» Thu Dec 08, 2011 8:53 pm http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/fallout-new-vegas
I've been gaming for more than two decades, and Fallout: New Vegas is the most broken game I've ever bought, played, or "finished" (games of this nature are so large, it's practically impossible to say you've done everything in the game, particularly with premium DLC on the horizon).
Do I expect any game to be glitchless? No in general, double no specifically for an open-ended sandbox RPG with actual hundreds of discrete locations to discover and thousands of characters to interact with. I slapped my money on the counter knowing the glowing digital window to this iteration of Fallout would have streaks, smears, and cracks running top to bottom, front to back.
There's a difference between an acceptance of flaws and what I was confronted with in NV, however. This window to NV's world wasn't just cracked and dirty, it provided such a comprehensively unpolished, chaotically messy portrait that to say the game is broken is a massive understatement, and to say it's demolished would be an understatement. If I were to accurately describe the failing of NV as a consumer product, a piece of entertainment, and a valuable investment of my time, money, and attention, the anology I'd use isn't flowery or tortured; the experience is fundamentally incomplete, as in undone, a husk, a shadow, a framework of something rich and vital, the evidence of potential, squandered and spoiled. You see, hear, and go on a tour of a wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas, but this one ain't in the Mojave, it's at the tips of your fingers every time you try to basically control and meaningfully engage in the experience of the game, from either a narrative perspective or a mechanical one.
I played the X360 version of NV, until I hit the level cap through side quests, discovery, etc. and then I completed the main quest line. During that time I encountered probably more than a thousand separate issues that either spoiled my immersion in what was happening, or made the experience unplayable. I'm not gonna list everything, because 1) if you played/are playing the game, you have no choice but to encounter these glitches, because we're all playing the same game and 2) if you worked/are working on the game, there's no excuse for not knowing, as it's your job to identify, notify, and solve major--not all--problems with your product.
What the hell, my five most memorable:
1. Low-to-high level enemy characters randomly becoming invulnerable to all types of high-level damage, from melee to nuclear.
2. Getting stuck in VATS, just before killing the last enemy in a prolonged battle.
3. Killing a main enemy (Victor), progressing to the next area via load screen, only to confront the same enemy again and killing him again.
4. Characters leaving weapons and/or body parts floating in mid-air as they transition from their introductory marks to their scripted movement routines, or leaving twitchy/flickery/unlootable duplicates of their model hovering over their corpses after they die.
5. Being unable to complete quests because of the above issues, or other more mundane ones.
The fifth one, for me, is unforgivable. You're making an RPG, so quests are your bread and butter. That's like saying you're making toast, except without bread and butter. I can at least tolerate the thousand stupid little glitches that do nothing except ruin the veracity of the moment and totally countermand any sort of zoned-in emotional or psychological trigger where all the flaws fade away and the sheer experience of what you're witnessing and participating in as observer and player overwhelms whatever the nuisance of the moment is. But if there's one thing that should be the constant beneficiary of whatever limited creative resources an RPG dev team has, it's the conception, scripting (from dialogue, to events, and most obviously, pathfinding and objective markers), and execution of the quest lines in the game, and certainly at least the main quest line. As an example, after the final battle, when all enemies were no more than conquered heaps of non-essential loot, the game didn't recognize I'd achieved the main objective, so I walked around the objective markers which were still needlessly highlighted, wondering what the hell to do, until I was teleported to the final in-game conversation--mid-dialogue--totally unaware of what was happening, why it was happening, or whether it meant anything besides the game disappointing me again. Two other quests had similar issues where the achievement of the objective wasn't recognized, so completion forever went untriggered, regardless of re-loads. They were side quests (one cost me the ability to use Power Armor, which is at least half the point of a Fallout game), but to have the same problem rear its ugly head during the climix of the story and gameplay was just pathetic.
So I seethed, and I watched the credits roll. And I saw Obsidian's QA department for Fallout: New Vegas had a whopping two credited testers. Bethesda had 17 under the main QA heading, and a group I didn't count under a sub-heading. When the developer of a game this size has two credited game testers, and relies on its publisher to catch, catalog, and correct the mistakes they made on a technological foundation that's at least five years old and has been the platform for at least three high-selling, well-received games (Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas), it's not only a professional embarrassment, it's an obvious admission of company policy and philosophy: We don't need to test for or solve this game's problems, it'll sell anyway. They're obviously right (see supporting links), and they got me this time with NV, but I refuse to be a volunteer member of Obsidian's QA staff. I will never buy another game under their banner again. The two Bethesda games preceding this one to utilize the same engine were glitchy, but, per my experience, they were not not this glitchy. There was also the small matter of being able to reach each of those games' crescendos without wondering what the hell was going on or how I literally ended up there.
If I developed Fallout: New Vegas and I put my name on it when the consensus was that the work was done, I'd be ashamed of what stands as a representation of my commitment and effort, not just embarrassed.
