A Fallout fan's Fallout: New Vegas review

[Retlaw83]

You start off in New Vegas more alone than you've ever been in a Fallout game. In Fallout, you had Vault 13 behind you. In Fallout 2, you had Arroyo. Tactics saw you as a member of the midwest chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel, and in Fallout 3 you had your dad.

You start New Vegas off with a bullet in your head and no idea why you were shot for the package you were carrying. A tantalizing initial clue, and a hope for support, come from the fact you're a courier for the Mojave Express, but you quickly learn they don't have many full-time people on the payroll and your involvement with them is mercenary.

With Fallout 3, Bethesda took the Fallout franchise and attempted to warp it into something unrecognizable. In New Vegas, if feels like Obsidian is on an offensive to take it back. That being said, if you can't stand the idea of Fallout not being isometric and turn-based, you won't like this. You also won't like this if you think Fallout 2 was a travesty and the wrong direction for the series to take.

The biggest change between New Vegas and Fallout 3 is dialog. Not only is almost everything an NPC has to say compelling, the voice acting is done well. I've only recognized four voice actors from Fallout 3, and they're used sparingly; even then, they sound like they're performing, instead of just reading off of a script whose context they don't understand. A standout performer is Matthew Perry as Benny; he mixes hip 50s slang with Fallout nomenclature and makes it sound like it's a natural way to talk.

Dialog isn't just window dressing; it effects the outcome of situations, and quite often hostile groups or people are willing to talk things out before it comes to shooting. Also, non-speech skills, such as barter, medicine and survival, can influence dialog with a startling variety of NPCS. I doubt you'll be able to play the entire game without killing anyone, especially considering the amount of territorial wild-life and roving violent gangs, but from what I've experienced, main story quests are solvable without force provided you have good luck and speech skills.

But when it does come to shooting, Obsidian has fixed Bethesda's problems. Guns have iron sights, and using them to aim increases accuracy, unlike in Fallout 3 where it just zoomed in a little. While it's a must-use feature if you don't want to be needlessly spewing ammo and ruining your gun, I've found it to be particularly effective with hitting moving targets with a shotgun, and you have to use it if you want to hit anything with a sniper rifle.

Multiple ammunition types from the original games makes a return, and they have real tactical benefits. Cheap ammunition, called surplus, is cheaper than regular ammunition but detoriorates your weapons faster as powder residue makes it filthy.

High end ammunition, like incendiary rounds, are good against fleshy critters, but their high cost and difficulty to produce doesn't make their constant use practical. With damage threshhold also making a return, armor piercing rounds have their place; if your gun isn't beating an enemy's DT, you'll do minimal damage and a shield icon will appear next to their health bar. Armor piercing rounds allow you to overcome the DT - shown as a broken shield - but the tradeoff is you don't do the full damage your weapon is capable of. If Fallout titles from here on out are going to have first-person shooting as the main way to fight, at least Obsidian has laid down the framework to do it right.

Melee enemies no longer have the retarded AI of Fallout 3, often charging at you from unexpected directions and their lunge attacks mean they cannot be defeated by back-pedaling and thereby keeping them out of melee range. Players using melee have a variety of counters and take-downs and special hits they can perform, though the downside is quite a few, like an uppercut move, are simply chosen randomly by the computer while in VATS mode.

VATS has also been highly improved, making it a tool instead of a requirement/cheat code. To-hit percentages are sane, and the player is no longer virtually invulnerable in VATS mode, making it a horrible idea to go into when, say, completely encircled by radscorpians. By default, a "cinematic kill-cam" is enabled, which shows a VATS like death sequence every time you kill something with a critical hit, but thankfully it can be disabled in the options menu. I think it was included as a tool to help Todd Howard jerk off, given his famous pronouncement that VATS head shots are the highest form of humor.

As for the game world, New Vegas is quite literally the center of it. From virtually any elevated location or the wide open desert surrounding the city, you can see the Ultra-Luxe, Tops and the spire of the Lucky 38 rising above the city's walls. It's quite a spectacle from the distance at night, a glowing beacon in the distance, and gives a reasonable explanation as to why there's enough light pollution to have decent visibility at night. If you look at Vegas as the sun sets and the moon comes up, all those lights flick on at once, and it's a pretty slick thing to behold the first time you see it.

That's something New Vegas was built on that Fallout 3 failed miserably at: probable explanations. Everything in the world seems to have a reason for being, settlements teem with people working together and the layouts make sense, and people's motivations for living where they do is clear. In Fallout 3, you see a functioning sink or toilet and go, "Why the fuck is this here and working after so many years?" In New Vegas when you see working plumbing, you marvel at the wealth or ingenuity of the party owning it.

Things like that are small, but the game having consistent internal logic adds to the immersion, and the lack of it was one of the game ruining aspects of Fallout 3.

The writing of the game is frequently funny, and features so many callbacks to Fallout 2 sometimes I fear Fallout 3 fans will feel there's a joke they're not in on. There is one quest where completion calls for you to pick, multiple choice, the most popular president in the NCR's history and what the capital of NCR was originally called, which as far as I know is not information you can glean from playing New Vegas. There's also quite a few nods to Fallout 2, with one of the tutorial quests requiring you to find broc flower and xander root. As soon as the NPC said it, I smiled and thought to myself, "I've done this before." A small thing, but it made the game start off with a tremendous amount of goodwill that at over twenty hours in, it has yet to squander.

Speaking of time, I would have wrote this review sooner, but I didn't enter Vegas Strip until about 12 hours into the game, because there was just so much to do and see outside of it. I'm still nowhere near seeing everything, and at level 20 I took the perk that shows you all the map locations; at max zoom places I haven't been to yet are right on top of each other, the squares overlapping, and it's clear I have a lot of walking to do.

When I finally did get to Vegas, it wasn't the event I thought it would be. The entire time I'd been playing, it had been shining in the distance, a symbol of hope and promise in an otherwise gritty and terrible world. I won't give specifics to avoid spoilers, but once I arrived the reality of the place was startling. A lesser mind will think the humor and wit of the game makes it less bleak and oppressive. A thinking man will find that bleakness is all around and the humor is to cope. Fallout 3's blatant declaration was, "Man, this shit sucks," without going into details of why or how; New Vegas comments on the human condition and the hypocrisy of man with the alacrity of the originals.

The skill system has been overhauled, and I'd venture a guess that as long as one of your skills is a type of combat, you can't pick wrong. Medicine and survival are useful skills, the latter moreso in hardcore mode, and show up to be used in the oddest places. While the 25% threshholds for lockpicking and terminal hacking are back, along with the shitty minigames, science shows up a lot when dealing with scientists, doctors and robots. The biggest change to a skill is repair. You can repair something to 100% regardless of skill, though the lower your skill the more material it takes and the faster it degrades. This makes repair a useful skill, but not a must-have, and like the other skills it comes into play when interacting with things in the world. Barter also comes into play while negotiating increased fees and coercing people, a role traditionally carried out by the speech skill.

A special note about the reworked "guns" skill. Guns, encompassing all firearms, including miniguns and the like, works well, especially with strength requirements for maximum efficiency, but it feels as if they could have lumped grenade and rocket launchers under the category because they're so different from the thrown explosives. Guns also effects your accuracy and weapon efficiency; at the beginning of my game I started out trading potshots with convicts, my shitty rifle and my shitty skill making for a lot of curving bullets when I was sure I was going to hit the guy. At 100% gun skill and 8 perception, my character is currently emptying brain pans with the named 9mm pistol, splattering unsuspecting enemies with the anti-materiel rifle, and pouring streams of light machine gun fire into super mutants. The skills are balanced in such a way that you genuinely feel the progression.

The progression of equipment is similarly rewarding. Going from a getup of scavenged armor and an NCR service rifle to spending everything I had on reinforced combat armor and an assault carbine felt every bit as much of a massive upgrade as the time I managed to snag combat armor and an assault shotgun off of a dude I knocked out with a 5% chance hit to the crotch to replace my 10mm pistol and leather jacket in Fallout 1.

Another huge improvement of New Vegas is the lack of essential NPCs. Everyone I've met besides children is killable, and I'm guessing the mod for that won't be long since New Vegas and Fallout 3 mods are compatible.

Of course, New Vegas is not without flaws. The technical downfalls of the engine it shares with Fallout 3 are still present, as are some bugs unique to this game. One of the things I found annoying was followers recruited after you had an experience occasionally speak as if they were there for it. Followers outside of hardcore mode are set to essential while they travel with you; there's no sense of loss if they get beat down in combat because they just take a nap. Some of the Fallout 3 weapons, like the laser pistol, were not modified to have iron sights, so you're better off not aiming it. The patching for the game was been remarkably quick, though, already fixing random crashes to desktop and a weird autosave bug.

I also once experienced what I'm guessing is a distance LoD bug at night, where Vegas was visible but the lights weren't on. It looked eerie and wrong, and after I walked some more the problem corrected itself, but during that bug it had seemed like the light had gone out of the world.

One of the design flaws is if you don't want a faction to dislike you, you better not steal from them. Despite that, stealing always carries a karma penalty, though this penalty is minor; I've been yanking stuff from the bases of vanquished enemies and am still neutral, despite the fact I rarely do anything good to balance it. The karma hit is obviously minimal, but I don't approve of a karma scale where I can shotgun a guy's head off, gain karma for doing so because he's an evil son of a bitch, and then take a karma hit because I helped myself to the contents of his fridge afterward.

The story itself I can't comment on, especially since I haven't finished the game and appear nowhere near the end, because I want to avoid spoilers. I also get the feeling that there's tremendously different stories depending on what you choose to do, and from hearing other peoples experiences the true triumph of Fallout: New Vegas is that each person's story while playing the game is their own.

But the question is, in the end, is this Fallout? If your opinion is Fallout is built on turn-based isometric and a simulation of pen-and-paper RPG mechanics, then this isn't Fallout. If you're concerned about story, logical consistency, a genuine world and well-written experiences that cannot happen the same way twice, this is the Fallout you've been waiting twelve years for.

[Superhaze]

I agree with alot of what you are writing. The best new features are:

Starvation, Dehydration, Sleep deprivation and the likes. I actually have to keep buying purified water just to stay alive, not just to get some HPs back.

Hardcore mode. Could just have been called Fallout mode, and normal mode could have been called Bethsoft mode for lazy bastards. Hardcore mode is a requirement to make the game good. Yes, I said the game was good. But only in hardcore mode. Without it you are back to the whole 19 year old 2 strenght girl carrying 400,000 rounds of 5mm.

More logical progression through the towns and cities on your way to New Vegas. And no more of the horrible dungeon grinding through the subways, which is what Bethesda seems to think is how a player should level up.

I did not see a ghoul or super mutant for a long, long time. No more super-muties attacking you at lv.3 and dropping a minigun for you to muck about with. No more, and thank fuck for that.

All in all, much better result.

[Yonmanc]

Picked up a copy on Friday, enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. Genuinely good writing, few scenes even made me laugh.

[Wolfman Walt]

Started playing it yesterday and yes, I have to agree, it is a much more improved game. Graphics are still wonky in third person, but I think that's more of the engine's fault than Obsidian. Overall? I'm enjoying, but I've only had a very limited time with it, so I'll have more to report the more I go through.

[Dogmeatlives]

I guess I'll be the first grouch. Is anyone else finding that some of the towns have very little going on outside of the main quest? I am utterly bored by most of the towns. Take Nipton for instance. I walk in and its completely destroyed. I speak with two people, find some goodies, and then I find myself just wanting to get the hell out. Not much is keeping me in these locations.

I'm in that dinosaur tower town right now and after finding the info i needed to continue on my main path, i just wanna leave. I really don't care to save the town or whatever because the 'town' is made up of like five people who have little to no depth to them.

I think you guys are being a bit easy on this one.

[Yonmanc]

I dunno, I've just finished Novac, did the sidequest for Boone, which I very much enjoyed, and the sidequest for Vargas which was a whole lot of fun. My only gripe at the moment is the loading times on xbox. Other than that, havn't really found too much to complain about yet.

[Dogmeatlives]

I have another gripe: trying to find some protection for Primm is a mentally insane pain in the ass. I'm at the point where I have the ex-sheriff waiting for me to bring him an NCR pardon and so I go around and can't find anyone whom I can ask if they'll give the guy a pardon.

The main NCR guy in the area doesn't have a single dialogue option for it. Like where the hell am I supposed to get this pardon. Am I supposed to use spider sense or some shit?

So after visiting the vault wiki I apparently have to have 200 caps and/or 30 speech? How am I supposed to know this? Fucking hell, whatever.

[jetbaby]

I have another gripe: trying to find some protection for Primm is a mentally insane pain in the ass.

Really? I turned around, talked to the robot, utilized science, and made him the sheriff. Took me all of about nine seconds.

[Yonmanc]

I have another gripe: trying to find some protection for Primm is a mentally insane pain in the ass. I'm at the point where I have the ex-sheriff waiting for me to bring him an NCR pardon and so I go around and can't find anyone whom I can ask if they'll give the guy a pardon.

The main NCR guy in the area doesn't have a single dialogue option for it. Like where the hell am I supposed to get this pardon. Am I supposed to use spider sense or some shit?

So after visiting the vault wiki I apparently have to have 200 caps and/or 30 speech? How am I supposed to know this? Fucking hell, whatever.

The two ways I know of:

Program the robot to be Sheriff.

Head over to some NCR base, convince some guy, or do a quest for them and tell him how great you are, then request etxtra units be sent to Primm.

[Retlaw83]

I'm in that dinosaur tower town right now and after finding the info i needed to continue on my main path, i just wanna leave. I really don't care to save the town or whatever because the 'town' is made up of like five people who have little to no depth to them.

Sounds like you haven't explored Novac enough, honestly. Boone's quest is interesting, Daisy Whitman's past is pretty obvious even though she edges around it, Andy is a pretty cool retired old ranger, and there's that ex-NCR singer - though he doesn't jive well with me because his past doesn't mesh with the timeline very well.

Either Bethesda has abused us so horribly any bit of cleverness or human traits shown by NPCs rocks our world, or ur doing it rong.

[popscythe]

The Complacency!

It's Underwhelming!

[Frater Perdurabo]

I guess I'll be the first grouch. Is anyone else finding that some of the towns have very little going on outside of the main quest? I am utterly bored by most of the towns. Take Nipton for instance. I walk in and its completely destroyed. I speak with two people, find some goodies, and then I find myself just wanting to get the hell out. Not much is keeping me in these locations.

I'm in that dinosaur tower town right now and after finding the info i needed to continue on my main path, i just wanna leave. I really don't care to save the town or whatever because the 'town' is made up of like five people who have little to no depth to them.

I think you guys are being a bit easy on this one.

To be honest, I feel the same way. That being said, I really haven't given it that much play time yet to be able to judge.

[Aonaran]

Players using melee have a variety of counters and take-downs and special hits they can perform, though the downside is quite a few, like an uppercut move, are simply chosen randomly by the computer while in VATS mode.

Actually, you don't get the special attacks for Melee or Unarmed until skill level 50, but after that point you do have control over what attacks you can use in VATS.

[Dogmeatlives]

I'm in that dinosaur tower town right now and after finding the info i needed to continue on my main path, i just wanna leave. I really don't care to save the town or whatever because the 'town' is made up of like five people who have little to no depth to them.

Sounds like you haven't explored Novac enough, honestly. Boone's quest is interesting, Daisy Whitman's past is pretty obvious even though she edges around it, Andy is a pretty cool retired old ranger, and there's that ex-NCR singer - though he doesn't jive well with me because his past doesn't mesh with the timeline very well.

Either Bethesda has abused us so horribly any bit of cleverness or human traits shown by NPCs rocks our world, or ur doing it rong.

nah, i get Daisy Whitman and the FO2 connection. The thing for me is that I got the game for an engaging story and group of characters and right now I can't think of any characters that stand out in my mind. I can't even remember a name.

This might be sacrilegious but I would almost prefer a combat oriented RDR style Fallout at this point, because frankly RDR's story was much more engaging.

The most frustrating thing is the lack of dialogue. I mean once I've drained most NPCs of their small amount of knowledge, they have nothing else to offer. I think I prefer RDR to FNV's story because of the way the characters are portrayed. In RDR you are given glimpses of NPCs who have rich histories and interesting back stories and they seem to really be going off to do something important with themselves.

But with New Vegas you can watch an important NPC just sitting around for literally weeks. They just sit there. It's like a static dollhouse world populated by little stationary characters of no real consequence. They do nothing and I see them doing nothing! and it totally takes me out of the story when I go up to a major wasteland player and he's just walking around his office all day. Like WTF?

Like i appreciated the little nod with Daisy Whitman, but what has her life become now?! She just sits around in her room all day... It all seems so hollow.

My last word is that I can't wait til they get rid of this god awful engine and move on. The game is ugly as hell. rocks and hills look like turd piles.

[Stalagmite]

Yeah I went thought the game once it was far better than Fallout 3 and the right idea was definitely there just something about it didn't completely come together somehow.

I'm gonna do another playthrough and hopefully this time I feel a sense of consistancy based on the knowledge I gained the first time around.

Something tells me it'll get funner the more you play it...

[Retlaw83]

The Complacency!

It's Underwhelming!

Yeah. Because moaning and whining about how things used to be when they aren't coming back is highly constructive.

Why do you have all this ire against entertainment not being perfect when you can use the anger for something worth getting pissed about, like how politicians fuck over people every chance they get, McDonald's and Burger King cutting down acres of rain forest for cattle grazing land, and major corporations trying to own our drinking water? Is your life that empty that you have to get upset and act like you're entitled to every entertainment product being tailored specifically to you?

[popscythe]

politicians fuck over people every chance they get, McDonald's and Burger King cutting down acres of rain forest for cattle grazing land, and major corporations trying to own our drinking water

Look, you threaten his crude little small-view bullshit world by saying that the emperor obviously has no fucking clothes, bethesda makes fucking terrible video games and fallout new vegas is fallout 3 with a pinch of fucking salt on it and that certain assholes are so fucking antediluvian that they insist on pretending otherwise, and he freaks the fuck out, spewing ink out of his ass like a squid prison rape-victim talking about mcdonalds and shit.

Breaking News: New Vegas is a fucking shitpile. You can't wrap a horsedick in bacon and tell me it's a BLT buddy, no matter what type of cloying fucking bullshit you write about how your philistine ass enjoyed it.

[rad resistance]

Horsedick and bacon. The breakfast of champions.

[Username]

I completely disagree with your opinion about the karma hit when it comes to stealing. In other aspects the review was balanced, if not a bit biased in favour of the game despite its flaws.


The way stealing worked in Fallout 1-2 was moronic.
And until gamedevelopers truly develope AI that can analyze a situation then the karma hit is a way to simulate it.

Why would a person simply accept you going into their private room and not figure out that when he enters it 30 minutes later you were the one that stole his Rad-away?

Or even if only a neighbour sees you and not the actual owner. Such things would spread in town like a forest fire on a hot summer day.

I actually went through the majority of the game F3 without stealing much at all and completed it at level 12 or something the first and only time I played through it with mods that resemble hardcore mode in Vegas. So it's not like you can't survive without being a total asshole and stealing from everyone.

Also stealing almost becomes teadious in Fallout 1-2 but you still do it since it's basicly "free stuff" if you aren't bent on playing a good guy. So this way with the karma hit it at least has some effect.


Care to elaborate on why you do not like the minor effects of stealing?

[Username]

I'm in that dinosaur tower town right now and after finding the info i needed to continue on my main path, i just wanna leave. I really don't care to save the town or whatever because the 'town' is made up of like five people who have little to no depth to them.

Sounds like you haven't explored Novac enough, honestly. Boone's quest is interesting, Daisy Whitman's past is pretty obvious even though she edges around it, Andy is a pretty cool retired old ranger, and there's that ex-NCR singer - though he doesn't jive well with me because his past doesn't mesh with the timeline very well.

Either Bethesda has abused us so horribly any bit of cleverness or human traits shown by NPCs rocks our world, or ur doing it rong.

nah, i get Daisy Whitman and the FO2 connection. The thing for me is that I got the game for an engaging story and group of characters and right now I can't think of any characters that stand out in my mind. I can't even remember a name.

This might be sacrilegious but I would almost prefer a combat oriented RDR style Fallout at this point, because frankly RDR's story was much more engaging.

The most frustrating thing is the lack of dialogue. I mean once I've drained most NPCs of their small amount of knowledge, they have nothing else to offer. I think I prefer RDR to FNV's story because of the way the characters are portrayed. In RDR you are given glimpses of NPCs who have rich histories and interesting back stories and they seem to really be going off to do something important with themselves.

But with New Vegas you can watch an important NPC just sitting around for literally weeks. They just sit there. It's like a static dollhouse world populated by little stationary characters of no real consequence. They do nothing and I see them doing nothing! and it totally takes me out of the story when I go up to a major wasteland player and he's just walking around his office all day. Like WTF?

Like i appreciated the little nod with Daisy Whitman, but what has her life become now?! She just sits around in her room all day... It all seems so hollow.

My last word is that I can't wait til they get rid of this god awful engine and move on. The game is ugly as hell. rocks and hills look like turd piles.

In what game do NPC's do alot then? I think the reason why at least Fallout 3 felt so empty ( I haven't tried FNV so I can't comment on it) is because just like you say the characters are not only shallow on the outside, they are shallow on the inside. Their stories and the conflicts and everything around them seems fake.

And even in the only city that was done really well; Megaton (and Tenpenny Tower) nothing ever changes. The bartabs always stay the same in Megaton.

I once asked in some thread if people still remembered you and your actions or do they still ask you who you are after you save them from utter destruction?


Seems sad if these things weren't improved upon.