A Novel Blog

So I finished Fallout: New Vegas.

My verdict?

It’s okay.

Not great, at least by the standards of what came before, but it does the job.

For this installment Bethesda takes the players back to the West Coast or at least as close as they dare without retreading the steps of the Vault Dweller (Fallout) and The Chosen One (Fallout 2).

The Good: The wasteland is far more colorful, the characters are more engaging and even if your not playing in hardcore mode, it’s will remain challenging for most players through out. And for fans of the franchise (I’m taking Fallout and Fallout 2 devotees), the call backs and references to earlier games abound.

The Interesting: You have faction based reputation, so as you play you build up your reputation (good or bad) with a vast variety of factions. Towns, governments, gangs and movements all form an opinion of you depending on how your actions affect them. Like I said above the Mojave Wasteland is far more colorful, with red rock lined canyons, actual trees and even snow caped mountains.  And there is more variety of critters as well, which makes for more interesting combat.

The Bad: (HERE BE SPOILERS!) Here is where things take a downturn, especially if your a fan of Fallout 3. The storyline fails to immerse you the way past games did. While the story in Fallout 3 literally kicked you out of the womb here you wake up after being shot in head. Fine you want to get revenge on the SOB who did it, but besides that, what happens in the wasteland is of little concern to you. In Fallout 3, the world seemed to revolve on your every move, your actions either sung or vilified by Three Dog on the radio.  Not so in this game. In fact, it seems that whatever you do, you have very little real impact on the game.

Not only that, but you will see the twist a mile away.  It suffers from the inevitable sandbox shrinkage far to early in the game (when you realize that the game world is not as big as you thought it was). The reputation system is a bit broken as well, as doing things that are beneficial for some factions will still garner you a loss of karma/reputation with them. It even has the annoying feature of telling you you failed quests you didn’t even knew you were a part off. And you suffer from ending fatigue (as I did while playing Morrowind) because while you know how the game is going to end, you have to run around and do a bunch of quests that simply streech the game play further.

This game is then an adequate continuation of the Fallout franchise, but one I consider could have been delivered via DLC rather than packaging in an entire new game. Lets see how New Vegas own DLC packs deal with the flaws above, and I hope that Bethesda has not abandoned the East Coast completel