Well, I finally just had enough of stupid sidequests last night and finished the main story. This is one of those strange games where I can't really say if I enjoyed it or not. I mean, I put in the 30 hours of time to explore, find loot, and beat it but it felt more like a relief when I was done. Like, good, now I can move on to the other five games I've been waiting to play since I got them last month.
I think what happened here was I just got overwhelmed with how much they jammed into the game, but the gameplay just isn't varied enough to support the sandbox. Go here, shoot this, loot that -- it's where the complaint of being too much like Fallout 3 comes in. I've already played this game to death and the scenery hasn't changed all that much aside from new landmarks. In fact, once I got to the main draw (The Strip) of the game, things just seem to slow down and it felt claustrophobic because you do spend so much time just running around freeside, the strip, westside, etc. I don't want to spoil anything, but I'll say that the main story just
ing explodes way too fast and sends you in twenty directions at the same time. At the expense of sounding hypocritical, the game isn't linear enough.
What I mean by that is starting off you're kind of given a tour of the wastes and you have a sense of direction with a few branching sidequests to check out the area you're in. Then you hit the strip and it's not clear what you're supposed to do at all. I felt totally lost just moving from camp to camp constantly finding new quests with no end in sight and nothing had any clear impact of how it relates to the main story. I think maybe I just did things out of order and that's why it didn't flow well for me.
On the other hand, if you do follow the main arc too quickly the game is over in 10-15 hours. The thing is, I don't feel like I would have missed much if I'd taken that route. I'm probably in the minority here, but I think they tried to add too much content that has no bearing on the actual story, but is for the true role-players. All the woe-is-me shit has no effect on me and I just want to know where the gold is at. There is a real lack of character progression as well, which never really satisfies the instant-gratification people like me.
I just felt like leveling was too slow and I wasn't finding the cool loot at all. At a certain point, I started looking at guides to see where the
I needed to go or do for some sweet gear only to find out it was all mostly off the beaten path. That's a terrible way to reward people for playing the game, by hiding the nice guns in places you might never visit or placing retarded requirements on them. Like the sniper rifle you see at the beginning of the game (anti-matter rifle) requires 8 STR to use (unless you pick up the gun handling perk, then it's 6). LIKE WHO THE
WOULD TAKE THAT MUCH STRENGTH IF YOU'RE PLAYING A SNIPER?!
I want to wrap this up, but the last thing I'll touch on is the bugs. Oh my god this makes Fallout 3 look like a golden turd. All the same bugs are still problems here and they're mostly engine issues dating back to Morrowind. The AI is horrible and some dialogue prompts don't even make sense or will sometimes miscue and spoil something that's coming up. It's very easy to bug scripts and I recommend multiple saves otherwise you can seriously
up your game. One such bug is if you have ED-E as your companion, at a certain point you have a chance to upgrade them but if you do not remove all the gear they're carrying it will be WIPED FROM THE GAME. I was very lucky and caught this fatal flaw before moving too far on in the game where back tracking would have been a serious chore to get it all back. My best advice is DO WHAT THE DESIGNERS INTENDED. Don't stray far from the path or think outside the box, because you will break the game.
Oh and don't worry too much about the decisions you make. The ending is a three minute exposition of what you did after wasting your time playing the broken game. Chances are you won't care about the impact because I sure as hell didn't.
