TL;DR – Fallout: New Vegas is a thoroughly enjoyable western RPG with a couple of handicaps that keep it from being a 10/10 game. In spite of these issues, it’s a great example of how RPG elements can be included within a genre that ordinarily doesn’t have them (FPS) and has a vast amount of content to explore. Just be aware that playing on console is not recommended and that even playing on PC without any mods can be a painful experience. As such it’s a game that I don’t hesitate to recommend, especially to RPG novices, but it is also a game that has it’s fair share of caveats.
Quick Note: As mentioned above, playing this game unmodded can be a needlessly frustrating experience. Fortunately as the game is popular it’s community has spent years releasing free modifications (mods) that resolve most of it’s issues. While I won’t recommend any that are in the realm of personal taste, I would highly recommend you install the following fixes and unofficial patches before playing. You can find them and thousands of others at the Nexusmods website, but I’ll link the specific ones I’d recommend to everyone here as well. I’d also suggest downloading the Nexusmods Vortex program which will make installing these much easier for you. With that being said, here’s my list: New Vegas Script Extender, NVAC – New Vegas Anti Crash, NVTF – New Vegas Tick Fix, JIP LN NVSE Plugin, JohnnyGuitar NVSE, Unofficial Patch NVSE Plus, Yukichigai Unofficial Patch – YUP, Asterra’s Many Fixes.
At this point it’s fair to say that Fallout: New Vegas is the opposite of obscure, as it’s been a darling of the gaming community for over a decade and has remained near and dear to many of it’s players. Due to this popularity I’d assume anyone reading this has either played the game themselves, or at the very least has an understanding of what it’s about and how it plays. Regardless, for the purposes of justifying the 50ish hours I spent recently replaying it I thought I’d write a short-but-sweet review. Now, if by some horrifying twist of fate Big Boaby Gaming is your one and only window into the gaming world, then I’m happy to tell you that Fallout: New Vegas is a large, sprawling western themed post-post-apocalyptic FPS/RPG hybrid that was developed for the 7th generation of consoles by Obsidian. The game is in essence a meaty standalone quasi-expansion for Fallout 3 (Fo3), as it’s not only built on the same engine but shares basically every mechanic and a ton of other content from Fo3 including animations, weapons, mini-games and so on. Unfortunately one way in which Fallout: New Vegas is a chip off the old block is the way in which it frequently encounters bugs and crashes, hence why I really don’t recommend playing it without mods or heaven forbid, on console. Seriously, while the modern Xbox ports aren’t terrible the PS3 version is crippled by a bug wherein your save game will eventually bloat and the whole thing will freeze often and repeatedly – which is caused by the save file trying to remember too many things and thus crashing the game more frequently the longer you’ve played it. With that warning out of the way, let’s take a look at the game on the assumption that you’re playing the PC version with those mods mentioned above.
Fallout: New Vegas starts with a decent quality pre-rendered animation (the only one it has by the way) that sets up the basic premise of the game. Chandler from Friends A mysterious figure known as Benny has shot you in the head and left you for dead, and you’re going to make him pay. This non-consensual act of violence not only serves as your motivation for pursuing the game’s central narrative, but it also justifies your lack of a background (as you have amnesia) and sole obsession with tracking down the person who robbed you of your old memories and life. It also handily justifies the game allowing you to create a character build, and Fallout: New Vegas starts off fairly strong as the amount of customisation and replayability is huge. There are 7 main stats known as your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats which will be familiar to the exceedingly small minority of you who have played a G.U.R.P.S pen and paper RPG or the majority(?) of you who have past experience with the Fallout franchise. These stats correspond to your Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck and all of these stats not have a modest impact on your skills, but will also be required for Perks and occasionally enable optional responses in dialogue. Your skills are the basic ways in which you interact with the game, for example you’ve got a Guns skill that lets you shoot guns better (if you can believe it), a Speech skill for being persuasive in dialogue, a medicine skill which makes healing items more effective and so on. Again these skills occasionally enable you to access specific dialogue options and these are almost always a superior option to the normal ones. Finally you’ve got Perks, which are granted every other level and which provide various benefits including the ability to knock-down enemies in melee, reducing the damage you do to allies with your explosions, letting you heal from radiation or cannibalism and so much more. The main takeaway here is that you can’t do everything with one character but you can create a wide variety of characters with which to roleplay. You can be a suave diplomat who sucks at combat, a greedy mercenary who always follows the money or a brutish boxer who just runs around and punches everyone to death. There’s a ton of character build variation provided via these systems and honestly Fallout: New Vegas is a game that you’ll most likely come back to every couple of years.
Part of the reason for this is that there’s just so much content squirreled away within the game, and even after playing for around 120 hours I’m still seeing other players mention quests and locations that I’ve yet to see. Even the main narrative is a good example of this, as while it’s largely consistent across playthroughs initially it branches out and let’s you decide which of the four major outcomes will impact the entire game world as you lend your weight to one of three factions or just try and take over everything yourself. This world is the Mojave wasteland, the pre-WW3 remnants of Nevada which is currently being fought over by 3 groups. You’ve got the New Californian Republic, who are the most akin to a successor state to the United States but have endemic issues with supply chains, corruption and various problems back home. Opposing them is Caesar’s Legion, a motley assortment of tribals and warriors who are aggressively LARPing as Romans and led by a new Caesar who is trying to create a civilization that can withstand the wasteland and eventually evolve into a more palatable nation state. Caught in the middle is Robert House, the owner of New Vegas and Howard Hughes stand-in who is trying to milk the NCR for money and use it to turn New Vegas into a futuristic spacefaring city state. Each faction has a bunch of their own quests, items and rewards and then when you include all of the smaller factions into the equation, you have a ton of possible endings even if you ignore most of the side content. And that would be silly, as for all of it’s flaws (which we’ll get to in a minute) Fallout: New Vegas has a lot of enjoyable and unique side quests which give the game a lot of flair and that provide the players with some exceptionally useful rewards and benefits. Plus you’ll find that the more you play, the more you chase after higher levels because “just one more perk” or “just one more item” will make your character even more powerful and help you complete that vision of how they’ll handle certain situations.
And it’s incredibly fortuitous that the game is able to nail that feeling of making you want to keep playing and to keep building up your character, as the start of the game is honestly a drag. Now that’s not to say it’s awful, but the moment to moment combat especially at lower levels isn’t very enjoyable as enemies don’t really react to your damage and during the early game they can be a bit bullet-spongy. This issue still exists to a lesser extent even as your character gets more powerful, but as you start accumulating specific equipment, perks and enough levels in your skills the combat gets a lot less monotonous. To give a pertinent example, I made an unarmed boxer character and the first couple of levels just straight-up sucked. I didn’t do much damage, so I spent a lot of time just punching enemies in the face over and over as they shot me over and over with neither of us ever making that much of an impact on the other’s health bars. It wasn’t until I got some good weapons and a couple of unarmed combat perks, that punching the local fauna and bandits raiders got to be enjoyable. The other issue with the early game is the fact that it’s basically the only point in the game that’s pushing you heavily towards a certain path, as it “railroads” players to go through a sequence of quests and areas in a linear order. That’s not to say you have to go through the game’s main narrative in this way, but unless you know what you’re doing the game will just curb stomp you with high level enemies that are very difficult to avoid. As such I’d easily say that the first five hours of Fallout: New Vegas are the worst, without a shadow of a doubt. Again, that’s not to say the first five hours are bad, but the combination of your poor performance in combat, limited skills outside of combat, low amounts of cash to get equipment/healing supplies and the highly linear nature of the game’s start really do combine to drag down the experience. I pre-ordered this game back in the day, and I distinctly remember being disappointed with my initial impressions (especially as those handy bug fixes hadn’t been created yet, so the game crashed about once per hour).
But you shouldn’t be disheartened by the fairly slow start, as once the game picks it up it maintains a brisk pace due to the addictive nature of building a stronger character and the way that the world truly opens up to allow you to explore it fully. A good example of this would be the companions system, which enables you to have up to two companions that follow you at any given time and who help out in combat (and by carrying stuff when your inventory is full). Initially you’re just all by yourself, but as you explore the world you get opportunities to recruit these characters and each provides a constant bonus to you. As the game also makes use of a level-scaling system, you’ll gradually encounter better weapons and more varied enemies as you play through the game. Of course one caveat of this system is that there’s a point around level 15 to 20 wherein you’re dealing with the tougher enemies, but have only just started gaining access to the better weapons and perks so there’s a bit of a difficulty spike. But you’ll be able to handle it, trust me. The only thing you might not be able to handle is the way in which the game handles it’s lockpicking and hacking skills, as unlike in the Elder Scrolls series you need to have obtained a set number of skill points to even attempt to hack a computer terminal or bypass a locked door. It’s a minor complaint, especially as these alternative routes are generally scaled well, but it is a little niggle that’s worth mentioning as I feel that new players might neglect to put points into these skills as opposed to their combat skills.
Another minor complaint I see mentioned fairly often is the way in which the game has somewhat mediocre visuals. I personally don’t mind how the game looks, but the combination of choppy performance and the not particularly noteworthy visuals can be off-putting especially to players who mainly dabble in the latest and greatest big budget releases. A bigger complaint I have with the game is actually due to the limitations that were imposed on it by the need to maintain parity with the console versions, as it means that larger areas are often riddled with loading screens and transitionary areas so as to avoid overloading the measly RAM capacities of the PS3 and Xbox 360. This means that New Vegas in particularly doesn’t feel very big and many of it’s casinos are weirdly empty inside. But again these are minor issues and shouldn’t detract from the fact that Fallout: New Vegas provides players with a huge amount of quests and often (keyword) enables a wide variety of ways for players to proceed with them. In fact the only major criticism I can level at the game is the fact that it’s structured itself so that you have combat skills and then a speech skill. Now this shouldn’t be a big deal, but I personally found that not levelling up speech basically precludes you from not killing people in a decent amount of situations. You can occasionally talk people down with S.P.E.C.I.A.L checks and the barter skill, but for many of the smaller side quests it can often boil down to passing a speech check or just shooting someone (whether the person you’re trying to persuade or someone they don’t like). The ways in which you can do this killing or pass those speech checks does often have some nuance to it, for example you might be able to coast by on the basis of past reputation, or have obtained evidence but generally the smaller quests have less ways of resolving them peacefully unless you put points into speech. In fact I’d personally consider Speech to be the most overpowered skill in the game, as it lets you get the best outcome in a given situation in the majority of cases.
Balancing issues and nit-picking aside though, Fallout: New Vegas does an admirable job of crafting it’s world and the way that the factions interact is handled pretty well. There’s plenty of reasons to go out of your way to do side quests, as generally they’ll make things easier down the road and the ways in which your choices shape the game world can also have surprisingly deep ramifications. Even outside of some of the obvious examples like a companion being available to recruit or a new vendor being available to sell you items, there is a lot of small touches and changes that can happen due to your actions. Whether it’s helping a town join the NCR causing prices to go up, having an arrest go south because a criminal called the sheriff’s wife a whore or having a group turn hostile because you completed a random side quest, this is a game that does a great job of feeling like a living world. Of course there are some cases that break the immersion slightly (generally related to NPCs not realising that my character is overpowered and thus not scared of them) but by and large Fallout: New Vegas is an immersive and enjoyable experience that gets better the more you play it. The only catch is that you can’t keep playing the game once you’ve finished the main quest, but because there are so many variables in determining the future of the wasteland you’ll generally not want to rush finishing it as otherwise various groups and individuals can encounter some less than ideal outcomes. Plus there are plenty of really interesting side quests that are totally missable, including entire settlements and areas that lie off the beaten track. These include a pre-war bunker filled with mutated and hostile plant life, a settlement of peaceful mutants trying to get by and the irradiated result of a nuclear attack on an NCR outpost. Unless you take the time to explore the game’s world you’ll miss all of these and the way in which the game is able to continually provide new and interesting areas is one of it’s biggest strengths. Indeed one of the reasons the game is so replayable is the simple fact that you’ll hit max level before you’re anywhere near to beating all of it’s content.
In conclusion Fallout: New Vegas is a great RPG that has some niggles, quirks and balancing issues plus a whole lot of bugs which stop it from being a 10/10 game. In spite of these drawbacks however, the sheer scale of the world and potential for roleplaying across multiple playthroughs makes it an easy game to recommend. Even if the combat is initially underwhelming, it definitely picks up and the ways in which character builds diverge helps to keep the gameplay fresh while also imbuing each playthrough of the game with a real sense of progress. The game’s not perfect by any means, but so long as you play on PC and install the mods recommended above you’ll easily be able to get dozens if not hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of this game. Just be sure to pace yourself and explore the world, as your character has just cheated death after all
