I was perusing FOVN achievements on Steam and noticed some interesting numbers. First, the five achievements for Lonesome Road are listed, even though the DLC isn't out yet. Second, for the main game, players seem to heavily favor independence or the NCR over House and Caesar:

• 15.8% - Independent New Vegas
  
• 10.7% - NCR
  
• 7.6% - Mr. House
  
• 6.7% - Caesar

The really oddball thing is that the numbers only add up to about 40% of players finishing the game, and that number would include those who have done multiple playthroughs. This set me to thinking and looking at a few other achievements and I found a telling one: only about 94% of players completed the "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" achievement. In order to get this achievement, all a player needs to do is start the game and exit Doc Mitchell's house. It strikes me as odd that out of however many million installed copies of the PC version, 6% didn't even start. For the next two achievements, slightly less than 60% tracked Benny through Boulder City and only slightly more than 60% recruited even a single companion. And the achievement completion numbers just go down from there to less than 1% getting the "Artful Pocketer" achievment (picking 50 pockets).

I found it hard to believe that people would buy a game that they wouldn't play, and then the little lightbulb went on: you don't get achievements if you use the console during the current gaming session. Which raises an interesting point. Here we have a game where slightly more than 1 in 20 players felt the need to use the console at the outset and well over half felt the need to use it at some point before completing the game. I'm fairly certain that the 1 in 20 were modding SPECIAL, perks and/or starting equipment, so they can be safely ignored. But the rest would seem to indicate that most players are finding shortcomings in the game that could not be worked with or worked around. Perhaps it's an impatience issue, but probably not if we're looking at numbers that large.

No finger-pointing from my end. Your game, your character; play 'em how you'd like. But serious food for thought on the developer end of things: why is it that such a large number of players feel the need to use the console? The only reasonable conclusion I can see is that there are gameplay issues that have not been resolved to the players' satisfaction.

On a related topic, I'm lacking 3 achievements. I'll get them eventually since they're play-style related. But a progress meter of some sort would be nice. Probably a beast to code, but it would still be a nice thing for the future.

Console is the only way to fix some gamebreaking bugs.

I'm guessing that people who plays with Steam set to offline permanently won't have their achievements uploaded either?

THEY CAN'T HANDLE THE LEGION! :cryvaultboy:

Yes, also you can use the console and still gain achievements ... just save afterwards, quit and restart.



Correct, they are not recorded when in offline mode.

its because of this.

All games on steam with achievements show weird percentages like that because a large amount of people will only go online to download the game then never connect steam after that, the achievements then never get logged.