Fyonn
did their best!
Fallout: New Vegas
Obsidian Entertainment
Published by Bethesda in 2010
Recently I played New Vegas again. This isn't unusual for me, New Vegas is my favorite WRPG that has separate combat mechanics (this qualifier brought to you by Disco Elysium), and I have done a number of gimmick runs, such as Richard "Dick" Johnson, everyone's favorite cannibal. If you're curious, the gimmick for that run was to be as evil as possible while getting every town and faction I could to Idolized status. Thanks to the excellent way crime and especially murder is handled in New Vegas, that is very easy.Obsidian Entertainment
Published by Bethesda in 2010
This run, a bog standard Guns And Also Speech run, was my first play through with a couple of new mods (I've tried several major overhaul mods): Project Nevada and Stewie Tweaks. And it's the best New Vegas has ever played?
I think I discovered the biggest problem with the gunplay in the Fallout 3 / New Vegas engine has very little to do with the controls and far more to do with how long you're doing it. Project Nevada makes a number of stat changes (most significantly stripping level out of HP scaling) that make combat far more deadly in both directions. Combat ends up about as difficult as vanilla New Vegas but there's a ton less of the "okay I'm out of tricks so I guess we're just gonna stand perfectly still in this hallway and pour 30+ bullets into each other, huh?" phase of combat.
As for Stewie Tweaks, it's impossible to say exactly what it does because it's a huge list of optional tweaks in an .ini file that include things like "worn Power Armor is weightless if you have Power Armor Training," "you can only wait if you're sitting down," "you can hotkey swap weapons while doing xyz," and "hide hotkeyed items in container and shop menus." The biggest single thing that changed how I played the game was the option that hides the skill check info on dialogue options. The game has a number of dialogue choices that are based on whether one of your skills is high enough or not, but they're all clearly labelled like [Speech 25/30], and if you meet the requirements, they always work.
By hiding the requirements and whether you meet them, it introduces a level of uncertainty to the dialogue that makes the system sing. I found myself with some frequency picking options I thought were probably skill checks that I didn't meet but thought that maybe I did, or maybe they weren't skill checks at all! I don't know! It's so good ya'll.
Eventually, I ran out of enthusiasm for the run around Vegas itself (Vegas is usually where I find myself running out of steam), partially because I discovered I had engaged in enough petty larcency that the game labelled me as Literally Satan, and I just kind of rushed through the House Always Wins ending.
And then I got a vertical ergonomic "gaming" mouse. The thing that makes it a "gaming" mouse is that it has a little digital stick on it. I was thinking about how I could use that to get used to the mouse, and it occurred to me that mapping weapon swapping to up, right, down, and left would free up a ton of keyboard space, and then started a second "quick" run of New Vegas starring a Courier I was too lazy to name, specialized in Energy weapons and Explosives.
This nameless Courier ended up being my longest New Vegas run to date. I realized I was alarmingly close to having every New Vegas achievement, so I just started intentionally doing some of them, which led me to playing in weird ways I never had before. For instance, it was the first run I've recruited every companion. Have ya'll even met Raul? He's great, I love Raul. Both very helpful and also constantly astonished at his own ability. I also really recommend listening to Black Mountain Radio when it's in range instead of Radio New Vegas. Not only is it very informative about the history of Super Mutants and Nightkin in the Fallout universe if all you've played is Fallout 3 and/or 4, it's also very funny.
I think there are essentially four things that make New Vegas so appealing to me:
- Despite being a game with, I would argue, Only Bad Choices for the main plot, the writers know what ideology is, and have at least some understanding of material pressures. The reason there are Only Bad Choices is that the privilege of having a choice in the situation requires an army, and factions who have sufficient military force are limited to the kinds of factions that have, say it with me, sufficient military force.
- The game world is open to be explored, but the path that is least likely to murder you dead at level 1 is shaped like a donut you start on the middle left of and walk the long way around to the top of. This allows the game to have a very good idea of what locations a player will visit and in what order, so they can use each location as a set of vignettes to introduce facts about life in the setting, what's at stake, the major and minor factions, and what political interests those factions have.
- There are zero throwaway quests. There are some quests that serve a similar purpose to Bethesda's Radiant Quest system, but they're still hand-crafted. The most generic quest in the game, I think, Return To Sender, starts with "hey can you go to each of these ranger stations and give them new radio encryption codes" and ends with "I know I screwed up tampering with reports, I'm just trying to get the people back home to give a damn about us. If you want me dead for that right now, so be it. If not, I'm going to stand on the front lines with my men at the second battle of Hoover Dam and die with them on the suicide mission we've been given over petty political bullshit."
- The game shows great respect for Fallout as a setting but also isn't just imitating the iconography of the franchise for maximum brand appeal. It's a work in conversation with Fallout, not a work making Fallout again. The Brotherhood of Steel isn't the Bethesda Power Armor Super Heroes in New Vegas, they're a dying ideology that can't keep up with the changing times. There are barely any super mutants present at all, and the majority of them are in a peaceful settlement that doesn't want trouble with humans and a different settlement that doesn't want trouble with humans, so they kill any humans that come there on sight. Even in the second case, given a good enough sneak and/or lockpick skills, you can completely resolve that situation diplomatically without firing a single bullet.
Last edited: