, which at least added some accompanying gameplay to the speech solution (and also forced you to go through the Psyker corridor to actually reach the Master, which stealth characters don't have to do). Fo3 sometimes had Speech checks either backfire on you (Tenpenny Tower) or represent compromise solutions rather than optimal ones, though I suppose people would get really annoyed if that were a constant thing, especially when determining the ending of the game.

 

[ShiningSoldier]

I agree with Lemming42. I like New Vegas, but I think the entire persuasion system where you have to just choose the [SPEECH] option is a very lazy solution from the devs. It's a pity that so many games use it...

 

[gooseman]

No? You go through a string of speech checks to convince him

You dont. The game tells you what to say. You arent persuading anyone, you just spend your points into the skill and then press whatever option has the skill check indicator. This is quest markers for dialogue. You dont have to listen to the dialogue or read it, you just select whatever the game tells you to.

"So... You'll retreat?" He'll instantly go hostile.

What kind of dumbfuck would choose this? Maybe if you are actually braindead and are just clicking every option this would somehow be meaningful.

You play as a Mary Sue and the game guides you by the hand through le apocalypse.

 

[jackofshadows]

A reminder we're talking about fucking RPGs here. They're rather games about abstraction, not simulation. You can make the same argument that your char just crouch a little and becomes fucking invisible if his stealth skill is maximized. The charname just does it, it's not only about which exact words did he utter in order to convince someone.

But I agree that from gameplay standpoint it would be better say to have some items or other means to back persuasion stuff. Same as stealthboy is improving one's ability to remain hidden btw.

 

[Lemming42]

Even if you mentally substitute the scant in-game dialogue with an absolutely gangbusters speech, the game still ends with a random postal worker demanding two major armies leave, and both commanders aquiescing and withdrawing their forces from the entire region.

It's a bit silly that you can talk the Master down so quickly too but at least Fo1 generally treats the player as an embattled traveler who's just passing through and who most people don't care about, rather than the messiah whose word must always be obeyed. The Master confrontation feels thematically appropriate too and like a narratively satisfying conclusion to the game's wider themes - the Master was a well-intentioned scientist who believed he was building a more resilient future safe from the horrors of the post-nuclear world and that the ends justified the means, one of the humans he sought to transform or subjugate came to him and showed him he was wrong, he realised with utter horror that all he'd done had been for nothing and that there was no way to justify himself anymore, the last remnants of his humanity came rushing back to him, tragic suicide etc etc etc.

The game still ends with you selecting a few dialogue options but at least you can kind of see the overall shape of what that conversation was about and it forms an appropriate conclusion to the game's story, which takes a little bit of the lameness of clicking to win out (and obviously you also have to get the evidence and choose the option yourself rather than having it tagged for you).

Meanwhile the Lanius and especially Oliver conversations don't really connect to any themes in the game as far as I can imagine. It's not like New Vegas was a story about logistics and supply routes that makes the Barter solution feel like a beautiful poetic coup de grace to the plot. The conversations are just there because Obisdian recognised that people would expect/demand a speech solution to the finale. If New Vegas has any overarching theme, it's the dangers of nostalgia and repeating the mistakes of the past (as Avellone relentlessly drills into your head in Lonesome fucking pissing shitting Road), but the conversations with Oliver and Lanius don't really touch on that as far as I remember.

 

[Old Hans]

Even if you mentally substitute the scant in-game dialogue with an absolutely gangbusters speech, the game still ends with a random postal worker demanding two major armies leave, and both commanders aquiescing and withdrawing their forces from the entire region.

It's a bit silly that you can talk the Master down so quickly too but at least Fo1 generally treats the player as an embattled traveler who's just passing through and who most people don't care about, rather than the messiah whose word must always be obeyed. The Master confrontation feels thematically appropriate too and like a narratively satisfying conclusion to the game's wider themes - the Master was a well-intentioned scientist who believed he was building a more resilient future safe from the horrors of the post-nuclear world and that the ends justified the means, one of the humans he sought to transform or subjugate came to him and showed him he was wrong, he realised with utter horror that all he'd done had been for nothing and that there was no way to justify himself anymore, the last remnants of his humanity came rushing back to him, tragic suicide etc etc etc.

The game still ends with you selecting a few dialogue options but at least you can kind of see the overall shape of what that conversation was about and it forms an appropriate conclusion to the game's story, which takes a little bit of the lameness of clicking to win out (and obviously you also have to get the evidence and choose the option yourself rather than having it tagged for you).

Meanwhile the Lanius and especially Oliver conversations don't really connect to any themes in the game as far as I can imagine. It's not like New Vegas was a story about logistics and supply routes that makes the Barter solution feel like a beautiful poetic coup de grace to the plot. The conversations are just there because Obisdian recognised that people would expect/demand a speech solution to the finale. If New Vegas has any overarching theme, it's the dangers of nostalgia and repeating the mistakes of the past (as Avellone relentlessly drills into your head in Lonesome fucking pissing shitting Road), but the conversations with Oliver and Lanius don't really touch on that as far as I remember.

what I always liked about fallout 1, was even if you had the speech skill, you were never 100% sure which dialog options were the correct ones. At least that's how I remember it.

 

[Just Locus]

Lanius and especially Oliver conversations don't really connect to any themes in the game as far as I can imagine. It's not like New Vegas was a story about logistics and supply routes that makes the Barter solution feel like a beautiful poetic coup de grace to the plot.

I would consider Warfare to be a good part of NV's overall story since it's touched on almost every step you take in the world, and logistics play a pretty big role in that. It's not like you just tell Lanius to fuck off and he obeys without hesitation, You logically make good points that he never considered or didn't consider until now, and he doesn't leave for good, he just retreats to further strengthen his forces.

 

[jackofshadows]

Even if you mentally substitute the scant in-game dialogue with an absolutely gangbusters speech, the game still ends with a random postal worker demanding two major armies leave, and both commanders aquiescing and withdrawing their forces from the entire region.

Come on dude, by the time (ex-)courier reaches the center of conflict he's an elite agent, a hotshot. Like you could argue some previous status ups were questionable, especially that reputation reset when he enters lucky 38 but not by the end. And in a case of threatening by your own bot army that'll 100% legit reason for at least temporal force withdrawal.

 

[Lemming42]

Come on dude, by the time (ex-)courier reaches the center of conflict he's an elite agent, a hotshot.

I guess, but every step on the road of getting there feels so bizarre to the point where your status at the ending is as questionable as at every other point in the game; even aside from the Lucky 38 reputation reset there's so much weirdness. Caesar handing you, a stranger who potentially has had no interaction with the Legion other than genociding them, the Platinum Chip and entrusting you with the secret of the Securitrons. Mr House doing the same because he was really impressed with your Deliveroo service and the guy he's been grooming for years to be his top agent turned out to be a traitor so might as well trust some guy/gal off the street instead. The NCR assigning you as their sole representative to the most volatile factions in the Mojave without so much as a probationary mission, all because they like the cut of your jib (even if you've killed half their commanders and wiped out their camps to that point).

It's not helped by the fact that people will bow to you even when you haven't done anything impressive - the NCR will literally accept your judgment on Primm when you're a complete stranger who woke up in Goodsprings six hours earlier (and won't move to take the town one way or the other until you give them permission), they just sit outside Nelson until you (still a random postal worker) decide to kick the Legion out yourself, the Boulder City crisis is just whatever you demand it to be, etc. Talking down Oliver and/or Lanius feels less like a big heroic moment of triumph earned through hard work and slow reputation gain and more like par for the course - of course they'll fold if you tell them to, everyone else in the Mojave has for the last few weeks.

I wonder if there might have been a way to incorporate the faction reputation system, like if you were Vilified by the Legion or NCR then Lanius or Oliver just straight-up wouldn't listen to you.

 

[gooseman]

A reminder we're talking about fucking RPGs here. They're rather games about abstraction, not simulation. You can make the same argument that your char just crouch a little and becomes fucking invisible if his stealth skill is maximized. The charname just does it, it's not only about which exact words did he utter in order to convince someone.

Yes, I already said this exact thing, just different wording.

it seems to be actively doing everything it can to destroy any immersion you might have had

Just ignore everything that happens in the game and LARP like it all makes sense. You really have to filter out the graphics, voice acting, dialogue, to get to the abstraction under it all. That's why all of that stuff is in the game, to be ignored. Don't think about what your character is saying in the game, just click the [SPEECH] button to play the game.
Complete failure at using the medium to deliver a riveting story such as:
"How does the character do this thing?"
"He just does."
Bravo, Obsidian.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

1. Vegas came out in an era at the height of this: "When you press a button, something awesome has to happen." + "We want Call Of Duty's audience" + "Fallout, to us, is a vault dweller wearing a power armor, running around and killing things."

2. Until rather very recent, Vegas has been the only reasonably bigger budget RPG of the past like five generations of hardware that showed big budgets and RPGs may one day actually link without overly compromise, e.g. increasingly making RPGs for people who don't actually like RPGs. That Vegas in terms of tech is but a modded FO3 only strenghtens the point, as does its short development cycle. All it takes for them fuckers to do a RPG or Fallout proper is getting their act together. They just don't wanna.

3.

 

[Morgoth]

John Gonzalez and Chris Avellone were the best people that ever happened to Obsidian. Without them, the company just keeps stumbling around with AA-California fantasy schlock that is being tossed onto Gamepass and quickly forgotten. I consider their downfall even more tragic than that of Purpleware.

 

[BING XI LAO]

After reading the past couple of pages, I'm glad I never installed this.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I agree with Lemming42. I like New Vegas, but I think the entire persuasion system where you have to just choose the [SPEECH] option is a very lazy solution from the devs. It's a pity that so many games use it...

Best way to go about it is for speech skill to open up a new dialogue tree, but besides the original check the subsequent optimal choices that would lead to a possibly better outcome not being marked as such. This way you're still aware that the skill is actually useful and worth investing points in, but you still have to deduce what sort of persuasion would work in a given situation.

If that would require too much effort for the devs to implement, then a compromise could be to have it be tiered (e.g. skill check requiring 20 speech: automatic success, skill check requiring 40 speech: requires a correct pick following the openly advertised speech option; skill check requiring 60 speech: requires two correct picks following said option and so on).

 

[Lemming42]

It's cool in theory but it sometimes turns into having to read the developer's minds: TES Battlespire had totally unmarked dialogue options and you could sometimes use common sense to guess which one would work but half the time it'd be near-random and you'd just end up picking one that sounds right to you but which the devs decided was wrong. DXHR had the worst version ever, no idea what was even happening with that system.

Starfield, of all games, had the best speech check system I've seen in an RPG, I think there's a base there to build on for sure. But the biggest issue with all these games is that failing a speech check almost always just means you get attacked; until there's interesting story permutations and unique fail states for botching a check people will just quickload and reroll to get around whatever system's in place anyway.

 

[agris]

This is quest markers for dialogue

well said!

edit: there’s a stewie tweaks option to disable all the skill tags in dialogue fyi. required tweak if you have self respect

 

[Harthwain]

A reminder we're talking about fucking RPGs here.

So what? Skill checks (including speech/persuasion) had binary results for decades. Until Disco Elysium shoved that you can have failures that produce interesting outcomes (instead of simply locking you out of content or rewards) and successes that do not always yield the result you'd expect/want (resulting in getting an extra quest instead, for example).

In this scenario, you could perhaps convince the leader to pull out, but at the same time have not all commanders agree with that, resulting in battle still happening, but on somewhat lesser scale (you fight fewer enemies). There were situations in real life when something like that happened. General Yamashita ordered the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Manila in 1945, but this order was ignored by some imperial troops who decided to fight to the death instead (a postion not at all uncommon amongst the forces of Japan). The end result was that Manila became one of the most destroyed cities during WW2.

DXHR had the worst version ever, no idea what was even happening with that system.

If I recall correctly, you could unlock the psychological profiling, which helped figuring out which responses were you should be taking when speaking to certain people. But, yeah, it wasn't too great.

 

[jackofshadows]

So what? Skill checks (including speech/persuasion) had binary results for decades.

Not sure what's your point, don't think we're in a disagreement here. And I like your suggestion about partial withdrawal.

My point was that the implementation wasn't as bad as people itt were painting it just because of the game's genre in question. But could it been better? Absolutely.

 

[Beans00]

Why I liked new vegas is simple


The gameplay is trash, the shooting is bad. People bitching about the skill checks I semi agree with. The dlcs sucked(except honest hearts IMO).

I liked the game for 1 reason



Something about the theme of mission creep. I like this theme in games, NCR fighting a stupid war for politicians, stretched too thin. I thought they did a good job showing how corrupt the NCR was and it made them compelling.

Maybe it's because my dad fought in the soviet-afghan war, and my grandfather in the french-algerian war(on the french side unlike ryzer). I have always found these themes compelling.

 

[Stella Brando]

What in the god damn!?

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

I hate new vegas.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

It burned my GPU