girlofprey

I love Fallout: New Vegas. But it's so buggy, I almost can't believe it.

I mean, Fallout 3 had it's problems - when I first started playing it, I had to crash my Playstation pretty much every single day for a week, because if I had the game on for too long and then tried to use a shop WOE BETIDE. And then it started just sort of freezing up when I had fights, or sometimes just when I went into new areas, and I had to crash the Playstation. Which was annoying. And yes, the people in Megaton kept disappearing, because they apparently walked through holes in the meshes and out into the void. But by and large, the game itself still mostly made sense.

But Fallout: New Vegas - I mean, I have problems every now and then because I just can't understand which dialogue options lead to or continue quests, or I don't know where to go to start or continue quests, but that's fine because I don't think it's great when games hold your hand all the way through, and I can usually figure it out. But the bugs I am running into at the moment are kind of ridiculous. AND TERRIFYING. I just did a quest yesterday where I had to talk a lot to a guy, and then at one point I went to speak to him and HIS WHOLE HEAD TURNED RIGHT THE WAY AROUND WHILE I WAS SPEAKING TO HIM. And I don't mean like in The Exorcist. Not even that. I mean that while his head was facing me, it did a 360 circle, down across his chest and back up again. And I went to check something about the quest later on the internet, after I'd finished it, and it turned out that was a common problem that lots of people saw. A COMMON PROBLEM. But I also read that in the same quest, part of it I didn't complete involved finding the body of a dead prostitute (Fallout: New Vegas isn't always very pleasant), and a common bug occured where often she would be up and walking around, instead of lying down dead. And I thought 'haha, at least THAT didn't happen to me'. But today I decided to investigate that stuff I didn't find out, to see what it actually was, and lo and behold. She was up. And she was walking around. Into the hallway. But whenever I clicked on her to talk, the game told me she was dead, would I like to examine the body? She also spoke to me. She said "Wait, don't go!". I had to be all "I have to. You're an abomination".

Other than that, there are the quests that you fail without ever having been given them, but I'm willing to overlook that because of role-playing and branching path reasons. But I really feel like you should be given some warning about that type of thing. Then there are the quests you fail or items you can never get because you did things in a quest IN THE WRONG ORDER, without the game ever telling you that will happen. Then there are the bugs where the game developers obviously didn't put in quite as much effort for female Player Characters as for male Player Characters - quite a lot of games do this sadly, but in Fallout: New Vegas you get an alternative inventory screen thing, and at the moment I'm having to read mine at a jaunty angle. I thought this was style choice to do with the inventory itself, but no, it turns out it's because they only fixed the alternate mesh for male player characters, and didn't quite manage for female characters. So I get a weird angle. I kind of like it. But still. Well done, Bethesda/Obsidian.

And then today I was doing a quest where I had to go kill a bandit leader, and if possible rescue a soldier from their base. I went to the base, killed the bandit leader, searched all of the base and didn't find the soldier. But I figured it was okay, because I thought I'd seen a character with a similar name stuck somewhere before, so I would get back to the quest giver and they'd be all 'hey, he wasn't there but it turns out he's here, can you go get him?'. But in fact I got back to the quest giver and they were all 'hey, that soldier just got back, he told me he wouldn't have gotten out of there without you, we're all totally grateful'. EVEN THOUGH I NEVER SAW HIM. Apparently he is putting his rescue down to me and praising my good name though. And then, I was looking up the quest on the internet to find out WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED, and it said that if you kill the bandit leader before looking for the soldier, you often find him dead anyway. What the hell is that, game?

And it's like, I have the Ultimate Edition of the game. The Game Of The Year edition, with all of the add-on quests and packs released for the main game, which they don't usually bring out until at least a year after the original game's been on sale. So it seems like they had a chance to hear about and fix some of these bugs if they wanted to. Or include some patches? But they didn't. Instead, there are dead bodies walking around.

I love Fallout: New Vegas. But it is SO buggy.

Also, there is a petition here against them taking Mary Seacole out of the National Curriculum. I didn't know she was in the National Curriculum - it sort of explains Horrible Histories doing a sketch about her when I'd never heard of her - but it seems like she shouldn't be taken out of it. Petitions nowadays seem to be replacing their "share this petition with your friends" pages with "would you like to donate some money to us?" pages, so I cannot share it anywhere else. But it is here, at any rate.