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Fallout: New Vegas Old World Blues

Old World Blues is a terrible experience. Everything good about old game is thrown aside. Writing is horrible and amateurish. Fighting is extremely bothersome with bullet spongy enemies.

Introduction
Introduction to this DLC is something. It is half an hour of exposition where you can do very little. At first there is a massive slide show of where you are going. Then you wake up in your hub with no explanation. You eventually go to the professors running this place. Conversation there is legendary bad. It is about 20 minutes of never ending talking and jokes between each robot. Game on the other hand forces you to do massive skill checks in order to get insignificant rewards. This introduction feels like a bad mod where developers had too many inside jokes. Robots are bickering with each other as they are paying attention to you. Humour is completely forced. It is a joke after a joke, often with no build up. Joke is delivered flat. This DLC is the most perfect example of quantity over quality. It has a lot going in it, but everything in it are so poorly done that quite often it feels like an exceptional mod rather than content created by the professionals.

How developers pushed their own engine past its breaking point
Do not trust what others are saying about this DLC. They do not know how to review a game. They do not know what they are experiencing. Thus, they only selectively remember good parts and cherry pick what to say. Other than that, they like mere children only are capable of describing to you what you will be doing in a game.
    Combat
  • The first thing that I became aware is just how absolutely horrible combat in Old World Blues is. Every enemy has massive amounts of HP and huge resistances to damage to the point it is impossible to effectively fight them without an appropriate weapon for them. Each enemy has a massive weakness to one type of damage, robots to EMP for example. This leaves the only effective weapon to fight robots are dedicated EMP weapons. All other weapons feel like BB gun in Mojave.

    Overcrowded
  • Monster allocation is also completely busted. Some buildings next to your HQ are completely pointless and hold nothing of value. However, they are filled with a brim with Trauma Harness enemies. These are most powerful enemies in an entire zone. You can enter into a wrong building and find out that a small storage area has 8 Trauma Harness just standing there, doing nothing. I had exhausted most of my supplies and ammunition just in that room alone.

    Paths to various buildings are equally terribly designed. Your most starter areas feature the most contested roads with most powerful enemies which this DLC can offer you. However, as you explore further, there is nothing as difficult or as contested as a starter zone. In fact, you could avoid combat for the most part if you know how to slip through your starting area.
Story
First, I do not like these whacky, out of place worlds. Fallout New Vegas is very grounded experience. Old World Blues is science fiction with plastic space lasers who goes PEW PEW PEW. There is a massive difference in tone between these two games and the problems starts when developers had tried to tie Old World Blues to our world. This not only goes against old lore, but it seems out of place for the established world. Story could been better if it was made as stand alone experience without clumsy explanations how everything is logical and ties together. It is unneeded and just annoys a player who cares about Fallout lore.
    What is the point of it all?
  • Storyline in itself is convoluted. I honestly can't tell you why I needed anything. It is a standard collect 3 items, but when you finally deliver them, doctor himself have no clue why he had asked for those items. He merely gives you a key to open Dr. Mobius (main villain) lair and all the talk about going out evaporates. You go to confront main villain and it can't even stomach an effort being evil. He is just a demented old man who is addicted to drugs. He will have a friendly chat with you, explains his reasons, you agree with him and then the only option is to kill him. However, soon after that you are left with two options: either kill other doctors or trick them that you are Mobius and force them to stay in the dome. So, you essentially did the same thing as Dr. Mobius was doing all this time, but with more random acts of violence. There is also a random twist of betrayal at the end telling you that doctors never intended to reunite you with your brains. This however is instantly contradicted by leaving player an option to remain brainless and as for doctors, it is never explained how you alone are their key to the world outside. Or why they can't just put their brains to a random lobotomites. Story is full of plot holes, it is inconsistent and there is no development. Entire storytelling is done in first half an hour and then that is left are random dialogues and jokes. Story is a joke in this DLC.

    Tie-in obsession
  • Instead of letting it to be an out of place, whacky experience, developers were obsessed to tie everything together. So, they had ruined two more DLCs, Lonesome Road and Dead Money. Rather, people working there already set their minds to make them nonsensical. First, with the other courier which just rambles on and on about nothing. He is of course everywhere, but nowhere. Always one step ahead and leaves before you. It is a tired and lazy trope. Then it creates ties to world around it. How it created animals you see in the wasteland. However, when you confront them, professor is clueless and game seems to support courier theory that animals were imported to Big Mountain to be experimented on rather than vice versa. It also has all the tech found in Dead Money and briefly mentions how they done everything. The issue with this is simple. Fallout universe was not so advanced to have space bases. Then it comes to the fact that it has tech way above what we are used to. Then there is an issue of this tech being affordable and transferred to Earth. However, mutated animals appeared much later when bombs hit. So, who was travelling to those bases? It ignores that it was over 200 years after apocalypse and how base would be self sufficient if it is already in post apocalyptic state. How those professors were so out of touch that they did not knew that there are intelligent life on Earth when they themselves came from there, were transferring tech there all the time and had visitors in the past.

    I could go on and one. This is such a bad fan fiction that you could write a book exploring all the plotholes story creates and it will be a longer text than the story itself...
The Zone
It is not the fabled zone from Stalker games. That map is at least atmospheric while working with very limited graphic budget. This one is just feels cheap and dull. It is a prime example of what happens when developers need to do something quickly and they can't put proper care and love towards their own work. The end result, a mass produced content which is fine while you are consuming, but it is not memorable nor you want to repeat it.
    The more barren version of Mojave Wasteland
  • It is a very boring zone. Outside are your usually grey wasteland variant. Buildings are your usual cold war bunker variants. DLC fails to introduce any effects or terrain which would be interesting to watch. In fact, at large map seems to be randomly thrown together as a mod. You can quickly prototype such quality map, because you do not care how each element ties together. What is player's experience. Quality of a map is even lower than a random patch of desert in Mojave.

    Various Curios and Oddities
  • There is also aren't any bits of story to gather. Computers contain comically over the top scientists talking about how they are comically evil or obsessed over some small thing. Information is just plain boring and has no twists or development. Compare this to whole mini-stories found in Vaults! This by comparison looks downright amateurish!

    Loot for Days!!!
  • Zone in addition has a massive quantities of loot. You get tired of looting every cupboard, every table which is filled to a brim with valuables. This DLC is particularly hard offender, because you will be constantly dragging stuff back and selling it. It ruins whole in-game economy if such a thing even was in a game. Worse, it fills maps with valuable loot which you want to sell which takes directly away from exploring maps, enjoying the atmosphere and then eventually finding actually something very valuable.
Beam Me Back
It is by far the worse Fallout experience I had so far. It was so bad that it had killed my desire to play this game for a while. It had left a sour taste in my mouth after sweet main campaign.

This DLC takes away from the story with its lore-rapping elements. It creates an out of place, all encompassing place which does not need to be there. Fallout New Vegas would had been better if this DLC was never developed.
Last edited by Nightbringer; 6 Jul, 2022 @ 4:28am