Fallout: New Vegas Previews

It’s time for another quick round-up of recent Fallout: New Vegas previews, and we’ll start things off over at The Bitbag:

The game takes place in the Mojave Desert, and of course the city that hides within, Vegas. I’m almost sure that this game will have many gambling mechanics, but as for the moment no details concerning that have been released. One can only hope we’ll see people jumping out of windows, or committing mass suicides over the potential debts that can be acquired.

While the name of the game has always been to blow stuff up and ruin peoples lives, this installment takes somewhat of a different approach. Normally each iteration of The Wasteland is filled with people trying to just scrape out an existence, but this doesn’t seem too true of New Vegas. Instead it seems there will be factions vying for complete control over the Mojave. People who haven’t just sought to survive, but to thrive and rebuild civilization as they see fit.

Before making a pit stop at IncGamers:

We’re briefly shown two more locations from the New Vegas game world; a casino/rollercoaster setting which sees another run-in with the Powder Gang and Novac, which features a giant novelty dinosaur which serves as a great sniper spot. From there it’s onto Black Mountain, an area of New Vegas that wasn’t spared by the nuclear holocaust and, as such, has a bit of a mutant problem. The central hub of the area is a radio station under the control of a super-mutant called Tabitha. The station, ironically, still broadcasts warnings about the mutants. It’s here that Avellone reveals there are two generations of mutants in New Vegas those created by the radiation and the super-mutants which originated in Fallout 2. Interestingly, there is also a hierarchy at play, with the super-mutants viewing the regular mutants as dumb and unevolved. The player can take advantage of this situation by playing them off against each other as we interrupt their comms and create dissent between them. An inter-faction fight ensues and, once we’ve rescued a chap called Raul and fired up the new minigun, we’re ready to indiscriminately slaughter everything in sight, including the deranged Tabitha who, for some reason, is wearing a peroxide blonde wig.

In the final section of the demo, we’re shown an area known as Helios One, a power facility now under the control of the New California Republic. Consisting of human survivors, the NCR is prone to promoting the wrong people to important positions, Avellone says, demonstrated by the introduction of the brilliantly-named Fantastic, a bone-headed chancer who is now in charge of running the power facility. We discover that we need to realign the power plant’s mirrors to get the plant running at more than one per cent efficiency. Once done, we’re faced with another option: do we reroute the power as per the NCR’s instructions, or do we choose where to send it?