Fallout: New Vegas
- Details
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Published on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 19:00
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Written by MuNkY
| Title | Fallout: New Vegas |
| Developer | Obsidian Entertainment |
| Publisher | Bethesda Softworks |
| System Availibility | Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC (Microsoft Windows) |
| Players | 1 |
| Release Date | October 19, 2010 |
| ESRB Content Rating | M (Mature) |
| KillingBoxx Score | 4.0 |
| By It Now On |  |
Welcome to The Wasteland...Again
Many people (including myself) regarded
Fallout 3 as one of the best, if not, THE best game of 2008. So in October of 2010, when Bethesda decided to release their follow up,
Fallout: New Vegas (this time developed by Obsidian Entertainment), they had a tough act to follow.
Fallout: New Vegas is not a direct sequel to
Fallout 3. It takes place in roughly the same time period, the year 2281 (4 years after the events in
Fallout 3) and, uses a lot of the same gameplay mechanics as
Fallout 3. But that is where the similarities end.
Fallout: New Vegas, as the name suggests, takes place in the city of New Vegas and the surrounding desert of the Mojave Wasteland. The nuclear war of 2077 never made it's way completely to Vegas, and thus the city still exists. Even though it is a shell of it's former self, The Strip still has its casino's, The Hoover Dam is still pumping out power, and Lake Mead still has fresh clean water. Also, unlike
Fallout 3, you are no longer a vault dweller who has lived your life entirely underground. You play a courier for the Mojave Express Courier Service. At the beginning of the game you are captured, shot in the face, and left for dead by a man named Benny. Benny wanted the package you were carrying which contained a platinum chip.
You don't know why, but the main story of the game has you trying to find out. Shortly after this ordeal you wake up in a doctors office, in the town of Goodsprings. Due to the fact that you were shot in the head, this is where you get to build the look of yourself, and adjust all of your in-game stats and skills the way you like. And just like
Fallout 3, this is where you also get your handy dandy Pip-Boy 3000. Given to you by Doc Mitchell, a former vault dweller. From there The Wasteland is yours to explore. And believe me, there is a lot to explore. The Mojave Wasteland is almost as big as the Capital Wasteland in
Fallout 3.
Fallout: New Vegas takes everything that was good in Fallout 3 and makes it better. The workbench building system has been expanded beyond just weapons, and now includes ammo and medical supplies. Plus you can now modify weapons, like adding scopes, and bigger ammo magazines. The skills and perks system has been refined. There are many more weapon options. They added gambling which was a no-brainer considering the game takes place in Vegas. They also made your traveling companions much easier to control and much more useful. But everything else remains largely untouched. So if you were familiar with the mechanics in Fallout 3 you will feel right at home. Your Pip-Boy menus are exactly the same. V.A.T.S. still exists, and is better then ever now that they added special unique "finishing moves" to a lot of weapons.
While
New Vegas pays like
Fallout 3, that doesn't mean that Obsidian just took
Fallout 3 and skinned it in a desert scenery. They added a lot of new ideas to the game this time around. For instance, you still have a karma system in
New Vegas. You do good things, and your karma goes up. You do bad things, and your karma goes down. But this time your karma is not directly related to how much a particular person likes or dislikes you. For instance, in
Fallout 3, when talking to someone who was a "good" character, if you had bad karma they wouldn't necessarily talk to you. Now there is a new mechanic called reputation. The more you help a particular group of people, the more that entire group likes you. For example, there is a quest early in the game where you can help the town of Goodsprings defend from a group of Powder Gangers. If you help the town you get an "Idolized" rating in Goodsprings and are forever loved there. However, if you decide to help the Powder Gangers raid the town instead, you become "Vilified" in Goodsprings, but "Idolized" by the Powder Gangers. Once you are "Vilified" in Goodsprings, most people will attempt to shoot you on sight if you go near the town. If you do get close enough to talk to someone they are most likely just going to tell you to fuck off, and then shoot at you afterwards. Most things you do in the Mojave will either help or hurt your reputation with one group or another, sometimes multiple groups at once. So you have to be careful who you piss off, and who you are friends with. The reputation system gets heavily involved in the main story towards the end of the game, when you have to decide which of the major 4 groups you want to take sides with. Basically which ever you pick, the other 3 are gonna me mad. But it is your choice to decide how to play. This also adds a great deal of replay value, because each group has their own ending. So you could play the game 4 times and see a different ending each time around.
With all the great additions and fixes from
Fallout 3 to
New Vegas, you would think that
New Vegas would be a shining stand out compared to
Fallout 3, which was already a fantastic game. However, 1 thing that
New Vegas falls short in is a serious low point for the game. Glitches, more glitches and even more glitches.
New Vegas is full of bugs and flaws at every turn. The game locks up for no reason at parts. Some times when you fast travel you will be transported to your destination but you will be 100 feet in the air, only to fall and kill yourself, or at the very least be extremely injured. Enemies, creatures, and sometimes even you, get stuck in environments. There is occasions where you will be walking in a tunnel or cave and you will just fall through the floor. The end result being you are either permanently stuck and have to reload your last save, or you get zipped back to the beginning of the area as if you had just walked in the first time. The most annoying glitch I personally encountered... for an entire play session, I could not shoot any gun in my inventory without first holstering my gun, and then redrawing it. Luckily for some reason the next day this particular glitch mysteriously went away and I could play the game as normal. Obsidian is aware of a lot of these issues and they are releasing free patches. But the debugging process is apparently going slow. They have released 2 patches as of the time of this writing (3 if you count the patch that comes when you download the new Dead Money DLC). But there is still a lot of bugs that haven't been fixed yet.
The above glitches are just some of the glitches that I myself have occurred. There are many, many more that are talked about daily across the internet. In my opinion there shouldn't be any reason for this many glitches. They used the same game engine as
Fallout 3, they just added on. So why so many problems? I don't know, but I hope that they are being addressed behind the scenes.
The glitch/bug problems in Fallout: New Vegas, do not take away from the game itself. They are more annoyances then anything. But it's like the needle poke analogy. Get poked by 1 needle it's not so bad. Get poked by a few hundred and you might be a little pissed. And due to the auto save feature, even if the game does lock up you usually don't have to redo that much. The game is really everything you loved about Fallout 3, but expanded upon, improved upon, and moved to the city of New Vegas. Despite the glitches Fallout: New Vegas is still one of my favorite games of 2010. If you enjoyed Fallout 3, this is a must play. There is another hundred or so hours of content here, but moving the story to the West Coast makes it still feel fresh and new. Fallout: New Vegas is not just Fallout 3 in the desert. It is a whole new experience for you to explore.
