Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money Add-On: your thoughts?

[Sigourn]

I just finished Dead Money for the first time today. I was going to make a rant post, but it's best if I just make a much shorter comment here.

I really enjoyed the setting as an idea, the NPCs, and the backstory around those long dead, particularly Vera. I feel like the ending would have left me much more sad if I had actually enjoyed the DLC, but the gameplay was... awful. The deserts of the Mojave were a welcomed sight.

My issues with the DLC were purely from a gameplay point of view. I feel the DLC did literally nothing well when it came to gameplay.

• The radio signals, for starters. When I first got to the police station, I thought "cool, I have to be on the lookout for these!". What I got instead was "fuck, I need to savescum in order to find where the signals come from". And sadly it got old pretty quick, I died countless of times because they were so hidden you weren't meant to find them on the spot (for example, they were behind a wall).
• Traps having no consequences. Bomb goes off, reload the save and try again. Wow, the possibilities!
• The Ghost People and New Vegas' awful gunplay. Now, I don't want to blame Obsidian for the gunplay since it's pretty much Bethesda's fault. But if you know the gunplay in your game is bad, why make an enemy type that jumps around from place to place, forcing you to spam V.A.T.S. to him them? I was playing with VATS Alternative - A Comprehensive Bullet Time Mod, and fighting them was infuriating. Even with time slowed down by 50%, it was HARD to land a shot on them, or hit them with their own spears (which quickly became my favorite way to hunt them down). Even worse is that the fights themselves weren't tough; the real difficulty came from them swarming me because I kept missing my shots.
• The DLC discouraged thorough exploration. And this happened because of the Cloud draining your health all the time, and the lack of of supplies in Hardcore mode. If Obsidian had truly wanted this, then they shouldn't have littered the DLC with Dean Domino's Stashes, playing cards, and the elusive Snowglobe.
• Even without the Cloud busting my balls there's still the samey-ness of the entire Villa. I get it, the place has the same artsyle all over the place because it is a villa. That still doesn't excuse how it is near impossible to orientate yourself without the map. It's ridiculous and unforgiveable. Even during the day I had to rely on the map because it was a nightmare to traverse. And kudos to Bethesda for that garbage they call a "local map" and that's still being used in Fallout 4.
• The repetitiveness of the quests. "Find the companion", "Now do it two more times", "Now deliver a companion to a location", "Now do it two more times", "Now find the companion in the casino!", and so on...
• Then there's the mindblowingly stupid idea of having the player face Dog on his own, who is ridiculously overpowered in comparison to any other enemy in the DLC. Seriously, I was about to kill him through console commands before he started speaking to me. And even then, I had to savescum just to stop him from fighting by reading a Meeting People magazine.
• The bugs and the oversights. New Vegas is buggy, no surprises there. What I didn't expect was having bugs when using Yukichigai's Unofficial Patch. And perhaps most annoying of all are the oversights. I'm talking Christine's voice being near silent and suddenly shouting when talking to her in the Suites, or Father Elijah dropping the "speakers" act and talking as if he was next to you during the Vault sequence. I was unable to shut off the gas valves in the kitchen, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do it, Dog sets off his collar way too fast before I can even turn off a second gas valve, let alone three.
• Oh, and the nightmarish FPS drops in the villa. Can't forget about those.

I can't begin to tell you how annoyed I was by Dead Money. There wasn't any challenge, there was only tediousness. I didn't see the alleged "survivalism" of the DLC, I never ran out of bullets or supplies.

Overall, I consider it to be a fantastic story and setting overshadowed by bugs, oversights, bad design decisions and awful gameplay. Is the story worth it? Not really, I would have been better off looking at the character's pictures on a wiki and reading the story, imagining better looking locations in my mind, because what I got was a samey-looking reddish villa for the first half of the DLC, sort of nice looking casino for the second half, and finishing with the archetypical Bethesda "huge factory" level at the end. What I expected was much, much more. If this is truly considered to be one of the best New Vegas DLCs, I fear for Old World Blues. So far it's the only DLC I've left to do, everything else has just been "good characters, terrible DLC" material.

I love New Vegas, but I feel Obsidian fucked up with this one. It's like one of those long movies where the story was nice, but you won't sit through 3 hours of that shit again just for the ending.

What are your thoughts?

 

[Comte]

I thought it was the best of the DLC released for the game. I know a lot of saps don't like it including yourself.

 

[Starwars]

I pretty much agree with everything you say. Greatly enjoy the story and characters, and love the idea behind it at all. But the engine is just too shitty to make it fun to play. And some of the ideas are just plain bad (the radios, I mean... come the fuck on). The ghost people are pretty boring enemies and despite its "hardcore" thing, it's very easy to scrounge up a whole bunch of equipment.

Best story of the DLC by quite a bit, but the most tedious to play through (except maybe Old World Blues, but that's tedious in a different way).

Nowadays, I like Honest Hearts the best ironically enough. It was the one I thought was easily the worst when I first played through them but I find that one to be the best one to replay. Old World Blues is probably the one I dislike the most. Dead Money and Lonesome Road are in the middle for me.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

It's been a while since I played Dead Money but I remember it being balls-to-the-wall hard but good. My favorite New Vegas DLC was probably the one with all those brains in a can. I mean, giant robotic radscorpions! :D

 

[Sigourn]

I pretty much agree with everything you say. Greatly enjoy the story and characters, and love the idea behind it at all. But the engine is just too shitty to make it fun to play. And some of the ideas are just plain bad (the radios, I mean... come the fuck on). The ghost people are pretty boring enemies and despite its "hardcore" thing, it's very easy to scrounge up a whole bunch of equipment.

Best story of the DLC by quite a bit, but the most tedious to play through (except maybe Old World Blues, but that's tedious in a different way).

Nowadays, I like Honest Hearts the best ironically enough. It was the one I thought was easily the worst when I first played through them but I find that one to be the best one to replay.

I enjoyed Honest Hearts my first time through, and looking back on it it's probably my favorite DLC: the characters and the Zion valley, which is beautiful (well, "beautiful" by GameBryo standards).

I played Dead Money with JSawyer Ultimate, and I honestyl wasn't exactl "scrounging for ammunition". It was mostly a matter of Stimpaks to cure that stupid red cloud, and EVEN THEN I only died whenever my collar exploded or when my limbs were all crippled and I had to make it all the way from the Campanas del Sol across a field of Ghost People. That part made me ragequit, between the crippled limbs, the swarm of Ghost People, and my vision doing that "black out" effect... FUCK.

 

[Sentinel]

I absolutely loved it. It's my favourite New Vegas DLC by far. Oddly enough, I don't remember experiencing any annoyances when I played the DLC, and I went in on Very Hard difficulty (OWB by comparison was a fucking nightmare - so much so that it made me quit my playthrough for some 7 months).

I thought the way it explored the themes of letting go of something was really well done. It was quite painful leaving all those bars of gold behind me while having some juicy Gun Runner's Arsenal loot I wanted to grab and needed caps for.

 

[Sigourn]

I absolutely loved it. It's my favourite New Vegas DLC by far. Oddly enough, I don't remember experiencing any annoyances when I played the DLC, and I went in on Very Hard difficulty (OWB by comparison was a fucking nightmare - so much so that it made me quit my playthrough for some 7 months).

I thought the way it explored the themes of letting go of something was really well done. It was quite painful leaving all those bars of gold behind me while having some juicy Gun Runner's Arsenal loot I wanted to grab and needed caps for.

The part that got to me the most were Vera's holograms crying for Sinclair. Bethesda got us used to the stupid skeletons in funny poses, and some times we do get to hear people talking about the end of the world through holotapes.

But watching the hologram go from room to room and the voice acting being SO GOOD really made it a fantastic moment, especially when I was sneaking through the rooms and Vera said "Sinclair, is that you?".

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

Shit gameplay, good story sums it up.

 

[Ziggy]

feels weird on some ninth-tenth playthrough going into a thing about letting go

 

[cruelio]

I just finished Dead Money for the first time today. I was going to make a rant post, but it's best if I just make a much shorter comment here.

I really enjoyed the setting as an idea, the NPCs, and the backstory around those long dead, particularly Vera. I feel like the ending would have left me much more sad if I had actually enjoyed the DLC, but the gameplay was... awful. The deserts of the Mojave were a welcomed sight.

My issues with the DLC were purely from a gameplay point of view. I feel the DLC did literally nothing well when it came to gameplay.

• The radio signals, for starters. When I first got to the police station, I thought "cool, I have to be on the lookout for these!". What I got instead was "fuck, I need to savescum in order to find where the signals come from". And sadly it got old pretty quick, I died countless of times because they were so hidden you weren't meant to find them on the spot (for example, they were behind a wall).
• Traps having no consequences. Bomb goes off, reload the save and try again. Wow, the possibilities!
• The Ghost People and New Vegas' awful gunplay. Now, I don't want to blame Obsidian for the gunplay since it's pretty much Bethesda's fault. But if you know the gunplay in your game is bad, why make an enemy type that jumps around from place to place, forcing you to spam V.A.T.S. to him them? I was playing with VATS Alternative - A Comprehensive Bullet Time Mod, and fighting them was infuriating. Even with time slowed down by 50%, it was HARD to land a shot on them, or hit them with their own spears (which quickly became my favorite way to hunt them down). Even worse is that the fights themselves weren't tough; the real difficulty came from them swarming me because I kept missing my shots.
• The DLC discouraged thorough exploration. And this happened because of the Cloud draining your health all the time, and the lack of of supplies in Hardcore mode. If Obsidian had truly wanted this, then they shouldn't have littered the DLC with Dean Domino's Stashes, playing cards, and the elusive Snowglobe.
• Even without the Cloud busting my balls there's still the samey-ness of the entire Villa. I get it, the place has the same artsyle all over the place because it is a villa. That still doesn't excuse how it is near impossible to orientate yourself without the map. It's ridiculous and unforgiveable. Even during the day I had to rely on the map because it was a nightmare to traverse. And kudos to Bethesda for that garbage they call a "local map" and that's still being used in Fallout 4.
• The repetitiveness of the quests. "Find the companion", "Now do it two more times", "Now deliver a companion to a location", "Now do it two more times", "Now find the companion in the casino!", and so on...
• Then there's the mindblowingly stupid idea of having the player face Dog on his own, who is ridiculously overpowered in comparison to any other enemy in the DLC. Seriously, I was about to kill him through console commands before he started speaking to me. And even then, I had to savescum just to stop him from fighting by reading a Meeting People magazine.
• The bugs and the oversights. New Vegas is buggy, no surprises there. What I didn't expect was having bugs when using Yukichigai's Unofficial Patch. And perhaps most annoying of all are the oversights. I'm talking Christine's voice being near silent and suddenly shouting when talking to her in the Suites, or Father Elijah dropping the "speakers" act and talking as if he was next to you during the Vault sequence. I was unable to shut off the gas valves in the kitchen, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do it, Dog sets off his collar way too fast before I can even turn off a second gas valve, let alone three.
• Oh, and the nightmarish FPS drops in the villa. Can't forget about those.

I can't begin to tell you how annoyed I was by Dead Money. There wasn't any challenge, there was only tediousness. I didn't see the alleged "survivalism" of the DLC, I never ran out of bullets or supplies.

Overall, I consider it to be a fantastic story and setting overshadowed by bugs, oversights, bad design decisions and awful gameplay. Is the story worth it? Not really, I would have been better off looking at the character's pictures on a wiki and reading the story, imagining better looking locations in my mind, because what I got was a samey-looking reddish villa for the first half of the DLC, sort of nice looking casino for the second half, and finishing with the archetypical Bethesda "huge factory" level at the end. What I expected was much, much more. If this is truly considered to be one of the best New Vegas DLCs, I fear for Old World Blues. So far it's the only DLC I've left to do, everything else has just been "good characters, terrible DLC" material.

I love New Vegas, but I feel Obsidian fucked up with this one. It's like one of those long movies where the story was nice, but you won't sit through 3 hours of that shit again just for the ending.

What are your thoughts?

It sounds like both you and your computer are garbage op, as I had none of these issues. Chears!

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Traps having no consequences. Bomb goes off, reload the save and try again. Wow, the possibilities!

Light Stepper perk.

The Ghost People and New Vegas' awful gunplay. Now, I don't want to blame Obsidian for the gunplay since it's pretty much Bethesda's fault. But if you know the gunplay in your game is bad, why make an enemy type that jumps around from place to place, forcing you to spam V.A.T.S. to him them? I was playing with VATS Alternative - A Comprehensive Bullet Time Mod, and fighting them was infuriating. Even with time slowed down by 50%, it was HARD to land a shot on them, or hit them with their own spears (which quickly became my favorite way to hunt them down). Even worse is that the fights themselves weren't tough; the real difficulty came from them swarming me because I kept missing my shots.

Melee.

The DLC discouraged thorough exploration. And this happened because of the Cloud draining your health all the time, and the lack of of supplies in Hardcore mode. If Obsidian had truly wanted this, then they shouldn't have littered the DLC with Dean Domino's Stashes, playing cards, and the elusive Snowglobe.

Didn't hinder exploration much.

I get it, the place has the same artsyle all over the place because it is a villa. That still doesn't excuse how it is near impossible to orientate yourself without the map. It's ridiculous and unforgiveable.

It's not that bad and why is having to use a map a bad thing?

The bugs and the oversights. New Vegas is buggy, no surprises there. What I didn't expect was having bugs when using Yukichigai's Unofficial Patch. And perhaps most annoying of all are the oversights. I'm talking Christine's voice being near silent and suddenly shouting when talking to her in the Suites, or Father Elijah dropping the "speakers" act and talking as if he was next to you during the Vault sequence. I was unable to shut off the gas valves in the kitchen, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do it, Dog sets off his collar way too fast before I can even turn off a second gas valve, let alone three.

Okay, I had no issues.

Oh, and the nightmarish FPS drops in the villa. Can't forget about those.

Might've been your mods? Seriously man, I had no issues.

I never ran out of bullets or supplies.

Then why is exploration, specifically:

The DLC discouraged thorough exploration. And this happened because of the Cloud draining your health all the time, and the lack of of supplies in Hardcore mode. If Obsidian had truly wanted this, then they shouldn't have littered the DLC with Dean Domino's Stashes, playing cards, and the elusive Snowglobe.

a problem? Pick one, either you never ran out or they were hard to obtain.

 

[Sigourn]

Light Stepper perk.

1) Light Step Perk doesn't affect the radios detonating your collar.
2) The problem isn't dying. The problem it's such a cheap tactic that isn't fun in any way or form because there are no consequences to live with after having your collar go off.

Melee.

Not all of us especialize in Melee, and it's no excuse for the gunplay being bad.

Didn't hinder exploration much.

To me it did, but to each their own.

It's not that bad and why is having to use a map a bad thing?

Because the map is garbage in the Fallout games and has always been garbage. You see tons of lines but aren't quite sure what each line means, or whether they are playable spaces, or anything.

Might've been your mods? Seriously man, I had no issues.

I am using mods and of course my FPS is lower than vanilla. But Dead Money is a whole different story, which means the problem isn't the mods themselves, but Dead Money which has bad FPS compared to the base game.

I never ran out of bullets or supplies.

Then why is exploration, specifically:

The DLC discouraged thorough exploration. And this happened because of the Cloud draining your health all the time, and the lack of of supplies in Hardcore mode. If Obsidian had truly wanted this, then they shouldn't have littered the DLC with Dean Domino's Stashes, playing cards, and the elusive Snowglobe.

a problem? Pick one, either you never ran out or they were hard to obtain.[/QUOTE]

The only stuff that was hard to obtain were Stimpaks, and even "hard" is overestimating it. "Hard" is having to loot everything and hope you find a Stimpak, whereas in Dead Money they are just limited by the amount of chips you find.

I never ran out of bullets, weapons, magazines, basically anything sans Stimpaks (and Rad-Away, if you went the "drink toilet water to regain HP" route). It never felt survivalist because there was hardly any management of resources.

 

[Mexi]

It was my favorite DLC. 10/10

 

[valcik]

Watch out for signs written on walls next time, there are huge white arrows or warning signs pointing to most of the radios/speakers..

 

[Vorark]

Dead Money is excellent. Never had a problem with the collars, red fog or the holograms, which are the three things most people complain about. I went there as a gun focused character and made due with the police pistol and the riffle. Better than OWB and its hp sponges.

 

[Master]

Dead Money is a piece of shit and like everything else with NV it needs a mod to fix it. Yeah a real seal of quality that is. There actually is such a mod but i cant remember how it was called. Fuck! In any case DO NOT play without this mod. It should definitely be on that Sigourns list of Essential mods.

I cant even remember what it does, but i know how when i first tried DM unmoded i thought: "what a fuck... Fuck this!" So i immediately looked up for a mod and there it was, fixing almost all my complaints.

Except the traps. I knew that DM will be like a dungeon full of traps and i just dont want to remember how NV handles them but i know it was fucking horrible, so i decided not to make another step until that issue was fixed. This was done by a separate mod called Advanced Recon Trap Detection. It should also be on that list.

Link
http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/39476/?

What it does is it makes the traps glow green if you have the required stats. Fucking genius! Why Obsidian didnt implement this? I dont know but it must be Bethesdas shitty engine that somehow prevented them. That damn Bethesda...

 

[Sigourn]

Dead Money is a piece of shit and like everything else with NV it needs a mod to fix it. Yeah a real seal of quality that is. There actually is such a mod but i cant remember how it was called. Fuck! In any case DO NOT play without this mod. It should definitely be on that Sigourns list of Essential mods.

I cant even remember what it does, but i know how when i first tried DM unmoded i thought: "what a fuck... Fuck this!" So i immediately looked up for a mod and there it was, fixing almost all my complaints.

Except the traps. I knew that DM will be like a dungeon full of traps and i just dont want to remember how NV handles them but i know it was fucking horrible, so i decided not to make another step until that issue was fixed. This was done by a separate mod called Advanced Recon Trap Detection. It should also be on that list.

Link
http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/39476/?

What it does is it makes the traps glow green if you have the required stats. Fucking genius! Why Obsidian didnt implement this? I dont know but it must be Bethesdas shitty engine that somehow prevented them. That damn Bethesda...

That trap mod is interesting... I'll see if I can isolate the Perk from everything else.

 

[Iznaliu]

feels weird on some ninth-tenth playthrough going into a thing about letting go

I don't see why people play RPGs 9-10 times, but that's just me.

 

[undecaf]

Dead Money was the sort of DLC that had a nice premise and a neat cast, but also something I was extremely relieved that it was over once it was. It was very heavyhanded and choresome both in its style and gameplay. It was a relatively memorable and even good at times, but it's not something I'd want to return to.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I've made the game shit by installing some shit mods made by shit people who have shit for brains.

Indeed.

 

[laclongquan]

I know your pain.

Yeah, i used to get that all the time playing Dead Money. Only when I am familiar enough with that setting did I start to enjoy it a little bit.

To get combat over quickly:

1. I use chems anywhere I can get away with.
2. The perk that allow hand made ammo? Yeah, that. I dont use the pistols much unless it's 92-100%. The energy combat shotgun (holorifle?) I use the junk cells to get increase damage and use supply to repair it. That way enemy die in almost one shot.

 

[Beastro]

I never found the cloud much of a drain and whenever I needed to go out into it for an extended period I had enough stims to cover me. Even then the DLC gets rid of all of it at the end if you want to freely explore.

The jumpers were annoying until I got into the habit of sneaking into every new area and looking for heads to shoot. Could usually get a couple because they could react which was enough in most areas.

 

[Jarmaro]

One of the worst DLCs I've ever played. Everything was dissapointing, fucking stupid city with those annoying ghouls, lack of proper weapon, concept of city itself, vendor machines, characters, patroling holograms are infinitly retarded, pretentious annoucing of Lonesome Road (well, every DLC has it), story that makes sense only on the surface, most annoying gameplay mechanics I can think of.
When I hit the Casino I was relieved, it's over, done with the city and ghouls and other shit. And then? It all happens again.
3/10, avoid in every Fallout:NV playtroughs.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

One of the worst DLCs I've ever played. Everything was dissapointing, fucking stupid city with those annoying ghouls, lack of proper weapon, concept of city itself, vendor machines, characters, patroling holograms are infinitly retarded, pretentious annoucing of Lonesome Road (well, every DLC has it), story that makes sense only on the surface, most annoying gameplay mechanics I can think of.
When I hit the Casino I was relieved, it's over, done with the city and ghouls and other shit. And then? It all happens again.
3/10, avoid in every Fallout:NV playtroughs.

This, my boy, is why you oughta roll a barbarian.

 

[Jarmaro]

This, my boy, is why you oughta roll a barbarian.

I finished New Vegas two days ago, haven't got enough of fallout so started Fallout: Resurrection... And you know what?

Spoiler

Nearly all the time I am thinking about doing one more playtrough as unarmed/malee barbarian who slaughters everyone.
All the time.
Be gone evil spirit.
You tainted my mind.

Spoiler

I can't. I already spend 60h on NV this week