Fallout: New Vegas Review

“War…War never changes.”

Fallout : New Vegas has hundreds of hours of content. Unmodded, with no DLCs installed, completely unpatched, it can be a little troublesome, but it’ll all lead to kicking some Legion butt.

Let me tell you what, Fallout series is, hands down, the best gaming series forever. Let’s have a flowchart of Fallout fun.

Fallout 1 : Very new. Something … feels unique about it. The options are maddening. Something feels crazy about it.

Fallout 2 : HOLY SHIT DON’T DISTURB ME I AM GOING TO KILL THE SUPERMUTANT WAIT FOR A WHILE M8.

Fallout Tactics : Brotherhood of Steel : Kind of a disappointment. Not even close to the first two.

Fallout : Brotherhood of Steel : A little better, but still not close to Fallout’s blood.

Fallout 3 : I am a little biased here because it’s my first Fallout game. But the environment is awing. The mods just are the icing over cake. New Lands, mods like Fallout : Wanderers’ Edition, Enclave soldiers (something missing off Fallout New Vegas) … leads to beautiful things.

Closer to Fallout : New Vegas : It’s one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. The mods are even better than Fallout 3’s. It actually gave Bethesda the fame for Fallout it has. It’s cthe original games. Its DLCs are, in the name of Kyne, extremely well-done. I especially like how it has better endings compared to Fallout 3.  But there are a few catches.

Fallout : NV has beautiful music. I especially like the ending music — where the credits roll, which is a modified version of the menu theme. It’s crafted by Obsidian, what else can you expect? Most of the staff of Obsidian is Black Isles, the original developers of Fallout. Music is top-notch. Mods and DLCs add new lands and new radio stations. Heck, in how many games do you get to listen to radio from your Pip-Boy?

The visuals are… outdated. But there are ENBs that can force FNV to use 8GB RAM and 3 cores of your i7 and a good amount of vRAM your Nvidia GeForce 270 GTX has. But gameplay > graphics. One thing I like about Fallout is that it was never much gameplay oriented. Don’t get me wrong, there’s more than enough to kill, resurrect, kill, resurrect and repeat. More than enough to explore and more than enough to be amused at. But  it’s directly opposite of Morrowind,.

In Morrowind, the guildmasters tell you to kill person X or do something with your fancy magic. And that’s it. The moment you leave the tower where the unmoving NPC is situated at, your relation ends. How many of you still remember Caius? The NPCs don’t even move, except the guards. The animations are dull and awkward. The endings… the games have no endings. Skyrim, Morrowind, Oblivion, have zero endings. Yes, you kill the main boss / creature / Daedra / Aedra that’s taunting you since the starting of the game. But that’s it. Credits don’t roll, epic music doesn’t play, and the people you’ve met, the places you’ve visited, the guilds you’ve worked at, are not told the fate of.

Fallout series is exactly opposite.

I still remember the Master and its mutant army. I love how it perfectly ties together with the Enclave. I love how in-depth Old World Blues is. I love how much creepy Point Lookout is…I love how I don’t need to fetch some magical artifact every two seconds.  But instead talk with the NPC and have outcomes out of it.

In Skyrim, even if you finish the Civil ‘war’ (not much of a war without mods) and in Morrowind also, the NPCs still want you to be hired by the Empire or Ulfric Stormcloak… the NPCs don’t even realize the war is over. They keep speaking, ‘because of the war that’s going on’ is the same war in whom I killed Thalmor ambassadors and its Empire last year’s First Seed. It’s been a year since I finished the war, yet no NPC realizes.

Yet in Fallout, it’s exactly opposite. The world is programmed to have an impact of your words. For example, if you speak to Great Khans about “ghosts and martyrs”, you’ll get a different ending, the one where the tribe  is actually destroyed and “quickly forgotten by the rest of the unforgiving Wasteland.” Just because you chose a different dialogue option, rather than speaking of gracious words.

The Fallout universe is beautiful. Its humor us awing. Its weapons are a (deadly) dream come true. Its locations are terrific. Its dialogues are witty. Its mods are the inspiration of other community’s modders. Its DLCs are a terrific masterpiece… It’s one of the best things that’s happened to entertainment.

When you start to develop feelings about a character, you’re playing Fallout.

Because war…War never changes.