I'm thinking the Karma system in NV is quite screwy. You could have killed thousands of civilians, and yet you get masses of positive Karma for killing Ghouls and Fiends. Also, NCR Troopers seem to be fine for target practice in terms of Karma, since they don't seem to be marked as good. However some of the BoS members you will encounter during the game are marked as 'good' despite their arguable tactics during the game.

Even stealing everything in the game would never get you enough Negative Karma to be considered 'evil' after killing a handful of Ghouls.

Apart from that one quest in the Ultra Deluxe, is there any other quests/events that actually rely on Karma?

And there are a bunch of areas in the game where you might have expected something happening, or some sort of quest or interactive PC. But the place is just empty, with maybe a prospector standing around if you are lucky. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about if you have been wandering around. Locations of interest where you know something was supposed to be there and expanded upon.

Is Obsidian going to be able to flesh out the world with a patch in the future? Or will it will be up to mod makers to try and piece together what was supposed to exist from clues and try to mod it in themselves?

I just wonder exactly how much more amazing the game could have been if they had been given the time and resources to finish it properly.

The game really doesn't promote or reward exploration. You'll find those areas that seemingly have nothing in them, or that feel like they're hinting at content that never made it in, are actually locations to pick something up tied to some quest or other. Like Deathclaw caves that just feel barren and empty when you're out exploring, but that contain Deathclaw eggs for Red Lucy of The Thorn when you arrive there as part of a quest. Eggs that you'll probably miss (or possibly not be able to select) if not on the quest. You could explore Vault 22 and get the story of what happened there, and read the terminals with Keely's research on them, but never encounter Keely, and never find anything of note in the Vault save for data that you're not sure where to use, and a whole lotta nothin' else. More than most of the terminals in the Vaults are pretty sparse, more than most of the caves are occupied by creatures but are too well lit, and also sparse.

Sticking to the path, and gravitating toward people (seeking out quest-givers) makes the game feel more alive, and full, and these people will give you quests that take you into places with objectives, and you have a focal point for your journey. The Deathclaw caves become something you have to explore when searching for their eggs, and Vault 22 becomes an engaging place to be when you're working for the OSI, and also searching for a missing researcher. But yeah exploration... in Fallout 3 for example... was rewarding IMO, but finding and completing quests is what NV is all about. The places that genuinely have nothing to do with quests are pretty much abandoned shacks, empty prospector camps, and toxic dumps. Nothing locations, and the nothing locations I think you're referencing, I think feel like nothing places because you have no reason to be there.

As to karma... I've only played neutral characters, good characters, so haven't had sufficient negative karma to know if the game world reacts differently to my character. But I agree, good karma seems to be dished out in droves, killing something I would have killed anyway - because it was trying to kill me - should not reward me with good karma.

The karma system almost feels like something they forgot to remove from FO3. Getting karma for killing feral ghouls doesn't make much sense to me - they act like enraged animals, there's not much of a moral choice involved either way.

I much prefer the faction reputation system in any case, it seems to fit the setting better.

Looks like that Obsidian did the same thing that the formers members at Black Isle And Interplay did it with FO1 and FO2, You kill a good/evil related thing, you got good/bad karma, even if the message pop-up doesnt appear telling you that, and even if you dont want to, and you cant change that

IE, you kill a slaver, you got good karma, you kill a a Caravan Master, you got bad karma

I hate karma. I prefer making my own judgements on my character.

karma is blind to personal wants though, it's a judgement of your actions system. Punch a kid IRL so you can take their toy, thats bad karma right there. Convince a junkie to change their ways? Good karma. It's because karma, in and out of game, is how the world sees and reacts to you.

Karma is a joke in FNV its not even worth looking at. Its so messed up.

They should just take it out and focus on reputation.

They did, it only effects one or two things

I disagree. #1 you can go to Quarry Junction and get the eggs. You've already cleared it out and there are no Deathclaws around. #2 Exploring F3 was tedious and boring to me. How many subways can one person go into? I prefer roaming topside. In NV exploring gets you unique weapons (YCS, Ratslayer,Tesla Cannon, Plasma Protoype) and you meet some interesting people. Hell I almost missed No-Bark due to the way I played, I happened to make it to Novac around nightfall and after haphazardly talking to the farmers I walked out back JUST at midnight and killed the nightkin.

But this is a forum, we can disagree.

You're putting Ferals out of their misery. They used to be human. Seems you only get good karma when you sneak attack them too.

You can, but that doesn't make the Deathclaw caves any less boring to explore when you come upon them when you're, oh, I dunno, out exploring. You find there are no stories being told in placed items, there are no bodies of mercs or prospectors laying around, their equipment telling a tale, or the lack of bullets they were carrying hinting at why they got owned, or perhaps a note that reads, "I've found another cave, I'll make camp outside tonight and go check it out in the morning. There was a camp here when I arrived, (you the player passed the camp outside the cave) which is a good sign that there's nothing like the beasts I had to contend with in the last cave. Maybe that [censored] back at Novac was full of it, and there is no hoard of caps... but I have to find out for myself, Jessie needs that medicine!"

What you find is an empty cave (save for the Deathclaws, obviously) with NO placed items, no dead bodies (save a BoS Paladin who was obviously, clearly placed there to give the player a unique weapon, but who is OBVIOUSLY placed there, and didn't fight her way there, or camp anywhere near there, or look half-mauled by Deathclaws, or have any info about why she was there, she's just so simply there.) The cave is extremely well lit, removing any tension from your exploration, and essentially, it feels like a forced area, with not enough content to justify it. That is until you encounter Red Lucy and your quest marker's lead you there, and your sole purpose is to retrieve eggs. The player who likes the location is the one who found it through that quest, not the one who stumbled upon it while exploring.



Exploring topside in FO3 is what I'm talking about. You could spend all day stumbling across locations, and you wouldn't need a quest that got you there, or if there was a quest associated with the area you'd likely encounter somebody associated with it. (Unlike Keely being strangely missing from Vault 22 until you activate the quest at McCarren. Meaning if you do explore without a quest, you'll end up back in Vault 22 when you get the quest, and Keely will magically appear trapped in the cave, that is not guarded by anything because you wiped it all out on your first visit while exploring... so... why is she sitting there?)

When you talked to the farmers you activated the Nightkin encounter - he's not there unless you activate the quest. (He appears during the day too, when you leave the house with the quest.) Lots and lots of NV's areas simply aren't worth checking out without a quest. My first-play through was pretty much spent going from blank arrow to blank arrow, location after location, and honestly without quests most of them you can ignore, the areas rarely tell a story, and a lot exist as a marker for a fetch quest. I wouldn't mind stumbling upon Ranger camps, and having my reputation yield some ammo or water, or having one of the Rangers task me with a job to do, but pretty much all of the Ranger camps exist for the Comm Officer quest started at Forlorn Hope.

The main areas of New Vegas are awesome. But the Vaults don't offer as many recordings to listen to or terminal entries to read. Fallout 3 was more about exploring, Vegas, not so much. I'm pretty sure you can enter the exact same cave in different locations throughout the Mojave, lit the same, with the same layout, but with Geckos instead of Deathclaws. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing New Vegas, it's just a lot more enjoyable when you take my advice in the first post and go looking for quests that take you out into the wilderness, rather than going out into wilderness without quests, to explore... doesn't make it a bad game by any stretch. I LOVE it.



Indeed.

Yah really its just pointless.

You didn t get good karma for killing a feral or a raider in fo3. That s nv s baby .

Karma is dumb any way. My people do what they do........ They don t really care what the game thinks.

This probably the only time I ll ever 100% agree with alex.

Karma has no point.............Rep does..................

I did notice this. If they r coming after u I don t think u get the karma, but if they don t see you and u 1 shot them, thsn you get good karma

Actually, I would like to see quest flow effected by karma, or some dialog options. Although I the way karma gain is pretty lame.

Fallout is MEANT to be a free roam game. They really should've put more into free-roam, instead of putting random patrols in, or placing a crater with a vertibird. Why did it crash? Is is Daisy's vertibird? Could the NCR or the Brotherhood take it, make it into a scouting Vehicle, for worthy place to make a chapter? Honestly, Obsidian, what happened?

Fallout 1 and 2 were map nodes, and had many more random encounters.

Stealth kills with a silencer grant nothing at.

Sposed to be karma, shouldn't matter if anyone sees you.

That's the problem though; in NV, kill a Caravaner, you don't get bad karma. Kill almost any blameless civilian and you don't lose karma. To be honest, I kinda thought they might've addressed this in one of the patches, it's surely an oversight, it beggars belief that it could be intentional.

Stealing being worse than murder is so blummin' stupid. The karma system's all kinds of wrong in this game, as I've said many, many times.

The issue is that the devs are very careful about pointing the finger and calling something "evil." Don't get me wrong, there are some actual issues (like above, killing a random civilian not giving bad karma or the sheer AMOUNT of good karma you get for killing a ghoul), but I think we'd STILL see a struggle to maintain bad karma even if such things were fixed. If a player shoots an NCR soldier, is it because they're evil, or is it because they see the NCR's occupation of New Vegas as a disaster waiting to happen? If the player shoots a non-hostile Legionnaire, is it bad karma for shooting someone who wasn't looking for trouble, or is it justified by the fact that the Legion enslaves people and, according to the player, needs to be kept out of Vegas? Every single act of murder could be argued as justified because Vegas is one giant political scene.

But "good?" That's easy to define by comparison. If you put a dangerous wild ghoul out of his misery in a way that's quick and painless, that's good. If you offer what's essentially morphine to a man who just got the crap beaten out of his legs, that's you showing kindness. If you help people achieve their goal in order to make them happy, that's (generally) good.

I don't neccesarily think it's anything wrong with New Vegas itself, but rather, things are bound to work this way. Mr. House is definitely good when he prevents the bombs from obliterating New Vegas, but when he orders the genocide of the BoS? On paper, in black and white, of course that's bad, but Mr.House's intentions are not bad: he sees the BoS as a terrorist group that he has no choice but to deal with. The game lacks bad karma because the game ONLY points the finger at you when it's absolutely 100% sure that your intentions are bad, which very rarely happens. People are good by nature, if you want my opinion, and it's very unlikely that you would see personalities in the game that are without-a-doubt bad, because very rarely does it happen that someone INTENDS to be bad; people try to be good and have different justifications arguing what is bad and good. Imagine instead if Mr.House said he wanted you to destroy the Brotherhood "because it'll be funny." There's your dose of bad karma, but suddenly the game lacks realism...