Duck and Cover

Since this is one of the few places that isn't up Bethesda's ass let me ask you this DAC.

Is the game worth buying at the Steam sale for 5 euros? Some say it's pretty decent, at least compared to FO3 (which I didn't play, btw). Also, it's the standard edition, did anyone play the DLC? Is the bonus content worth a shit or should I just buy this now?

The DLC are worth it.

Yes it's worth buying I spent much more hours playing this game than Fallout 3. Altogether superior game.

sure, I'd buy it for 5€

Thanks guys, bought it.

Actually wanted to buy the DLC too but Lonesome Road, which apparently should be available, is "unavailable in my region". So fuck'em, I didn't buy any of the other DLC.

I would definitely get Old World Blues if you don't get any others.

I guess it's worth a 5'er, but def. not a whole lot more.

Noticed that New Vegas: Ultimate Edition (all DLCs) was on sale for 20 €. Immediately grabbed it. I played the pirated version with no DLC quite a bit, so I'm more than happy to pay that much for the entire package. In general NV was so much more of an experience than FO3, actually coming close the feel of the original Fallouts.

Kashluk wrote:happy to pay that much for the completed game.

FTFY

To be fair all of the DLC for New Vegas were developed after release, so its not like they cut content and sold it afterward like day one DLC or anything, with the exclusion of the pre-order bonuses of course.

The pre-order bonuses were shit, anyway. And there was just so much more stuff to do in vanilla NV than in vanilla FO3, that it'd be unfair to call the came incomplete in that sense. Bug-ridden and glitchy, sure, and in that way incomplete. But the DLC on NV actually feels like it's on top of the complete game instead of filling the gaping holes left there.

Nowadays, I don't consider anything but the "Game of the Year Edition" types to be the final product. Now, though, all DLC is planned in advance, if not created in advance, and its release is dictated by jerk-off marketing departments.

Dismiss it as a rant of someone who hates all DLC on priciple, if you will, but my chief problem with them is the matter of quality. It is, as far as I'm aware, the best interpretation of the whole DLC concept, in that, whereas you'd pay 1/2 of the price for roughly 1/2 of the content in an "expansion pack" and you'd feel justified, in this case you'd pay a fourth or a fifth of the price and it does seem like a fourth or a fifth (on the ones I played, the burning mummy and talking computer mountain dlcs) of the game, so that seems fair enough. That's not my beef, though.

Honestly, they're both more interesting than the actual game. Old World Blues, in fact, makes a lot of NV look like F3. That's my problem. The whole notion that I have to pay extra to play the best bits doesn't sit well with me at all, and I'm forced to question the honesty of the person who thought that [insert boring sidequest here] was more important to the core game, or that Blues was "too good" and that it could be amped up and sold for an additional buck later.

So why wasn't it in the game to begin with? Different map area? Yeah, I don't think NV's going for the most reliable representation of the Nevada desert that people would be bothered by a couple of mountains that were out of place. Unrelated story? Yeah, Fallout is basically a bunch of "unrelated stories" that you go (or not) through, all the while resolving some bigger issue, Blues or Hearts wouldn't be any different to solving Gecko's power plant problems.

You wanna sell a huge game for 100$? Fine, sell it for 100$ when ALL of it is done. But you wouldn't because kids would cry, since their 50$ allowances isn't enough anymore.
You wanna sell episodes for 10$ a pop? Fine. But you wouldn't because then that'd mean maintaing a high degree of quality from episode to episode otherwise people would drop the whole thing.
This? This is a damn mess. This is what a pokeymon enthusiast would call heavenly. I'm not a pokeymon enthusiast, however.

Expansion packs were sold at like $20 or $30 dollars a piece, some games had upwards of two or even three depending on how successful the original game was.

So that would make a fifty dollar game at least twice that. Would you have felt just as ripped off back in the days of expansion packs? That's all these are. They're not cosmetic items or gun packs or anything, they're entirely new stories and overarching ones at that. So the old RPG you liked got that 40 dollar expansion? That's great, go out and buy it. This kind of did that, too, except its split up into four parts and sold individually. Did you honestly feel like they cut content from the final product to make these DLC's?

Why wasn't it in the game to begin with? Probably time constraints, maybe actual space on the discs on consoles, who knows. The same thing can be asked of the expansion packs of yore.

Most DLC is a quick but on the developer's part, but every once in a while its done right. I'd say for New Vegas they're one of those examples of doing it right.

No matter if you like the whole DLC concept or not, I still have to agree with King of Creation: if you want the full experience, you have to go for the GotY-edition sort of thing. It's a good thing I'm not that enthusiastic about games anymore these days... I have time to wait until you can find the whole package from a special sales bin.

Denis, cost considerations aside (since I've already admitted that AFAIK these are the best DLCs ever in terms of money for content), there are 2 things that add-ons of either sort mess with, and they're shit I don't think sould be messed with.

First there's the matter of how the artistic significance of the original work (in this case vanilla FNV) is trivialized by afterthought. Vanilla FNV had something to put across, assuming it had the presumption of having any artistic merit; FNV GOTY has something else entirely. In essence, they "spoil the game". How do you feel (assuming you like Star Wars) by having Lucas add and remove parts of the original SW trilogy at will every time the tech advances, whilst censoring (via not selling them alongside new cuts) previous versions of the film, the versions that you or your parents saw 35 years ago, the versions that do have cinematic relevance?

Second there's the implication of dishonesty from the part of the creator that I've alluded to. This implication could be applied to every other case, but in this one you know the details. You know, as far as I do, that the Burning Man story has, in one form or another, been around at least since VB got cancelled. Someone thought that it would be (for one reason or another) fit for DLC. Someone thought that it wouldn't be (again, because whatever) fit for vanilla. Someone thought that it'd be better to have a whole not-really-related side mission featuring item collecting and cage fights against critters in the sewers near Vegas (as an example of a side mission/zone that's completely inconsequential) instead of the Burning Man story (in whatever form). That someone was clearly wrong from a story/game standpoint; that someone was right from a purely monetary one. I can't help but question that person's intent, and that intent I find dishonest. Unless you want to argue that somehow it slipped everyone's mind until such a time came when they had a contractual obligation to fulfill by making DLCs... Then, fine. I don't reckon you think that's the case.

Granted, I'm sailing dangerously close to the whole "games = art" thingy. To oversimplify, they should but aren't, and part of why not is the two reasons above. Also, acute sequelitis.

EDIT- Also, it's time spent idling in a creative sense. It's making more of the same instead of something new.

Kashluk wrote:I have time to wait until you can find the whole package from a special sales bin.

And there's no reason to do anything but, given how every game released today still has features missing, or DLC that hasn't come out, or bugs in need of patching, etc, buying a game on day one nowadays is essentially paying for a beta version on the hope that it'll one day be as intended.

I played the pirated version, with all the DLCs, and I gotta say I tried completing the game before going on to the DLCs (which it seems, if I remember correctly, are in different locations? I hate that, I wish it would just melt with the whole thing and become one game, not like 3 locations, anyway) and I didn't even finish FNV. At first I was enthousiastic, but it's quite long and a bit shallow, in the end.

I'm with the idea of waiting for ultimate editions, only because
a. I'm fucking cheap and don't feel like buying Todd a beach house
b. my PCs are usually 5 years behind the gaming HW curve
c. I'm fucking old and shit passes me by and I don't care anymore. The advantage to this is I'm completely immune to the hype and can wait long enough for the dust to settle and see what's worth it, and at that point it's cheap as hell.



I think my problem with a lot of DLC is that it's business model driven and not creatively driven.
Looking at how formulaic Bethesda has been with 3 DLCs being released at like a 2 month interval or whatever, it strikes me as more of a business mandated decision, especially to keep sales of the original up, rather than a case of someone creatively saying "hey I have a great idea for new content" I get the sense it's like "you're doing 3 DLCs, come up with something".

My thoughts exactly.

It's like Hollywood and it's shitty sequels to good movies.

The Matrix, anyone?

Cimmerian Nights wrote:I think my problem with a lot of DLC is that it's business model driven and not creatively driven.

Bullseye.