Fallout: New Vegas

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
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
The gang from Interplay return to add another addition to the Fallout Franchise. This is a great thing...

I admit that I don't really get in to the Sword and Sandal RPG games. So that's why the Fallout series is so cool to me.

The mechanics of the game are nearly identical to Fallout 3, which is a good thing in itself. However, The story is much more intriguing. You have several factions to contend with. Many of the goals will conflict with other factions and put you in trouble. Sometimes, You can unite them. Other times, you can antagonize them to your own benefit. No matter what you do, someone will love you for it and someone will hate you.

A lot of what you can accomplish is decided by how you spin your character in the beginning. It's compelling because you don't know what you can do unless you play it again.

The FPS aspect of the game is a little tighter, but you'll still often find yourself outmatched in most fights unless you recruit some friendly NPCs.

Getting an NPC is critical to winning the game. Each NPC comes with their own fighting style, skills and backstory. Unlike some RPGs, The NPC storyline unravels as you play so it become part of the game, instead of boring filler.

The voice acting is considerably improved from Fallout 3. There is a much larger cast of voice actors. A lot of them are famous and very good at bringing their respective characters to life. Your interactions would have consequences that also impact the game in the long run.

And the infamous kitchen sink approach that made the Black Isle games so great is back. Aliens? Vampires? Check... The game ending was comprehensive in its list of impacts you had on the game world. That was a nice touch.

The Bad
Starting off, There are no immediate plans for a sequel by Obsidian. The DLC will have to do.

Otherwise, I have no real complaints.

The Bottom Line
Play it if you are tired of Sword and Sandal RPGS.