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Vault 101 (Fallout Thread)

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LeeC:
Are any of the FO3 DLCs worth playing other than Broken Steel?

Thrillho:

--- Quote from: Thrillho on 13 May 2015, 00:38 ---I posted this review on Amazon of the different DLCs for New Vegas.

(click to show/hide)Okay, as I did with Fallout 3, I'm going to use this to review the bonus material you get with the GOTY edition because New Vegas is frankly incredible, that five stars up there is for the complete package. The graphics were a touch dated even when they came out, and in many ways it's just the world's most expansive expansion pack for Fallout 3, but honestly, I prefer the story and function of New Vegas to 3 by quite a wide margin. Your mileage may vary, though. Anyway, the downloadable additions.

The additional guns, armour, accessories, etc. can be a bit of a weird one (the Gun Runner's Arsenal and Courier's Stash) because a lot of it shows up in your inventory the second you boot up the game. This leads to a hard call because you've got to decide whether to keep it and start the game a little overpowered (one of the items is some armour that never deteriorates) or hide it somewhere to come back to at some arbitrary point in the future. As far as the items themselves, I'm not sure any of them would be worth paying for in their own right, although they add some nice little wrinkles to existing weapons and armours, and if you're playing on Hardcore Mode, the Vault 13 flask that you take a sip of periodically is vital for stemming off dehydration.

The main event here is the DLCs, and while they are across the board a huge step up in quality from Fallout 3's mixed bag of lumpy downloads, there's still a great deal of good and bad. So, in no order:

Dead Money: I. Hate. This. DLC. I cannot express in words how much I loathe it, but the thing is, that's only slightly a quality issue; it's largely down to personal taste. Dead Money is basically Fallout as survival horror; all your gear gets taken, and you're in a town-sized prison doing a casino heist for a mysterious overlord. You end up scraping by on the most scant resources (I don't think I'd have completed it had I not stumbled across a secret hologram vendor at one point) and the number of old saves I had to reload was ridiculous. This is partly some brilliant design. The new locations are jammed full of atmosphere, it's genuinely frightening, the new characters are brilliant (the one bit that I will heartily endorse with no provisos whatsoever) and the attention to detail is beyond reproach. The thing is, this detail goes into unkillable enemies, floor traps EVERYWHERE (you will spend a great deal of time operating on one or more crippled limbs), a security collar that blows your head off if you stand near a radio for too long, and lengthy stealth passages where you avoid hologram security. If you're the kind of person who plays stealth, melee and quickness anyway, this may not be much of an irritation for you, but for me, as someone who generally talks or shoots my way through the game, this was ridiculous. Late in the DLC, it switches randomly over to a rock hard combat segment that makes no sense from a gameplay perspective and nearly caused me to put my foot through the TV. Also, there's no fast travel between locations despite endless backtracking. When I completed it, I felt no sense of achievement, just relief at finally escaping. God help you if you try it on Hardcore Mode, because then even the air you breathe will kill you.

Honest Hearts is sort of like the anti-Dead Money, in that it's generally easy to play (aside from enemies who, like the inbred hicks from Fallout 3's DLCs, seemingly invulnerable to bullets despite being half naked) but has had a lack of effort put in. Steeped in Native American lore, you find one of the precious few locations not touched by the nuclear wars. There's no radiation, and fish swim freely in clean water rivers. You also get to find out more about Joshua Graham, a frequently mentioned background character formerly of Caesar's Legion. There's limitless potential, but the locations and characters are largely boring as sin. The new quest lines are largely just fetch quests and the landscape is somehow even more featureless than the ruined Mojave. It's still reasonably good fun but if you put in an iota of effort you can breeze through it in a couple of hours and forget how you got there moments later. (The main criticism for me was how badly the opening events are staged. Due to an itchy trigger finger, I accidentally shot the first friendly NPC, and he promptly attacked me. Not aware that I had done so, I spent an hour or so wandering through the landscape, being inexplicably attacked by other named NPCs and not knowing why. It took looking online to realise what I'd actually done.)

Old World Blues is far and away the best of the DLCs. In this, you answer a call to go to a ruined drive-in sci-fi theatre, and that gives you a real indication of what you'll be experiencing. This is pulp sci-fi action, bordering on a comedy game - Plan 9 From Outer Space is even referenced at one juncture. You're transported to Big MT, a former research centre staffed by brains attached to monitors (think the doctor laptop from Perfect Dark, or Alex the Great from Bioshock 2, only friendlier. Just). Having casually lobotomised you on your way in, you find that you're missing numerous organs, and your brain in particular is in possession of the villainous Dr. Mobius, who has unleashed all kinds of horrors on the landscape. While this is as weighed down with fetch quests as Honest Hearts was (in fact worse because within the same quest it will send you to the same locations twice instead of letting you collect everything at once), you don't mind here because the landscape is teeming with locations, enemies, trinkets, items, stories and worldbuilding lore. While at times it is extremely difficult (I hope you know your way around an energy weapon) there are over a dozen NPC AI characters, each of which has its own memorable character (two back biting light switches, a tiny securitron who eats coffee cups, a lazily aloof Autodoc). I can't speak highly enough of this particular DLC, and little moments in it call back to Dead Money, and also look forward to Lonesome Road.

Ah, Lonesome Road. What a dreary last entry this was. Lonesome really is the word for it, because once again, you talk to nobody, except for the mysterious Ulysses (great name, great voice, hackneyed, lengthy dialogue) who lectures you through a robot companion you acquire early on. Again, there are new ranges of nigh-unkillable baddies (we are introduced to one via it murdering a Deathclaw with no effort), but this one is really not much to write home about. Taking a world like Fallout, already bereft of life, and stripping out what remnants of life there were seems counter productive. This is a long, slow, boring journey, although unlike the others luckily you can come and go as you please. The ending, depending on what route you take, can also be frustrating if you've not levelled up a lot before you get to it. I found it literally impossible until I totally changed my approach, I won't elaborate on particularly why though so as not to spoiler too much.

Given that you can play all of these DLCs at any time during your run through, they are still a great selection and provide a fun distraction if you get a little tired of the Mojave without wanting to leave for good. Just make sure you're at least level 25 before you try most of them.
As for Fallout 4... once that gets a release date, you can bet your sweet ass I am buying the next generation just to fucking play it.

--- End quote ---

Thrillho:
Oops, wrong one. Be right back.

Thrillho:

--- Quote ---Operation: Anchorage is a pretty pathetic addition to the game, consisting of a simulation of the Chinese invasion that your character enters, but of course if you die in the simulation you die in real life. The missions are all vastly uninteresting, amounting to crossing a monotonous snowy landscape, shooting some Chinese folks and then returning to home base. The plunder you receive at the end of the DLC is kind of worth it if you plan on continuing with the game on from there, but it's not really worth playing in its own right.

Into The Pitt is a much meatier expansion, bringing in a host of new areas, characters and quests for you to progress through. It does feature that increasingly irritating trope of Fallout DLCs, namely that you get all your gear taken off you at the start. If you're playing this DLC as part of a replay of the game as a whole, I'd recommend you doing this one fairly early on in your run, particularly if you're heavy on melee - some of the mid-point missions are pathetically easy if you've got even some of the lower level perks. Story wise this is a good one - there's new moral choices, and they're much more ambiguous than the main game, which tended to have quite binary (and often bizarre) choices. However the closing overs of this DLC are majorly heavy on your 360 and the game may crash, a lot.

Broken Steel is a slightly bizarre add-on; the only one that picks up where the game left off, without spoiling anything it completely undoes the ending of the original game. The missions aren't especially inspiring, it's basically just more of what already existed in the main game and as such is worth completing simply to have more to do and explore. It's also the funniest DLC.

Point Lookout is second only to The Pitt in its content and intrigue, an entire new area with a wealth of locations to explore (and unlike most of the other DLCs, you won't find every single one on the main mission), side quests, new missions, new weapons. It is, however, one of the most frustrating because the enemies in it are straight up rock hard. Why exactly a bunch of semi-nude tribesmen or inbred hillbillies can take fourteen shotgun blasts to the face is beyond me, but Point Lookout is actually a more expansive map than The Pitt and with a further reaching story arc, again adding in morally ambiguous choices into the bargain.

Mothership: Zeta is the final add-on, and second most disappointing. Think of every single alien invasion trope you can possibly imagine and it's in there. The aliens are uninspired, the environments painfully repetitive, and while in The Pitt enemies are tough, there are some aliens on the Mothership that have such a high damage threshold that my character, lacking an emphasis on explosives, literally could not kill them in almost 90% of cases. I could only complete this (or at least without throwing my controller through my television) by going back and levelling up different stats so that I could shove a rocket wherever the sun doesn't shine on an alien.

--- End quote ---

There ya go.

LeeC:
Sounds like the DLCs arnt really all that interesting then.  Maybe the Pitt and Broken Steel but I don't like loosing all my stuff, sierra madre style, considering I'm rocking heavy duty power armor and a Gatling laser.  I may do a hard pass.

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