There isn’t much in the way of Obsidian-related news this week, Dragons and Dragonettes. Really just one item:

J.E. Sawyer’s mod for Fallout: New Vegas has hit version 3.0

What makes this particular mod interesting is that its author, J.E. Sawyer, was the project director for New Vegas at Obsidian. His mod increases the game’s overall difficulty, and also makes several changes to its balancing.

This latest update continues the trend of balance adjustments, and also fixes a number of bugs.

Just to give you all an idea of what the mod does for the game, here’s one of the changes that version 3 makes:

IsHardcore condition on raw meat ST reduction removed. This means you will always suffer ST loss from eating raw meat unless you have Lead Belly.

As one burger chain or another said in one of its advertising campaigns a couple of years ago: “Meat. Fire. Good.”

The Rhythm of the Quest

Rowan Kaiser has published another piece at Joystiq, part of his ongoing series looking at Western RPGs, in which he discusses the differences between quests in Fallout 3 and quests in Fallout: New Vegas, springboarding into his analysys after posing a question about those quests in some games that challenge the living hell out of you, frustratingly so, and then later become somehow memorable.

His overall analysis would seem to be that Fallout 3 offers such moments of frustration and enlightement as part of its main quest, whereas New Vegas does not. The DLC for New Vegas, however…

Have you ever been horribly frustrated by one part of a game, only to think of it as the best and most memorable section of that game in retrospect? It’s the ruins of D.C. for me. I played Fallout 3 on the PC a year or so after release, so the first thing I did was load up on mods, introducing different play balance, graphics, more weapons, and most motivating of all, more music for Galaxy News Radio. But at the start of the game, GNR is in trouble and the station’s signal is weak. So I went to fix it as soon as I could.

When I went into the ruins of D.C., I wasn’t ready. By heading in that direction almost immediately, I skipped doing smaller-scale quests, which would have provided more experience and better equipment. D.C. was a slog. I scrambled for ammo, for health. I explored nooks and crannies that I didn’t need to, because I hadn’t even really figured out the game’s compass yet. It was nail-bitingly tense, it was fresh, it was new, it took me hours. It was a pain, too. I died multiple times, but oh was it magnificent.

…

Fallout: New Vegas didn’t do this. Oh, sure, I still enjoyed the Fallout 3 engine, I was impressed with the writing, and I had great respect for the moral ambiguities of the choices in the main plot. But it didn’t grab me; it didn’t force me to pay attention. One quest hub tended to seem the same as the next one.

Then I went off to play my first DLC mission, “Dead Money”. This was exactly what I was looking for. My character was whisked away to a new and dangerous area, with all her equipment taken away. Instead of a storyline whose nonlinearity meant that I was never challenged, here I was not only challenged by linearity, but also the problem of finding new equipment and navigating various environmental hazards like toxic gas or fatal radio signals.

This would seem to align with comments left on the previous Obsidian article. Interesting!