Fashionably Late: Fallout: New Vegas

More than a year after its original release, the folks at True PC Gaming have published a review-like editorial on Bethesda Softworks and Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout: New Vegas. After spending 250 hours with the title and applying a few mods to it, the writer came away obviously satisfied, and calls it a “true RPG experience”. Here’s a snip:

You can’t save everybody. Because of inter-faction politics, someone’s always getting screwed. By you. I slowly began to notice that pushing for an independent New Vegas meant pushing out the people who were best for it. Because almost all of this world it is left in stasis before the player’s meddling, I became its representative. I was the person to blame for its successes and failures. Though the game was revolving around me, it wasn’t empowering me.

New Vegas is depicted dispassionately, and that’s one of the game’s biggest criticisms. It may also be its biggest strength. Its alphabet soup of acronyms (the NCR, NCRCF, Big MT) hammers home how unexciting these factions are supposed to be, but I relished in it. The storyline has no urgent goal breathing down your neck, no pressing tension hurrying you to finish the main quest. If you can accept the Legion, there isn’t even a real antagonist. Instead, the goal is something remarkably pure and almost innocently (game)ish: to simply experience New Vegas. The main quest mereley has you traveling across the Mojave to try to understand the various tribes and factions that inhabit it. One by one, you become entrapped in their society and face their problems, then express your thoughts about them to the secretary back at your office. Ultimately, the final goal is to simply experience the battle at Hoover Dam and watch a credits sequence explain what you did to influence its aftermath.

Thanks RPGWatch.