Anyway! Fallout New Vegas is, according to most reviews I've read, the best of the "two" Fallout games produced roughly around the same time. I had something of a mixed opinion of Fallout 3, which was good but not great, and I've always been a little scared to fire up FO:NV. You see of all the bad mental habits I have, I think I'm a bit suggestible in a weird way. If someone tells me something is hot doody, I tend to gird myself and then be pleasantly surprised. If someone tells me something is amazing, I tend to pick out its flaws and not give it much room to breath.
Tell me Fallout: New Vegas is the hottest RPG title in the last five years for storytelling and worldbuilding, watch me sputter like a vagrant in a hot dog explosion as I try to get over how bad the mouse acceleration is. More on this later, though...
FO:NV also has the weird issue with Bethesda steam DLC pricing. Basically, a friend of mine bought me this game for a fiver a couple years ago, and I left it in my inventory. I used to do that, leave games lying there out of my library. Anyway, eventually the game went on sale for the same price, but with all the DLC packed in, and it was more to buy the DLC later. I don't know what Bethesda's deal is here, but I ended up buying the game again with all the DLC and leaving that copy sitting there. Which I still have.I don't know how to feel about that, either. I do want to make the point that the played statistic above is an astounding thirteen hours off my in-game played time. That's a lot of time alt-tabbed looking at solutions, crashing to desktop, fixing mod orders and other general nonsense. Still, sixty plus hours is a lot of game, either way, and I guess playing with mods counts as gaming sort of anyway?
FO:NV is as everyone on the planet probably already knows a 1st person RPG made some time ago under circumstances I wasn't following at the time. The biggest "thing" that pushes me toward playing FO:NV is actually a wee little video by minor youtube celebrity MrBTongue regarding "What do they eat?" For a lot of people game world design and creating habitations or terrains that favor some sort of in world "natural" development isn't a concern. For me, it is. Game worlds too easily turn into arena A with many chest high walls into arena B with some chest high walls into arena C with no chest high walls and then a market. Variety in world creation creates variety in game play. Think about your favorite action films, even really dumb ones. The settings are often in places that aren't Brownity brown town McChest High Walls now serving our millionty wall, but rather things created by the socioeconomic and natural pressures of human habitation. When I think of action scenes the stuff that comes to mind is the shoot out in Blade Runner where they tear through a department store, or that bit at the end of Zombieland. So the idea of a game that actually spent some time trying to world building instead of wall build is promising. It promises variety and a logical construction that favors memorable scenes instead of And Then I fought the Mutants In the Many Grey Walls.It's probably why I liked Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm so much more than say, Hard Reset.
I actually tried out modding FO:NV, since the game is more toward Skyrim and had an active modding community. I haven't tried modding Bethesda games since Morrowind, and in Morrowind I just like added a house to put my stuff into.
Modding in FO:NV is interesting, since it feels like it wasn't really supported as fully as you'd think looking at all the doodads and textures and so forth. Stuff loads funny, people's faces disappeared, there's load orders and everything feel rather patched together. On the other hand, mods do a lot to improve the visuals, though I'm reluctant to do any real significant modding that impacts gameplay. I tried putting clothing on people and their torsos disappeared ... Not really sure I want to fuck up a save game fixing the goofy ammo system (more on that in a bit) or doing much with the NPCs. I did install an extra human companions mod, which is probably a difficulty drop but eh...
As experiences go it wasn't a negative one at all, but it is sort of grim going through the FO:NV mod section of nexus since a ton of the mods are just abandoned or have 'upcoming features!' lists that obviously aren't ever going to be finished. It looks like people left to play Skyrim, came back when the modding wasn't mature, then went back when the modding did mature. I guess I'll buy Skyrim this year.
Visually FO:NV is totally weird even before the modding goes in. The game world is grim, certainly, but there are a lot of moments where it is just Nevada. Maybe Nevada after a spot of bad weather. People give you the date, and your brain sort of traces back how far the war was and you really start to wonder why the game world looks the way it does. The engine isn't visually bad, though it isn't great, though it feels like from looking at modding screen shots you can add a lot of stuff to how it processes lighting to spruce it up. FO:NV is past the point where you quite notice you're playing middle era 3d gaming so I guess I shouldn't complain. That being said, I do feel like other engines could have done this game a lot better.Audio wise the game really shines, but I think FO3 also had really good audio. The lack of Three Dog oddly hurts, as the game doesn't really hint in the same measure at the antagonistic cycle within the game. One of the oddest things the game is missing are the little Enclave floaty robots broadcasting americana tuneage out into the wastes. Instead Caesar and his Legion are this over the top ridiculous grimdark nonsense that comes off as really overbearing instead of slowly working to be noticed - just bam! The music, though, is really a cut above. There's a good selection of radio tunes and the game world ambiance is well put together. I don't think I've enjoyed wandering around a goofy world and listening to the music this much since Morrowind.
There is a ton of voice acting in FO:NV, more than any other game I think I've ever played. Not only do NPCs talk to you, they say things outloud that can get a little repetitive, until you complete another 'event' quest and then they talk about that. There are a lot of, man, A LOT of event quests like this, even killing some npc in the middle of nowhere can promote reactions. It's an interesting way to build the setting, although I feel like maybe they took a little too far. There's different reactions in different buildings and with different factions who themselves align with different factions and just yeesh.
Quest design in FO:NV is a mixed bag. The game tries to do a lot, allowing you to pick and choose your battles, but I think this might have gone a bit further than its scripting language would allow effective implementation of. Sometimes quest objectives can become messy, or not make logical sense due to underexplanation, but more irritating is the flood of 'quest failed!' when you're not even doing a quest, when it relates with certain NPCs or your status with a given faction. A lot of the quests offer multiple options and it becomes extremely tedious trying to figure out where it wants you to go based on the limited descriptions, lack of updates and multiple markers that don't offer any quick means to distinguish them apart. A lot of the quests simply shouldn't have had the optional crap added onto them. There's an example right at the end of the game, which adds a second set of difficult to distinguish markers that clutter up your trek through an already confusingly designed level. It kinda ruins climatic scenes to have you wandering around like a dolt.
On the plus side, while it is true some of the quests - especially the main quest(s) - stretch the game too far, a fair number of the basic quests are a lot of fun and offer some interesting writing. It's a bit of a shame they went so much energy into producing a bajillion permutations to the main line when the game is honestly not improved one iota for having the ability to do multiple 'neutral' endings. I also found several of the main quests didn't work properly, or at all, or offered me solutions that didn't seem to quite fit. So I ended up spending a lot of the game trying to avoid the main quest and just exploring the world.The world is great, there's lots of interesting stuff and although it feels like it should have been a bit bigger with too many sites jammed in too close together. Given the availability of fast travel I don't really see why everything is so densely packed, you'll often be in one quest area and you can see another two from where you're standing. On the other hand this does give the game some really awesome visuals - you can be battling it out with a solar power plant nearby, and then a dish network and radio towers in the background as you fight off, I don't know, giant ants. In a little tiny patch of desert that is, um, measured in feet.
It's a little weird?
I guess it's sort of asking a lot but I felt like there wasn't much energy in the main quest. The plot isn't simplistic, but it also doesn't really have any big revelations or twists, so there isn't much inertia to carry it forward. It imagine this is partially caused by the overwrought staging and multiple connected but optional lines toward the ending, which feels like too high a price to be paid for the reward of ... Like, slightly different versions of 5% of the content? I was more interested in stuff involving ghouls, the various super mutant quests and especially OWB than the main quest, which is sort of jarring to how the game feels like Morrowind but lacks that powerful spine to really stand up. You know it's going to end with ... What it ends with ... Very early on.
The Fallout world is weird and wonderful, albeit a tad overly too willing to go stupidly grimdark. The original Fallout story of the world just before the bombs is interesting stuff, satirical and chilling in how much closer to reality it is than we'd think. FO:NV on the other hand loses a lot of its charm trying to portray something that doesn't make much sense. It's funny, the closer you get to the heart of New Vegas, the worse it gets. The outskirts of town, the farms and the desperate politics, are all really good. But penetrate the gates and get on the strip and ... It's just weird, and not in a good way.
I was watching Redletter Media review Battlefield Earth and there's a moment in the review where they mock the idea that they want to train using a flight simulator but there isn't any electricity. I immediately thought of how disjointed Fallout ends up feeling. The world building here on the biggest scale is good, and on the smallest scale the little communities or stories tend to work, but between the two the game loses itself. I'm not really saying the game is bad, mind you, I'm just saying there is this moment where you sort of go between the two, which makes the game have weird mental tearing. They talk about the value of the power plants in the area, and then you look up at the destroyed power lines and wonder how New Vegas is going to fix that. I guess most people don't notice that, but they're like, right there! The fallen power lines are awesome looking set pieces, too.Level design in general has a weird issue too. The world is not big, outside as I said, but it tends to be big inside. So you end up with this conflicting emotion where the map feels really safe and nice, but you get cramped inside the terribly designed vaults or even relatively safe buildings. They feel sort of authentic, except you run into the repeating textures issue and everything looks the god damned same. It's troubling. The game has too many hallways and not enough rooms, basically.
Some of the maps would have worked a ton better if the flattened the floors, or just generally kept things under control. The vaults, for example, are just a headache to navigate. It's disappointing mostly because the vaults are each set up to tell a story, but they often end up such a maze that you drop the narrative and get frustrated. Maybe I'm just losing my sense of spatial recall, but everything looks the god damn same and involves going through twisty-turny corridors without any real sense of landmarks. This will sound really weird but I wish this game was in the same engine as Dead Space, with all those elements, instead.
It's a weird thing to comment on. I really wish FO:NV just had more outdoors, more going over hills and traveling beside downed power lines. The visuals in the exterior are good, but at some points phenomenal. The game is willing to do some pretty interesting stuff with its engine and really push itself on the artistic spectrum - but only outside. Inside you're trapped in samey corridors fighting with very little cover and just face to face blasting things, then going through too many loot boxes to sort through too much loot. Then you go back outside and breath a sigh of relief.
I mean that's some amazing atmospheric resonance, but I'm not sure it was the designer's intent to have me go "whatever fuck Vault 34 I'm just gonna console in the loot I hate your stupid mazes" or even more egregious "oh god why is this casino designed like this I'm just never coming back".
I did three of the DLC for FO:NV. I skipped Dead Money, which sounds awful; I don't think this engine does tension or stealth especially well, and atmosphere wise it is a little lacking so that didn't sound like a good idea. I want to make mention that if you find the game pretty stable within the general NV experience, which I did, get back into the habit of jamming quicksave every 5 minutes in the DLC. Honest Hearts was especially crashtastic - not sure why exactly - but OWB and LR both crashed far more for me than the basic game.
Honest Hearts was a weird mix of elements I'm not certain it handled well. I like the core ideas, but the execution suffers for two things. First, the geometry of the zone is just brutal, essentially a big rat maze. The only times I felt threatened were when I was ambushed, which happened all of once, so other than that just lots of walking. The other thing is the writing is a bit weirdly tonedeaf and following along the quests I think I missed a lot of the content. But the DLC tries to make pacifistic overtones that honestly make absolutely zero sense in the setting. In Fallout, a place with clean water and clean air is beyond precious. The DLC region is pristine, and frankly, the idea anyone from the horrifying outside wasteland would suggest they leave over whatever nonsense comes off as pure insanity.That being said, as a little side quest the zone was nice looking and the combat was pretty good. The voice acting is a cut above, and although I still have trouble really figuring how you're supposed to portray "tribals", the attempt was interesting enough. I'm not really sure if the "tribals" were supposed to be Native-Americans or if they were supposed to be mixed heritage persons acting like their perception of what Native-Americans had looked like two hundred years ago. That's an interesting juxtaposition to look at.
As a small note, FO:NV is helped immensely by knowing the basic console commands and using them when things go poorly. Sometimes it just helps to turn on no clipping, and sometimes it helps to just hit the 'go to next quest objective' command.
The story of OWB is good, and while the map loops you around a lot and spawns enemies in, I still found it considerably more interesting than HH and honestly much of the main campaign. If I was going to do one DLC, I'd definitely pick OWB since it has a somewhat more refined story less about an endless cycle of violence and more about the madness that makes the Fallout world distinct from our own. You also get a talking suit of armor that never ceases to amuse me, even if it's a little weird to have a Crysis style suit in a game world that simply doesn't have that level of miniaturization. My only real complaint is that while I really liked the eventual conclusion to the story I wish they'd dropped more hints about the life of the cast before Big MT and the events the DLC rotates around. Still it was ... Oddly subtle, and oddly melancholy.
I gotta admit its either genius or irony that the guy who voiced Fletcher (a disembodied AI) in Defense Grid also voices Doctor Klein in this, given his voice just clicks instantly for me because of Fletcher. Maybe I'm being a little subjective, but I really think he nails the voice work.
Lastly, Lonesome Road is ... A bit confusing. The gameplay is very linear shooting, extremely reminiscent and direly inferior to playing Crysis 2 or actually I guess Rage is close too. But more Crysis. The first problem is that FO:NV isn't exactly a great shooting game, and the second problem is the dialogue options with the main antagonist, if you even want to call him that, are just ... Boring.
One thing NV generally excels at is keeping me interested enough in the storyline to want to listen to the various babblings of its inhabitants, but LR just rambles on in such an incoherent and silly manner I just found myself clicking through. It makes constant references to vague metaphors or just vague, poorly explained concepts that I'm uncertain are literal, ironic, analogy or metaphor and snooooooore. The story is just so vague and silly about what is actually quite simple I can't bring myself to care. Imagine if your friend came over and tried to talk up going to the store to get a frozen pizza with grand melodrama, it works about as well as that would. It tries to talk about 'you' doing things before 'you' started playing the game, which doesn't connect with me at all. Basically it ends up feeling like a generic shootman, with pretensions that the level of story telling can't hold up to.I would say skip LR, unless you're like me and suckered in by the quality level of OWB and its little clues about LR being more interesting than it honestly is. The FONV ultimate pack includes everything, and does it cheaper than buying DLC piecemeal, but if the base game, Gun Runner's Arsenal and OWB were cheaper than it I would just buy them instead. Not that LR was bad, just not really great especially coming off OWB which is just fantastic. If you get them all, I think HH through LR are just fine. I could see people liking OWB less than LR, mind you, if they were more shootman minded.
In real life, there are a lot of guns. More than you'd think. In FO:NV, there are also a lot of guns, and every gun feels like uses a different bullet that doesn't really connect itself with the gun. This system is terrible. I remember thinking it was terrible in FO3, and here, it has actually been worsened. Now there are even more minmax-y, overwrought weapon and ammo types, including hollow points and AP and sub-grade and aaaaaaa. Seriously, these people don't bother to sweep up the debris from walls that were damaged 150 years ago (and shouldn't be standing still, but whatever) you're telling me they're going to sort bullets into subtypes? How would they even know the difference?
The crafting system in FO:NV is... Was there crafting in FO3? I don't even remember. I mean I know there was from looking at wiki articles, but I don't recall using it often. Don't quote me on that. Regardless, crafting here is awful, just so awful. It is like a follow up to how bad the ammo system is.There is even an ammo crafting system and it is just painful. Both systems seem like something you should be actively using - the ammo crafting system is a good, if nonsensical, way to make sure you can supply the guns you need to use - but they're very painful to engage with. The ammo swapping also constantly likes to break for me, which isn't helped by the persistent lust the developers have for taking your guns away and giving them back. My service rifle just absolutely refuses to use surplus ammo reliably. Then it does. Then it doesn't again.
Also whenever you execute a recipe you then leave the crafting window and have to open it up again. Also was it seriously necessary to have ammo creation require four items, one of which is already unique to the item (and therefore forms a limit) and two more that are unique to 2-4 different kinds of ammo? You constantly hit the limits and have to breakdown other ammo which means going into one screen, then out another, then back and forth...And seriously? The whole breaking my keybinds over and over thing when you hand off your weapons? Kinda lame. I was really reluctant to do stuff in the casinos, given what a pain in the ass this stuff was. The whole ammo thing is frankly just overwrought and given the selection of guns painfully unnecessary. Just make some rifles better against armor and worse against soft targets. I keep thinking maybe I added this unfinished garbage system in by accident with a mod, not that I'm playing with a finished and actually playtested product.
Basically, the ammo system and weapons are just too overambitious and the UI doesn't really suit. I like the idea of switching ammo to different targets, but it feels like a system for a different game, given F
allout is so pieced together both in setting and engine. The other thing is I like the element of thing breaking in Fallout as you use them, and then being repaired by cobbling them together with other dropped weapons. Having 18 different ammo types and 36 different kinds of guns means you instead start dipping back to core RPG values, using a repair vendor and lugging stuff to them to get your caps back so you can do it again.
Though - I will say this - outside of weakening the repair system, FO:NV is loads better at getting you to engage with its little sub-systems. Even if I didn't like it, I did use the crafting system, I did make auto-stimpaks and I did brew up some potions. I used the ammo thing a fair bit while going through the DLC, but less later on after I had so much money it didn't matter. I also used the whole chems things a great deal more, injecting my poor Courier with all sorts of nasty drugs and eating all sorts of irradiated food. I can't really articulate how FO:NV did this so much better, but it absolutely did and I found that really refreshing. I drank lots of nuka-cola and pumped RadAway into my system, something I really don't think I did very often in FO3. Heck, I actually modded in the ability to use multiple companions, since I enjoyed their personality and little quips enough, which I was pretty surprised at.
On the downside I felt like I never really got that much more powerful, from leveling or gear, in FONV until I hit the DLC. I couldn't afford the top end GRA weapons without grinding, and leveling didn't feel like it did all that much to make me that much more dangerous. The DLC gave me access to some nicer weapons and considerably better armor, but also a huge amount of money, which seemed weirdly out of place.I do wonder how the DLC could be, to be honest, better integrated. The existing system is horrible - you step out of the starting building and it splurts four separate quest hooks right onto your face. I wandered over to one of the DLC entrances early on in the game, the one closest to the starting area and it throws up a warning this is for level 25 characters. Because it's the last DLC. Why is the last DLC closest to the beginning and the first DLC the furthest? The DLC don't really integrate into the main game at all, and I sort of feel like they should have been staged to enter at certain points. I suppose the argument is you can't do the DLC with an existing save, but the idea of going back and doing Dead Money right from the end of the game is weird too?
Of course, since the game has so many absurd game paths the DLC can't hook to any of the main plot, really, other than I guess some reference to a couple characters who were themselves just references in the main game and it spirals out that way. It's interesting world building, and not quite as "who cares" as other DLC I've played in other games, but it could still be done better.
Probably the weirdest complaint I have about FO:NV and lords don't read this as a question of racism but it is kinda weird how white the game's populace is. They went to the trouble of having four racial archetypes, but it seems like 60% of the people or more are all just white people. The region is supposed to be made up of wild natives and people emigrating east from California. That does not say to me "75% white population". It doesn't say racism, it just says that white was the default race and no one really bothered to care. It isn't even really a question of hierarchy, there are black rangers and hispanic scientists and white hobos all mixed up, but there's just waaaaay more white dudes. The game is like 33% white dude by volume. There's 16 options, and it's almost all just whiteys.
Second weirdest complaint: Poison is not a mechanic you should put in games. Ever. I don't really recall if FO3 had poison, but it did have diseases and various maladies, right? Most of those had a sense of attrition to them. Poison in FONV is grating, the noise it makes is annoying and you get instantly poisoned by the brush of any enemy that has that attack.Weirder than Poison is Fixer, a drug which allows you to cure your chem addictions, triggers this long stretch of constantly making the poison whipcrach noise coupled with blurring your vision. You will literally never use this, because it inflicts a far worse debuff - not having any fun because the fucking game keeps blasting this through your headphones - on the player. While I noticed that the DLC crashed me a fair bit more than the main game, I think part of it is that increased usage of chems/alcohol results in additional visual effects, which when accompanying loading seems to pretty reliably crash the game.
In spite of the complaining I think FO:NV just drowns any criticism in a flood of quality content; sure, I didn't enjoy LR all that much and the main quest was pretty messed up by its own ambitions, but the game is just astounding for how much there is to do and see. The game map is smaller than it should be in terms of distance between objects, but that's a complaint about how densely packed with stuff to do it is, which is pretty weak as complaints go. There is just so much stuff in New Vegas, so many questlines to do or sights to see. There are a couple that really stood out to me, and even having finished the majority of the content, looking at the possible endings there's a fair bit of stuff I missed out on, even precluding the other endings I found completely goofy.
On the other hand the main quest is ruined by ambition and by taking itself too far with too many factions. There is a split between four possible factional allegations, not including the various choices you can make for the other smaller factions. This is just too much for too little differentiation. The game should have forced a choice earlier on and then shifted the scope of the game a little, but it played it safe and it honestly doesn't do much for me. But like I said, there's just so much to do, so much beyond the scope of the main quest that makes up a tiny tiny part of the game's content, it just doesn't really matter.
The other thing FO:NV does pretty well, albeit not perfectly, is personality. The game has a strong grasp on iconography and giving most of its main actors lots of character. I like how different the NCR, the families, the raiders you can talk to and the Legion felt. The one character I was really let down on Mr.House, who without getting into spoilers, didn't really sell his case at all and just sounded like a raving lunatic which sort of ruined the neutral paths to the game. I never had any desire to help him at all - can someone explain to me how the rebuilding of humanity should go to a person whose first response is "let's build a casino" followed by "eh, fuck all these poor people huddled around"? I was also a little surprised that the game gives you a very strong reason to dislike him and then you never really follow up on it.The other, last quibble with the game is it is sort of surprising how little the vaults actually mattered in the game. You're not a vault dweller, and on the most part, you meet very few vault dwellers or interact with them all that much. It's more into the Fallout universe moving past the vaults, which is interesting given the Fallout universe is actually so much more than that, but it might bother some how far it has gone from Fallout's original ideas. I actually sort of liked this, but it does feel a little strange.
Either way - this game actually stirred a lot of the Morrowind feeling in me, which is pretty high praise. I don't think I've enjoyed a WRPG as much as Morrowind since. It did crash here and there, and load times were pretty weird even on my SSD, but the music and setting are just so good. It makes me really sad the next Fallout game is still probably years off and won't involve the NV team. Bethesda's recent work is, well, pretty mediocre? Other than Skyrim, you have RAGE and that horrific joke of a MMORPG? I mean, New Vegas' flaws probably stand out so much because the game is mostly so interesting that it gets you looking. Tamriel Unlimited, or whatever they're calling it now, is not the sort of team I want on the next FO game.
So there's three actual games finished during RPG dubbamonth, and several other games completed along the way that I'm still finishing up write ups for. I've played a lot of good games so far since the start of 2015 - New Vegas, Dungeon of the Endless and Shovel Knight - and I've found myself complaining more than I thought I would. Maybe it's time to play some games with some mediocre metacritic scores for, and someone please suggest a better title, March into Terrible Games month. Heh? Heh.
No comments:
Post a Comment