Updated: 5 May 2012 2:39 am
Posted: 19 Oct 2010 10:00 am
You'll forgive me, then, for focussing on the things that are different. Because in some respects Fallout: New Vegas is a very different game from Fallout 3, and that's largely because it's better written. It understands that sometimes you must do awful things for a greater cause, or choose the best of two bad options. It offers you decisions all the time, but it rarely forces you to make any. It understands that morality is ambiguous, and subjective, and that games shoving obvious choices in your face undermines their emotional maturity. It knows that sometimes there is no right choice.
It often fools you in this regard. The game's central conflict between the people's militia, the New California Republic, and the slave-driven empire of Caesar's Legion seems like a black-and-white decision between well-meaning lawmakers and murderous, barbaric fiends, but neither of them is a force for good, and over the forty or fifty hours you can easily spend with the game you'll see the worst side of both of them. Similarly, the families vying for control of the the Mojave Wasteland's glittering, neon-lit New Vegas are all as bad as each other. Fallout: New Vegas' focus on factions is less facetious than it first appears; it's never just a matter of siding with one at the expense of another.
The Mojave Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic Nevada, is a better setting than the Capital Wasteland. It's smaller, but there's no less to do, making uneventful treks across barren scenery a thing of the past. It draws you out all over the place, pointing you in four directions at once, never telling you to explore but rewarding you greatly when you take the risk. The complete absence of a mutant-infested subway makes it easier to get by without guns and handle situations the way you want to.
When you eventually get to the New Vegas Strip, you realise that the rest of the wasteland so far has been foreplay. Your Luck stat suddenly becomes very important, especially if you get drawn into the city's sinful culture. New Vegas, like Fallout 2's New Reno, is at once fascinating and hugely depressing, a centre of tawdry entertainment for miserable, damaged, bored people run by malicious, manipulative powers. It's the embodiment of Fallout's nihilism, a cheap, neon shadow of former glory that's nonetheless the most attractive thing in a irreparably devastated world.
Fallout: New Vegas has strong, clever dialogue as well as good writing and quest design. Characters are duplicitous, foul-mouthed, desperate, broken, suave, or all of the above. The voice acting is much better, too, which really helps carry the game's hundreds of interlocking stories. It's a serious game, overall, with moments that are genuinely sobering, but there's also a wicked undercurrent of black humour; in the face of such desolation, the Wasteland's inhabitants have developed an amusingly cynical worldview. Fallout's uncompromising violence, too, is double-edged; seeing crucified Caesar's Legion victims dying in agony isn't funny in any way, but watching a raider's head explode really is.
This isn't all Obsidian's work, obviously. Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 share a talent for subtle scene-setting that Bethesda first mastered in Oblivion. Much of the wasteland's detail and narrative texture is in the background, in places that you're never told to go looking; written down in computer logs in abandoned buildings that have nothing to do with quests, strewn in a bloody mess at the roadside, hidden away in journals and lockboxes and side-rooms.
The Mojave Wasteland is so believable because it's an incomplete puzzle. So often you'll push open a door to a new location somewhere out in the wastes, unprompted by mission markers, and know only that something terrible happened there. Bethesda knows how to build a game world that works, and Obsidian knows how to write quests and dialogue that aren't bland. They're a perfect fit.
Like Fallout 3, New Vegas can feel inaccessible. This is a role-playing game in the classic sense; you have to play to your character's strengths. Becoming a nuke-launcher-wielding hard-ass with a Strength stat of 4 is impossible; equally, you'll never see all the dialogue options without high Charisma, and getting the most of the wasteland's technology needs high Intelligence. You'll close off options to yourself right from the first decisions you make about your character, but you'll also be forced into playing in non-conventional ways, and discovering the sheer breadth of options that New Vegas offers you – particularly in Hardcore Mode.
Playing Fallout: New Vegas in hardcore mode is a revolution. You become a true wastelander, collapsing onto whatever roadside mattress you can find to stave off sleep deprivation, lapping dirty water from toilet bowls to hydrate yourself, going through every bin and abandoned building you can find for morsels of irradiated food and dying almost every time you venture off the beaten path. Skills that otherwise lurk at the bottom of your priorities, like Unarmed and Survival, become absolutely essential. Perks that you'd otherwise skip over become lifesavers.
It doesn't just make things harder – it's not a wasteland Hard mode that artificially gives mangy raiders thousands of hit points. It changes the whole way you play the game, completely altering your worldview. Ammunition has weight, so there's more of a reason to explore Fallout: New Vegas' vastly improved melee weapons. Instead of obsessing over your next quest goal, you're scouring the horizon for buildings that might have water, or a settlement that might have a doctor to heal your crippled limbs.
Because Fallout: New Vegas' most important improvement upon Fallout 3 is the writing and quest design, it's impossible to wax lyrical about them without spoiling it, or to pick out particularly affecting characters and situations for fear of influencing how you might react to them. Like 3 and Oblivion before it, New Vegas is a game to share stories about, one that lets you carve your own path through a beautifully constructed world. If you felt that there was just something missing from Fallout 3 – some indefinable quality of soul – you may well find New Vegas especially satisfying.
Verdict
Fallout: New Vegas is the game that many wanted Fallout 3 to be. It's harder, more ruthless, better written and more morally ambiguous. It's a game we’ve been wanting to play for more than a decade, a real modern re-imagining of the Fallout series, complete with that deliciously black humour. But it's also more of the same, aesthetically and technically identical to Fallout 3, wonky facial animation and all.
The ever-so-slightly ageing technology only marginally detracts from what is otherwise an expansive, fulfilling and ambitious game, unmatched in scope and maturity. If Obsidian were to make another Fallout game, we certainly wouldn't say no.
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