Now I played most of the Dead Money add-on for New Vegas.

That was an infuriating experience. Dead Money is way worse than anything in Fallout 3 (even FO3's endless copy & pasted rubble-wall-filled streets & subway stations). If the entire New Vegas game was anything like Dead Money, then New Vegas would be a 0/10. Dead Money is not worth playing. Playing it is inherently unenjoyable and even worse, immensely frustrating & aggravating.

They never should have implemented the "speakers and radios kill you" mechanics. That was a boneheaded design decision. That is exacerbated by the fact that the game gives you zero visual cues as to where they are. I've pixel-hunted the whole environments in many different sections of Dead Money, and yet I still never found the speakers that kept killing my character. The "shielded" invulnerable speakers that cannot be destroyed even if you see them are the epitome of a boneheaded design decision.

The immortal holograms are likewise a boneheaded design decision, which is exacerbated by the fact that 95%+ of the time, it's impossible to see their emitters.

The red cloud that suffocates you to death is yet another boneheaded design decision, especially in sections where it all but guarantees your death (I.e. the warehouse where Christine has to program the computer).

The "you cannot wait or sleep in this location" HP-recovery-blocking mechanic for 98% of the Dead Money environments is yet another boneheaded design decision.

I was shocked at how bad Dead Money was. I expected the terrible gameplay to end once I finally started the gala and entered the casino. I thought the casino would be full of people and would bring back the normal types of NV quests. But no, it was just more of the same terrible gameplay which consists of constantly dying to speakers you either cannot see and/or cannot destroy.

After I went to great pains to enter the casino vault, and then I found myself back in the same warehouse where Christine programmed the computer, I was outraged! I'm not even sure if it is technically supposed to be the same warehouse or not. But either way, it's an extremely sloppy copy & paste job on the part of the devs. I spent like 5 hours navigating that warehouse the first time and venting out the red cloud of instadeath from it (which probably killed me at least 25 times before I finally figured out the correct path to vent it). Now it feels like the devs have slapped me in my face and then spit on me too by undoing all that progress and making me slog through that garbage again.

Father Elijah is not an interesting character either. He is a typical one dimensional bad guy. NV's other villains like the Think Tank Doctors, Benny, Dr. Mobius, and Caesar are all far better characters than Elijah. Even the Van Graffs are better than Elijah even though they are one dimensional too.

In my play through, Christine magically got her voice back once she was inside the casino. As far as I can tell, how that happened was never explained to me, so I have to chalk it up to very bad writing.

I'm surprised they made more DLC after Dead Money. I'm bewildered as to why anyone would have bought Dead Money as a DLC, unless they didn't know what they were getting into before they bought it. I would have expected for Dead Money to have poor sales and convince them that it's not profitable enough to make more DLCs.

Dead Money feels like it's a really bad April Fool's joke on the players, or perhaps a research experiment to see how many masochists play video games.

I prefer FNV. Others already said most pros and cons of both games so I don't have much to add, but let's see (it will probably end up being a wall of text, I tend to ramble). I am old though and played the First Fallout game when it came out, if that makes any difference for anyone.

There are many players who prefer Fallout 3 and many players who prefer Fallout New Vegas. But over the years it seems like people are starting to favor Fallout New Vegas more and more. I guess it is like a good wine or something.

Fallout 3 world doesn't feel right to me, there is no farming, everywhere is still un-looted even though the Capital Wasteland has like 100x more Raiders, Super Mutants, Mercenaries, etc than actual settlers/residents.
What do raiders raid? They sit in their raider camps all day doing nothing besides hanging and leaving around body parts and skeletons as decorations in their camps. Settlements don't make much sense (entire settlement full of kids younger than 16 years old where older people gets kicked out, a settlement built around an atomic bomb, 4 shacks on top of a broken raised highway lane, a town with people who get raided over and over by Super Mutants, Raiders and Super mutants and it still has people even though they don't know how to defend themselves, a settlement with three shacks where a family lives in the middle of nowhere right next to a Deathclaw Breeding ground, has no walls besides a flimsy chain fence, only has one real guard with an assault rifle and call themselves the Republic of Dave, the trading hub that is 3 ruined buildings where 5 people live, has no real shops or stores, only has one dinner, and only one trading caravan is there in specific days, a settlement of two shacks and no defenses at all where a Nuka Cola addict lives with a guy who wants to bone her also in the middle of nowhere and with a big raider camp nearby, etc). The game doesn't show an economy, what I mean by this is that 95% of people don't seem to have any way of earning an income. Go to any settlement and most of the settlers just walk around, they don't have jobs or do anything. Where do they get their caps from? They have no actual gear besides settler clothing and a pistol or knife if they are lucky, so they can't scavenge or hunt. Etc.

The story of Fallout 3 also doesn't ring very well to me. Purified water is a necessity, the game tells us, and yet everyone in the Capital Wasteland seems fine drinking dirty water. We have water beggars who ask for purified water, but they don't die if they don't get any, some are even old men with long beards, so they can live to old age drinking dirty water. The settlements also have plenty of old people that all their lives drank dirty water and show no ill effects. Tenpenny tower somehow has purified water on their own so it can't be that hard to get a purifier or something. The bad guys make no sense, their leader wants to poison the water supply so everyone in there dies and then make a proper USA, the second in command doesn't want to do this and wants to use the pure water to help the wasteland to rebuild a proper USA... So why are we forced to fight the Enclave when they want to help the wasteland after all? The Second in Command definitely wins against the president, so why must we fight him? I guess we might want to infect the water and that will give us a motive to have to fight him, but most people do not infect the water... Why do we have to join the BoS if we are good when it seems like the Enclave would be better for the wasteland future under Autumn than it is under the BoS?

I play Fallout for the roleplaying experience so Fallout New Vegas wins it for me because I don't constantly feel like I am a character in a world that doesn't function.

Now, I also enjoy FO3 for what it is, it is aimed at players who want to relax and have fun being a badass and kill enemies while exploring ruins. If i didn't enjoyed FO3 I wouldn't be part of the Tale of Two Wastelands project since almost the start of it (like others mentioned before, get TTW and enjoy both games with the added benefit of the improved FNV more polished engine and features like crafting, weapon mods, iron sights, recipes, weapons use different ammo types, etc).

**Finished advertising now xD.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that Fallout 3 took 4 years to be made while Fallout New Vegas only had 18 months (1 and a half years) to be made. Also Fallout 3 was made by people who knew everything there is to know about the game engine and game making tools while Obsidian had to learn by themselves while developing the game (those 18 months were for them to learn how the engine and tool work and make the game, they didn't have any extra time to learn how to work with Gamebryo and it's tools). That is why Fallout New Vegas had a large part of what was planned cut or not made, and why anyone who plays it can feel something is missing.
Also another interesting fact, Obsidian was only allowed to use 10,000 lines of dialogue for all of it's DLCs, they couldn't add more than that (it is the reason they made Christine become mute).

That sucks. Fallout 3 had 40.000.
What I would've done in their place, is informing Bethesda that the DLCs dialogues for Fallout New Vegas would be mute, that would allow the team to not have their creativity limited, just to have fully voiced dialogues in the DLCs.
If Bethesda didn't like the idea they could've helped with bags of money. They wanted DLCs as big as in the previous Fallout game. Imagine how the DLCs would've been without this problem.

IIRC there's a free mod that was developed by one Obsidian guy, after the game was released. Shows how much some of them cared about New Vegas.

Totally agree here - I hated this DLC so much. I only played a few a bit of it before I stopped and just gave up, as I figured it wasn't worth the frustration. The red cloud, the speakers, all of the things you mentioned - I'm glad I didn't explicitly buy this DLC (I got the version with all DLC already) because otherwise I would have been pretty pissed off.

OK for some reason I vaguely remembered it still being needed for something - not sure how I got that idea. So yeah, I agree you could just give him a chip that doesn't work.

I never looked into the Caesar endings since I've never joined with Caesar. I always assumed (wrongly, as it turns out) that if you sided with Caesar as a female character that you'd end up being enslaved or something at the end. On the one hand I can understand Caesar wanting to reward the one who effectively enabled him to win over his enemies, but it would have made more sense for him to screw you over and enslave you. From what I know he doesn't even let you fight in the arena as a chick (except to fight that casino guy, if he made it to Caesar with the chip), so it seems strange that he'd suddenly make exceptions like this.

I'm not so sure about the chip being "all that Caesar really wanted in the first place" though - didn't he want it only because it gets into that bunker, and he wanted to see what was in it? Which makes it even stranger that he doesn't so much as send anyone with you, since I would have thought he'd do that out of pure curiosity if nothing else.

Still the chip/Caesar and female/Caesar things are exceptions to the rest of the writing on NV, and even with these bizarre plot elements it's still way better than most of the stuff in F3.

Totally agree - F3's world made little sense.

Having said that, I wish they hadn't imported so much of the nonsensical crap into NV. By which I mean that no one seems to actually clean anything!

The gunrunners operate out of a building which is mostly ruins - you'd think they'd clear some of the junk away so they can craft their guns, not work around a bunch of rubble and tipped over desks.

Likewise, the NCR - which is a proper military with uniforms and everything - seems to work in places that are trashed as if they were a bunch of raiders. Sure Mr. House gave them an "embassy" which he didn't bother fixing up - so I can deal with the peeling paint etc - but there are filing cabinets tipped over in their offices! Do they have anger management issues, or are they so hard up for time they couldn't clean up a bit after a year or more in the place? Likewise their main base has tipped over slot machines, and their mess hall has crap everywhere!

On top of that, there is an amazing amount of loot everywhere - even a place inhabited by what we are told are effectively refugees (or people down on their luck at any rate) is not only messy as hell (which is understandable in their case), but also chock full of food and other stuff. You'd think that a place full of people would have at the very least cleaned the place out with respect to food and other loot, even if they didn't bother cleaning up.

Sorry for the wall of text!

Personally, I stay away from lore comparisons. Not only because lore means nothing to me (if I want a story, I'd go for a book, possibly a movie), it also doesn't really add much to the questions originally posted. As for coherence, and ultimately believe ability, all Fallout games are laughably bad. If one really believes that this could be like the world would look like after a holocaust in the 50's...
It's SiFi, silly fiction.
Ideally it would have a lot of science in there, but they 're games for funsies and I kinda doubt that Interplay or Black Isle did massive research on this. I mean, it's fun to geek out in discussion threads of course, but for which game is better and why, I never seen that help too much.

On the topic of the spiritual successor: I've played Fallout 1 to New Vegas and I'm not sure if I prefer 2 to NV, because it's been a looong time since I played Fallout 2 and the few memories I have certainly are heavily nostalgia tinted. Watching a Let's Play of Fallout 1 made me realize that isometric Fallout was fun and fascinating in its time, it's also from a time where "we" experienced video games in a very different way from today. Some parts of it are repetitive and god awful and the 'great atmosphere' was great for its time within the limitations of the medium. The video dialogues and graphics were endearing and kind of immersive just because you had to use more imagination to fill in everything since the ole performance power of legacy machines ain't gonna do that for you. The infamous low int pc was a pretty neat idea as well.

Anyhoo, back to the original topic. I got the Lunch Box Edition for Fallout 3 and played for about a dozen hours before uninstalling it. I got New Vegas and played it for about 20 hours straight to begin with, and after finishing it, I re-installed Fallout 3 and finally had some fun with it. The uninspired story didn't bother me anymore cause I just wanted a little more Fallout. I'd say if you treat F3 as an action game in a Fallout costume it 's fine. Apart from the terrible subway connection system. I find Bethesda's Gamebryo maps confusing when I actually need them and I needed them way too often. Needed them in New Vegas at times too and it annoyed the heck out of me there as well. Anyone, go watch somebody play Daggerfall if you want something amusing on a bad day ^_^

Critical reception:
I 've never seen an article or video that depicts New Vegas inferior to Fallout 3 but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Depends on how you define critical reception I guess. Metacritic? IGN? Eurogamer? TotalBuiscuit? Yahtzee? Generally those don't change much if ever. Public (internet) opinion fluctuates somewhat but I'm sure your guess on the filter bubble is a correct one. The few times I stumbled and stopped in a forum thread on it, the lines were clearly divided on this. The majority of people probably didn't expect a pulpy Saloon City and yellow/brownish color pallets after what Fallout 3 was.

Is NV clearly the better game?
From an evolutionary perspective in terms of further enhancing game play, not really. It 's just much
more RPG (dialogues, abilities) then Fallout 3 is. It still has the same engine and abysmal oversights
and/or contradictions build in like the ones Siannah pointed out, those might actually make it
mediocre objectively. But if you can ignore them it does a lot of other things well enough to make it
quite fun. If you enjoy dialogue, characters, decision making and cliche here and there, New Vegas is
clearly better.
If you enjoy ... shooting a lot and scripted events that just have to be appealing to every 'gamer'
(yes Bethesda, we all simply love giant robots and blowing up settlements for no reason) then Fallout
3 is clearly the better game. Exploration and atmosphere comes down to a matter of taste. New
Vegas is more of a futuristic cowboy game then anything else in my mind and I enjoyed playing smt.
like this in spite of the tristesse for the first time, so there goes my vote.

Ultimately:
Both look unreasonably dirty. All people in both look like skin disease come to life for which the laziness of
the devs is to blame, cause mod makers showed it can be done much better. Both are power fantasies.
Both require a massive hand wavy suspension of disbelief. The clunky Gamebryo combat was made better
and worse by V.A.T.S. Invisible walls were even worse in New Vegas, thanks Obsidian.
Both have terrible endings. No wait, that was just Fallout 3, NV at least had slides that fulfilled their
purpose. An area specifically designed to troll the player (looking at you Little Lamplight), can't think of
anything like that for NV. Both games were released in an unfinished buggy state that is inexcusable.
Essential followers might be fine for noobs and peeps that never played a game of this kind, but boy how
that makes for a bad game otherwise.
Fallout 3 has (Super Mutant-) orcs cause every RPG of theirs has them in some way or another and muties
can fit the role. I still have a screen shot of an encounter with 18 Super Mutants in Fallout Tactics, which
seemed like an incredibly deadly encounter at that time. Now they 're just bullet sponge trash mobs. NV
has Super Mutant Masters as well, thankfully not everywhere.
Both have 'Centaurs' which were always just are a pathetic excuse for an enemy.
Both have towns with a population that wouldn't even qualify as a tiny village, and the list goes on and
on...and on. Thinking on it, both games are horrible and shouldn't be touched with a ten foot pole, lol. I'm
currently having fun replaying GOG's New Vegas with mods from the outset, feels still broken in places but
much better now after all these years.

From your post I take it that you preferred the mushy grey textures of Washington to the mushy orange textures in Nevada? :p
Have you met Mr. Fantastic? That might be the good and bad of New Vegas in a nutshell. He 's a
hilarious character when you meet him for the first time, but no way in hell would his story
really happen. Fallout 3 in a nutshell might be Prime. Or Broken Steel.

Obsidian usually thinks about the possibility of handling situations in a few different ways and comes up with memorable characters. Bethesda comes up with huge world spaces that look interesting on the first glance and include minor, easily overlooked, details that have some actual thought put behind them. As shallow as the main quest in Oblivion was, and as infuriating as the enemy leveling, I loved roaming the countryside. Morrowinds mushroom settlements and Stilt Striders were fascinating but combat was always a chore. Obsidian is good at people, Beth is good at worlds. Both are terrible in being consistent beyond a paper thin layer. Consistency being the other word for realism in video games.

I agree. Obviously I enjoyed New Vegas a lot more but I can understand you (and others) enjoy exploring the Capital Wasteland better by now. Never joined the Legion either because being evil in video games always equates to being a duchebag to me (no offense meant). The Legion is a too far fetched faction that never worked in the first place, probably added to be more edgy or something. Funnily enough I'm not surprised by what you describe, I guess I don't expect much from game devs anymore. But yeah, I'd be upset too if I were in your place. Kudos for putting up with some crap other people wrote by the way.

Oh, I didn't know that, thank you for the info. And yeah, considering how little time there was for what you get in the game, they did a marvelous job. It always seems so much less after some time has passed. Generally tho, Obsidian does have a track record of very buggy game releases, and always hearing them being short handed by someone else starts getting old after a while.

For the record:
I have no problem with people disliking F3 - there are good reasons for it.
I have no problem with people liking NV better - again, good reasons for doing so.
I actually liked both games. F3 better for atmosphere / environment, NV as an RPG. For me Dead Money (despite Christine) is the worst and Old World Blues the best DLC for any Fallout game (including F4).

I do have a problem with people saying NV is better, then coming up with xx examples why F3 sucked, yet 80% of it happening in NV too - but doesn't get mentioned.
If it's a blistering stupidity in F3, then it should be a blistering stupidity in NV too. If you criticize F3 for it, be at least freakin' consistent and don't overlook it in NV - otherwise I can't take your criticism serious.
... and you see that in this and every other thread about F3 / NV.

You want to take a scrutinizing look on F3? Fine. But you better manage to do so on NV too, before claiming it's so much better. Or expect that I'll keep calling it biased bullshit. ;)

Not only Dead Money is my favourite DLC, it would have been one of the top standalone games if it wasn't, well, a DLC. Gimme my gimp suit. >:-P

Buuuut you're far from alone in your hatred for Dead Money, and I kind of suspect why -- people come in expecting it to be shootery RPG just as the base game and other expansions -- thing is, it ain't shooter at all. It's a pure atmospheric survival horror: your equipment gets taken from you, you have to scrounge for supplies, environments are a horrible rat maze, most of paths are trapped, the beepers, the Cloud, the holograms that you cannot kill but have to observe and then disable/avoid/manipulate their routes, you name it...and everything says: "You're not welcome here, but nobody cares about you to actively try murder you. Go find yourself a way to die. Or not. You are nothing. Nobody cares."

That wonderful, delicious, dread inspiring atmosphere. Creepy sounds. Ghastly lighting. Dead people's logs. Vera's hologram, trapped for eternity, doomed to recite her tearful, hours-before-death fears to its unwitting "guests" as they flee or hide from it. Dean Domino, one of the most despicable video game characters ever, so wonderfully acted. For me, the atmosphere of Dead Money almost rivals Amnesia: Dark Descent and surpasses (if only by a little) STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. And for that I am willing to forgive an occasional annoyance like labyrinth levels or a beeper or two that's impossible to detect without a walkthrough. :-)

Far from it, at least for me.
The characters are it's saving grace. Dean was good, I love what they did with Christine, Dog.... not so much. That's pretty much the good part for me. Maybe the endings too. Elijah, his motivations and what brought him here.... already only lukewarm.

If we're talking about a bland environment, the first part of Dead Money is the epiphany of it. Worst visibility in the most boring copy / paste place in any Fallout. Then comes the grand opening, which looks like.... well, I've seen more impressive scenes on the C64.
The second part is better, but didn't managed to save it anymore.

I do get why some like it as it's, as you pointed out, pure atmospheric survival horror. And they may have done a fantastic job with it - I can't say, I'm far from an expert in that field.
But it's also what I don't get - what has that to do with Fallout? Nothing.
I swear if Bethesda tried to pull something like that on a DLC for F3, they would have been slashed for raping the franchise even more, than they already did. It likely would have been featured with it's own paragraph in Shamus blistering stupidity work. But Obsidian did it, so it's great, cannon and fitting.

I'm not telling anyone that they should like or dislike one game over the other. But it's exactly that double standard, which I despise so much.

That is not proof that the whole NMA community is like that. You shouldn't generalize.
If you have evidence that the whole community thinks like that, please share with us.

Even if you somehow found evidence for that, you have to remember that the entire Fallout fanbase is not registered at NMA. :))

You said "I think I can answer that", I simply revealed the bullshit from your post.
You can't answer my message with mere theory. Not possible.
As simple as that.

My "what if" scenario was just something to wonder about, kind of like a console gamer wondering what would be the next SEGA consoles if they hadn't been forced to stop, it's impossible to answer precisely how would be their next consoles.

I'm not at all against you posting a theory, my problem was you trying to lecture me, without bringing facts to the table.
My problem was with you saying you could answer something impossible.
Regardless of how secure you feel about your theory or not, it's still just a theory. :))

And it wasn't directed at you, not sure why you even replied to that. :p
In case you didn't notice, it was a reply to krakadyla.

I didn't find it to be horror, not a genre I enjoy anyway. To me it was mainly confusing in its layout, low visibility (the clouds didn't help) and tedious trial and error game play with the beepers. Christine's tragic story and the indeed well voiced Dean Domino were interesting enough, the Holograms were a nice touch; especially considering that my character was beyond the recommended level for it and could have easily wiped the floor with them if there weren't invulnerable. The Casino and vending machines made you rich in resources long term if you were interested in crafting. The ghosts and new recipes felt just meh to me tho and the red environment was not a welcome diversion.

I went twice through all of NV with all the dlcs and did enjoy DM much more the second time around. Still, Dog rather annoyed then captivated me and I never cared for Elijah. I read about his story on the Wiki much later on and thought 'So that's what it was about'. Not that I found it fascinating in any way, to me it 's just irrelevant fluff. Make a character interesting ingame and you just added some lore. If you don't, do what Bethesda does and stash it away in books for the avid reader.

I don't remember the details but wasn't there some timed event at the end of DM? After a kind of silly conference call with the master mind himself? Who then runs out to face you while the clock is ticking? Yeah, Elijah was baaad in my opinion. You wake up, devoid of all your equipment *eye roll* Works well for setting up the things to come - but haven't we been through this kind of thing so many times before?
Too much tragedy in general for me, but at least you could save Christine and had the obligatory possibility to kill Domino. Too much shooting, too little interesting stuff might sums it up for my TLDR.

Really happy to hear you had such a great time with it though! Something so completely different from what I experienced.

Hmm, could you remind me of what Point Lookout had to do with Fallout? I'm genuinely curious cause I can't think of anything.

This is rich. You demand facts for something, you just deemed as impossible to answer.

You post a "what if" scenario to wonder about, but if someone then actually does in a direction you don't like, you demand facts - facts you failed to deliver supporting your point of view.

I delivered facts to support my theory (never claimed it to be more - you noticed the "I think I can answer that"), which you then shot down as generalization, dealing in absolutes. Yes there may be great and unbiased people posting at NMA and don't feel the need to use sanguinary language in every thread about F3.
But that's not a viewpoint their known for, see , [url=http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:No_Mutants_Allowed]here and here (plenty more available). And I'd really like you to prove me wrong on that - before demanding more facts from me.

I'm sorry but this is an open message board. If you don't want others to discuss certain points with you, use private chat.

Absolutely nothing. I'm free to admit that. Mothership Zeta was based on a random encounter and pushed to such extremes, that it doesn't fit either. However, I'm not claiming it should.
Someone can slash F3 for stuff they don't see as fitting, no problem. But when then the same person claims NV done it better, despite the same or similar stuff appearing there too - again, double standards.

Aah, got ya.
Fair enough of course. Have fun defending Bethesda, from what I got it's usually the other way around. If you 're lucky you might even get to switch sides and defend Obsidian from a fanboy coming in *smirk*... Have a good night 0/

I see your point how Dead Money is going for a survival horror vibe. My rebuttal to that is: Dead Money goes beyond just being survival horror. Dead Money is survival horror plus extreme hardcore mode forced upon every player. Dead Money could still have been in the survival horror genre without also including its unfair and incredibly aggravating gameplay mechanics. Or they could have programmed those mechanics not to be activated unless the player has the hardcore mode difficulty set to "On."

I agree that Dean was a good character and his voice actor was excellent. My favorite part in Dead Money was when I told Dean to stay on the roof and I gave him some hot air about how I care about his safety...then he replied with something like, "Oh, now you care about my safety? That's not the tune you were singing when we first met and you threatened me" [that's not a direct quotation, his actual line is written better than how I've paraphrased it here from memory].

However, that good moment is counterbalanced with a terrible moment. In my playthrough, the game literally forced me to threaten Dean during my final conversation with him. After listening to him, my only dialogue choice (it's not really a choice since there was only one option) was something like, "That's all I needed to know. Prepare to die." Either I had to threaten to attack him, or else I'd be forever stuck on the dialogue screen from which I cannot proceed, until I first click on the threat to attack him. That was highly disappointing.

And there should be options to take all three of the companions back with you to the main game. I have no idea why the devs didn't allow that. They already did all the programming work to have those NPCs function as companions. So to deny the player the option to keep them as permanent companions serves no purpose that I can see. Unless it's just their final act of trolling the player with that whole DLC.

I'd say your characterization of Dead Money as having an "occasional annoyance" is a vast understatement. More like IMO, it's 95%+ colossal annoyance, and 5% interesting/fun moments.

As for the Vera hologram, why does she have a blaster on her head when she is on Christine's floor? That's another thing that made no sense to me. It seems very OOC for her. And why is she complaining about how she wants to save the guests, yet at the same time, she is trying to blast the guests (i.e. the player character) to death?

Yeah, exactly. The beeper gameplay reminded me of this review for Outlast 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Wn2bu8BeA

He spends a lot of time ranting about how the game forces to you follow the one exact path that the devs want you to follow, step-for-step, or else you die. And therefore the game forces you to die a lot, and to learn by trial and error via a multitude of unfair deaths.

All of that is exactly what the beeper system in Dead Money is.