Fallout: New Vegas

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.

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...

The Good

• Deeper role-playing elements
• Retains most of Fallout 3's" best elements
• Plenty of great set pieces
• Both funnier and darker than its predecessor, adding more mood
• Tons of new weapons
• Factions are a great addition
• Hardcore mode is great for a "Sim" like experience
• The nightkin are endlessly hilarious

The Bad

• Some bugs, most notably in performance degradation
• Faction system can be sensitive
• Story isn't too engaging
• A few pointless "Filler" quests
• Followers can be dolts with path-finding
• All radio stations play the same small selection of songs

The Bottom Line
I won't lie. I am a huge dork when it comes to Fallout. I even wrote an AWFUL "review" for MobyGames that was just me blabbing about how it became my instant favourite without actually, well, reviewing it which I now regret. My feelings on 2008's Fallout 3 were more or less this: From the standpoint of an old Fallout fan, I felt that it was far from a true sequel to the game, but Bethesda knew their stuff and it was easily their most engaging and entertaining game since the underrated masterpiece Daggerfall (Which is free to download legally...GO-GO-GO!) and not even the very, very lite RPG elements could bring me down with its well realized world and gameplay.

New Vegas is the followup to Fallout 3, but while not to be considered Fallout 4 definitely gives you enough bang for your buck that you won't feel like you've wasted money on an expansion pack. It improves on Fallout 3 without sacrificing what made Fallout 3 good, and it adds its own stylistic touches.

The game returns to the western stomping grounds of its predecessors, specifically the Mojave Desert, the I-15 and of course the eponymous "New Vegas." I have to admit, it is a little surreal. My wife & I are desert wanderers here in Utah, and we frequent Nevada and the Mojave VIA the I-15. It certainly was a little weird to walk into a post-nuclear Primm, but then again maybe people living in DC felt the same way about Fallout 3.

Anyways, the game begins with your character, a Courier delivering a mysterious platinum chip to a prestigious New Vegas casino (New Vegas is one of the few truly modern, safe havens untouched by the bombs), being shot in the head before being buried and left for dead by a mysterious man in a checkered suit and his goofy, poorly pre-rendered goons. You are dug up by a robot and taken to a doctor nearby, and after naming your character and creating him or her you begin the game proper. Your main quest is of course to find out who tried to kill you and why. In truth, the story is very wire-frame. It's not all too interesting and the world around you is far more interesting than the actual plot; specifically the war between the NCR and Caesar's Legionnaire.

To elaborate, The NCR (New California Republic) are a militaristic organization that want to organize and return the wastes to a more governmental system. Caesar's Legionnaire are a "Clan," who are extremely twisted and perverse who punish their adversaries in torturous ways (Often crucifixion) and deal in human trading, to the point of trading women to breed children before killing the elder off. One of the key points in controlling Nevada is the Hoover Dam, and the NCR and the Legionnaire have been fighting for it for years as it is one of the few sources of generating electricity.

The world is just as alive as Fallout 3's, if not more so. One thing lacking in Fallout 3 is that while you had a karma system that could make you "Good" or "Bad," it was a very hackneyed system and some characters were simply evil no matter what. In the old games and many other RPGs, you could befriend raiders or chat up super-mutants, in Fallout 3 they all attacked you no matter what. In fact there's actually a funny dialogue retconning the Fallout 3 super-mutants where the Nightkin; a new breed of supermutant; are talking about how the "Second generation super-mutants" were all dum-dums. You can now befriend various factions, and this has a huge outcome on the game. Although I regret it after learning of some of their more twisted ordeals, I befriended Caesar's Legionnaire and made a majour enemy of the NCR; which proved getting into New Vegas and making it through checkpoints difficult, but it still brought benefits later on. Another feature of the faction system is that you can wear a factions armour and you will be identified as one of them, which can be used for Stealth provided you aren't completely vilified by the community you are infiltrating or you get a mite too close to one of their superiors.

The faction system can be a bit touchy though. Naturally doing things for one faction will improve their outlook on you, whereas harming them or wronging them will piss them off. You can balance this as you can be "Disliked" by a faction, but still keep enough reputation that you can walk through without being shot on sight. However combat can make this hard, killing so much as 3 or 4 of one faction might instantly Vilify you (Which means they will attack on sight and will not negotiate at all) and there are some instances where this proves very annoying.

I played a second play-through and when I was in "Freeside," the slums just outside New Vegas, I did not have the caps to get into New Vegas and worked for a gang known as The Kings (I won't spoil the humour behind their name, but it was a genuinely funny touch after hearing a news-caster talk about how sinister and mysterious they were.) so that I could get access to New Vegas. I was on good terms with the NCR, but when doing one of The King's quests, I had to fight some NCR. Two of them went down, and I was suddenly taken down to just one level before Vilified. A little more balance or benefit of a doubt would be nice in some cases such of this, plus the number of acts against or for one faction changes wildly.

The SPECIAL system is also improved. When replaying Fallout 3, many of my characters were exactly the same with the SPECIAL system the way it was, with VERY mild modifiers. Here, my two characters were very different beasts. Each stat actually counts this time, and while not as advanced as its original incarnation in the first two games; it is definitely richer and closer. The game also eases up the scaled leveling a bit. While it is still here, there are sections that an inexperienced player cannot survive and some beasts simply will not scale down for the players convenience like in FO3. Leveling is also closer to its predecessors, you do not get perks each level, but rather every other level. You also get two traits when you begin the game, like before. This adds to the role-playing elements, amongst many other things.

The rest of the gameplay will be familiar to those who played Fallout 3. V.A.T.S. is back, you'll explore the wastes and find lots of secrets and goodies, etc. There are some expansions, the workbenches are expanded to traditional workbenches that allow you to build stuff and reloading stations. Workbenches make weapons or tools, reloading stations make ammo. You can also collect plants and use campfires to make things like healing powder. They can all be used in various ways, and much of the junk you find around isn't as useless as you might think. You never know when a pile of scrap electronics can make your trusty plasma-pistol one of the deadliest around.

Speaking of weapons, there are multiple types of ammo and mods now. You can get Armor Piercing rounds which do as they say, but are less effective against unarmored creatures. Armored creatures/characters will be labeled by an armor symbol when you shoot them, which is convenient. AP rounds are especially nice for rad-scorpion packs. There are also hollow point rounds that do more against flesh, but less against armour. If you are low on funds, you can also get surplus ammo; but it isn't as effective. Mods can be anything from scopes to doo-dads that make your bullets or energy shots explode in crippling shots.

Another new addition to the game is hardcore mode. Hardcore mode is much more sim-like, items like stimpaks work over time rather than instantly and only rare doctor bags can be used to heal crippled limbs. You will need to eat, sleep, and drink to survive. Companions can die, etc. It is great for free-roamers who want to feel an even richer experience of living in a harsh-wastelander and allows you to squeeze some more gameplay out of an already massive game.

The game is somewhat more humorous and also more disturbing than its predecessor; a trademark of its 2D roots. The most humorous aspect for me were the Nightkin, the new breed of Super-mutants. I loved their radio station as whenever I would hear their leader Best Friend Tabitha (Who of course has a deep, grunty voice) and the news reporter Rhonda (Who has a throaty falsetto) chatting it up. One of the funniest exchanges regards how cute and huggable centaurs are, and the parts where they try to execute a stereotypical Mexican mechanic for being human is also humorous as he keeps getting off since Best Friend Tabitha needs something repaired. Caesar's Legion punctuate the darker and more disturbing element, along with some other undesirables and acts of desperation. I already mentioned their love of crucifixion and human slavery and trading, but there are many other dark secrets they hold. Even the NCR has some dark twists awaiting for you.

On the whole, New Vegas is a fantastic game. I enjoyed it even more than Fallout 3, and anyone who enjoyed that game will enjoy New Vegas. It offers the same level of fun and expands several elements and gives you an extreme amount of bang for your buck. I simply hope Bethesda considers Obsidian's additions to the game canon and incorporates and expands said elements in Fallout 4.