Fallout: New Vegas

Dear Blag,

Today I think I'm ready to talk frankly about Fallout: New Vegas. Given how much time I've spent playing it, it may come as a surprise to you that I still haven't actually completed the main campaign. Instead, I've been playing it the way I play most Bethesda releases: creating a menagerie of characters, and then picking which one I like best before pursuing the game's final conclusion. Of course, seeing as this is a Bethesda game, this process can be quite lengthy. However, despite my rather unusual play style, I think I can speak honestly about the game at this point.

First Impressions:
Fallout is always awesome when it comes to gameplay and story, but this time the story feels a little weak. It develops well, and the characters and events are fun and colourful, but the premise itself feels forced. The introduction isn't what I've come to expect from Bethesda, though it works from a mechanical standpoint. The one thing I can say for certain is that New Vegas never fails to disappoint when it comes to immersion. Sure, the graphics engine is showing its age, and the glitches are too numerous and hilarious to even mention, but the actions you take as a character feel important. Many RPGs give you a "good" or a "bad" choice, which nets you an overall score on a scale of "good" and "bad", and such a mechanic can feel very forced and very unsatisfying. New Vegas, on the other hand, will often give you a choice between a variety of warring factions, or present you with an opportunity to do a relative amount of "good" or "bad" to a certain individual or group of people. These opportunities are vital in the game's faction system, and even smaller decisions, like choosing to shoot someone in the face to acquire an item instead of asking nicely for it, give you a sense of gravity and consequence, with nearly immediate results.

As someone who enjoys the moral compass in some more polished games, I have a tendency to play such roles with a certain degree of hostility. When presented with a moral decision between, say, killing a town full of rubes or killing a gang of ruffians, I will often side with the gangsters. But New Vegas has a tendency (particularly in the later stages of the game) to offer more conflicting choices, with less obvious conclusions. Even though I work for a legion of - let's face it - douchebags, not all of my missions will involve blowing up  bus full of orphans. A considerable effort has gone into making the story convoluted and controversial, which depends almost entirely on the choices of the player.

Story-wise, this is a great mechanic. The new "Hardcore Mode" also provides you with some more meticulous aspects of wilderness survival, which is mostly fun, but not altogether necessary. It must also be noted that Hardcore Mode is considerably more time-consuming and (later on) frustrating than what I call "Fun Mode".

Adding all these new features has bolstered the game's staying power, but it also appears to have had a drastic effect on its performance. Fallout: New Vegas functions beautifully on most mid-to-high spec systems, but has a tendency to break and explode from time to time. Quicksaving is a must, which I tend to do anyway, but doing it too often can actually have an adverse effect -- I was once accidentally stuck in a scripted story loop with no conclusion, and was forced to load a much earlier save.

Aside from that, the gameplay is pretty much the same as Fallout 3, which was fun to begin with. The character creation is basically the same, but the "Stat" and "Perk" system has been given a much-needed neutering.

Is it better than Fallout 3? No. But it's definitely par for the course, which leaves me reasonably contented. Also, being given the option to stab people in the face (and subsequently steal all of their things) without immediately dire consequences is almost... Morrowindian. And I'm not sure if that's a compliment, but it's certainly something. And if there's anything I need most in a game it's... that's something.