Welcome back to the wasteland.
Fallout 3 was released in 2008 to near-universal acclaim and was gifted with a Game of the Year edition the following year. In 2010, Bethesda released the newest game in the series, Fallout: New Vegas. This time, instead of playing a vault-dweller, players take on the role of a Mojave courier tasked with delivering a special platinum chip. Before the delivery can be completed, the courier is shot and left for dead in a shallow grave, classic Vegas-style. The courier awakens and begins a trek across the Mojave seeking answers and revenge and learning about their place in a war that spans the entire desert.
New Vegas begins with the usual character creator which lets the player choose the gender and appearance of their courier as well as the initial stats and skill levels of their character. Afterward, instead of the restrictive vault setting we saw in Fallout 3, New Vegas sets the player loose right off the bat with the freedom to roam wherever they may please. New Vegas features the same kind of open-world gameplay one would expect from a Fallout title and allows the player to explore the wasteland, complete sidequests and tackle the main quest at their leisure. New Vegas features a new faction reputation system which affects your standing with the various Mojave factions that are present in different towns in the wasteland and will influence the way they treat you. Helping one faction may cause one or more other factions to dislike you and certain armor will dress you up as a member of one faction. Certain quests will only open up if your reputation with a faction is high enough and companions will only join you if you share a similar cause.
The courier’s journey through the wasteland is affected by their skills and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats. S.P.E.C.I.A.L stand for the seven primary attributes of the courier: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. Each stat has an effect on your character, for example strength determines your melee weapon damage and how much weight you can carry and intelligence affects the amount of skill points you receive per level and also unlocks certain conversation options. In addition to these attributes, the courier has access to a variety of skills such as lockpick and repair, which allow you to pick and unlock increasingly difficult doors and repair weapons and armor respectively. There are also weapon skills that increase your effectiveness while wielding guns, energy weapons, explosives and melee weapons.
Combat is much the same as it was in Fallout 3. Fighting takes place from either a third-person or first-person perspective with melee, ranged or thrown weapons. Aiming in first-person mode with a ranged weapon now allows the player to look down the guns sights instead of simply zooming in and allows for more precise targeting. V.A.T.S. (the vault-tec assisted targeting system) returns from Fallout 3 and once again allows players to target specific body parts of their enemies and even shoot weapons out of their hands. You can cripple enemy legs to slow them down, cripple their arms to ruin their aim or destroy their weapon to disarm them. Each body part has an accuracy percentage which will rise or fall based on distance to target, visibility and your weapon skill for the weapon you are wielding. Your own weapons will, over time, suffer durability damage from use and need to be repaired periodically with other weapons, which will repair your weapon to a level based on your repair skill, or from repair vendors which will cost you money.
The player can be assisted in combat by companions which can be recruited through a combination of quests and reputation. Companions come with their own armor and weapons and each has a specific way of attacking. One companion may prefer sniping from afar or another might like to get up close and personal. This time around, instead of interacting with your companion through conversation options, New Vegas introduces the companion wheel. This new system allows players instant access to eight commands which include healing, opening their inventory and telling the companion to follow the player or stay behind and allows for quicker micromanaging of companions in and out of combat.
Where Vegas shines is in the ways it distances itself from its predecessor. The faction reputation system allows for more dynamic gameplay and assures that you can’t just do whatever you want and expect everyone to still love you. Unlike Fallout 3, you can’t just murder an innocent, fast travel away and return a couple of days later with all forgiven. If your reputation drops to a point where a faction is hostile on sight to you, it will stay that way until you take steps to improve it. What this does is make the player think about the consequences of killing certain individuals and completing certain quests, but also ultimately determines how the game ends as the player has the option of supporting several different main factions. This is perhaps the biggest difference between New Vegas and Fallout 3 and is what prevents it from feeling like an expansion pack. Companions are easier to manage than they were in Fallout 3, and at campfires around the wasteland, players can cook food with ingredients gathered from all around instead of needing to spend money on food and stimpaks.
Yes, you can gamble at the casinos but unless you’re going for achievements there isn’t much point in doing so. There are only three games to play: roulette, blackjack and slots. They follow the real-life rules of each, but there isn’t much point to gambling except for the sake of gambling and for a handful of achievements/trophies.
One major new addition is hardcore mode. Hardcore is a new level of difficulty above hard that makes the game more “realistic”. The player will need to keep track of three different meters which represent sleep deprivation, dehydration and starvation. If any of the meters gets too high, the player will die. Crippled limbs will also not recover instantly when healed with a stimpak and will require a doctor’s visit to heal or the use of a doctor bag. Stimpaks themselves now heal over time instead of instantly, so combat needs to be approached much more carefully. In addition to increasing the difficulty of the game, hardcore mode grants an achievement/trophy to the player if the mode is enabled for the entire duration of that playthrough.
New Vegas does suffer from some technical issues, some minor but some major enough to disrupt the experience. I would occasionally find typos and missing words in character dialogue and every once in a while a character would say nothing at all while their words appeared on-screen. More seriously though is the freezing issue. In the first three days of playing New Vegas, my game froze three times and I got frozen out once or twice at the very end as well. The situation got better the more I played after the start, but I still encountered more freezes than I felt was acceptable. If the game wasn’t freezing, it was pausing every 10 seconds or so or it was lagging here and there. I feel that a little more fine-tuning would have fixed this and I’m disappointed that these issues made it to the final product.
One other issue I had that bothered me was how over-powered my companions were. I barely had to fight anything at all because my companions would either kill everything before I even noticed it or would easily handle the threat if it snuck up on us. I could literally stand in a room of enemies and not fire a round while my companions took care of the situation while I went and made a sandwich. Plus, at least on normal difficulty, my companions never died so I’d never need to waste stimpaks on them. The worst thing that would happen is they would be rendered unconscious and I’d have to actually fight something so they’d recover. Like I said though, this is on normal difficulty so this may actually be different at higher difficulties.
Aside from the technical difficulties, my complaints about New Vegas are few and far between. Yes the companions are over-powered but they are also optional. New Vegas was, for me, a continuation of the fun I experienced playing Fallout 3. The sheer size of the world, while just a little smaller than that of Fallout 3, still offers countless experiences for the player and the story has the option to branch off in many different ways and brings a lot of replay value. Gameplay is still smooth and still works well and I’ll give Bethesda credit for releasing a game that feels like it belongs in the series without feeling like too much more of the same. If you liked playing Fallout 3, I definitely recommend picking up New Vegas.
