fallout: new vegas :o
Yes, only a month after its release I have a Fallout review for you all. I know I said I wouldn’t play it until it wasn’t on Steam but it turns out my constitution isn’t as high as I had hoped. Also, a cracked exe to disassociate itself from Steam may have swayed me a bit.
So we are all on the same page, I LOVE Fallout. But I do not love Fallout 3. It is ‘okay’. It is not great. It is not terrible. It’s generic and bland for the most part. The only parts I really dislike are the indoor wander-around-and-get-lost-in-loads-of-identical corridors. Mostly because it gives me motion sickness, for some reason, which is probably not the game’s fault (although it might be). It is a 6/10 affair. Its major shortcomings are:
- Bad writing, giant absence of character design save a select few people (RPGs are heavily story based, writing and character depth is important)
- Bad visual design (bland world, too many greys and dark greens and browns)
- Lazy world design (many things seemed to have been placed largely at random. The wasteland is supposedly sparse but you can’t walk more than 3 steps without meeting someone/something or finding a settlement)
- Annoying combat system
- Fairly dated game engine, leading to ugly graphics in places (shiny walls?), really strikingly mediocre animation and lacking AI.
- Quantity over quality. This is Bethesda’s motto.
Fallout 1 and 2 were incredibly deep and broad RPGs, which crafted their own world from scratch in 640 by 480. Fallout 3 was made by a different company (Bethesda) and didn’t have much innovation or focus in general, it had an advertising budget and a game market saturated by first person shooters. Plagiarising Fable, they marketed it as an action-RPG, but also plagiarising fable, it wasn’t much good at being an action (i.e. FPS) game or an RPG. For some reason it was a huge success, mostly with people too young to remember Fallout1/2 and too young to believe that people REALLY used to use 640×480. Which just goes to show popularity isn’t the same as quality.
New Vegas is made by a different company and is implemented using a modified version of Fallout 3. That means some of the above criticisms are unavoidable, like the game engine and the combat system, but the other things are addressed very well. In fact, it’s made by a company whom many of the Fallout 1/2 developers joined when Black Isle shut down. As such, it’s clear that they do get Fallout. They get Fallout because they made Fallout.
The world is no longer grey, it’s more yellowy-brown, because it’s in the desert. You’d be forgiven for being a little sceptical at the apparent change in direction into a desert world with a slight wild west theme, but you’d also be wrong. Fallout 3 was on the east coast and gave Bethesda the freedom to completely ignore the canon and start making stupid shit up, New Vegas is, well, for those of us who don’t know our American geography that well, somewhere a bit inland of the west coast, i.e. adjacent to Fallout1/2. So, there’s no geographical overlap but New Vegas and Fallout 2 definitely consistently reside in the Fallout universe while complementing each other: New Vegas turns out to be quite a lot like New Reno, and one of the major happenings in the world is the NCR (from Fallout2) are pushing East and trying to annex territory. There are nice little additions, like you can talk to an old woman who’s an ex-pilot who claims she once crashed a vertibird near Klamath. This vertibird? Oh yes! This is just a single example of the kind of attention to detail that Fallout requires but Bethesda didn’t have any interest in providing.
The overall story and game events are a lot deeper and more interesting. The locations are more interesting and the world is more believable. Fallout 3 felt like everything had been thrown down on the map at random, whereas New Vegas’s map consists of realistic human settlement patterns and transitions between areas, and better wildlife. The characters are by and large more believable, dialogue is much better written. Everything is better. It’s of a noticeably higher quality than Fallout3. Also, combat is a bit more fun as they give you iron-sights. Also also, the sound is really good. Some of the music is recycled from Fallout 1, like the Cathedral music which you’ll recognise instantly even if it’s 4 years since you played Fallout 1, because it’s one of those things, but the new ambient music is also wonderful. Some of it has a hint of Ennio Morricone/spaghetti westerns, which is perfectly fitting as you’re wandering about the desert with a revolver and a lever-action repeater.
New Vegas also has one of the most obvious omissions from Fallout 3: humour. Yep. Fallout1/2 are full of totally bizarre don’t-take-it-seriously hilarious moments. So is New Vegas. Here’s a screenshot of one of the sights you are given.
Ghouls in spacesuits. A hilarious ‘WTF’ moment! That whole quest was brilliant. First there’s a human who’s convinced he’s a ghoul, then there’s a Nightkin who talks to an animal skull called Antler, because he was lost without The Master (killed in Fallout 1) so they “needed new master”, so he found Antler whom he believes relays orders to him and “since then everything’s been going REALLY well”. You wouldn’t find this sort of ludicrous stupidity in Fallout 3, and I think we can all agree that it’s all the worse for it. You have to keep humour in Fallout because otherwise it’s a post-apocalyptic depression-fest about everyone’s lives being fucking terrible because of the giant fucking nuclear war. We want a slightly brighter outlook.
The most annoying parts are: bad AI, annoying bugs that occasionally have your companion(s) get stuck in the scenery. There is a new ‘hardcore mode’, which makes things a bit more realistic, by making it such that you need to manage food/water/sleep as well as radiation, and healing items’ effects occur over several seconds, not instantly, but it’s still basically impossible to die, with the one exception that you might accidentally wander too close to a swarm of cazadors. Overall however, a huge improvement on Fallout3.
Basically, what I am trying to say is New Vegas is still limited by what is by modern standards a fairly substandard game engine, but it succeeds in the most important area that Fallout 3 did not: It has character.
Verdict: probably… 8/10.
Note: This is a game review, but when buying Fallout New Vegas you don’t just get a game, you get a product. The product has an artificial dependency on an annoying, intrusive and unnecessary piece of software called Steam. The ideology of Steam is that you must ask a computer in America whether or not you are ‘allowed’ to play the game you bought in a shop down the road, and you must obtain permission every time you want to play it. You can remove this dependency by using a third party (untrusted) fixed executable, which may be illegal if your country has have poorly designed computer crime or copyright legislation. Furthermore, I had to use a third party dll file to make the game run at any kind of usable speed on my hardware (Athlon x2 3000+, 4GB RAM, nVidia GTS 250), but after using it, it now runs fine at high resolution.
If I was reviewing it as a product – an amalgamation of the experience that follows directly from what you buy – I would give it 0/10.
Fallout New Vegas DRM
I’m a hardcore Fallout nerd and I’d like to play Fallout New Vegas. But I have a problem. Fallout New Vegas it relies on a program called Steam. Steam is basically a digitial shop and integrated social networking for games. It’s probably okay if you are interested in its features, but they’re only really of use for multi-player games. In the case of many games that depend on it, Steam is merely a means of enforcing entirely artificial limitations on what the user can do while providing no benefit whatsoever to the user, AKA DRM, digital ‘rights’ (restrictions) management. Steam is a particularly obnoxious form of DRM because at its core, what’s going on is: you buy a game from a shop, you take it home, install it, and then you have to install and open Steam which asks a server in America whether you are allowed to play the game you bought. Imagine if you bought a car then had to phone up the showroom every time you wanted to drive it. It’s a wholly unacceptable way to do things.
The developers will happily offend their customers because they think it will reduce piracy. So the pivotal question is: does it work? Is it effective enough to make it worth reducing the value of your product? Does it turn more pirates into customers than it does customers into non-customers? Well let’s see, New Vegas was released in the US on the 19th and Europe on the 22nd, and, a torrent to the cracked version was uploaded to The Pirate Bay on the 19th at 19:25GMT, or about 14:25EST. So there you have it, it was cracked 14 hours after its release date in the US and 2 days before its release date in Europe. Currently there are about 18,000 people downloading it. Even better, the cracked version doesn’t require Steam at all, so the pirates offer a better product!
I bought the collectors’ edition of Fallout 3. I paid full price for the game on release and then I paid a bit more for the bonus DVD, the lunch-box, the vault boy bobble-head, and the art book. I love Fallout. It turned out F3 wasn’t exactly the second coming of Christ, but it was entertaining. I would love to buy New Vegas, but any game that depends on Steam or in any way implements artificial constraints and controls over how the user is allowed to use the software has a value to me of precisely £0.00. Unfortunately my connection is too slow for me to be bothered with downloading it, so I won’t be playing it until either they release an official non-Steam version or I get a faster connection.
Similar story for Civ V.
Fallout!
Bethesda announce new Fallout game for 2010! I read it on Slashdot.
Maybe i am just too old for computer games (I am almost 22, when I see fresh faced 18 year old first years who barely look 16 wandering around uni it makes me think JEEEEBUS, I was a first year once… how did this happen?)…
…but, here is my reaction: “…”. I am sorry Bethesda, it was fun while it lasted but Fallout 3 was hardly brilliant. The combat system was… there is only one word for this, and that word is “shit”. It would have been better scrapping the FPS element and making it third person and having a proper turn based combat system with proper action points instead of your pointless Max Payne VATS system instead. Because aiming perfectly at someone’s chest with a big hunting rifle only to see the wall flash 2 feet away from them because your small arms skill is only at 62% gets old REALLY fast.
In fact you know what, just make it 2d. I am not being facetious. It’s completely unnecessary for it to be 3d, or pretty. And by making it 3d they need a lot more time to create locations and people and content in general. And this showed in F3 where supposedly you could walk across the entire ‘wasteland’ in about 20 minutes, whereas in F1/2 it’d switch to a map view and plot your progress while the ingame clock progressed rapidly.
ALSO it was not very Falloutish. I mean, the Fallout universe has spelling mistakes, dark/obscure humour and MASSIVE power armour. F3 had few if any spelling mistakes, was pretty devoid of humour and power armour made you look about 5’6. For example in F3 you’d never come across a man in the middle of the wasteland infront of a long rickety rope bridge over a canyon wearing a wizard’s robe, and see your character announce to the world in general “I think I should save in a different slot right now”, then proceed to be quizzed on the intricacies of the Fallout 1 engine rules. Things like that make the difference between memorable and brilliant, but unfortunately F3 is more just bland.
The enemies were crap too. You have encountered a giant radscorpion! Which is near impossible to kill! That sucks. In F2 I’d regularly encounter packs of 8 or 9 radscorpions and I’d think “woot XP” and get out my sledgehammer. In F3 I’d think “oh shit” and run backwards shooting it in the face with the biggest gun I have any ammo for and then I probably walk right into another one. That was crap.
And the locations were pretty lazy. F2 had great places like Vault City and New Reno which were very memorable. So was the one with all the scientologists (was it San Diego? *looks at map* no it was San Francisco) and the New California Republic. Broken Hills, the mining town with Marcus the Sheriff, everyone remembers him… especially when he joined your party, and you’re on a cattle drive, and he opens up with his minigun and in one burst not only does he decapitate all your attackers, but he also slaughters all the cattle you’re supposed to be protecting. It’s all memorable.
OTOH F3′s only interesting city was, er, what was it called, the one with the bomb? Barter Town? no that was Mad Max? I don’t fucking know. That’s how memorable it is. Anyway, that’s the first city you see and you think “great!” but then after it turns out it’s the most complicated ecosystem in the whole game you feel a bit cheated. Rivet City was big and boring. The Republic of Dave was pointless. Umm. Paradise Falls was empty. And so on.
Bethesda have also trademarked the name Fallout for TV and Film. Oh no. Please don’t. There are already three Fallout films, they’re called Mad Max 1-3. Unless the third one really was as bad as I remember it in which case we’ll cut it to the first two.
please note it was actually a fairly good game it’s just that since it was a Fallout sequel it should have been no less than perfect.
I liked the Dogmeat and Harold reference, and the Mr Handys’ transition to voiced 3d were superb.
I wrote more about that than I intended to.
