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Fallout: New Vegas

aka: FONV
Moby ID: 48717
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Fallout: New Vegas, like its predecessors, takes place in an alternate timeline where a war over resources sprouts up in the 1950s and ultimately culminates in a nuclear apocalypse. The game is set in the wastes of Nevada, surrounding the city of New Vegas, the successor of the old Las Vegas, a gambling paradise seemingly untouched by nuclear devastation. A war is brewing in this territory between the NCR (New California Republic) and various tribes of raiders, including the Great Khans and Caesar's Legionnaires. The NCR is a group that wishes to preserve ancient weaponry as well as bring law and order to the wastes, no matter at what price.

The player takes on the role of a courier who is assigned to deliver a package to the mysterious and enigmatic Mr. House, the owner of New Vegas. However, once the package finds its way to its destination, a man in a checkered shirt and a pair of thugs intercept the courier and begin to dig an open grave. The courier is shot, buried, and left for dead, but is later dug up and brought to a doctor in a nearby town by a robot who saw the events transpire. The protagonist must now find out who tried to kill him/her, and why.

Gameplay primarily resembles its immediate predecessor, Fallout 3, utilizing the same engine, interface, and most features. Like the previous game, Fallout: New Vegas is open-ended and focuses on exploration. Although each game begins essentially the same, once the player has molded the protagonist's base stats, traits, sex, and appearance, the game progresses in a largely non-linear fashion. The player can pursue the main quest, or explore the wastes and take up side-quests from various NPCs. The main character will level up as he or she gains experience by completing quests, doing unique actions and defeating foes.

There are new gameplay elements as well. There is a larger variety of weaponry, and the player can now aim down the sights with guns, as well as change the type of ammo the gun uses. Different types of ammo have different effects on enemies. The player can also use workbenches, campfires, and reload benches to craft unique items, consumables, and ammunition respectively. There is an influence system in the protagonist's standing with various towns and factions. The influence rating will determine whether or not that faction or town is friendly to the protagonist or not, and his affiliation to some groups may affect this as well. The player can also try and fool enemy factions by dressing up as a member of that faction, but must use stealth to avoid guards as guards may see past the disguise.

There is also a new mode of play known as "Hardcore" mode. Hardcore mode is an extreme difficulty setting that alters the gameplay to make a much larger focus on survival. The changes in hardcore mode are as follows:

  • Stimpaks will not heal the protagonist immediately, but over a period of time, and they cannot heal crippled limbs. Only a doctor bag can heal a crippled limb.
  • Similarly, the RadAway chem does not remove radiation sickness immediately, but rather over a period of time.
  • The protagonist must eat food, drink water, and sleep on a regular basis, or he/she will die.
  • Ammo adds weight and encumbers the protagonist.
  • Companions can be killed in battle.

As in Fallout 3, the protagonist levels up, gains perks (although perks now come every other level and instead of starting with a perk, the player starts with two special traits), and can use functions such as fast traveling, waiting or sleeping to adjust the time of day, and fight foes in action combat using the traditional first-person control scheme (although the third-person camera is still an option), or the V.A.T.S. targeting system, which allows the player to pause the game and target specific parts of the enemy's body.

Spellings

  • フォールアウト: ニューベガス - Japanese spelling
  • 異塵餘生:新維加斯 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 辐射:新维加斯 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 폴아웃: 뉴 베가스 - Korean spelling (Hangul)

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Credits (Windows version)

641 People (538 developers, 103 thanks) · View all

Published by
  • Bethesda Softworks
Developed by
  • Obsidian Entertainment
Project Coordinator
Executive Producer
Producers
Additional Production
Lead Artist
Concept / Vault Boy Artist
World Building Lead
User Interface Artist
Character Artists
Environment Artists
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 83% (based on 86 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 151 ratings with 5 reviews)

Oblivion with revolvers

The Good
There's quite a bit of writing in New Vegas, much of which is decent--a huge improvement on Fallout 3. The places one visits and the characters one talks to are more realistic. There are more choices to make, and the choices are more ambiguous. At least some attention was paid to making characters with real motivations for their actions

Gameplay was improved on Fallout 3 - the game is harder, the level scaling less apparent and the combat more satisfying. There are many skill checks in dialogues, making pure combat characters less attractive.

Thanks to the old engine, the game runs very well in Linux through Wine.

The Bad
The characters and their animation still look terrible. And I mean terrible. There are PS2 games that look ten times better. Shadows are non-existent and objects tend to pop-in out of nowhere as you're running through the desert. Performance degrades significantly if you look at the direction of several NPCs. The UI continues to be cute, but barely usable.

Some of the dialogues are poorly written and accompanied by inappropriate voice acting. Many of the skill check lines in dialogues are unconvincing. The game is poorly balanced against energy weapons and there are really only two sorts of enemies in New Vegas: the sort you can outrun, which are trivial and the ones that are faster than you, which are more difficult.

There are many elements of the game that break immersion. The clever quest names, for instance. the ding sound accompanied with You've Gained Karma! when you kill raiders, the ominous sound effect together with a list of quests you've just failed when you kill some significant NPC, the animated experience bar that appears whenever you do something which the game deems significant, the red colored text informing you that what you're about to do illegal, the all-knowing quest compass, the slow motion decapitations that sometimes play, etc. All of this just gets in the way. Clearly Obsidian has never heard of 'less is more'.

In attempting to make the game morally grey, Obsidian may have gone a bit too far. None of the three main factions you can choose to support are any good. House is an Objectivist abomination who clearly needs to go outside more, the NCR is a corrupt, ineffective republic with naive grunts and cynical leaders (closely mirroring the contemporary US government), and the Legion are evil slavers. A steam poll showed that most players chose the fourth--comedy--faction. It's not hard to see why. Maybe they should've made the Followers one of the factions.

Most of the companions are particularly annoying personalities and are much too powerful offensively to the point where they can handle all the enemies themselves. They also have infinite ammo. And they automatically heal. And the all the experience points for their kills go to you. So why should you bother? Together with the quest compass, it's like the game plays itself, really.

The hardcore mode's eating and sleeping requirements add nothing to the game. You randomly find food and water every few minutes in boxes, it's just a matter of a few annoying extra clicks. The lack of depth is disappointing. Even if you're about to die from starvation you can't ask anyone to spare some food, for instance. I guess voice acting all those lines wouldn't been too expensive. Such are the disadvantages of voice acting.

The Bottom Line
It's a lot like Fallout 3, which was a lot like Oblivion. There was a bit of hope that the staggering decline in quality after Morrowind was temporary, but it looks like Bethesda is set to continue to push bad games forever. In view of this, I give New Vegas an F.

Windows · by dorian grey (243) · 2011

Huge, fun, buggy

The Good
I picked up New Vegas not really knowing what to expect, having only briefly played Fallout 2 many many moons ago. What I found was an impressively immersive and varied game; you may start as a small-time unknown courier in a little village, but by the end of the game, you'll have played a crucial role in deciding the future of the entire Nevada desert...

Inbetween these two points, there's a wealth of stuff to do. Initially, your quests are fairly simple - find some plants, clean out some wildlife - but these soon become more interesting as you interact with more NPCs and venture further into the world, and not only do some quests have optional elements, but many of them lead to further quests. For instance, an expedition to an abandoned vault may lead to a search for a missing scientist, which in turn may lead to the uncovering of a major threat to the entire Nevada population!

As you might expect from a Role Playing game, the player is given a fair amount of freedom to shape the course of events; most major quests can be completed in several ways, and the results affect both the course of the overall story, your karmic score and your reputation with the various communities and factions, though the latter two can also be affected by your general behaviour. In some towns, you may be revered as a hero and given discounts with merchants or even a free room; in others you may be hated and attacked on sight. And if you upset one of the main factions too much, they may well end up sending out elite squads to hunt you down.

Then too, there's plenty of other elements for people to delve into. Much of what you find in the world can be used to craft items - plants can become medicine, tin cans can be used to make bullets and there's a variety of unique equipment which can be made if you can find the schematics and the right parts to go with them. There's a handful of companions who can be persuaded to join you on your quest, each of whom offers a unique ability to boost your gameplay. Plus, there's the obligatory levelling mechanism: not only does improving your various skills grant access to better equipment, but it also opens up more options during quests, as well as allowing you to tackle more complicated versions of the lock-picking and hacking mini-games. And there's the game's various stories which run the full gambit from tragedy to comedy, as well as the many NPC characters you meet, whose varied personalities are fleshed out by some excellent voice work.

Arguably though, the main star of the game is Nevada itself: a vast, sprawling place filled with surprises around every corner. You may start in a tumbleweed town, but there's so much else out there, from the tattered remnants of the 1950s American Dream Of The Future, to vast sweeping deserts, bustling cities, luscious mountain forests and cool beaches. And tucked away in each of these places - and often inbetween them - lie a wealth of little set-pieces for the player to find. A dead body in a bathroom with a pistol dropped on the floor explains itself, but what about a skeleton sat at a table with 5 aces before him? What about a baby's cot in an area infested with predators, an abandoned campsite surrounded by booby traps, or strong liquor hidden in a storage closet? Some answers can be found in computer terminals or abandoned diaries, but many are left to the player's imagination.

And that perhaps is NV's main strength: not only does it give the player freedom to explore and complete the game at their own pace and in their own way, but it also doesn't feel the need to explain and highlight every last element, nor does it continually lead the player by the hand. So by the time you reach the end of the game, the player's actions, experiences and memories are as much a part of the story as the data printed onto the disk!

The Bad
There's no way around it: the biggest flaw of NV is the fact that it's buggy, especially on consoles where players don't have access to the mods and community-patches produced by fans over in PC-land. Not only is it prone to freezing and locking up, but there's often quirks and issues with the gameplay and quests. For instance, objects will often sink and become stuck in the ground, while some quests will become broken if you choose the wrong dialogue actions or have already completed other, unrelated quests beforehand.

Of the two console releases, the PS3 is easily the worst. Without getting too technical, as you explore further in NV, more memory is required, and thanks to the limitations of the PS3's memory architecture, it's far more likely to run out of memory and lock up. Things are made even worse when you install the DLC, as these increase the memory requirements, to the point where with all 4 DLC packs installed, the game is effectively uncompletable. You really have to wonder how the "Ultimate edition" made it through Sony's QA testing...

Things are somewhat better on the Xbox 360, though it's still prone to issues especially with the DLC installed. This can be mitigated to a degree by disabling auto-save, but this obviously has an impact on the player's experience - not only does manual saving break the immersion, but it's all too easy to find yourself repeating an hour or two's worth of gameplay!

Personally, I started on the PS3 and then switched to the Xbox 360 when the crashes became intolerable; between the initial aborted playthrough and the various crashes on the Xbox 360, I'd guesstimate that I've wasted around 20 hours of effort. In many ways, the only reason I persevered was because I'd already invested so much time into the game!

Beyond the bugs, there's a few design issues. The first is the fact that you can't fast-travel when inside a building, or to an area controlled by a major faction. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the majority of the main quests (and many of the merchants and NPCs you need to interact with) are in these areas, so you spend a lot of time watching the loading screens, as you fast-travel to somewhere nearby and then walk the rest of the way. For instance, to get to one of the main merchants, you have to fast-travel to the gated community, enter the building within the community, walk up some escalators and into a hub before entering his room. That's four loading screens in a row! Similarly, one faction's leader resides in the second level of a bunker deep underground, and several quests involve traipsing back and forth to him multiple times, making for a repetitive and dull experience.

The issues with repetition don't stop there however. For all that the landscapes of NV are both varied and beautiful, the internal environments tend towards cut-n-paste corridors, and it's all too easy to become disorientated in a maze of identikit, twisty passages. Your Pipboy's auto-mapper helps to a degree with this, but can actually hinder as much as help when dealing with some of the more complex 3D environments. It's also worth noting that NPC characters can't be tracked on your Pipboy unless they're the focus of the current quest - many are fairly static. but some move around and/or go somewhere to sleep at night.

There's also a lot of missed opportunities in New Vegas. For instance, barring a few flooded Vault rooms, there's no loot to be found underwater and just one quest actually involves diving, this sticks out like a sore thumb in a game which revolves around Hoover dam and where virtually every square meter features at least a rusty tin can waiting to be picked up. And many of the quests seem to have little or no impact on the game-world - for instance, if you clear a drug-crazed gang out from an abandoned vault, then no-one else moves into it and gang-members still continue to spawn in that area.

Perhaps ironically though, the main concern I've had with the game is that it's too big. Theoretically, an experienced player can speed-run the entire thing in 30 minutes, but if you want to explore the game and find everything it has to offer, then you're looking at dozens of hours; with the DLC thrown in and ignoring the time lost to restarts and crashes, I've put over a hundred hours into the game. And it's only been sheer bloody-mindedness that kept me going once it became clear how much of a time investment was needed; there's absolutely no way that I'm going to replay to the game to see what I've missed or try a different character build. Though it has to be said, even with just a single playthrough, NV has definitely been value for money!

However, this brings me to the final issue I had with the game: the size of the soundtrack. There's several radio stations you can tune into, which offer a mix of in-game news and music; however, they each only have around 45 mins of content - and some tunes are shared between stations, reducing the variety still further. In a game where players can spend dozens of hours exploring the world of NV, this level of repetition gets tiresome fairly quickly!



The Bottom Line
Fun - but prepare to put a lot of time into it...

Xbox 360 · by Jamie Mann (17) · 2015

On the way to RPG perfection

The Good
The guys at Obsidian certainly are a bunch of talented individuals with plenty of creative ideas; and, above all, individuals who really love RPGs. Not surprising, considering the fact this team was assembled by some of the leading RPG developers of the past, particularly those who did those classic games for Black Isle.

So far Obsidian has been more successful with sequels to existing franchises than with independently conceived games. After the troublesome Alpha Protocol they decided to go back to their old ways, creating an entry in an established series. The high status of the Fallout franchise was somewhat downgraded by the previous installment, which divided fans into warring groups and left many hardcore Fallout junkies unsatisfied.

The thing is, Bethesda doesn't really know how to do role-playing based on ethical choices. Their idea of role-playing is basically "do whatever you want, because whatever you do doesn't matter anyway". But what they certainly can do is create big, generous playgrounds. That's how Western RPG development split into two sub-genres: "exploration" and "story-driven" RPG. Bethesda kept doing their sandbox experiments (followed by Piranha Bytes with their Gothic), while the story-driven RPG started shrinking. And while people talked about how Dragon Age was big and interactive, they forgot one important thing: Dragon Age was the same old thing, only with 3D graphics. It didn't take any advantage whatsoever of its engine. It didn't have physical interaction, and its world couldn't be truly explored. We didn't see that endless, breathtaking landscape in front of us; we didn't feel the whole gorgeous world lying at our feet the way we did, for example, when playing Oblivion.

I was waiting for a game that would combine those two approaches. A game that would have this kind of addictive exploration, but also add everything I loved in classic quest-driven RPGs. Fallout: New Vegas turned out to be exactly such a game.

I can't stress it enough: if anything I wrote above about my personal RPG preferences echoes in your heart, stop reading this review. Go and get this game. If you feel the same way as I did, you should be jumping and singing and performing religious rituals right now. New Vegas might not top Fallout 2, but it's as close as it gets in transporting its spirit into a gorgeous third dimension.

Essentially, New Vegas combines Obsidian's own charismatic personality and unwavering passion with the best of Bethesda. It is the fruit of continuous historical development, the logical conclusion that came so late. I won't talk much about the "Bethesda parts" of this game. New Vegas looks and plays (on a basic level) the same way as Fallout 3. It has everything the other game had; in my opinion - though the engine begins to show its age - its game world is more beautiful. The artists clearly had more inspiration when designing this world; it is more detailed and more natural. Gone are the monotonous subways and the endless piles of rubbish; the world of New Vegas is much more "alive", it is vibrant and versatile, with much more variety in location design than the previous game.

Though the basic gameplay system is the same as in Fallout 3, the playing experience is quite different: it feels much more like a flexible RPG. Typically for Obsidian, the game is ripe with clever setpieces and situations that call for choices - and this time, your ethical proclivities are harmoniously combined with a vast world you can freely roam. The game is absolutely non-linear, meaning that you can go wherever you want, behave in any way you want, do any quests in any order, etc. Of course, there is a main quest that must be completed if you want to finish the game; but the true experience of the game is in discovery, exploration, and flexibility of actions. The fusion of meaningful choices and physical freedom, which was so sorely missing from modern RPGs, is finally back.

I won't go much into details; suffice to say that the quests in New Vegas are very interesting, and you will feel compelled doing them. Moral choices and dilemmas pop out everywhere; in the best tradition of classic Western RPG, the "meat" of the game is deciding what to do, how to do it - from an ethical standpoint. I actually felt I truly created my own character. I didn't just assign a bunch of attributes to him, but shaped him as a human being, made him say things and commit actions that defined him from a moral point of view.

The game is full of exciting, varied, and challenging quests; you will be deeply involved in the intricate world of New Vegas, you will become part of it and determine its future. Those tired of BioWare's schematic "good-bad" moral structures are welcomed to a world that is rarely black and white, but mostly a dark shade of grey. It's not that there are only villains in this game, but this world is cruel, and you feel it. No matter whom you join, you will have to do something that will probably make you feel uncomfortable. The choices are anything but easy. This kind of approach to morals is involving, and it makes you face the consequences of your decisions.

The world of New Vegas is populated by many organizations and factions; three of them (Mr. House, NCR and Legion) play the largest role, and joining one of them basically determines the main plot of the game. But there are also so many other factions, groups, towns, settlements, locations, people, etc. The ending changes depending on what you have done. What is most interesting in this game is not the actual story, not the series of events that leads to an ending, but the way your choices push this story forward, often with unexpected results. The writing is also decidedly better than in Fallout 3, and there are more interesting characters.

The role-playing system generally works much better than it did in the preceding game, returning to the series' roots. One phrase: speech matters! So many quests (even including the final boss confrontation) can now be solved differently depending on the speech parameter. That was perhaps what I missed most in Fallout 3, and New Vegas is quick to fix it.

The shooting mechanics are as solid and as satisfying as they were in the predecessor; but even during combat, the game somehow feels more RPG-like. For once, the game is much more challenging; you can be on par with the enemies, underpowered or overpowered, and this constant evaluation of your skills and character growth feels just right. The balance is perfect for the most part: underpowered characters are bound to take a serious beating near the end stage of the game, since many enemies are extremely dangerous, and V.A.T.S. is your friend much more so than I found it to be in Fallout 3. New Vegas also has a cool "hardcore mode", which opts for realistic elements such as the necessity to rest, serious damage from radiation, limited usage of stimpaks (instead of the magical "instant healing" items they have become), etc.

The Bad
It must be noted that New Vegas wasn't exactly developed from scratch. It became possible thanks to Fallout 3, and we mustn't forget that. That game re-invented the Fallout universe, New Vegas would have never seen the light of the day if Obsidian hadn't had the engine and basic gameplay at their service, so that they could devote their time and energy entirely to creative content.

That said, it is a bit perplexing why bugs weren't ironed out of the tested, solid engine. New Vegas has quite a few weird occurrences. Since the freedom of actions here is nearly unlimited, you can certainly stumble across occasional strange and illogical dialogues, especially if you do everything you can to stay away from the main quests. Sometimes representatives of factions which are supposed to hate you behave nicely for inexplicable reasons; another time people attack you without any provocation on your side, etc.

The whole idea for the main plot is somewhat questionable; I, for once, could never understand why the protagonist of the game suddenly decided to get involved with high politics. I always imagined him as a regular guy, someone who tries to stay away from all this stuff. You'll have to choose sides, volens-nolens; you can't just walk away from the political struggle if you want to complete the game. I'd prefer to retain the option of not allying with any of those ethically dubious factions and get to the "neutral" end without the hassle of double-crossing all of them.

The Bottom Line
New Vegas is the only modern RPG that comes close to the early Fallouts in role-playing flexibility and quality of quest design, at the same time offering a large, fully explorable, interactive 3D world. It is the first attempt to create a rich role-playing game rooted in diverse traditions since the genre split into morally indifferent sandboxes and contained cinematic rides, and it deserves praise and recognition for that.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2014

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Teh Official MobyGames' New Vegas Top Quest Ranking! Slug Camargo (583) Feb 26, 2011
So buggy its breaking my heart. Scott Monster (986) Feb 13, 2011
Which ending did you get? (Sopilers insides!) Slug Camargo (583) Dec 1, 2010

Trivia

German version

In the German version blood and gore effects were removed. The latter, in contrast to Fallout 3, does not affect robots and animals.

Mods

There is an unofficial mod made by lead designer Josh Sawyer. It basically makes the game harder, e.g. by adding expired stimpacks, and fixes item values. It was not released as an official patch because of balancing concerns and technical incompatibilities with the console version. The mod can be found on Mod DB.

References

  • The unique weapon YCS/186 is a reference to the Something Awful sub-forum Your Console Sucks (forums id 186)
  • The dead mercenary Johnny, only found with the Wild Wasteland perk, is based on Johnny Five Aces from the cancelled game The Zybourne Clock which originated from the Something Awful forums.

References: Star Trek

Fallout: New Vegas draws attention to and often pays homage to the numerous Star Trek series; * The perk Set Lasers for Fun is a reference to the phrase "Set phasers to stun" from Star Trek: TOS and subsequent series. * The damage challenge "Beam (Weapon) Me Up" is a reference to the phrase "Beam me up, Scotty". Interestingly this is actually a famous misquote. The closest it ever came to being said was in the fourth Star Trek film when Kirk says: "Scotty, beam us up." * The Jem'Hadar quote "Obedience Brings Victory" can sometimes be heard after upgrading the Securitrons to Mark II.

Van Buren

Fallout: New Vegas has some similarities to Van Buren, Black Isle's cancelled Fallout 3. While the plot is almost completely different, both games are set in the Mojave desert and use a war between the Brotherhood of Steel and NCR respectively the struggle of NCR and Cesar's Legion over Hoover Dam as backdrop. Also the "Burned Man" Joshua Graham, who plays an important part in the Legion's recent history and the DLC Honest Hearts, was a companion in Van Buren. He was supposed to be the statistically best companion with the downside of being very evil and causing problems for the player when interacting with tribal residents and towns.

These similarities are not surprising because some of Obisidian's staff used to work for Black Isle, including the original lead designer of Van Buren, writer/COO Chris Avellone, and his successor, lead designer Josh Sawyer.

Awards

  • 4Players

    • 2010 – #2 Best Role-Playing Game of the Year
  • IGN

    • 2010 - Most Bang for Your Buck

Analytics

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kaddy B..

Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox One added by Sciere.

Additional contributors: Jeanne, MegaMegaMan, Klaster_1, Patrick Bregger, Starbuck the Third, Plok, Rik Hideto, 64er, Koterminus.

Game added October 21, 2010. Last modified March 17, 2024.