I finished Fallout: New Vegas this past week and have come back to report that while I did find some real enjoyment in the side quests (that the game almost forced me into doing), the end result of Fallout: New Vegas is that it is a pale comparison to the original Fallout 3. New Vegas is full of bugs, poor plot development, and just doesn't have enough to break into what could have been an awesome game.
Throughout the entire game I was constantly asking myself "Why am I doing this?". Why am I working for Mr. House? Why do I care what happens to New Vegas? Fallout 3 took an hour of game play and dedicated it to not only teaching you how to play, but giving you reason to play. The bonds that were quickly formed with your father and then shattered as the vault erupts into chaos explains why you don't know anything about the outside world and gives you a long term goal to strive after. New Vegas briefly attempts to get you started with a revenge plot but that lets you decide what you're going to do 25% into the game, and doesn't give you a whole lot of reason to finish it.
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| Helping a static image take over is a bad reason to play |
You play the game as "The Courier". All that you know about your past is, well, nothing. You find out over time that you were given a package to deliver and you were intercepted and nearly killed, but that doesn't take place in the game. A substory about losing your memory from being shot in the head and needing to piece your life together could have added so much to this, to give me something to care about. This is a game about exploring a world that as a courier you should probably already know and somehow you don't. Bad design.
If you like fighting bugs, this game is for you. Most of the enemies are desert insects that try to attack you. Oh sure, there's factions that you can fight against, but the interactions with them are so brief and unmemorable that it doesn't matter. VATS is back, and still as entertaining as ever. Somehow I will never get tired of using it to fight. The weapons are basically the same stock from Fallout 3, you have your pistols, your rifles, lasers and explosives, nothing too out of the ordinary save a few choice major weapons.
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| Yeah, you can fire that., I'd be impressed if it wasn't from Gears of War |
Along the way you meet up with followers that... don't really do anything? Most of them require a quest of some sort to enlist, and afterward will offer an additional quest to unlock their full potential, but beyond that are only really good for running into battles that they can't hope to win and carrying around all the stuff that's too heavy for you. If they died, they were gone forever, no way to resurrect them or anything, so bringing them out to help with hard quests was a pain because they were hard to keep under control. It would have been nice to see a need to recruit as many people as you could to help turn the tide of battle in the end. In my play through, I didn't even take anybody with me at the end and left them all to rot in the Lucky 38.
The end of the game is the game deciding which side that you chose to fight for (seriously, there's a point in the quests that if you do too much for any side you then become affiliated with that side and the others won't help you) and seeing how the things you did for them helped them win. Compared to the events in Fallout 3 that benefited mankind from your family's research, helping any side take control of a dam kinda sucks.
The bugs in the game are unforgivable. Creatures and players getting stuck in terrain, falling through holes in the world, and crashing are only the beginning. In addition to the bugs that I mentioned in my previous article, I found a brand new one that caused two of my game saves to be locked out of The Strip with no way to get in. This is like getting locked out of world 8 in Super Mario Bros. You can't win the game without being able to get in and out of it. Creating a new save game every 15 minutes is a terrible way to work around these issues, and we still haven't seen a patch to fix them since launch day.
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| Nobody caught this in playtesting? Seriously? |
There's some real problems with Fallout: New Vegas. What it does, it does well, but focusing on the bad in the game isn't hard to do. It has its moments, but they are marred by a game that didn't know how to be a game. There's a lot holding this back from being truly exceptional, but if you can find it on sale or wait until a price drop, there's worse ways to spend 30 hours of gaming. Pass for now, but keep an eye on.
