Rating of
4/5
Mo’ Jave, Mo’ Problems.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/09/15
The ‘Fallout’ franchise and its associated IPs were created and first put to use under the banner of Black Isle Studios, a super-star RPG developer that began as a division of the once-great Western videogame publisher, Interplay. Due to a whirling vortex of money troubles and legal issues, Interpay, Black Isle, Bioware, and every other developer or publisher that was once associated with great RPGs on the PC platform have died, and their IP rights have been scattered to the four winds. Some of the people who made-up these companies, however, have managed to pull their old teams back together in order to arise from the ashes like a digital phoenix. After Bethesda Softworks bought the ‘Fallout’ IP from the defunct Black Isle, they created “Fallout 3,” which I felt did a fantastic job of representing the old Role-Playing franchise in the new pop-medium of the First-Person Shooter. Many gamers (wrongly) disagree with me, perpetuating the idea that “Fallout 3” is just ‘“Oblivion” with guns.’ In order to appease the portion of the ‘Fallout’ fanbase that irrationally hated “Fallout 3,” Bethesda handed-over the keys to the kingdom to Obsidian Entertainment, a developer made-up of many displaced refugees left behind after the death of Black Isle. Surely the people who created ‘Fallout’ could better satisfy the fans of the old ‘Fallout’ RPGs more than the studio behind ‘The Elder Scrolls,’ right? Unfortunately, that isn’t quite how it worked out, as the resulting spinoff, “Fallout: New Vegas,” adds just as many problems as it fixes.
Presentation
“Fallout: New Vegas” is built on the same Havok Engine as “Fallout 3.” Indeed, as it turns out, Bethesda just gave the Obsidian team a Havok creation kit with all of the “Fallout 3” assets and let them, essentially, create a full-length mod of that game. Everything in “Fallout: New Vegas” looks very similar, if not identical, to the graphical assets in “Fallout 3.” The environments are somewhat different, however, as “Fallout: New Vegas” takes place primarily within a rural desert environment, compared to “Fallout 3’s” primarily urban ruins. Of course, the only significant graphical difference besides cluttered buildings and architecture being replaced with sand dunes and rocks is the fact that “Fallout: New Vegas’” color scheme focuses a lot more on the browns while “Fallout 3’s” focused more on the grays.
The horrible ambient noise that makes up the soundtrack in a given ‘Fallout’ title is back, but this time around seems to be 100% identical to that found in “Fallout” and “Fallout 2.” Of course, I rarely heard any of it, since “Fallout 3’s” fantastic musical radio is back in “Fallout: New Vegas.” The new radio is not, however, as overwhelmingly amazing as the radio station in “Fallout 3.” First of all, it is necessary to flip between two different radio stations to hear all of the game’s licensed music. One of these stations, Mojave Music Radio, features primarily Country Western Music, while the other, Radio New Vegas, features crooner tunes by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin (along with in-game news reports voiced by the legendary Wayne Newton). There seem to be less licensed songs overall in “Fallout: New Vegas,” which makes dividing them in half an even worse idea, as each radio station repeats their music with distressing frequency. Perhaps the most disturbing change in “Fallout: New Vegas’” soundtrack is the fact that most of the Country Western music played on Mojave Music Radio ISN’T from the 1940s or 1950s! While the quality of these songs is good enough, it turns out that they are almost entirely taken from music CDs created in 1997-1998 for the express purpose of being used in movie/TV/game soundtracks, which completely destroys the soundtrack’s ability to bolster the authenticity of the faux-perpetual-1950 culture that stands as the foundation of the ‘Fallout’ universe.
The voiceacting is, again, as is traditional for both ‘Fallout’ and ‘Elder Scrolls’ games, a mix of big name actors and relative unknowns. While “Fallout 3” did a great job of mixing up voices for important characters and random schmoes, “Fallout: New Vegas” falls back into “Oblivion’s” old rut of having one person voice an insane amount of characters. It’s so bad in “Fallout: New Vegas” that the entirety of one of the game’s main factions all sound like the SAME GUY.
While “Fallout 3” was technically pretty solid (for a Bethesda game), “Fallout: New Vegas” is something of a technical disaster… despite the fact that Bethesda didn’t have sole control over its development. “Fallout: New Vegas” randomly crashed on me innumerable times. It has a known issue with infinite loading screens that can be caused by minor save file corruption (and fixed by reloading the affected save from within the game instead of from the title screen). It even has a number of quest-related bugs that incorrectly cut-off the player from certain options if they do things in anything but a specific order within the main story’s rat nest of interconnected plot threads.
Between the samey voices among characters and the stupidly large number of glitches, “Fallout: New Vegas” already seems more like ‘“Oblivion” with guns’ than “Fallout 3” ever did!
Story
Unlike “Fallout 3,” “Fallout: New Vegas” doesn’t have a particularly long-winded opening tutorial. Instead, the player is simply dumped into a scenario and expected to run with it. It seems that the player character is a professional Courier (and coincidentally, ‘Courier’ is the default name NPCs will use when addressing the player directly) who was shot in the head by a New Vegas mobster and buried in a shallow grave outside of a small town in the Mojave desert. After being pulled from said grave by a friendly robot and patched up by the town’s doctor, the Courier is gently directed to follow the story path of tracking down the mobster who shot them and retrieving the novelty-sized Platinum Poker Chip they were supposed to deliver, but which was stolen by said mobster.
Amazingly, the number of story missions tied directly to the Courier and the Platinum Chip is incredibly small. The main quest thread leading up to the finale could be completed in just a few hours… were it not for the fact that the player is plopped in the middle of the Mojave Wasteland surrounding the ruins of the Las Vegas Strip. Navigating this large, open desert takes a lot of walking, and there are an insane number of side distractions to encounter… all of which are more interesting than tracking down a mobster and a stolen parcel.
Maybe I’m weird for thinking Las Vegas is a complete waste of space in a perfectly nice desert, but whenever gambling or mobsters are involved, I lose interest. “Fallout 2” had a significant amount of content take place in the similar environment of New Reno, and I skipped over the majority of it simply because it didn’t make me care, while other story threads were far more interesting. In the case of “Fallout: New Vegas,” I didn’t even approach the New Vegas Strip until I had already sunk about 80 hours into the game and had run out of leads for more interesting activities.
Indeed, the story of the Courier and the stolen Platinum Chip is completely overshadowed by another story thread in “Fallout: New Vegas.” This secondary thread actually does end up being the route to resolving everything and completing the game’s story, as it involves a large-scale conflict between two military forces: The NCR and Caesar’s Legion.
The NCR is the New California Republic, which started way, way back during the events of the original “Fallout.” Through successful use of Democracy, the NCR has managed to bring back a significant amount of pre-war lifestyle to the West Coast, and is now expanding Eastward into the Mojave desert, with their eye specifically on the hydro-electric power plant housed in Hoover Dam.
Caesar’s Legion, on the other hand, is a massive conglomeration of barbaric tribes united by a former NCR citizen who decided that re-creating the lifestyle of the Roman Empire would be far more suitable to life in a post-nuclear holocaust world than trying to rebuild the American lifestyle that lead to the war in the first place. Of course, anyone who has studied Rome in any detail knows that it was a lifestyle not worth emulating.
Thus the player has the option to choose between aiding the ‘good’ guys in the NCR or the ‘bad’ guys in Caesar’s Legion. There is also a surprise third-party to choose from (involving the Platinum Chip), and the player can also choose to go rogue and side with nobody but themselves.
Besides the relatively un-engaging plot, “Fallout: New Vegas” attempts to invoke a strong sense of continuity and/or nostalgia to “Fallout” and “Fallout 2.” The setting in the Southwest is far closer to the West Coast setting of the first two games than the Washington, D.C. setting of “Fallout 3.” There is also a larger effort put into callbacks to previous ‘Fallout’ lore… yet there are a surprising and disappointing amount of lore discontinuities, many of which are baked into the very core of “Fallout: New Vegas’” narrative. Why – in the most egregiously lore-breaking example – are the NCR and Caesar’s Legion fighting over a hydro-electric dam in a world where EVERYTHING runs (or rather, ran) on nuclear power? Why is there a significant sidestory revolving around the NCR fighting the Brotherhood of Steel over possession of a solar power plant? Why are there even hydro-electric and solar power plants at all in the ‘Fallout’ universe? Why, again, are there references to fuel oil and petroleum power, when it is clear that every derelict vehicle in the ‘Fallout’ universe contains a miniature nuclear reactor (which will explode if the vehicle accidentally gets shot a few times)?
It really feels like the Obsidian team phoned in their writing for “Fallout: New Vegas” and relied on their reputation and name recognition to earn credibility among the hard core ‘Fallout’ fanbase. Bethesda did a much better job of authentically invoking ‘Fallout’ lore in “Fallout 3.”
In the Ultimate Edition of “Fallout: New Vegas,” there are four story-related DLC packs. These DLC missions, “Dead Money,” “Honest Hearts,” “Old World Blues,” and “Lonesome Road,” do essentially the same thing as the story-related DLCs in “Fallout 3,” in that they take the player to areas segregated from the main world map and build their own little mini-stories. While “Dead Money” and “Honest Hearts” are kind of throw-away stories and not particularly interesting, “Old World Blues” and “Lonesome Road” try to tie into each other with a bit of continuity. The weird thing about the latter two, though, is that they also try to invoke a stronger backstory for the Courier, but do it in an incredibly ham-handed fashion. Indeed, the only portion of the DLCs that I found really engaging was the side-story in “Lonesome Road” that does a fantastic job of fleshing out the background of one of the NPC companions from the main game.
Finally, speaking of NPC companions, “Fallout: New Vegas” does a much, MUCH better job of handling them than “Fallout 3” did. While I found it impossible to recruit a companion until the very end of “Fallout 3,” in “Fallout: New Vegas” I had a cute little flying robot companion before I’d played 10 hours. Even better, “Fallout: New Vegas” allows the player to have one robot companion (with two possible options) and one humanoid companion (out of six possible options) at the same time. I never had a problem getting any of these people/things to team up with me as a Good character, whereas in “Fallout 3” I was Forever Alone until Fawkes the supermutant decided to hang out with me. Having someone/something at your back while exploring the post-apocalyptic wasteland always makes the experience feel a bit better.
Gameplay
Very little has changed about the way ‘Fallout’ is presented from a gameplay perspective between “Fallout 3” and “Fallout: New Vegas.” This game is still as much ‘Fallout’ as an FPS as its immediate predecessor. Of course, there have been some changes, both for the better and for the worse.
The single best change to “Fallout: New Vegas” over “Fallout 3” is the fact that the shooting no longer completely sucks. Weapons now have true ironsights aiming, and overall the shooting feels much more responsive than it did in “Fallout 3.” I played through the whole game with my shooter-enabling Razer Hydra and found it to be a pretty solid experience. The V.A.T.S. auto-aiming system is still largely useless, as it can’t land the same shots a player can, limiting its value to hectic melee-range encounters. The only thing that still desperately needs to be improved about the shooting in FPS-style ‘Fallout’ is the fact that it is still far too easy to line up a shot against an unaware enemy, pull the trigger, and see a lovely bullet hole decal appear levitating slightly above the surface of the object the player is using for cover… yes, hitboxes for environmental objects are still sloppy.
Despite their improvements to the shooting portion of “Fallout: New Vegas,” Obsidian didn’t leave well enough alone and messed with a few other gameplay mechanics… or rather messed up a few other gameplay mechanics. Obsidian changed the way armor works in the game, switching the standard Armor Rating in “Fallout 3” to a Damage Threshold. The main thing I noticed about the change from Armor Rating to Damage Threshold is that it makes high-fire-rate, low-damage guns worthless, as their bullets can’t penetrate the target’s Damage Threshold, even when directly aimed at an unarmored body part (like the head). Next, certain melee weapons are completely overpowered in “Fallout: New Vegas” because they simply ignore Damage Threshold altogether. Obsidian scaled back the number of Perks the player gets to every-other level, just like in the first two ‘Fallout’ games, but bumped the level cap to 50 from 30 to compensate. There are a ton more crafting recipes, but in general the only ones I found useful were Stimpaks, Antidotes, and Weapon Repair kits that allow the player to fix any weapon, even if they aren’t carrying around a bag of identical weapons to scrap for parts.
Honestly, though, I would have preferred to see the weapon repair mechanic disappear completely. It wasn’t in “Fallout” or “Fallout 2,” and exists solely as a Havok Engine holdover from ‘The Elder Scrolls.’ Of course, Obsidian also added a bunch of other horrible mechanics to “Fallout: New Vegas” that were never in “Fallout” or “Fallout 2,” but thankfully only implemented them in a new ‘Hardcore’ mode that forces the player to keep track of sleep patterns as well as food and water intake (NPC companions can also permanently get themselves killed instead of just going ‘unconscious’). To me, Hardcore mode sounds like the kind of terrible mod some PC Master Race neckbeard would come up with to make the game ‘better’ by ruining it completely.
Overall
There is a very noticeable pattern going on with the ‘Fallout’ games: “Fallout”:“Fallout 3”::“Fallout 2”:“Fallout: New Vegas.” While “Fallout” and “Fallout 3” are both concise, engaging, story-rich games, “Fallout 2” and “Fallout: New Vegas” are more sprawling, duller, sandboxy experiences. If it weren’t for the drastically improved shooting in “Fallout: New Vegas,” it wouldn’t really have anything to offer. The fact that giving the ‘Fallout’ IP back to Obsidian for one final go didn’t end up creating a euphoric experience makes me feel better about Bethesda’s decision to take back creative control for the upcoming “Fallout 4.”
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay:
Shooting: 4/5
Everything Else: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
