I hate Fallout: New Vegas

I continue my trend of catching up to 2016 after covering one thing in Skyrim by going back a few years to Obsidian Entertainment’s take on a Bethesda Game Studios RPG. Or their take on a BioWare RPG. Whichever strikes your fancy, really, since it fucks up both.

Now, let me start of by saying that I tend to really enjoy Bethesda and BioWare RPGs. Even Oblivion, which I can’t fucking stop using as a prime example (because it fucking is) of missed potential, have given me hours upon hours of enjoyable gameplay because it had shit worth doing not attached to the main quest. Indeed, the main quest was maybe 10% of the total content amount in the game. Maybe. Probably more like 5%.

I enjoy linear and semi-linear stories too, like your typical BioWare RPGs, where everything major is in some way tied to your main quest, with a few side quests strewn in between. I can forgive stale repetitive gameplay if the world draws me in, like in Morrowind. So why do I hate, and I really do hate, New Vegas?

On paper the game looks absolutely brilliant. Post-apocalyptic New Vegas is the stage for a conflict between Caesar’s Legion from the East and the New California Republic from the West, with a pre-war genius trying to keep control of the New Vegas he built. It set’s BioWare characters and storytelling in a Bethesda sandbox, while improving on some of the niggles of Fallout 3’s gameplay. Another thing that makes perfect sense on paper is for Donald Trump to open Trump’s Mortgage shortly before the housing market collapsed. That is to say, it only makes sense until you actually think it through.

It is no secret that Bethesda Game Studios are not great at the whole “storytelling” aspect of developing a game. We saw them give a real good attempt with Fallout 4, and a token entry with Fallout 3, which were anticlimactic as hell. Much like New Vegas, come to think of it. But Fallout 3&4 have something NV do not: The option to fucking escape from the main story.

See, the thing that actually makes a BGS RPG is 1) the freedom, and 2) the world-building. These two ingredients are why Morrowind, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and to a lesser extent Fallout 4 are good games. BGS knows (or at least used to know. Cough, F4, cough) that their engine and approach to gameplay does not lend itself to lengthy conversations directly engaged in by the player. This is why all the best dialogue with, say, Ulfric Stormcloak is between him and Galmar Stone-Fist and not with the player. You can actually have the two of them react in some way to what the other person is saying.

What it does lend itself to is letting the player explore and to let you build a world. The former because it gives you a shit-ton of locations to explore and the latter because you can put books, journals, mini-quests, visual storytelling, interesting loot/rewards and more NPC to NPC dialogue in these places as the player murders their way through legions of whoever is unfortunate enough to be in their way.

If you want to play a game that lends itself to story-telling, I’d recommend most BioWare RPGs over any BGS RPG any day of the week. They use a very different engine, with more linear stories and more character focus. They also remove a lot of the freedom associated with BGS games, have more “cinematic” conversation systems and a very, very strong focus on the overarching story. Except in Dragon Age: Origins. That was an “unfortunate coincidence”-fest I might have to revisit in a post of its own someday.

The point I am ultimately making, since it obviously needs to be spelled out, is that the different game systems and designs lend itself to different things. When you remove the cinematic effect (which in older games, and some new ones, were given to you in textbox descriptions, which is fine), you remove a lot of the humanity of a character. You remove the option to showcase a lot of their quirks visually. Like Jack’s restlessness and unease and pain in Mass Effect 2, which are made more impactful and believable by the way she moves when interacting with Sheperd. Boone stopping you in the middle of nowhere to engage in a “who can go without blinking the longest” contest, while standing perfectly stiff, is not engaging, no matter how interesting and touching his story is. They do that shit in Oblivion and Fallout 3 too, but at least has the courtesy of being fucking brief about it.

This is, in my opinion, the worst of the flaws NV makes. The thing that cannot be fixed, because it is not a matter of the furniture (don’t worry, I have plenty of things to complain about there too), but of the foundation of the house. Even if it looked lovely inside, I am not buying a house that is collapsing in on itself. Or, since I did when I bought NV, I will complain about it.

The TL;DR of this first part about NV is this: Forcing me into endless amounts of Oblivion and Fallout 3 style conversations is a quick way to get me really fucking bored. Now to throw the furniture (and babies in bathwater) into a burning fire.

As I can’t stop ragging on about when giving my opinions on Morrowind and Oblivion (and later on when I get around to talking about Skyrim), world building is really fucking important to me. It can make or break a game by itself. And I really fucking hate the world building in New Vegas.

The first obvious problem is Caesar’s Legion. Not only are they a rip off of something I am really fucking sick of, the Romans, but they are also so mind bogglingly evil that it is hard to comprehend that they were introduced as one of the two major parts of a conflict that could be really interesting. They enslave people, force women into bearing children, force men to fight, destroy any semblance of self-identity and engages in torture, terrorism and genocide. And this is only by their own description of what they do. At least Skyrim’s Civil War keeps the obviously evil group as a looming threat, not a side to pick. Heck, the Thalmor being mind bogglingly evil isn’t even fully established in the canon of the series yet, just interpretations based on a former developer’s writings that are not part of the games.

I also hates the casino families. Nero (really going for the subtle approach, Obsidian) and his Gamorra are your stereotypical Italian gangsters, Benny and the Chairmen are stereotypical American gangsters and the white masked freaks are high society perverts and cannibals. Nice spread, shame only the least fleshed out one is the most interesting. Hint, it is the ones eating people. You’d think I didn’t have to specify that, but a lot of people seem to like this game, so I am apparently living on a planet of morons. Once upon time I started cooking food for a living and prayed to the Eight and One that the waiters and waitresses I worked with were not representative of humanity’s overall spread in intelligence, but the Eight and One apparently hate me.

In a short summation, because there isn’t a lot to say about them, I find the Boomers to be very silly, the NRC to be boring, the BoS to be poorly executed and the Followers of the Apocalypse to be numbingly dull. The slums outside of New Vegas and the Enclave veterans are alright-ish, but there are like 3 things to do there, so that’s nowhere near close enough to make up for the boredom the rest of the game leaves me with.

Most of the major sidequests are, in some way, tied to the main quest. And I absolutely hate this too. This is where the mixing of BGS and BioWare game styles really begin to run into one another. I do not play an openworld sandbox RPG (that is not the Witcher 3) to be forced to play the main questline and quest in a particular order. I play is for freedom. The linearity of FO:NV is further emphasized by the jerkish enemy placement that steer you in 1 path around the world that just happens to be the one with the most NPCs explaining what is going on in the world. You can sneak through these high level areas, but you’re not rewarded for it. You just end up in areas before you have the gear and level to deal with them. Whop-de-fucking-do.

On the topic of quests, most of them seem to be designed to give the middle finger to anyone who do not care to have a high speechcraft skill. And don’t get me wrong, I think that having a viable path through the game based around the ability to be persuasive is fine. What I am not fine with is making it so that you fuck up a quest in some way or another if you don’t have that skill on your character. Making something viable is not the same thing as making it the only fucking solution that doesn’t resemble a “thank you for trying” award. Name me 1 quest in the game that does not net you a benefit with speechcraft that is unobtainable otherwise.

The character could be interesting, I don’t know. I don’t know because I am taken out of the immersion with a bucket of cold water by the dialogue system past the 2 minute mark, so the game wouldn’t even get points for that if they were the best written characters I had ever encountered. Which they are not. Which I know because I can still hear what they are saying after the immersion has taken the first train to Sweden. Stereotypes and flat-faced popculture-references, a reliance on “silly mutants” and a Companion quest system that, should you actually want to get to know them, will miss no chance to mess with you as you need a bloody spreadsheet to not miss the triggers. And don’t get me started on the DLCs. Too late, I suppose, so let’s give each of them a quick look.

Dead Money: Oh, great, a claustrophobic heist mission in an open world game. Exactly what I want. No, New Vegas, I do not want more linear shit from you and I definitely don’t want more casinos.

Big MT: Running around an experimental facility while a bunch of mad scientist robots shouts nonsense at you in really annoying tones of voice. Hint: It worked for Portal because 1) it was short, 2) it had a strong central game mechanic that was incredibly (blatant brown-nosing) well implemented, and 3) it was clever and funny. It does not work in Old World Blues because I want to tear of my ears 5 minutes into the first conversation and things are only going downhill from there when they introduce the most annoying enemies from New Vegas again. Oh, and don’t try to pass it off as “original”. Running around an experimental science lab gone wrong is not original.

Honest Hearts: It was alright. I think. I remember engaging in a little tribal warfare and that was pretty much it. Honestly, I remember next to nothing about it, so I know for a fact that it did neither engage nor infuriate me. So it was probably alright. If I’m charitable.

Lonesome Road: Oh, great, retroactively unmaking every roleplaying decision the player has made by attaching a past to them in the last expansion of the game. Great way to end things guys. At least FO 3&4 give you your backstory at the start and don’t invite you to make up your own on a supposedly near-blank canvass. Oh, and then there is the dull-voices antagonist that is inexplicitly obsessed with the player because you changed the course of history for an area you just heard about for the first time like 2 hours ago. And this place too is very linear and I have ragged on about how well that goes with the engine four or five time by now.

DLC TL;DR: It does not fix any of the game’s faults, nor give you the option of a more interesting place to spend your game time. Like the Shivering Isles for Oblivion did, by adding an open chunk of land with bright colors, weird people and its own wildlife to hunt to your heart’s content roughly one fourth the size of the original landmass. Which is pretty damn good in terms of value.

I suppose a couple of positives towards the end are mandatory, if only in interest of being fair minded: There are a couple of improvements on FO3’s gameplay, with the added armor typing, adding of a threshold for weapons and armor condition before they start affecting performance and food crafting. The added weapon and armor variety is nice.

Naturally, with that, we also have to mention that for the first few months, the game had technical issues the same way a child rapist has a few personality flaws. Most of which was fixed in post, but fucking hell that launch resembled the Skyrim launch for PS3. It just happened across all platforms.