Posted August 23, 2017
Now I played through most of the Honest Hearts DLC (I just have to do the final quest(s) that start after you pick a final solution). This whole DLC is extremely lackluster. It feels boring and bland. That goes for the enviroment, and the quests, and all of the characters except for Burning Man and Daniel.
The "Follows-Chalk" NPC was supposed to be my "guide," yet all he ever did was follow me and never guide me. He should be leading the player.
I tried to do the "bring the baby calf back to its mother and try not to kill any bighorners" quest. The first time I did that quest, Follows-Chalk automatically killed a bighorner that I never attacked, even though I had his "tactics" set not to engage enemies until after I do. So I reloaded a saved game and told him to stop following me.
The second time I did that quest, I had about 8 bighorners chasing me aggressively, and when I led the baby calf to the mother, the male bighorners and the mother all started to kill each other...in other words, the game's bad AI automatically caused me to fail the optional "do not kill any bighorners" objective, because it killed them through zero fault of my own.
So I reloaded a saved game and did the quest a third time. This time the 8 or so bighorners that were chasing me had blocked me on one of the bridges, so I got fed up and killed them all, and then brought the baby calf to its mother. To complete the quest, I told Follows-Chalk something like "I had to kill some bighorners but I brought the calf back to its mother." He replied something like, "I understand, but at least the calf is back with its mother." Immediately after he said that, I killed the mother and the baby calf right in front of Follow-Chalk's face. He said absolutely nothing. I had expected the devs did not think to correct for the failure of immersion that would happen if the player did that, and I was right.
Navigating the environment of Honest Hearts was a pain because once again, the minimap is insufficient to guide the player within the game world, since it can't account for things like different elevations in the land. I had to waste a few hours being stuck in the middle of the environment, because every time I went to places where I should logically go according to the quest marker's location on the minimap, I was blocked by a dead end (i.e. I needed to be in the same spot I was in, but at a lower plane..which is something that the infuriatingly-bad minimap gives no indication of whatsoever).
Speaking of bad writing in NV, the Burned Man narrative is definitely an example of that. The narrative tells me he was covered in pitch, set on fire, and then thrown into the grand canyon, and yet he still lived and is perfectly fine other than a few burn marks (and somehow his eyes and the flesh around them remained unburned and perfectly normal? LOL!). That's ridiculous. When I asked him how he survived that, he said something like, "I survived because of God and love." That's just really bad writing. Maybe it would be okay if they established God as having an active presence in many aspects of the game world on the whole. But to pull the God card out of the blue, for Burning Man only, whereas God is present for nothing else in the game, seems like a lazy, uncreative, deus ex machina cop-out.
I couldn't care less about any of the friendly or hostile primitive tribal characters. That's all already been done before, millions of times (including the swamp quests in the Fallout 3 DLC).
Burning Man also told me that he changes all of his bandages every day. That's ridiculous! From where does he acquire his endless supplies of new bandages? How does he have time to take off all of his bandages, and then put on new bandages every day? That would take forever! And he is supposed to be leading a war at the same time. Absurd! LOL
The Burning Man voice actor and the Daniel voice actor are both excellent Those are about the only good things I can say about Honest Hearts.
It's almost like New Vegas is two different games: the innovative & creative main game is one game, and the run-of-the-mill DLCs are another game.
The medicore-to-bad gameplay, writing, and characters within New Vegas' DLCs consistently seem to drag New Vegas down to Fallout 3's level. New Vegas' DLCs really muddy the waters as to whether or not New Vegas is a better game than Fallout 3. If the contest was just New Vegas's main game vs. Fallout 3 or vs. Fallout 3 + all of FO3's DLCs, New Vegas would win.
But when one adds in New Vegas' DLCs into the contest, it begs the difficult questions: how much weight should the DLCs hold? How much is it fair to deduct from the main game's quality because the DLCs fail to live up to it, and slogging through them is an unenjoyable chore?
To Fallout 3's credit, at least its DLCs didn't take a huge nosedive in quality in comparison to its main game. They are all equally as mediocre as the main game. That is not so with New Vegas' DLCs: they feature an enormous drop in quality when compared to the New Vegas main game.
The "Follows-Chalk" NPC was supposed to be my "guide," yet all he ever did was follow me and never guide me. He should be leading the player.
I tried to do the "bring the baby calf back to its mother and try not to kill any bighorners" quest. The first time I did that quest, Follows-Chalk automatically killed a bighorner that I never attacked, even though I had his "tactics" set not to engage enemies until after I do. So I reloaded a saved game and told him to stop following me.
The second time I did that quest, I had about 8 bighorners chasing me aggressively, and when I led the baby calf to the mother, the male bighorners and the mother all started to kill each other...in other words, the game's bad AI automatically caused me to fail the optional "do not kill any bighorners" objective, because it killed them through zero fault of my own.
So I reloaded a saved game and did the quest a third time. This time the 8 or so bighorners that were chasing me had blocked me on one of the bridges, so I got fed up and killed them all, and then brought the baby calf to its mother. To complete the quest, I told Follows-Chalk something like "I had to kill some bighorners but I brought the calf back to its mother." He replied something like, "I understand, but at least the calf is back with its mother." Immediately after he said that, I killed the mother and the baby calf right in front of Follow-Chalk's face. He said absolutely nothing. I had expected the devs did not think to correct for the failure of immersion that would happen if the player did that, and I was right.
Navigating the environment of Honest Hearts was a pain because once again, the minimap is insufficient to guide the player within the game world, since it can't account for things like different elevations in the land. I had to waste a few hours being stuck in the middle of the environment, because every time I went to places where I should logically go according to the quest marker's location on the minimap, I was blocked by a dead end (i.e. I needed to be in the same spot I was in, but at a lower plane..which is something that the infuriatingly-bad minimap gives no indication of whatsoever).
Speaking of bad writing in NV, the Burned Man narrative is definitely an example of that. The narrative tells me he was covered in pitch, set on fire, and then thrown into the grand canyon, and yet he still lived and is perfectly fine other than a few burn marks (and somehow his eyes and the flesh around them remained unburned and perfectly normal? LOL!). That's ridiculous. When I asked him how he survived that, he said something like, "I survived because of God and love." That's just really bad writing. Maybe it would be okay if they established God as having an active presence in many aspects of the game world on the whole. But to pull the God card out of the blue, for Burning Man only, whereas God is present for nothing else in the game, seems like a lazy, uncreative, deus ex machina cop-out.
I couldn't care less about any of the friendly or hostile primitive tribal characters. That's all already been done before, millions of times (including the swamp quests in the Fallout 3 DLC).
Burning Man also told me that he changes all of his bandages every day. That's ridiculous! From where does he acquire his endless supplies of new bandages? How does he have time to take off all of his bandages, and then put on new bandages every day? That would take forever! And he is supposed to be leading a war at the same time. Absurd! LOL
The Burning Man voice actor and the Daniel voice actor are both excellent Those are about the only good things I can say about Honest Hearts.
It's almost like New Vegas is two different games: the innovative & creative main game is one game, and the run-of-the-mill DLCs are another game.
The medicore-to-bad gameplay, writing, and characters within New Vegas' DLCs consistently seem to drag New Vegas down to Fallout 3's level. New Vegas' DLCs really muddy the waters as to whether or not New Vegas is a better game than Fallout 3. If the contest was just New Vegas's main game vs. Fallout 3 or vs. Fallout 3 + all of FO3's DLCs, New Vegas would win.
But when one adds in New Vegas' DLCs into the contest, it begs the difficult questions: how much weight should the DLCs hold? How much is it fair to deduct from the main game's quality because the DLCs fail to live up to it, and slogging through them is an unenjoyable chore?
To Fallout 3's credit, at least its DLCs didn't take a huge nosedive in quality in comparison to its main game. They are all equally as mediocre as the main game. That is not so with New Vegas' DLCs: they feature an enormous drop in quality when compared to the New Vegas main game.
Post edited August 23, 2017 by Ancient-Red-Dragon
