Fallout: New Vegas is the latest addition to the Fallout franchise, though it was hard to peg down what this title was exactly based on pre-release PR. Call it a spin-off or standalone expansion, the only thing we knew it not to be was a full sequel, despite being a full game in its own right. What made it of high interest was the fact that it was not Bethesda-produced, but developed by Obsidian Entertainment, thus reuniting the Fallout franchise with many of the people who made it into such a “cult favorite” in the first place. It was clear the result would be slotted somewhere in between Fallout 3 and Fallout 2 in RPG sensibilities and writing, but what did we end up with? A title that’s essentially a large expansion pack to Fallout 3 with improved writing or a more daring reinvention that’s something else entirely?
Graphics and Sound
There are a few fields this review will cover quickly because they’re simply not that different from Fallout 3. The game’s graphics definitely are not. The engine’s age was already showing at the time of Fallout 3’s release, and it isn’t exactly aging gracefully. There is a fair amount of new graphical assets, but the game recycled assets from Fallout 3 extensively, as expected. The most significant contribution Obsidian made was to rework a number of Fallout 3’s rather pathetic animations. While they are improved, they’re still not very good, the improvements being mostly in combat animations, with dialogs still having people stand stock still and staring at you like robots.
Like Fallout 3, the game’s soundtrack consists of a selection of classical songs, primarily licensed, playing on the radio and an original, atmospheric soundtrack that plays when the radio is off. The radio soundtrack consists of a solid selection of classics, though the small number of songs means it gets repetitive fast, and keeping it on for long isn’t much of an option. The main soundtrack opts to reuse a lot of old Mark Morgan and Inon Zur music from earlier in the franchise, as well as new songs from Inon Zur. This brings a lot of moments of recollection in for earlier fans, and the tracks are generally well-picked and fitting, but it also highlights how the new, “epic” style Inon Zur used for Fallout 3 and New Vegas differs from earlier game soundtracks.
Gameplay and Tech
Fallout: New Vegas does not change a lot of the basic gameplay concepts of Fallout 3. It still utilizes its clumsy RTwP system, called “VATS”, though it has tweaked the balance so that this system is much less overpowered, while simultaneously improving the real-time shooting gameplay by adding iron sights for precision aiming.
A rebalancing of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. RPG system has also taken place, as envisioned many years ago by J.E. Sawyer. Obsidian also reinstated traits (a choice of level one perks that bring both advantages and disadvantages), moved perk selection from once every level to once every two levels, and increased the level cap to 30 (versus 20 in the non-DLC version of Fallout 3). Additionally, the skill system has been reshuffled and a number of skills noticeably gain in value, particularly survival and medicine, which now provide options in dialogue (as do other skills) and have a more significant impact on usage of meds and food.
The combat skills have been redistributed into four core skills (unarmed, melee, guns, energy weapons), and combat stats have been further expanded with Damage Threshold (DT). DT is an armor value that essentially replaces Damage Resistance (DR) from Fallout 3 by providing a minimum number one needs to pass to do damage outside of critical hits.
While simplifying the classic Fallout system of armor class, damage threshold, and damage resistance into just DT seems reasonable, it causes a number of gameplay balance issues. Particularly, it empowers the unarmed and melee skills and makes them much too powerful early in the game. Radscorpions are one of the most dangerous encounters early on, and while you can waste low-damage bullets on them, they can generally be one-or-two-shot killed with spiked knuckles, without any unarmed skill. Perhaps even more problematic is the usage of sniper rifles, which give a hefty critical bonus that more-or-less guarantees critical hits, particularly when sneaking, and the game’s fairly shoddy AI means there’s nothing stopping you from picking off most of the enemies from afar (and they don’t even respond when their compatriots’ heads explode). Fallout: New Vegas isn’t the hardest game to begin with, but its combat imbalances leave it well open to exploiting. VATS is further pushed into the background, with aiming at anything other than the head still being a waste of time.
That said, one thing the game does really well and the emphasis on DT is a part of that is bringing back the importance of RPG mechanics. The usage of DT limits how well you can get by on player skill without properly maintained equipment and skills. And, as mentioned, many formerly useless skills have become much more useful. Additionally, the removal of perks means it is harder to become a jack of all trades, though New Vegas still strikes a weak balance in frequency of leveling up, and maxing out multiple skills by level 30 is much too easy. Another issue from a risk versus reward standpoint is the arbitrary method by which the game determines how many experience points an enemy is worth – different enemies that provide 50 XP have wildly different challenge levels.
Then there’s the new “hardcore” gameplay mode, which I found fairly underwhelming. Despite its name, most of the changes it offers do not actually change gameplay by making it more “hardcore”, they simply add an element of tedium by making you drink some water or eat some food at regular intervals. The reason this doesn’t add a feel of classic RPG mini-management is that food and water are very plentiful in the wasteland, and even a person not focused on scrounging should have no problem fulfilling his or her needs (and if you have the Vault 13 Canteen, well, it’s pretty much a non-issue). The only way I can imagine this becoming a problem is if you spend too much time very early in the game exploring as much of the Mojave wasteland that’s immediately within your reach. It does offer some meaningful changes, namely the change of Stimpaks from instant healing to gradual healing, which means you have to be more cautious about running into combat. On top of that, followers become mortal and can permanently die, but this change primarily just makes them a pain the ass as their inferior AI makes them run off and die despite the combat orders you give them. Hardcore mode would have been much better if it was not just an on/off switch, but rather consisted of a number of menu options, so players could opt to turn on those elements they feel add to their experience, and turn off the tedious ones.
The casinos are an easy source of caps if you do find yourself short of supplies, and supplies are very cheap and plentiful, which contributes to an overall lack of difficulty. Even with the anti-cheating measure, which just adds tedium, breaking the bank on casinos is fairly easy. The game’s overly complex mini-game, Caravan, is similarly broken due to limits to enemy AI, and easy enough to exploit to win every time.
And, finally, the bugs. I don’t feel it’s worth as much attention as it has been getting, but as this is an Obsidian title a buggy experience was expected and is being highlighted all over the place. And I did run into some painful ones, from semi-frequent CTDs to the dreaded savegame-destroying bugs which has since been fixed. It is certainly rife with minor glitches, from collision detection flaws to NPCs switching voice actors mid-conversation. There are also a number of quest-breaking bugs, but while I had bad luck running into a few, they don’t seem frequent enough to be much of a problem. In general, New Vegas reminds me of Fallout 3 in its general lack of technical polish, as both games were rich in glitches and crashes on release.
Quest & World Design
The game puts more emphasis on resolving quests to improve your character than on grinding in combat. You’ll have a large variety of quests logged in your PipBoy fairly early in the game, with additional minor quests being logged as notes. Most quests have multiple ways of resolving them, and while combat remains an important part of the game, Obsidian does a great job in opening up the game to different builds, as a variety of stat and skill values open up specific dialogue options or quest paths. Speech is the most important skill here, but you’ll bump into options to resolve quests or improve your chances tied to pretty much every skill. Furthermore, quests are filled with different choices depending on if you care more about caps than doing good, or who you wish to side with.
The usage of skills for multiple solutions are well done throughout the game, but do come with two drawbacks. The biggest one is that the options marked by skills like [speech] or [science] are always positive options, if not auto-win options, where by one speech check you “win” the conversation and convince someone. The writing doesn’t always support that well enough as it is closely packed together, and it takes out a big part of my role as a player in convincing NPCs. The other drawback is that the game gives you full information on how many skill points you need to pass a test, making it easy to go back, use a skill-book and try again.
We’ll discuss the factions in detail later, but it’s worth noting here that Obsidian did an excellent job in offering many opportunities to choose to support or harm factions, while also allowing you to work for multiple factions for quite a long time. Faction reputation is much more important than the ill-used karma, which is sadly still present. Karma is as nonsensical as it was in Fallout 3, and still takes hits at completely illogical moments (killing gangers means a boost to karma, but then taking their stuff means you take a hit in karma). The game also tends to provide way too much information on when you take reputation and karma hits, or when actions close off certain quests. This means you can find out who a mysterious man is working for by killing him and then reloading, and it also means if you kill a certain NPC the game actually tells you what quests you just closed off, an overload of information that detracts from the significance of choice and consequence.
The game suffers from having an overly large amount of really tedious (courier) quests. Fetch, deliver, scout, whichever, all it generally consists of is going somewhere else on the world map, talking to an NPC or if you’re lucky fighting some enemies. Every RPG has a few of these typical fetch-model quests, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that has quite as many extensive and tedious quests as Fallout: New Vegas, from Still in the Dark to Ada Daba Honeymoon. They’re generally peripheral to the main quests, but even in the main quest you’re likely to run into one where you’re sent scurrying across the map carrying love notes.
On top of problems with fetch quests, this game has very poor world map design. The Gamebryo-Oblivion engine that this game is based on has always been more adept at creating large pieces of static scenery than at maintaining a high density of NPCs in that area. One method Obsidian uses to work around this is to split large locations into segments, which works against the feel of impressiveness of a spot like The Strip, but is as effective a quick fix as is available. Less practical is when they keep sprawling areas, but sparsely populate them, such as Freeside or Nellis Air Force. This gives the locations an empty feel that doesn’t fit well in the post-post-apocalypse setting as presented throughout most of the game, and what’s more, it adds to the tedium of having to walk through these empty, uninteresting areas over and over.
Puzzling map design is a problem throughout the game. The world map is rich in mountainous barriers, being set in the cliff-filled Mojave desert. That makes sense, but this game does not offer clear hints on where mountains are passable something the Gothic games excelled at, for example other than the main roads indicated on your PipBoy map. This means you can spend a lot of time jumping against mountainsides and hitting invisible walls on terrain that to the naked eye certainly look passable, which ultimately ends up being an exercise in frustration. Similarly poorly designed are the vaults and similar large underground mazes. I rarely enjoy underground mazes in first person games, but the usage of multiple levels by Obsidian and the similarity of different spots within the maps make the vaults exceedingly frustrating, the PipBoy map and quest pointer being absolutely no help in these areas. It’s a shame because New Vegas features some of the more better-written vaults in the franchise, particularly Vault 11, which in idea and writing stands as one of the better gaming experiences I’ve had in the past decade.
On top of its bugs, this game feels rushed at points in design as well. This significantly decreases the interest in specific locations that feel rather unfinished, such as the Brotherhood of Steel’s Mojave chapter or Primm, to name some examples. Furthermore, a lot of locations are really uninteresting unless you have a specific quest tied to it, which counter-intuitively makes this a quest-driven game on an exploration-driven engine.
In fact, the quest and world design overall seem ill adapted to the engine Obsidian was working with. I don’t really need fetch quests to get me to explore in an engine that tempts you with far-off vistas and map markers, thought it does help direct me past the invisible mountain walls. Nor does having a map compartmentalized by mountains and Vaults designed like mazes work well. Meanwhile, any sense of scale in the larger locations is either marred by being compartmentalized (such as The Strip) or made tedious and weird by being empty (Camp McCarren, Nellis, etc.). Even without any preference as a Fallout fan, I can’t help but feel this game’s design would have fit better in BIS’ Jefferson engine or anything with a similar top-down viewpoint and map-based world exploration.
Main Story & Setting
The Fallout franchise has never featured much in the way of story-driven titles, and New Vegas is no exception. There are some node points like finding the man that shot you and resolving the battle for Hoover Dam but otherwise the plot is threaded by means of whatever power you choose to support, as New Vegas is a heavily faction-driven game. There are four main paths to choose from (NCR, Legion, Mr. House, and independent), and minor locations and factions each offer additional choices to make. Much in contrast to Fallout 3’s weak endings, the New Vegas endings accurately reflect the different choices you made, and show how minor factions are impacted by the decisions you made regarding larger factions.
The odd thing for such an open game is that it starts off as a fairly linear game. You can explore early on, but the game clearly discourages it, and if you wander off in the wrong direction you get ripped apart by deathclaws. That kind of challenge is great in open world games and deathclaws are fully back to being as scary as ever but the game lacks ways to avoid this death zone early on, basically forcing you to follow the path it wants you to, circling around to the south-east before heading north to Vegas. This method of opening the game is solid in that it allows the player to get to know the factions in the way the developer means to introduce them, and your character is fairly set before the world is opened up, but it is a discouraging introduction to open world gamers. But they have something to look forward to: reach New Vegas and the world is blown wide open.
The main faction choices available were presented in PR as existing on a scale of gray, with no right and wrong sides existing. On the “good” end of the spectrum this certainly holds up, the NCR having some flaws highlighted throughout the game, from being overstretched in military capacity to suffering from corruption. Meanwhile, Mr. House and his independent Vegas will appeal more to libertarian-minded individuals, offering a future with wider freedom while leadership will carve a clearer path to the future under certified genius Mr. House. Of course, this option too suffers its drawbacks, from the lack of economic validity of Vegas being a “powerhouse” when it clearly is just a leech on NCR’s growing economy to the apparent megalomania behind House’s plans of a space program. There’s no easy “this is the good guys” option, and that is great.
Where it all falls apart is in the “evil” option, Caesar’s Legion. A sensible evil option should be based on a kind of inevitable bad for the greater good, which to some extent Mr. House provides in this game. Compare it the Master’s plan in Fallout 1, which is based on the best intention and considering the state of the wasteland even seems like a good option until you discover why it can’t work. Or Colonel Autumn’s plan in Fallout 3 though in typical Bethesda logic you could not side with him using the water purifier as a power base so the Enclave could pacify a wasteland desperately in need of pacification.
Caesar’s Legion, by contrast, is comprised of a bunch of psychopaths, a band of brutal slavers, butchering murderers and violent sexists, who aren’t just evil by our current standards, they are clearly evil even by the relaxed standards of Fallout’s world. If this group had been placed in the world in disarray of Fallout 1 or Fallout 3, you could at least argue they could be used to pacify the wasteland, but in this post-post-apocalyptic setting NCR has already proven to be a vastly superior option. It doesn’t help when you finally meet Caesar, who is spoken of in tones of admiration and awe throughout the game, and he is simply a boorish old man with all the charisma of a plank, whose whole philosophy is based on a unconvincing and shallow expression of Hegelian dialectics. The overall effect is to introduce a faction to Fallout that has all the cartoonish villainy of Fallout 2’s Enclave administration or Fallout 3’s President Eden, which is a real shame in a game that otherwise does a good job of balancing on shades of gray.
As a final point of criticism in a relatively weak main plot, it should be noted that Obsidian uses some odd narrative tools at times. Even in a franchise with a rich tradition of badly explained McGuffins, the Platinum Chip is an all-time weak one, magically given new abilities whenever the plot calls for it. Locked door? Platinum Chip opens it. Upgrades needed? Platinum Chip has them. OS upgrade for the power net needed? Platinum Chip does it. I consider this bad writing, as it leads to the device and the Courier having a really odd role in the plot. At one point in the story, no matter what choices you make, Caesar has the Chip, and he knows where the bunker is that the Chip can open. He gives it to you, and then asks you to do a task for him, without sending in any of his men to help you or check up on whether or not you followed his orders. If the game added something as simple as a thumb print or DNA check, this would make sense, but it doesn’t, and there is absolutely no reason for Caesar not to have his own men do the task rather than giving it to you. This shows exactly the problem with relying on a McGuffin as much as Obsidian did; it makes the plot extra sensitive to awkward plot holes.
Another odd but less painful tool Obsidian uses is the independent path. It’s hard for the game to get a feel for the choices the player wishes to make without any feedback from the guy providing the missions, so if you circumvent the three main factions, the game provides you with Yes Man. Yes Man is a robot that essentially breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the player to get feedback on his choices and lead him to the endgame. A risky choice, but Obsidian pulls it off primarily because Yes Man is a delightfully amusing character, with some great voice acting and writing to help you ignore how it is just a tool for the plot.
Faction aside, New Vegas has some oddities in setting caused by the franchise’s insistence on progressing chronologically. It makes sense for a sequel to be set at a later point than its predecessors, but the disadvantage of that for a post-nuclear series like Fallout is that you eventually run out of post-apocalypse, and New Vegas partially has, with The Strip and the NCR being an expression of post-post-apocalypse, while most of the surrounding wasteland feels more like a western-style game than a post-apocalyptic game. This is an issue the franchise will eventually have to find an answer for if they insist on moving forward chronologically, or it will move from post-apocalypse firmly into sci-fi territory.
The Strip is an odd spot setting-wise anyway, reminiscent of Fallout 2’s New Reno in its shortcomings. We’re supposed to believe that this area that produces absolutely nothing and does not function as a large-scale mercantile hub has economic validity in the wasteland. It offers pools and saunas while at the same time a community some miles to the south of it exists purely because it is near a water spring. There is a huge disjoint here, and the game never properly explains it. While gated communities are fine in the Fallout setting as Vault City amongst others proved New Vegas is never given a valid reason to exist, other than Mr. House protecting it with its robots, which is paper thin at best. New Vegas has issues with its gated communities in general. For instance, the Boomers are much too close to New Vegas for it to protect its independence, especially since its method of keeping outsiders away is shelling them with mortars and rockets, which doesn’t make any sense at all where would they get such enormous stockpiles of ammo from so long after the war?
What’s more, like Fallout 3 before it, New Vegas kind of mix and matches so that it can be hard to figure out when the game is supposed to be set. Fallout 3 was particularly egregious in this, asking us to believe that massive facilities were left unlooted 200 years after the war without any kind of protection. Obsidian does a better job explaining why specific spots have been left alone, and in general “makes more sense” as a setting than Fallout 3 did. But it still has problems. As Vegas wasn’t hit by bombs, the entire area should have had a relatively dense population, but it is never explained what happened to all those people. Meanwhile, wooden pre-war houses are left standing as if they would not rot or long since be looted for materials and firewood. Similarly, the Vegas buildings particularly the Lucky 38 do not look like they should still be standing undamaged 200 years on. And, as mentioned, a slaver army like the Legion makes much more sense around the time of Fallout 1 than around the time of New Vegas. Overall, Obsidian is trying to sell us a setting that is both post-apocalyptic and post-post-apocalyptic at the same time, and, in my opinion, it doesn’t really work.
Dialogue, NPCs, and Followers
I criticized the main plot extensively above, but it is important to keep in mind how relatively unimportant the main plot is. The strength of Fallout games has always been more in its factions and dialogue, and I was more interested to see what the Obsidian developers, who are well-known for quality writing, would do with the opportunity. And, well, it doesn’t disappoint. There are weaker characters and moments where the writing lapses, but overall, in characters such as Mr. House and Yes Man, the game offers some of the most memorable and best-written characters of the franchise. Many relatively minor characters, from No-Bark Noonan to the King, are also really well-written.
What helps the game is that it generally has much better voice acting than Fallout 3, though that is a fairly low standard to measure from. Rene Auberjonois as Mr. House, Dave Foley as Yes Man, and Kris Kristoffersen as Chief Hanlon are particularly brilliant, while even casting that was made for dubious nerd-love reasons such as Matthew Perry as Benny and Felicia Day as Veronica work out really well. There are, of course, a few offsets, particularly the really disinterested performances by Danny Trejo as Raul and Michael Dorn as Marcus, and the unconvincing performance of John Doman as Caesar. Still, with the more generic NPCs generally having solid performances as well, the voice acting is certainly solid throughout, with the most troublesome area being the repetitive comments made by unnamed NPCs.
As mentioned, character skills have become more important in dialogue again, and partially because of this the protagonist has a lot more character than the protagonist from Fallout 3, though he is still no match for the classic Vault Dweller or Chosen One from Fallout 1 and 2. Especially the dialogue lines for failing skill checks can be very amusing. One odd choice Obsidian made was to reintroduce stupid character dialogue from Fallout 1 and 2, but due to the limitation induced by full voice acting, NPCs never really respond to your stupidity, which makes this rather a waste of effort. Another unnecessary flaw is the addition of dialogue choices that lead to identical outcomes, and have no real game mechanic reason to be available.
Obsidian also made the decision to make the followers more interesting and important than in any other Fallout title. Each follower has a loyalty quest or event which unlocks an additional perk for them, and many have stories intertwined with some of the most important factions of this game and past games. The writing of the followers is generally outstanding, with Boone, Arcade Gannon, and Veronica in particular offering a rich back story and interesting quests especially compared to Raul’s or Lily’s. Worth noting here is that Arcade and Veronica are both homosexual characters, but this factoid is simply given as part of their personalty and treated naturally, which is a refreshing approach after the way BioWare has handled their bisexual characters in recent years.
While I have almost nothing but praise for the followers from a writing viewpoint, it’s worth noting that followers are always problematic in non-team based games, particularly in an FPS/RPG like New Vegas. Their AI really isn’t good enough for them to survive with normal stats, which means they’re often overpowered, and on normal difficulty will be slaying enemies left and right before you can even reach them. And at the same time their AI will have them running right into deathclaws and dying. While the writing is certainly a boon, from a gaming viewpoint increasing the importance of followers is not such a good idea.
Factions: Old & New
We’ve discussed the game’s factions under the main story header, but it’s worth highlighting the NCR and Caesar’s Legion separately. Particularly, New Vegas is unique amongst Fallout games in that it is set on the frontlines of an ongoing war between two major factions. Sadly, Obsidian does not do a good job adapting this engine to make the player feel like a war is truly going on. You’ll run into occasional fights between scouting parties, but beyond the quest-related battles, that’s it. And those battles are generally rather pathetic, including the final fight, which consists of a series of pitched fights. Bethesda did a much better job giving a feeling of large scale warfare in Fallout 3 with the battle around Capitol Hill or the final battle than Obsidian did here, and that game was much less war-focused.
The game does a great job in allowing you full freedom to choose between these factions. Unlike Fallout 1 and 2 which railroaded you to defeat the bad guys, and Fallout 3 which offered you two highly unbelievable “shining paladin” or “genocidal maniac” choices, New Vegas offers reasonable and deep choices, and still allows you to go independent if you prefer none of them. It is a great example of player choice in gaming, and the world is made believable in the different ways in which the factions are manipulating and damaging one another, but that doesn’t mean the factions are particularly attractive. While the NCR is a believable “good guy” faction, their only presence in the Mojave is an army presence, which means you’re not getting a good feel for the faction if you haven’t played Fallout 2.
Meanwhile, Caesar’s Legion goes way too far in its adopting of a Roman identity. Using a singular and unique identity to rally under is a staple of post-apocalyptic writing, but the problem is it was never seen in Fallout other than in minor roles, such as the Brotherhood of Steel using knight-like titles or raider groups calling themselves the Khans. Caesar’s Legion mints money, dresses up like Romans, and properly pronounces Latin terms (which makes less sense than if they misappropriated the identity). The net effect is for them to come across as even more cartoonish than their evil already made them. It is an equivalent of the Brotherhood of Steel running around calling one another ser and challenging each other to duels on brahmin back with sword and lance.
It’s odd, particularly because Obsidian introduces plenty of factions that work well enough in the Fallout setting. Despite their silly setup, the Boomers work setting-wise as a kind of homage to Mad Max. The Powder Gangers are certainly believable. And even the Kings work, mostly because they do right what Caesar’s Legion does not: their leader is actually believable as someone people would follow and listen to, and their setup is much more appropriate to the setting, particularly in their misunderstanding of history. Caesar’s Legion is at least adequately explained in the game itself, but I’m left wondering why the choice of Roman cosplayers was considered a good idea by the designers in the first place. With some better writing and a more subtle approach, it might have worked, but I feel it is lacking in both, in this game.
On top of adding new factions, New Vegas heavily recycles old factions. The nice thing about New Vegas is that it is much closer geographically to Fallout 1 and 2 and set a few decades after Fallout 2, which means that the appearance of various factions makes much more sense than their nonsensical inclusion in Fallout 3. Major factions like the NCR and Brotherhood of Steel show up and their presence is perfectly explained, as is that of merchant houses like the Gun Runners and Crimson Caravan, and even the Great Khans having been pushed into the Mojave, though of course Obsidian could not resist dressing them up in Mongolian gear. The Followers of the Apocalypse are a presence that’s harder to explain, as they’re still do-gooders whose survivability in the wasteland is close to zero, and their history is never really explained throughout the game.
Obsidian didn’t really know where to stop including nods to Fallout 1 and 2. The game features Marcus in a pointless cameo, the pilot of the crashed vertibird in Klamath, the rotator blade of the crashed vertibird in Klamath, the daughter of Cassidy, the son of the Mysterious Stranger, Enclave remnants, and so on and so forth. It is a bit much, but unlike Fallout 3’s weird tendency to pull classic factions out of its hat, here it kind of makes sense as story-wise this game is more of a sequel to Fallout 2 than it is a spin-off to Fallout 3.
Speaking of references and Fallout 2, pop culture easter eggs are also back but the worst ones (like the Rodents of Unusual Size or aliens) are hidden behind the Wild Wasteland trait and fully optional. Thankfully, even with Wild Wasteland, it never gets as silly as Fallout 2 was, and there’s no blatant references outside of Wild Wasteland.
With all that said, the strongest trait of the factions in New Vegas is that there are quite a few of them, and on each of them you can find enough information to decide how you feel about them. The game offers you the choice of picking your own friends and enemies, and more than that makes the factions interesting enough to make the player care about said choices.
…and in conclusion, Fallout 3
While I have made a lot of comparisons to the Fallout franchise throughout this review, I haven’t really addressed how it compares to Fallout 3. Well, to begin with, it really isn’t “just a large expansion pack” for Fallout 3. One might get that impression after a short period of gaming, but if you sit down for a few extended sessions or have even a half-professional gaming eye, you’ll soon note that Obsidian’s intent in design is much different from Bethesda’s in many key ways. These have been described above, and what they come down to is that where Fallout 3 was focused on offering an experience without any barriers for exploration and enjoyment, New Vegas tries to grab back further to Fallout 1 and 2’s roots. Not only is it more different from Fallout 3 than a casual glance would admit, it’s also an enormous game, easily the size of Fallout 3 in world exploration, and a whole lot bigger when it comes to depth and breadth of quests and factions.
When I start comparing the two, the first notable point of reference is the writing, simply because New Vegas’ writing is very superior to Fallout 3’s. Fallout 3 is a low standard to begin with, but as long as you don’t expect too much from the main story, New Vegas offers some of the best writing of any recent RPG. The fact that it also does so much to improve the RPG mechanics and their effect on the world means it is much closer to being a game where your character build matters, and therefore more of a joy for role-playing enthusiasts than Fallout 3 was. To put it simply: Fallout: New Vegas isn’t just a superior Fallout title, it’s also a superior RPG.
Whether or not it is a “better game” is something I feel is more open to debate. Its major flaws lie in map and fetch quest design and while that is tedious, it doesn’t detract enormously from the title. If you’re not looking for more roleplaying in your RPGs and felt Fallout 3 struck a great balance of open world exploration, shooting, and sandbox entertainment, then be aware that New Vegas has less sandbox and less shooting to offer you – though the shooting elements do come with improved mechanics.
Ultimately, if the FPS genre mixing doesn’t put you off, both Fallout and RPG fans should be all over this game. And if nothing else, Vault 11 is really, really awesome.
