» Mon May 07, 2012 10:12 am I personally was a bit hesitant to purchase it because I had heard about its bugginess. While it is in many places very buggy (including, unfortunately, some of what would otherwise be some of the best quests and content, such as the "Beyond the Beef" and Gomorrah quests), on the whole the game experience is very compelling and rewarding.
One major and pervasive problem throughout FNV, however, is that of poor mob pathing coupled with extremely bad terrain meshing. It is a problem that the developers have seemingly taken an attitude of calculated indifference to. I say that because the problem, which existed in Fallout 3, is considerably worse in Fallout: New Vegas, and it's worse still in the OWB DLC, suggesting that developers have come to the frankly lazy attitude that the problem just doesn't need to be ironed out in development.
Bad pathing and poor terrain meshing seem to have gotten progressively more problematic with new content, but these issues become almost insurmountable towards the latter half of the OWB DLC, specifically in the Nightstalker X-8 test.
The Nightstalkers will, at least several times on any given playthrough, jump through walls, floors, doors, and forcefields to get to the player. I have seen them do this even when my character is standing a good ten meters away from the Nightstalker.
Their pathing is overly aggressive but it is also erratic. Very often, the Nightstalkers will be within three meters of the player but be seemingly unable to find a path to the player. This is especially common if the player is standing on an innocuous object such as a desk, but it can also happen if the player is standing on ground that visually appears to be level with and offers no obstruction to the mob. The problem is that the terrain is patchwork and the pathing AI doesn't see many level surfaces as contiguous.
Another problem is that when operating in groups, Nightstalkers have terrible "fire in theater" syndrome. If three of them are together and the player does not have his back to a wall, they will often path into each other and fail to attack the player. This is not consistent, however; sometimes they will instead box the player in, which is more challenging but tactically correct.
I prefer the Chainsaw, and something I've noticed is that Nightstalkers and Cyber Dogs will often "impale" themselves on the blade. If these beasts attack the player frontally and the player has the weapon special activated, the mob will simply continue to path towards the player, without attacking, and die in a matter of seconds. Other times, however, the opposite will happen, and the mob will seemingly position itself at an angle, or inside the player/weapon model, and kill the player in a few seconds. This problem is compounded by their extremely high melee damage and excessive deviance range in their damage; on Very Hard difficulty a Nightstalker hits for about 75% of unbuffed player health, leaving no window to compensate or adjust. But this is not consistent either.
Too many pulls comes down to luck-of-the-draw as to how the mob chooses to path, and how the melee damage dice come up. It's very frustrating and dramatically reduces the fun factor to be stuck in a cycle of "save game, pull, reload game, pull, reload game, save game, pull" not because of player error but because the player is totally at the mercy of the pathing AI and damage RNG.
It also feels as if Bethesda's developers have tried to compensate for these flaws through really crude, heavy-handed approaches (such as the Implant GRX and anti-crippling perks, which mostly serve to prevent the player from being unable to extricate himself from situations caused by poor pathing). It's a common problem with DLCs and expansions that they unbalance gameplay through attempting to counterbalance excessively powerful game elements (making the game a cheesefest) but the problem here is that it feels like that excessive power is really just a shill for problems with the pathing AI and terrain design. That's just my perception, maybe I'm being overly cynical.
In short:
- Please patch Nightstalker pathing in the DLC
- Do more internal testing and corrective action concerning terrain meshing in future content using the Oblivion engine - don't just release really bad terrains and take what comes off as a complacent "it will work itself out" attitude
