“Honest Hearts”: I Take it Back

After playing through the new “Old World Blues” DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, I decided to go back and start a new character and run through the game again with all of the existing DLCs in place. I’ll post a review of OWB in a bit, but I need to take back a couple of comments about “Honest Hearts”. On this playthrough I noticed a couple of issues that I didn’t mention in my original review, so I want to add those. Overall, I’m downgrading the DLC to a 7 (out of 10) because of them. Again, I’m tacking on half a point because they rendered Zion so nicely. I’m relatively sure that this is not something that’s unique to my installation, hence the downgrade.

Problem 1: companion pathfinding. You have three companions that you can pick up in your travels through Zion National Park. All of them exhibit the same behavior. Because of the layout, their pathfinding algorithm falls way short of where it needs to be. Because their pathfinding is so sucky, you end up at the top of the canyon, while they’re running around looking for a path to your location. It gets so bad at times that they will completely disappear from your radar. If you’re a Lone Wanderer, this isn’t such a big deal. But when you’re needing someone to watch your back and they’re nowhere to be found, you can get really hozed really fast.

Problem 2: companion aggression. This might be something that manifests in the basic game, but I hadn’t noticed it being as bad as it is here. With the great differences in vertical distance between points in the same map area, this could be due to the layout of the place, but your companions will run off after enemies at the drop of a hat. This is not such a problem in casual mode because they won’t die on you. In Hardcore mode, though, you’re going to be lucky to keep these folks alive through more than one or two encounters.

Problem 3: critter spawning. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it happen right in front of me. My character had a 10 in Perception: 8 in SPECIAL, +1 for an implant and +1 for the hat. That means I will almost always be aware of the bad guys before they’re aware of me. But I had wondered why it seemed like I was getting ambushed so frequently. I would fast travel to a location, immediately scope out the area, see no signs of hostile activity, start to go about my business and BAM! Attacked. I finally saw the problem in action at the General Store and Park Ranger HQ. I had just finished cleaning out the store and was walking to the HQ building when a Radscorpion materialized right in front of me. It didn’t come up over a rise in the ground or anything like that. It just appeared. What’s the use of pumping all of those points into an attribute that won’t help you avoid this kind of thing? I don’t think this is a game engine problem because it never happens in the Mojave. It must be something unique to this DLC and it aggravates me no end.

Problem 4: appearing/disappearing map points. On my first playthrough I had missed Clark’s final resting place at Red Gate, so I had only collected five of the six caches. I made it a point on this playthrough to try to collect all of those and still only came up with five of six. Somewhere near the northern center of the map I noticed a map point that I hadn’t discovered and headed off in that direction only to have the empty triangle marker disappear from my HUD. I circled around the area and the silly thing would appear and then disappear again. I’m pretty sure this is a cave containing the last of the caches and it frustrates me no end that I cannot find it. This might be something on my system (FONV does tend to crash and burn on occasion), but either something is on the HUD or it isn’t – there shouldn’t be any smoke and mirrors.

Because of all of these problems (most importantly the pathfinding and ambush issues), I’m going back and docking a point from my initial rating. I’ll still give it a half-point for being so pretty, but that only leaves it with a 7 instead of an 8.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 24 July 2011 at 08:15 and is filed under dlc, fallout, games, Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.