New Vegas was only linear up until you start to get near New Vegas itself. I think it's better that way than just dumping you in the middle of a kind of generic wasteland or whatever the world might be. Like take Oblivion - I have probably spent a couple dozen hours playing that game over the years, but I've never felt like I have made any real headway. I get to a point in the main story, lose interest, and just quick warp to some other town and do a couple quests there before losing interest again and just kind of wandering around aimlessly for an hour or two then getting bored with the whole thing. There isn't any thrust to it at all, it's just a bunch of locations you can wander between, none of which are really that interesting.

I suppose if New Vegas actually was just a bunch of generic locations except this time in a straight line, that wouldn't be much better, but by the time I got to New Vegas I felt like I had seen enough of the world and was invested in it enough that wandering around became much more interesting - and I'd say the linear path part is only maybe the first 1/3 of the game. They give you a set of locations with an actual rhythm to them - and I think some of them are pretty interesting - and they make sure you get a good sample of all the different elements of the world and how they interact with each other.

Also, the placement of enemies above Sloan stopping you from heading to New Vegas probably encouraged me to play for longer than I would have if I could've just made a beeline for the main attraction right away, because for one: I don't think la vegas as an idea is aesthetically or substantially interesting, just sad and lame, and secondly, it made me feel like the world had some depth to it. It wasn't just a flat here's a cave here's a town here's another similar town they all have the same stuff in them and the same people etc. I guess fallout 3 had some varied gimmicks to it's locations too, but to me the world feels flat and uninteresting compared to new vegas's slightly more structured and tiered world. You can't just run up to the super mutant village right away, you've got to earn it a little bit, and that makes it more rewarding when you actually get there (if you think a super mutant village is a really interesting idea just in of itself) because when I was climbing up that mountain and whoah it was getting snowy! I've been playing for 30 hours and I haven't seen snow yet! nearly there! I did it! and all of that kind of stuff.

You've got to take your time exploring, and I feel like new vegas gets you into the habit of that by making it very difficult to go to certain places right away and kind of tunneling you along for a while. I think of fallout 3 and I think of a pretty much uniform wasteland and then the capital area, and that's pretty much it. There is differentiation between the wasteland locations I guess, but they kind of happen to you all at once and it feels aimless to me. When I think of the new vegas map there are different phases of the world, there is the critical path segment, then new vegas, then the outer reaches of the map, and then taking these end stage parts and then interacting them with the beginning again and then there are the little areas full of deathclaws and super mutants which are geographically right next to the beginning of the game but were way beyond what you could handle back then. Go back with your super mutant granny and the robot dog and deal with it now, see what's up there!

rambling but I think I said what I meant to

It's an effective rhetoric/tool largely forgotten for a reason or another from a lot of games these days (propably equating that to sandbox games YOU CAN GO ANYWHERE IN 3D WORLDS and indie games are just variations of super metroid system with no real sense of desire of seeing things far away) like i think OoT used this effectively in other way (you see it in the distance! there's a fence blocking your path! you can see it NOW with some help! question is, how and when to get there...) along with Baldur's Gate 1 and Fallout being first open worlds to pull it out...

sorry, rambling but tbh i only saw fallout 3 for short time and played new vegas for a large chunk of time but i quit new vegas at one point and not really caring about it because the world was really just as hollow and empty as in any game... or you could say that large amount of that exploration and PLACES TO DISCOVER were pretty much carbon copy/repetition of same ideas etc... there rarely was much challenge or difference between the smaller places save the larger domains. gotta get all the achievements also fuck that map for showing all the locations (i guess it's dog showing them?), i don't care if you can lock it with modifications because i want my vanilla game. i guess some of the larger organizations promised great mystery powerful organizations and big league mindgames WHOAAAA WHAT A WAY TO DISCOVER, BROTHERHOOD STILL OWNS, for a moment your mind is buzzing with paranoia and mystery as you furiously make connections with prior signs and events... but yeah then again they never progressed this anywhere. so much for powerful bro experiences...

i guess it's asking too much of too large scale shit and programwork but then again that's the whole premise of the game ne, a megalomanic manly game of power play between factions and you are supposed to go whoa powerful... great secrets... i wanna discover. it. all. and then it throws all that meticulous, meaningless random caves and meaningless NCN and legion minimissions. i don't care if the tomorrow doesn't come for me... anthem of new vegas.
idk you all knew this all! i guess i'm saying that all said and done this is still a game with pretty big apparent looming issues and i guess its a good effort in the modern age of dying games and narrative (IT'S ENTERTAINING ALRIGHT?!? I SAID IT) but man idk only thing you still have is a POWERFUL MANLY EXPERIENCE and other regular good game behauvioristic tools as such until it gets broken by the misplanning misdesigning and misfinishing and if you got any sense of self-protection, at this point you stare the screen blankly for couple of seconds before your face morps into earlchips face in cheap 80's highlander the movie effect and you'll yelp "what am i doing, my brain is melting out from my ears. this is bad for my physical and mental health" (and YOU KNOW YOURE RIGHT BUT GAMES ARE THE OPIUM FOR MASSES. your face nevers morphs back...)

aaa im not so good with this, such a long sentences gulp... *_*'''' i-i speak no english, bad english...me stupido, me lowly gobold...

basically or COMPLEXICALLY (gulp, choose your destiny), the real question is that do we have right to enjoy these games... WHY do we want to play games time to time despite we know it won't do or find any good... why reflect on cultural debris... what am i... aahhaah i realize that i actually have some humorous point to reflect on in defense of NEW VEGAS TALK but i can't remember it! it was an okay thought at the least.

really, even =I=, dear reader, desire to play pavlovian games but for some reason i never get my fill, never satisfaction... i do not know what i seek... never content, never properly drugged...

I disagree with jamie. I loved NV for the first few days I played it. now, the only part of new vegas I still like is when you're wandering around in the beginning and don't know what to do and barely know how to play the game. I guess it gets more nonlinear and story-driven later on, but realllllllly guys, these are some pretty friggen boring concepts. an in-game story, at best, makes the game more entertaining, and this is just barely the case with some of the best fallout lore (most of it is pretty stupid and very SMIRK SMIRK NUDGE NUDGE). and I find non-linearity overrated, almost worthless, and in any case it's not a new or entertaining concept at all anymore. that feeling of being in an open and infinitely interesting world that you get in the beginning, though, that's something special. but it's about the same time as the boring faction decisions and the bulk of the non-linear quest options come up that you start to realize just how hollow, empty, and infinitely boring the NV world really is. then it's entertain yourself with dumb quests or quit

I'm always calling NV a bad game, but time and time again I find myself being intrigued by it. sometimes I go back and play it and find something special again, but it never lasts long and I go back to criticizing it. obsidian really just set their goals way too high, and the end result is a game that's only about 25% finished, with the other 75% seeming like the basic framework hastily adapted into something playable.

keep playing if you want, but not under the impression that it gets better. maybe you're missing something, or maybe f3 ruined it for you

i loved new vegas for a really long time but by the time i got to lonesome road i found myself almost hating it.

maybe it's partially self-hate for actually buying all of the dlcs, or i'm just far enough away from what i really liked about it that i can't really remember the moments that i found interesting or effective or meaningful, but i kinda doubt that's entirely the case. after lonesome road i decided to wander the wasteland a little bit because i could and thought HEY I'LL GO SOMEPLACE THAT I LIKED but i couldn't think of anyplace to go.

i think i'm just finally sick of the way the playthrough of these games work. you get some neat moments every once in a while but in between you have these profoundly prolonged periods of just roaming from one carbon-copy near-destroyed office cubicle to the next. yeah this is kinda neat for a while because there's some degree of graphical detail and occasionally you find something kinda meaningful or a skeleton whose placement and context tells a story of its own, but this is a really unsubstantial way to construct the meat of the game. in retrospect, the only area in new vegas that i actually liked was the raid on the white glove society you can optionally chose to make, where you sneak in and do a bunch of shit and give random people a hard time. i'm possibly forgetting something substantial, but that was the only area in the game that really endeavored to do things mid-dungeon to actually sustain any sort of tension or mood or really anything. oh, there was dead money, but i barely even consider that part of the new vegas experience, as it's virtually a completely standalone game beyond the fact that there's vague story crossover and you can import your avatar. and i didn't really enjoy it all that much anyway when i played it.

i don't know if i want to call this a bad game, because i think there are some bright spots. i think the problem is that fundamentally you play these games for their substance, and while there is some degree of substance in both these fallout games, there's way too much grinding/rubbish/copypaste for the totality of the experience to work particularly well, as after a while you'll just get tired of having to make an effort to find something interesting. you kinda need to play them with low expectations for finding really anything interesting to do, which i guess i did do to some extent. if you go into STOCK_RANDOM_LOCATION there's like a 5% chance there's anything interesting in there. it's cool when you find something, but kinda adds to the collective emptiness of the experience when all you find is some stockpile of caps or some weapon that you stopped using several hours ago.

dunno. didn't expect to write this much. just getting sick of videogames i guess.

wise thoughts, fellow outsiderz... but yeah, the world seemed interesting and compelling at the beginning but aasgasg i don't know, it's like you both said. fallout 1 or 2 really didn't have this problem of carbon-copy dungeons of oblivion with meaningful little scrapes scattered between all the dungeons and it's not because it's 2d! it can limit areas! more than the fact that they just really didn't put any copyshit there for extra filler.
i guess the closest equilevant oblivion fallout 3 and new vegas ever had structurally was baldur's gate 1 - you had this huge overworld screen that is filled bottom to top with wildreness areas that don't seem to differ in the representative icons that much. and it's mostly as what the icons promise, wildreness, so most of the time you are roaming and scaling the fog of war of forests or rural places meticulously to find SECRETS or QUESTS. i guess people didn't find that intriguing i guess? but for me it owned because it was exactly what oblivion tried to do which is iust goofing around/checking out beautiful/cool wildreness on sunny days in-game while the nice cheerful, low-key orcherstral music plays in the background. I'm In Canada And I Love Trekking In Wildreness, hell yeah deers and xvarts/hobgoblins...
This works incredibly well especially at the beginning of the game when you are really the underdog to anything worse than XVARTS and you are trying to get from town a to town b (which you don't know what it is and you don't know what to expect), you can decice if you want to try to avoid the main roads out of caution! but it might mean dangerous wildreness. you also arent sure what or where to expect enemies at the beginning as hired thugs may reside out in open or in eg taverns (not immediately hostile but they usually reveal themselves when they start a dialogue with you) so things are hella exciting. also the town b owns when you finally get there with your pants in yo knees/with little hp and with spells ran out...only to be confronted by some assasin again out of blue aaaaa


 

Idk all i wanna do is talk about baldur's gate 1... i love baldur's gate... basically all massive-world rpg's should evoke is being world's dog, everybody kicks you in the stomach, all you should do is lay low or play dead gulp. everybody's tough... aaa paranoia i better avoid big roads or open places, detours through dangerous places, barely staying alive. only you and leather jacket and knuckle duster... massive wildreness, intriguing world aaa IDK stupid gaming fantasies but yeah uh all the rpg's really stink hard in everything except exploration and cool places and cool stuff and uh i never got around playing romancing saga hundley but i just really liked the idea/how the story or quests or dialogue is constructed by strange chance and this is something i'd like to see more along with non-obvious dialogue choices (grey shades) leading to odd results all the time, unique dialogue avaible/this playthrough leads you to interesting discussion/new revelation or new quest or new place... also problematization of violence, why the fuck people are so eager to join you in your BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYONE journey?? ramci sets foot on stockholm, god save the criminals and crematory...groaaann rami we got justive system, your a crazy christian massmurderer....like since when violence was the only answer to everything and this is really bizarre. the artificial worlds like dnd are BUILT on this premise (elf boobs and moonscimitars and heroic violence) and i guess fallout got the closest to having TALK YOUR WAY THROUGH as legitimate option though it's pretty elementary (check hero's CHARISMA points! check hero's SPEECH skill!) but i guess the focus was on entertaiment and polar opposite solutions to stuff (violence vs dialogue) to make game making easier... i guess this is the only way... you have to admit it... don't deny it, games will stay bad forever...NOT.
make the player the world's dog! real underdog! question violence and manly models of solution, let it lead to nasty shit in unexpected cases (GROANN ill just kill the head of thieves that fixes the corruption... w-what?? an uproar in the whole city, im a wanted man by everyone...). throw that kotor 2 greyshade-shit in the game. make people sparesly join you, make them REAL PEOPLE with own motivations and reasons to join and whatnot. blah blah, i'm sure you figure out how it goes and i think this is certainly doable EVEN to big world rpg entertaiment but you pretty much need couple of good writers to write of a long time with a healthy dose of misanthropy and distrust/healthy hate to games and fantasy/scifi.
also fuck sandbox rpgs...groann i'll break ya gw... you cant control this ape, ill say and swear what i want...i yam what i yam... ran out of steam :-/

Me too i'm playing Dark soul I only killed 2 bosses and only know 2 places to go. forward or down and both are going to kill me
forward is a dragon battle and my fire resistance suck but im working on it and down has hellish ogres that happen to hit me when im trying to back off and wait for a roar for a well timed back stab.
my  first let's play of dark souls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr6duc65ZRw

playing mount&blade, love it so far. might make a big post about it soon

Well on Dark souls I got farther in both fronts to hit walls and now realizing I got about 8 or 9 path to take and none of them are going to be easy. but some are easier then others.

I've been crazy into Dark Souls and I rolled a new character. There's a bunch of items you can get very early on (the first bonfire) with some death runs that help out a lot. Did you come to the dragon on the bridge? If yo ushoot the tail with like 15-20 arrow you get a wicked badass sword.

I've been hanging out here, lots of people discussing stuff: www.reddit.com/r/darksouls

If you come across a man in a cell in the undead church free him go home as soon as you can you will find him receive your reward and then kill him that bastard screwed me good and will do the same to you. I would tell you it's a spoiler but it's for the better to tell you.

I'm using a bad ass sword but I seem to be lost in blight town I killed the poison dart bitchs and now IDK what to do there I walked pass/on the branches/roots to get a few dead ends.

You know what now that I think about it this is the first game that messed me up unknowingly. Now there is no more grinding no more spells no more check point only me and my skill will carry me in my current game.

I love how challenging it is. It's crazy hard and sometimes you just rage at how stupid a death was (WHY DID I ROLL) but I just keep coming back for more. It's hard to stop playing. It feels really good to run around and fight, and finally defeating an area just feels amazing. I'm still at the beginning technically, I beat the Gargoyles last night (I summoned two guys to help and we killed them so fast). I'm at the Capra Demon right now and this fight is fucking hard, they move so fast and those DOGS. I can't wait for the weekend where I can really get some time in on it.

I started a Pyro and I'm doing much better than my wanderer. I still need to grind a couple of levels, because I need some Dex to equip a bow, then some Str to equip the Dragon tail sword. Drake sword. Apparently it's really awesome. I have a nice Astora's Sword+1 right now but I don't know how I want to level yet, I need STR and FTH for it to be effective and well I don't want a Faith build I guess. I dont know where you get more pyromancy spells, but I want some.

Don't forget to cut the tails off of every boss that has one. They all give you awesome weapons. This game is amazing!! DDay we should try to summon each other sometime, it doesn't work that well but we could probably kick some ass.

[edit] DDay did you mean this guy that you rescued? http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/Knight+Lautrec Because he will kill the lady that upgrades flasks I think, and you find some item that lets you invade him and kill him. If you kill him first you get a ring or something, but if you do it after you get his whole suit of armor.

That will be cool I missed the gargoyle tail sadly sound like a bad ass axe I can use too. but on the bright tail I killed them on my 2nd try and I was so bad ass doing it too since I soloed it. if you would like to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmI6m-IbDG0

I know I can kill him but that's not going to bring her back is it. but at lest her death is less severe than it appears to be. it's only effects my first bonfire. here i was thinking I was bone on all bon fires.

She also upgrades your Flasks. There's 2 fire keeper's souls you can find before fighting the Gargoyles. I got my flask to +2 and it heals a LOT. Also don't forget to kindle your bonfires, it gives you 10 flasks instead of 5. They also stay kindled forever.

'
I can get 15 now because im a bad ass that defeated the catacombs so much time and souls invested in that boss run. PS the boss is easy just getting there and not getting fucked up s the goal.

20 is my max i can trow 3 in the fire for the max of 20 flasks

playing fable 2 for no reason beyond the fact that i've been too tired to do anything productive with my free time.

really my most notable comment i have on this game is that i absolutely despise myself for enjoying it.

probably giving the game too hard of a time here, but one of the things i've been too tired to do is take outstanding thoughts and put them into words

So what is it that lets you get higher flasks is it an item or something?

Also I just finally got out of Blighttown. I hate that fucking place. Also my sword (Astora's Sword) seems to be not very good at all. Took me 2 days to beat Quelaag because my sword was doing fucking 25 dmg per hit, so I had to summon help. Felt like a boss when I finally fucking took her down. Then I went through Great Hollow to Ash Lake and the hydra was way too hard again.

So now I'm back in the Burg and I got the Drake Sword and it is a bit stronger than the sword i was using, but I dunno what to go for next. I have a mainly STR build, but I'm trying to dump some stats into INT because I just upgraded my Pyro hand to +5 and INT will now factor into the spell damage. Fuck this game is hard and so much fun. However I am sort of tempted to make a Warrior or something, magic is OK but not worth wasting points on. Maybe a sorcerer to get Soul Arrow but then focus on STR and END/VIT. No sorcerer sucks. I dunno maybe Warrior. I like my Pyro but I'm at like soul level 30 or 31 so it's getting expensive to level up.

I hated her too I need help too. also it allows me to put 3 humanity in bonefires to get 20 flasks

Also your class means almost nothing but starting attributes so technically you can still make a Warrior out of your Pyro there is one good move to me and that I like about pyro and that is dark flames the one that dose more with more humanity you have.

i don't get fable 2, it has no substance on any level (be it story or gameplay wise). It is very pretty though.