Better late than never! Yesterday I finished
Fallout: New Vegas. It just took me 108.9 hours to complete the game and all of it's DLCs. I also got 24 new achievements.
As mentioned I did the standard NCR run and brought them to victory. Because of that I never got to see what that platinum chip was all about as my chosen faction doesn't care for it. So I have that left for my next play-through which will be a Legion one where I focus on Melee.
It was a hassle to set this game up as
Viva New Vegas contains so many mods. I was quite fatigued after installing them that I couldn't be bothered by also getting
Autumn Leaves to work, which I had intended to try out. So I have that left for the future.
On the whole I like the game, it's probably bigger than Fallout 2 and it contains a lot of reactivity to your actions. It's great to have a game that builds on the previous two titles and carries the story further. As it takes place after
Van Buren you can even imagine it being one of the predecessors as well.
Fallout: New Vegas is the actually existing third Fallout game and I'm glad that it's a game about a worldspace and it's factions. Something I don't like about what I've read about
Van Buren is that the story is driven by a megalomaniac mad man. That was explored in
Dead Money and
Lonesome Road and I don't like it. One could argue that Mr House is of the same calibre but he has limited goals and means to achieve them. He also has to compete against and bargain with other forces of the Wasteland.
Some of the fan service was a bit contrived I think. No matter how good it is to see them again
the Khans,
the Vipers,
the Gun Runners and
the Followers of the Apocalypse still being distinct groups a 120 years after the first Fallout game is a bit far fetched. It's probably much more likely that they would have disbanded. But fair enough let's see how different groups of
Fallout ended up.
New Reno has been criticised for the whole Italian mafia thing and even the designer, MCA himself, has admitted to it not being entirely fitting to the Fallout setting. Yet New Vegas features the same thing with the Gomorrah casino and the Omertas. I don't mind and I guess it's natural to Fallout now.
I really wander why it was the NCR and not the BoS who took out Navarro after the fall of the Enclave. It's the BoS who sends you there to get the Vertibird plans and it is the BoS who have kept track of the Enclave during it's rise, not the NCR. So it would be far more likely that the BoS would have swooped in and taken Navarro than the NCR doing it. But ok.
The Legion is a weird faction and I'm not entirely sold on it. It would be easier to accept if they weren't dressed in mockup Roman garb. I would have used the Wacky Wasteland toggle for this. If you play with Wacky Wasteland the legion can have the Roman apparel. However if you don't they will just have normal gear. Some people of the Legion even comments on this themselves of it being weird with the Latin and all.
Viva New Vegas has the Vigor version of the Josh Sawyer mod. And that version allows you to level beyond level 30. At some point the game just got too easy because of your continued level gain and all the implants you can get. Maybe the game should be capped at level 25 so that there's some challenge left for the second half of the game. It's ridiculously easy and when you have good gear and high level there's no effort to anything. I thing I had maxed out almost all skills by the end except Guns, Melee and Unarmed.
Overall it's a great improvement on the lousy Fallout 3 and I'm really glad that Obsidian got the chance to make this game. There's four different endings? And with all the reactivity it can support multiple play-throughs. It would be interesting to see a back-port of it to the Fallout 2 engine...
Questionnaire:
-After having completed it what did you think of the game?
I think it's great and I'm very glad that I played it a second time. It was pretty much as what I remembered.
-What would you improve?
Mainly game balance. It needs to be a challenge from the beginning to the end and not a cake walk. It is a bit difficult at first but not that long. You also get good weapons far to early, I think I almost started the game with a plasma gun just because I tagged Energy Weapons. That is not have it should be. You should be punished by the game and have to rely on other weapons for a long time before you find or buy that first energy based weapon.
To imagine Fallout 3 being even easier is ridiculous, what's the point of playing if there's no challenge? Also it would be funnier to level up if you really had to care for what you put your points into.
-What's your thoughts on the main quest?
It's alright even though you wake up as a blank slate with memory loss. I didn't really care for the story and as I sided with the NCR I didn't even get to know what the Platinum Chip was for. The story is probably not that important for New Vegas. Which faction you side with is more important and that's because it decides the future of the Mojave.
-If old, does the game still hold up in 2022?
I played it heavily modded with Viva New Vegas. It took a long time to install it all but people say it's necessary. The combat is especially poor, the shooting is bad and the enemy AI is laughable. The combat isn't great to express it kindly. The other game systems are good.
-If not Fallout 1, does it add to Fallout lore in a good way?
I think so. It builds on Fallout 2 in a good way. You get to know what happened to the NCR heart lands and you get to see them expand further east, so the world grows. There's also a faction coming from the east that brings a great clash and you get to decide the outcome. However it doesn't add that much new deep lore like Fallout 2 did by explaining that the Vaults where actually experiments and that the government still exists on this remote Oil-rig. New Vegas doesn't change the established world so to say. It tries to consolidate.
-What's the game's strengths and weaknesses?
The strengths are player freedom and world reactivity. The weaknesses mainly comes from the technology it's build with, the Gamebryo engine.
-What would you like to change in the game?
Minor stuff like the legion not having ridiculous outfits. I've already talked about the game being to easy.
-What build did you use during your play-through?
Energy weapons and then focused on plasma. I had Speech and Science. And then I eventually got almost all the other skills to 100. I like to recieve many skill points so I most often bring Intelligence to 9 just in order to get a lot of them on level up.
-What's your weapon of choice?
Plasma gun for a lot of the game and then the Plasma Caster. I put all my money into implants so I only used weapons that I found.
-Describe your favourite quest and why you like it!
I don't know if it's a quest bu going to the REPCONN test-site exciting as the game was still challenging by that point. Can't think of a quest right now to be honest.
-What's your favourite location in the game?
The canyon of Honest Hearts if I can say that. It was so nice to explore another environment for a change and the canyon was really nice.
-What ending did you strive for/get?
The NCR ending. Kind of lame as that was the ending I did when I first played the game when it was new. However that was 14 years ago and I needed to refresh my memory.
-If the game is on Steam then write a sentence that would catch the NMA perception of it and that we could use for our Steam curator.
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-Is Fallout: New Vegas a good sequel to the previous games?
It's the best sequel we got. It respects the past entries into the series and it explores more of the post-nuclear world. That's alright I think.
-Do you consider Fallout: New Vegas to be canon?
Yes. It doesn't break anything and it builds on what was in a respectful way,
