Okay it's official: I fucking HATE "Old World Blues"

[Alhazred]

Hmm, Old World Blues. Thinking back, I can't actually say which of the New Vegas DLC's is my favourite, they all have something to recommend them.

Dead Money has the marvelously creepy atmosphere, the superbly written characters (God/Dog especially), and some neat but occasionally annoying gameplay mechanics (losing your gear at the start, holograms, ghost people, speakers etc). The holorifle is an excellent weapon for energy weapon users, and the automatic rifle is good if you enjoy MOAR DAKKA.

Honest Hearts has Joshua Graham and tommy guns. Nuff said. Also, Cazadors the size of a car and BEARS. Not to mention the diaries of the survivalist, which reminds one just how horrific the apocalypse was.

Old World Blues is the most interesting location to explore, as the Think Tank have covered the crater in all sorts of crazy experiment labs. Tracking down all the mods for the sink to get the robotic appliances online gives one a nice incentive to explore. And don't forget the K-9000 Cybergun, which combines two of man's best friends (guns and dogs) into one lethal package!

Lonesome Road is essentially one long dungeon crawl, but with plenty of variety thankfully. You finally get to meet Ulysses, the mysterious former courier six, and get to make a choice that impacts the wasteland in a big way. And you also get the Red Glare, a rapid fire rocket launcher that puts Fallout 3's experimental MIRV to shame.

 

[Karoshi]

I found OWB annoying as well, since the monsters are literal bullet sponges and I was running out of ammo all the time. At some point I finally realized that plasma weapon are a god send against armored or robot enemies and it became awfully easy. Killed the big robo-scorpion in 30 seconds by using my best plasma weapon.

OWB had its funny moments, but the grind and repeating the stealth or school quests was awful and kinda sucked out the fun. In the end I liked it, but I wouldn't repeat it a second time.

Surprised how many people hated Dead Money. Yes, the difficulty could be brutal, but the atmosphere and writing was superb and I loved the level design. Having to navigate in small space and occasionally switching between roofs, ground floor and everything else was an awesome experience. Besides - the ending was amazing and it blew me away.

 

[Chris Tian]

The third point I don't get, I played FO:NV on "Master" and had no problems with my stealth/sniper guy. Is this "HP/DT stacking" a bug too? Or something else bugged out on you? Otherwise i don't understand how it can be that you seem to need alot more shots than i did.

I dunno, you tell me. I JUST finished it tonight (after a relentless parade of crashes), so the experience is pretty fresh in my mind. EVERYTHING was bullet sponging except the lobotomites. As I say above, I'd be willing to attribute the problem to mods if the mods showed this tendency anywhere else. But they don't. I'm back to the Mojave now and things are dying quite normally.

I remember the HP scaling was out of control for the special mobs in Broken Steel as well, so this isn't really new territory. Makes me fearful for what awaits with Lonesome Road.

Project Nevada should not be the cause of this, I used that mod too. But if you use mods it seems one of them, or some combination of them, didn't like Old World Blues, that would explain your massive crashing issues too. Do you use "World of Pain" by any chance? I belive that mod could introduce balancing issues, under some circumstances.

I can't remember on wich level I started OWB, could be that the problem lies with the HP-scaling, like you say, and it gets disproportional difficult on high levels.

 

[Easton Dark]

Lonesome Road is so much worse in terms of enemy health. You just wait. Worst DLC IMO.

I wait for the day that Dead Money takes its rightful place as most fondly remembered DLC of New Vegas.

 

[Madman123456]

Never liked any dlc for any bethesda (or obsidian) game. Except maybe the two for morrowind, Shivering isles and maybe broken steel for fallout 3 and that only because i get to play with the big robot some more and it fixed the bullshitty ending. That chamber has more radiation then the crater where the whitehouse used to be? And my super mutant companion, impervious to radiation wont go in there? Yeah right.
I would have removed Fawkes as a companion; he'd show up at raven rock, maybe do something to get you out of there and then say "ok, now we're even, ima go see if i can find some other non stupid mutants, see ya!".


Bought honest hearts when it came out and wasn't impressed. It wasn't bad, merely rather boring, with one of those moral dilemmas that modern games must have apparently, complete with it falling on its ass.
So Daniel is absolutely sure that Cesar does not have assimilated some tribe that does know how do get around while "living off the land"? Whatever that means. If the Stuff with the dam is sorted out the legion might want to commit enough troops to run over those tribes and be done with them, no matter where they are.

Old world Blues was rather nice actually. Bullshit science and some workaround for the broken crafting system. Annoyed that you need the "empty soda bottles" to squeeze the water out of a prickly pear fruit and the empty whiskey bottle will not do? Fill up all the empty bottles at the sink.
Also, get ridiculous amounts of crafting materials by dumping previously useless stuff in there.


And with the last DLC we have this emo character with laughable angst and dodgy Philosophy.

Wonderful. Good thing the legion waited with their attack on the dam until i was done with all the crap...

 

[BabyRaptor]

The only New Vegas DLC I hated was Honest Hearts. Take all the NV DLC bar that, put it in Fallout 3, toss out The Pitt and...Fuckin' hick island DLC...and you'd have the perfect game in my opinion.

My one big rant DLC is The Pitt. I ended up siding with the owner dude, but neither of them were anything close to the solution I wanted for the issue.

I then finished the quest chain, mass murdered everyone in there except for the baby and the mother, and then left the quest area, main-lining stim-packs because the mother was chasing me with a giant gun the entire time. I was that dead-set on not leaving that baby without a parent.

Yes, I was more than a bit obsessed. But Fuck the Pitt, seriousface.

 

[nvzboy]

OP is slightly exagerrating on the strength of his enemies. I literally went into the game and did what he did, shoot the dogs with the AMR with the match ammo and it died like anything else in the game should when they get hit by that. It is a problem though that the enemies have way more health than the enemies of other DLC or the vanilla game so you are wasting a lot of ammo on killing them. It's pretty painful to return from that fetch quest to the sink with all your ammo blown and the sink's only providing me with scraps of ammo to buy.

On my replays I simply overloaded myself on ammo and craftables to make ammo when I started that dlc just to cope with the lack of ammo.

 

[Don Incognito]

One word by OWB is so hard... It's where the nightmares come from. Little ones, big ones, special ones, many of them grouped together in tight corridors. Especially after the patch that reduced the damage they do with hits, but speeds up their poison damage to warp speed...


Cazadors.



... *curls up in a corner and starts crying*


Everything else was pretty awesome though! I was laughing my butt off most the time, when i wasnt finding new corners to cry in.

Shoot the wings with VATS.

You'll see how great and powerful Cazadores are when they're flip flopping and are forced to scuttle on the ground

Spoiler alert - They're pushovers.

That's always a problem for me whenever I use VATS, its either a kill shot or nothing for me
I only ever aim for their head, torso or gun, I never think to shoot there legs to slow them down or anything

Cazadors are absolutely cake once you realize one thing: they have no armor. Just pack a SMG with ammo at all times, VATS the wings, and they go down like a ton of bricks.

 

[w9496]

The humor was alright for the first hour, but the next 4-5 became a drag. If they were going to have the jokes announced over a loudspeaker, then they should have written more of them.

I didn't have any bug problems with it, but maybe I just got lucky.

The combat isn't that tough with a decent explosives skill. A missile will cripple legs/wings/arms/everything with 1 or 2 shots, and it is hard to walk on 2 legs that don't work anymore.

Honest Hearts was still my favorite DLC, but Old World Blues is still worth playing.

 

[endtherapture]

Fallout 3 never crashed during a save for me.
New Vegas crashed horribly during regular gameplay as well as during autosaves or quick saves.
KOTOR 2 was missing half the story that fans later modded back into the game for parts to make sense.
Need I mention Alpha Protocol?
Neverwinter Nights 2?
Dungeon Siege 3?
Obsidian is good at making bad games that should have been tested better.
I've had minor bugs in Beth games but nothing game breaking bad, so until they come out with a game that doesn't take fanbased tweaks to run correctly, I'll stick to not having a high opinion of Obsidian.

FO3 and NV were equally broken and Bethesda did the quality control for NV.
NWN2 does not have any issues.
Dungeon Siege 3 does not have any issues.

Obsidian are some of the best writers in the entire industry and also innovate sequels with brilliant new gameplay - KOTOR2 and NV's gameplay was much better than their predessecors - more perks, more items, more classes etc.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

3. Most egregious, however, is the HP/DT stacking. I've never seen anything like it, and I endured the god awful albino radscorpions and Super Mutant Masters from the FO3 DLC. I'm a...I want to say level 44...character, loaded with perks, loaded with top end gear and top end ammo. My modified Anti-Material Rifle with armor piercing rounds...the gun I 2-shotted the Legendary Deathclaw with...takes 5 bullets to put down a routine cyberhound. It took 10+ to kill a random robot. And that's assuming I opened from stealth. This is not challenging, this is tedious. Let us not forget that the only source of resupply, the Sink, has 2-3 new bullets for sale every 2-3 days. Whee!

I'm not sure how you're having this problem. I went through the entire expansion using nothing other than the .45 (not even the unique model) without incident. Indeed, the military cyberdog only has a base DT of 2 meaning even the pitiful silenced .22 handgun can punch through and do damage without incident.

Even at high levels where their DT increases, the only weapon you'd routinely have such a problem with is one of the 20 gauge shotguns and even that assumes you have refused to invest in shotgun surgeon (and if you want to use a shotgun as a primary weapon, it's fairly vital to pick up) and never switch to slugs.

If you're instead talking about the robo-scorpions, which are substantially tougher, the DT is a hair higher but few models could shrug off more than a shot or two.

All of that aside, even the toughest enemy in the expansion (in terms of health and armor) has a low enough DT to easily be breached by any weapon reasonably appropriate for your level at that point. Moreover, while the anti-material rifle is certainly powerful, there are other very powerful weapons readily available that are better suited to the expansion. The Cyberdog guns are incredibly powerful for example, as is the COS Silencer Rifle (it is incredibly powerful, fairly light, and uses a commonly available ammunition). The gauss weapons use incredibly common MFC ammunition and are arguably more powerful than the Anti-Material rifle.

Really, your problem in this case is that you're using a weapon that is actually fairly bad in a lot of ways. Sure, if you're looking for single shot damage you can't beat it. In fact, the only enemy you have to fight in Old World Blues that can survive a single shot is a giant roboscorpion. But, by the same token, enemies that survive more than a few rounds from the .45 or a few 12 g. slugs are rare. Given how many easily accessible solutions there are to the problem, it is only your refusal to use those tools that is making progress slow and tedious.

-edit-
Read this post later:

I'd blame the HP sponging on my mod(s), perhaps Project Nevada, but I had absolutely no issues whatsoever with Dead Money or Honest Hearts (aside from White Legs running around with Anti Material Rifles...they still died in one shot, so no matter). I'm not even joking about the 10+ shots from my heaviest gun. The modded up dog mini-gun needed three CLIPS to kill a run of the mill robot or Nightstalker.

Most of the mods that purport to adjust difficulty do so by boosting HP and armor. Your complaint in this case is with one of the mods you have installed rather than with the content in OWB. The toughest enemy in that expansion only has a few thousand HP and a DT of 30 and can be killed with a scant handful of magazines from a weapon as simple as A Light Shining in the Darkness.

 

[Don Incognito]

Moreover, the modded up dog mini-gun needing three CLIPS to kill a nightstalker?

No. No sir. I call bullshit. A nightstalker goes down with two rounds of 10mm SMG fire in VATS. You dug your own hole on this one with your mods.

 

[DonTsetsi]

I did notice that I was killing enemies with several hits, while 1 was enough for most things in the wasteland. God bless Unarmed and it's overpowered perks. Armored foes were, as always, amusingly easy thanks to unarmed bypassing armor after a certain perk. I did try using ranged weapons, but found running towards whatever was shooting me to be a better strategy, even if it was far away.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

And here I thought that this was going to be a thread about the music genre, and I was going to have to question your taste in music.

I mean, the Blues is a great genre of music, and Blues from the "old world" (i.e. Spain in this case) are better than American Blues. I mean, the "old world" does just about everything better. Food, music, art, wine, beer, you name it. And this is coming from an American. American-born, American-raised, Europhile here.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Really, your problem in this case is that you're using a weapon that is actually fairly bad in a lot of ways. Sure, if you're looking for single shot damage you can't beat it. In fact, the only enemy you have to fight in Old World Blues that can survive a single shot is a giant roboscorpion. But, by the same token, enemies that survive more than a few rounds from the .45 or a few 12 g. slugs are rare. Given how many easily accessible solutions there are to the problem, it is only your refusal to use those tools that is making progress slow and tedious.

I do have more than one weapon. My current arsenal is a modded sniper rifle, the modded AM rifle, the All American, "Sleepytime" (GRA 10mm), a Riot Shotgun, a Dragoon Sword, and the Auto Gauss. I have next to no ammo for that last one (it uses 2mm EC or something like that, seems quite rare).

Oh shit, and the dog gun, modded up.

Most of the mods that purport to adjust difficulty do so by boosting HP and armor. Your complaint in this case is with one of the mods you have installed rather than with the content in OWB. The toughest enemy in that expansion only has a few thousand HP and a DT of 30 and can be killed with a scant handful of magazines from a weapon as simple as A Light Shining in the Darkness.

And as I say, I'd be more than willing to attribute the problem to my mods, but I don't understand why that reflects nowhere other than OWB. Why did the mods not cause issues in HH or DM? Why not in the base game? Why ONLY in OWB?

 

[loc978]

I agree the level scaling thing was bullshit (but the robots in there have nothing on that one bloatfly).
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Old_World_Blues_(add-on)#Notes

Notes
Old World Blues enemies pose a much larger threat for Couriers at Level 40+, as many enemies level with the player.

It's much more reasonable if you do it a bit earlier.

The humor... I consider it the best in the game, but some of us just like cheese, I guess.

Bugs? I dunno, by the time I played OWB, the game was fixed (and honestly, it was never half as bugged and unstable as Fallout 3). Never saw a single bug in the Big MT. You're not playing it on a console are you? I've heard New Vegas on the PS3 is... bad. Not that I'd want to try to control a crosshair with a thumbstick anyway.

 

[thehorror2]

It's definitely a hit or miss. I'll take Obsidian trying (and mostly succeeding) to be funny over Bethesda trying to be dramatic and somber any day. I'll agree the DLCs don't scale well at all, though. Nothing in the Mojave aside from Deathclaws (which couldn't get into melee with me anyway) could touch me, but OWB Lobotomites were ripping me apart. And don't even START with the one-shotting going on in Lonesome Road. I had over THREE HUNDRED HIT POINTS AND THE BEST COMBAT ARMOR AVAILABLE, and I was dying in ONE HIT.

Still a fantastic game in my eyes, though. No amount of frustration can take that away.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

And as I say, I'd be more than willing to attribute the problem to my mods, but I don't understand why that reflects nowhere other than OWB. Why did the mods not cause issues in HH or DM? Why not in the base game? Why ONLY in OWB?

Because there are variations of enemies unique to OWB?

 

[pandorum]

I can't speak to the bugs you've seen, the only one I noticed was where the Sink decides to stop restocking ammo (not that it would help much if it remembered). But Bethesda *always* sucks at the actual RPG mechanics, they get judged on their world design and writing alone for some reason.

Not Bethesda, Obsidian, they never get blamed for the shitty buggy games they make. Plus its always the same excuse "the publisher never gave us enough time", if that was the case why did you take the job if you new you were incapable of delivering the game at the time specified in your contract.