Hullo all you non-American non-Thanksgivingers out there. Happy Thanksgiving! If you're done reading our review, GameBanshee's Brother None provides a meaty review of the title.<blockquote>The game puts more emphasis on resolving quests to improve your character than on grinding in combat. You'll have a large variety of quests logged in your PipBoy fairly early in the game, with additional minor quests being logged as notes. Most quests have multiple ways of resolving them, and while combat remains an important part of the game, Obsidian does a great job in opening up the game to different builds, as a variety of stat and skill values open up specific dialogue options or quest paths. Speech is the most important skill here, but you'll bump into options to resolve quests or improve your chances tied to pretty much every skill. Furthermore, quests are filled with different choices depending on if you care more about caps than doing good, or who you wish to side with.
The usage of skills for multiple solutions are well done throughout the game, but do come with two drawbacks. The biggest one is that the options marked by skills like [speech] or [science] are always positive options, if not auto-win options, where by one speech check you "win" the conversation and convince someone. The writing doesn't always support that well enough as it is closely packed together, and it takes out a big part of my role as a player in convincing NPCs. The other drawback is that the game gives you full information on how many skill points you need to pass a test, making it easy to go back, use a skill-book and try again.
We'll discuss the factions in detail later, but it's worth noting here that Obsidian did an excellent job in offering many opportunities to choose to support or harm factions, while also allowing you to work for multiple factions for quite a long time. Faction reputation is much more important than the ill-used karma, which is sadly still present. Karma is as nonsensical as it was in Fallout 3, and still takes hits at completely illogical moments (killing gangers means a boost to karma, but then taking their stuff means you take a hit in karma). The game also tends to provide way too much information on when you take reputation and karma hits, or when actions close off certain quests. This means you can find out who a mysterious man is working for by killing him and then reloading, and it also means if you kill a certain NPC the game actually tells you what quests you just closed off, an overload of information that detracts from the significance of choice and consequence.
The game suffers from having an overly large amount of really tedious “courier” quests. Fetch, deliver, scout, whichever, all it generally consists of is going somewhere else on the world map, talking to an NPC or if you're lucky fighting some enemies. Every RPG has a few of these typical fetch-model quests, but I don't think I've ever seen a game that has quite as many extensive and tedious quests as Fallout: New Vegas, from Still in the Dark to Ada Daba Honeymoon. They're generally peripheral to the main quests, but even in the main quest you're likely to run into one where you're sent scurrying across the map carrying love notes. </blockquote>
The usage of skills for multiple solutions are well done throughout the game, but do come with two drawbacks. The biggest one is that the options marked by skills like [speech] or [science] are always positive options, if not auto-win options, where by one speech check you "win" the conversation and convince someone. The writing doesn't always support that well enough as it is closely packed together, and it takes out a big part of my role as a player in convincing NPCs. The other drawback is that the game gives you full information on how many skill points you need to pass a test, making it easy to go back, use a skill-book and try again.
We'll discuss the factions in detail later, but it's worth noting here that Obsidian did an excellent job in offering many opportunities to choose to support or harm factions, while also allowing you to work for multiple factions for quite a long time. Faction reputation is much more important than the ill-used karma, which is sadly still present. Karma is as nonsensical as it was in Fallout 3, and still takes hits at completely illogical moments (killing gangers means a boost to karma, but then taking their stuff means you take a hit in karma). The game also tends to provide way too much information on when you take reputation and karma hits, or when actions close off certain quests. This means you can find out who a mysterious man is working for by killing him and then reloading, and it also means if you kill a certain NPC the game actually tells you what quests you just closed off, an overload of information that detracts from the significance of choice and consequence.
The game suffers from having an overly large amount of really tedious “courier” quests. Fetch, deliver, scout, whichever, all it generally consists of is going somewhere else on the world map, talking to an NPC or if you're lucky fighting some enemies. Every RPG has a few of these typical fetch-model quests, but I don't think I've ever seen a game that has quite as many extensive and tedious quests as Fallout: New Vegas, from Still in the Dark to Ada Daba Honeymoon. They're generally peripheral to the main quests, but even in the main quest you're likely to run into one where you're sent scurrying across the map carrying love notes. </blockquote>
