Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Fallout: New Vegas: A Love Story!

This is a tough review for me to write. Not necessarily because I have mixed feelings about Fallout: New Vegas. Not even because I feel I have to dance around spoilers in a game so riddled with unique little set pieces that you’d really have to put a huge effort into re-creating the exact experience of running off those bird-dogging bandits or robbing that bank or assassinating that troublesome deputy. It has nothing to do with me having reservations about recommending what is, by far, my favorite game of this year to any and all people who like video games for any reason. It’s because I don’t want to stop playing it. Even for the time it takes me to write this. So here we go.

Technical problems aside, Fallout: New Vegas is an excellent game through and through. It is, in every way, an improvement on Fallout 3. The environment is more lively and varied, despite being a massive desert. The technology is more like technology, the scraps and odds and ends more useful in unexpected ways. All of the systems of the game play together in ways that are both completely reasonable and unexpected and the added elements of transparency governing things like crafting, combat and companions all make for a much more polished, rounded experience. Obsidian has had a lot of time to add features to this game and they’ve done more with it than I ever expected. The addition of iron sights aiming alone almost made me cream my jeans, and while the alternate ammo forms can occasionally be overwhelming it’s nice to be able to fit your favorite firearm to multiple situations, rather than carrying around four different guns to deal with the many targets of the wasteland appropriately.

The world also feels more densely populated. Not with people, but with groups, places of interest, and airwaves. Double the radio stations, actual faction tracking that tells you your standing with different groups and little flyspeck towns filled with bite sized characters who have problems for you to solve aplenty while you’re passing through. The various subgroups of the world also feel more nuanced and defined than they did in Fallout 3. Instead of a band of “raiders against the world” and a bogeyman-like Enclave backing up an appropriately complex Brotherhood of Steel, New Vegas introduces a number of complicated factions, big and small, good and evil, right and wrong, all of whom seem like real groups trying to make their way in the wasteland. And while Liam Neeson isn’t there to lend his celebrity and make us feel nice and grounded in this brave new world Michael Hogan’s less immediately recognizable pipes get the job done just as well. Perhaps better, since we’re not constantly waiting for the celebrity voice over to tell us which characters are important and which ones we can cast off.

But these characters, and the depth they provide, is secondary to the new role Obsidian has given the environment. In Fallout 3 the environment was mostly benign and, occasionally, a threat. In New Vegas, however, with its thriving plant life and new, incredibly engrossing Hardcore mode, which makes it necessary to forage so that you can find things like food and water to keep yourself strong, the environment can be a resource, often a crucial one, in getting through the game’s various hurdles. Ignoring the environment in New Vegas means giving up on the entire crafting system, sacrificing a huge number of items that provide radiation-free healing and, more often than not, running headlong into an unexpected threat. Fallout 3 was obsessed with the world as a dying place, a place which begged for you to breathe life back into it. The game centered around the theme. New Vegas is a world which has returned to the cycle of life and death that has always guided it, a world gripped by change which occurs constantly, without the impetus of the main character. Fallout 3 was about changing the world: New Vegas is about living in it.

And, unsurprisingly, the writing is focused towards this end. It’s rare to hear an out of place, overly demonstrative speech and far more common to hear characters downplaying their surroundings. New Vegas is completely aware of how deadly the world in which its characters live is, and how surviving in this world involves dealing with constant threats that eventually just become routine. It’s rare that I feel that I’m involved in grand events as I move from place to place in New Vegas, and far more often that I feel like I’m intruding on existing problems. It’s a flavor more familiar to players of the original Fallout games, the feeling that while the world may be big and filled with serious problems not all of these problems are yours. And while you can try to solve them the only way to really solve anything is to make sure that the people in any given place won’t need you once you’ve moved on.

And it is all rendered in the same loving, spot on prose that Obsidian has always offered up to gamers valiant enough to engage their ambitious products. Which brings me to the other hallmark of Obsidian’s games, and what is undeniably the single biggest problem with Fallout: New Vegas: the bugs.

I haven’t had it too bad yet. I have graphic flashes that make it look like a lightning storm is coming up in the desert, occasionally the AI wigs out and runs in circles or does...I’m not exactly sure what during combat. I’ve had crashes, crashes and more crashes, and I swear to go whoever designed the crafting interface should be shot. I’m not sure if they meant for it to be necessary to click an object, then press A, then press A again to craft it, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t want my interface to periodically lock up without warning and make the sound of scrolling text until I quit. And during large fights I sometimes have slowdown issues so severe that I can’t actually aim, although this could be entirely my fault for running the game under the same standards as Fallout 3. Regardless, none of these things are too bad – they’re part of playing the game. The alt-tab issue that made Fallout 3 the only thing my computer could do is no longer a problem in New Vegas, so that’s nice.

But other players have reported severe problems. Tom Chick has dedicated all of his Fallout: New Vegas game diaries to the technical shortcomings of the game on the 360, which are many. So many, in fact, that I cannot recommend purchasing the game on that platform, although I’m sure they’ve sold more than their fair share of copies on it. But even on the PC I’ve had bug reports creep in left and right from friends and the internet alike. One friend of mine, who splits his playing time between his home-PC and a laptop he carts around to his job and his girlfriend’s house, has had serious, serious problems with New Vegas’s relationship with Steam Cloud features like shared save games. This would be totally reasonable if the game didn’t force players to install Steam so that they could make use of such features during play. As a result he’s lost hours and hours of time and effort both trying to get a game feature to work as intended and in replaying parts of the game he thought he was finished with. Not cool, Bethesda/Obsidian.

Still, the potential of Fallout: New Vegas, the polish and the degree to which everything works when it does work, which is certainly not all the time, make it a must buy for any fan of Fallout. It is, in many ways, perfectly old school and, in many other ways, the most revolutionary RPG of this day and age. And while there are technical issues to spare the game itself is so pitch perfect, so lovingly crafted and so immersive, with its elaborate, completely transparent crafting system, its newly revamped targeting system and its brand new world filled with intrigue and conflict that most games fail so completely at rendering appropriately. Fallout: New Vegas is not a perfect game, not by any means. But it is an excellent game, and possibly one of the best games I have ever played. And whether or not it has problems it attempts enough revolutionary things that it deserves credit or, at the very least, attention.