Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The World of New Vegas!

Boone owed me. I delivered his wife’s murderer to him. I did it right, I didn’t cut corners or fuck up. I investigated places carefully and when the time came I drew that bitch out in front of the dinosaur and made sure she got what she deserved. So Boone joined up with me. Our mutual disdain for the Legion made us a perfect pair. So we hunted across the wastes together, stealthing up to Legion patrols, massacring them at a distance and then looting their corpses. We carved a swath through the contested territories and won Nelson back for the NCR. We made the Mojave a little bit safer.

But Boone was maudlin and taciturn. Great in a fight, but a bit much for me to handle all the time, especially since my only other companion is a robot that various tech oriented factions seem keen on using to spy on me. So I told Boone that I’d meet up with him later and recruited a lesbian with a mean fist from the Brotherhood of Steel. I’d always wondered what went on under that armor, and it looks like it’s a whole lot of Felicia Day. So now Fallout: New Vegas is kind of turning into that fan-fic I wrote. But I remain unsure about what the future holds. Not just because I don’t think Felicia Day is going to turn for a man with a measly five charisma, but because I’m not sure of what the future holds for the NCR, the Legion, the Followers and the Brotherhood, even with her no BS insider information. They’re all so unclear in just what they want and in what helping them would mean.

And I love it.

Most games I’ve played recently are bastions of clarity, including the laudable Fallout 3’s expansions. If I choose to launch cruise missiles at Project Purity, the Pentagon, or the Enclave’s Mobile Missile Command Platform I know exactly what that means. Even when things get a little muddy, like in the swamps of Point Lookout things eventually become clear, and I’m never asked to make decisions without complete information. By the time I have to choose a side I usually have pretty solid information on just what each side stands for, what each side really wants and what each side will do with my help. And while that is, at times, quite clear in Fallout: New Vegas, such as with the NCR and the Legion, wherein one group is clearly a benign bureaucratic entity and the other is a group of murdering, raping shitheads, most of the time it isn’t.

For example when I wandered into the Poseidon Power facility, HELIOS, I was met with a choice. Well, several choices. I could help the NCR cement their grip in the area, I could spread the power to disenfranchised areas, or I could share it with everyone with greatly reduced reliability and stability. Oh, or I could use the power to activate a weapon of unbelievable force and deadliness, a weapon that could split the world in twain and would certainly kill everyone in the camp surrounding HELIOS. None of these options, spare the last, made their consequences clear in the lead up to the decision. In fact some of the options weren’t even known to me until I finally managed to reactivate the array. And even after I made the decision to share the power with everyone, I still wasn’t sure it had been the right one. Unreliable shitty power to the entire grid? What are these people even going to be using it for? A lot of these people I was helping were known assholes. But the decision felt right, so I went with it.

But it endeared me to the Followers of the Apocalypse, one of the weirdest groups in Fallout cannon ever. The Followers told me about their semi-secret base and rehab clinic in the middle of Vegas and made clear their desire to make me feel like a part of their big happy family. Then they told me how evil the Brotherhood of Steel was and how I shouldn’t hang out with such a group of un-cool dudes.

But it wasn’t long before I ran into Veronica, who proved just how cool the Brotherhood really was. Especially compared to those sissy Followers. And as I got to know her a little better, and spent more time with my little friend ED-E I started to get dueling messages from the two groups. The Brotherhood wanted to study ED to see just what made him tick and see if they could learn a little more about the power station they’d nearly destroyed their entire order over a few years back. And the Followers wanted ED because the Brotherhood were apparently jerks who didn’t share. So I weighed the options, found out that the Followers would upgrade ED’s weapons and the Brotherhood would upgrade his armor, and decided to try the Followers first. Maybe the Brotherhood would be able to help me out later, but I wanted better weapons now. But I’m not sure I made the right choice there. Or any choice at all, to be honest. It’s so opaque, the decision making in New Vegas, that I’m hard pressed to know just what the consequences of my choices will be. I’m holding back on overthrowing the Brotherhood’s leadership, for example, because I want to see how the current leader’s direction will play out. But I really do have no idea. For all I know I could be denying myself an ally in the long run, but I want to know if he’ll come above ground on his own.

And this is one of my favorite parts of Fallout: New Vegas. The people, the places, the actions, they have a weight and reality to them that games strive towards and always seem to fail at grasping. Games put us in epic scenarios where we hone ourselves on respawning challenges until we’re ready to tackle the scripted plot mission. New Vegas is totally willing to let me piss around as much as I like, but the world is constantly changing as I do so. I’ve all but wiped out Legion presence on the Southeast river bank thanks to Boone’s assistance. i didn’t do it by taking down scripted boss battles (although that is how I restored Nelson to the NCR). Instead I did it by systematically wiping out patrols and then destroying their base of operations. As far as I know nothing has officially changed, but I no longer see Legion scouts in the area, and the NCR seems to spend most of their time fighting local wildlife and their own soldiers turned ghouls in the area now.

For all I know just exploring the world could change it forever. I could render the humble coyote extinct through my relentless hunting efforts. I could become some sort of fearsome figure among the Bighorn for occasionally shooting them in the skull. I’ve already alienated the Powder Gangers just by standing up for myself, even though they were the retards who came after me in the first place. The Jackal gang is all but gone from the area around Goodsprings, just because I spent enough time walking around thereabouts.

And now as I explore ancient areas I am totally unsure of what I will find. In Vault 11 there’s something afoot, something terrible and ancient and evil that the inhabitants gave their own lives to bury. What lies underneath is unknown, partially because I haven’t found it yet but moreso because the plot itself is skillfully doled out. Most games would telegraph that something awful has happened at some point, but not this one. Fallout: New Vegas actually has me in suspense. And it’s mostly because I’m never sure just how far it’s willing to go, what it’s going to show me and how this new knowledge will impact the world. When I found out about Boone’s wife it’s no mistake that I spent a full ten hours scouting and hunting Legion territory with him. And it’s no mistake that Veronica made me want to help the Brotherhood of Steel find their place in the world again.

Fallout: New Vegas is adept at both offering up a world and making you feel a part of it. It makes you care without trying, just by being itself, not by raising the stakes beyond where they need to be. There’s no epic conflict, no grave danger facing the world. The world is shit, and that’s enough. Showing me nice people living in that shit makes me want to help them, even though I’m not some sort of chosen one. And it’s because the world is so lifelike, so chaotic, so rich and full, that I find it difficult to step away from New Vegas even briefly, even to write an essay like this about just how incredible it is. Because forty hours in I’m still enchanted with this new world, I’m still learning new things about what lies beneath the sands of the Mojave and the darkness that inhabits the human heart. And the spontaneous nature of that experience, the manner in which it iterates and responds to me, is what keeps me rooted to this chair, waiting to unpause the game as soon as I finish this sentence.