Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Fallout: New Vegas - Thoughts


For nearly a decade now, I've heard nothing but praise for Fallout: New Vegas. Fans online crown not only the best Fallout game, but one of the best written narratives in video games period. I had always planned to jump into the old Interplay games first, curious how loyal New Vegas stayed to the classic formula, but years had gone by while I waited, with both Fallout 4 76 getting released while I twiddled my thumbs playing other games. One excuse or another always kept me from it, like other recent releases, or I wasn't in an open world mood, or it was just too damn long to start right now. So this year I finally said "screw it", booting up my Xbox 360 to sit down and finally play one of the best games of the last decade. And you know I found?

That it was a huge mistake to play it on the 360.


... And that the game is good, of course. But wow was this a buggy, busted experience from start to end, even with the newest patch installed. Enemies fell into the terrain, VATS would seize up, pivotal quest lines were unfinishable, and I suffered more crashes than I did radiation sickness. Worse yet is that nearly every crash wound up corrupting my autosave—of which I only had one of—so I lost progress constantly until I ingrained manually saving as a response to seeing the loading screen. I remember encountering some issues playing Fallout 3 on the 360, but New Vegas was an entirely new brand of buggy hell; either play it on PC or turn down the difficulty to blaze through the game. As for me, I'm never going to touch this game on the 360 again. Seriously, it was a miserable experience!

So, with that big asterisk out of the way, does Fallout: New Vegas still hold up? And the answer to that is a waffling, nasally kiiindaaa. The biggest problem (surprise surprise) is that it's rooted in Fallout 3—that is to say an ugly world with terrible gunplay. Had I played New Vegas back in 2010 (or on PC with mods) I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune, but Fallout 4 was a categorical improvement on the formula, so it's a little hard to go back. Not that it's "unplayable" or "trash" or anything so hyperbolic, but all the old issues are still present: spongy enemies, lackluster weapons, clumsy UI, stiff animations, shameless room reuse, and a drunk AI with pinpoint accuracy. Part of it is my fault for playing on Hardcore Hard (which only accentuated these issues), but I prefer survival RPGs with some bite to them, forcing me to be smart about stocking supplies.

And to Obsidian's credit, the changes made to Fallout 3's base are quite impressive. There's a huge amount of weapon mods, ammo types, and consumables to pour over while you're playing, along with a massive crafting system that gives a purpose to all the junk you've collected beyond just caps. Hardcore mode also establishes itself as the best way to experience the post-apocalypse, turning the game's purified water and floor mattresses into some of the best goods to come across. And giving ammo a weight ensures you can't just sit on a metric ton of mini nukes—you have to be wise about what you're bringing along and much more open to using the armaments weighing you down.


All of these are really cool additions—except for the crafting. It's great idea in theory, but there's no way to check what items you need out in the wild until you find a workbench or campfire. And given how easy it is to get over-encumbered on your journey, the last thing you're going to do is carry around weighty conductors and scorpion glands you can't use. Your only choice is to memorize what you need or collect junk like a hoarder, both of which require more work than simply ignoring crafting altogether. If you could simply look at the rubbish strewn about and see a quick list of what items could be crafted, then I'd toss all these complaints out the window. Again, it's something I'm sure PC mods easily fix—hammering home how obsolete the 360 version of the game is.

Lastly, New Vegas is an unbelievably swingy game, especially when fighting cazadors and deathclaws. Again, playing on Hard with low endurance did me no favors here, but no matter how many drugs I ingested and how heavy my armor was, I was always a few hits from death. But if I could face an enemy one on one (without them getting the drop on me), then it was a completely different story. With a number of valuable perks and a boat-load of VATS points at my finger tips, nearly every major enemy and boss melted before me, their heads dissolving into a fine and ruddy gas. It's just that as soon as VATS ended I was at the mercy of my next opponent. This problem only became worse in the DLC, as enemies became unbelievably tanky and could decimate me if left un-crippled. Fights felt neither strategic nor rewarding; battles were solely determined by who got the drop on who first, which gets pretty boring by hour 20, let alone 100.


I've blathered on for long enough that it's time to cover what makes New Vegas so truly special: its story. Despite my copious whinging, the plot of New Vegas alone makes it a must-play for RPG fans, as the amount of detail and factions is staggering. I thought Fallout 4 was pretty cool for having four different clans to ally with at the end, but it doesn't even hold a torch to the ideological divisions inside of New Vegas. Groups here are multidimensional, complete with sycophants, dissidents, skeptics, leaders, cooks, and a whole mess of internal organizational issues. There are no moral binaries in the world of New Vegas—your enemies are human, split only by ideals and circumstance, often making decisions similar to your own faction. That's not to say there's no moral compass in the world—Caesar's Legion rightfully sucks—but that you can never be confident that you're on the right side of history.

But it's not just the depth and granularity with which the world of New Vegas is portrayed (though they're nevertheless laudable)—it's how you can move through it. Besides the four main factions in the game, there's a host of other minor factions that you can befriend, decimate, or ignore altogether. And it's not the content that's surprising as much as it's the amount of outcomes. There are almost always violent and non-violent solutions to your problems, provoked by both inside and outside forces. This flow chart illustrates my point perfectly: you can stumble upon the quest in different ways, solve it through talking with different NPCs, go on a fetch quest, succeed through speech checks, or just kill the people involved. New Vegas not only understand that the world is filled with people of all different stripes, but that solutions to their problems can't be binary either, instead existing in multiple points on the spectrum between diplomacy and brute force.

There's less futuristic conundrums, less abstract debates about whether replicants are human or the krogan deserved the genophage. New Vegas asks a profoundly simple, yet unanswerable, question: who deserves to hold power? Do you support a war wherein the troops aren't fighting for their homeland? Is imperialisms justified if it's enacted to uplift the locals? Are all of our ambitious ideals doomed to failure, repeating the mistakes of our forefathers under a different name, a different brand? New Vegas pushes you to question authority without making it feel anarchic, acknowledging that lines have to be drawn but the issue is with where. It has a smart, deft script to support its messaging too.


Fallout: New Vegas is a piss-colored game that's a minor improvement over Fallout 3 gameplay-wise, but is on a whole 'nother level with its world.  is great if you want to know the history of an area. Just... y'know, make sure you play it on PC.

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Images obtained from: microsoft.com, gog.com

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