The game opens with your character tied up, awaiting execution by a gang that are digging your grave. Their leader has stolen your delivery, which seems to be a poker chip. After you are shot and buried, you are dug up by a passing robot and are healed by a doctor. He quizzes you on your personality, which acts as the character creation screen where you define your abilities. You get to pick upto 2 optional traits that have positive and negatives to further define your character. You get some basic equipment, along with a Pip-Boy and you venture out to track down your “killer”.
New Vegas is published by Fallout 3 developer Bethesda, but this is developed by Obsidian. The game is very much like Fallout 3, so is still based on the Elder Scrolls Oblivion’s game engine. Obviously the theme is radically different to Elder Scrolls, so replace fantasy with post-apocalyptic wasteland. The combat is mainly FPS rather than swords, shields or magic, although there are plenty of melée weapons, plus the option of fists. Some mechanics like stealth, pickpocketing, lock-picking are exactly the same as Oblivion.
The environments of "New Vegas" often feel different to those seen in Fallout 3. This seems more “wild west”, or at least in the initial area. The city of New Vegas is a run down city with a thriving casino area for the elite citizens.
This is an RPG, so when you level up by completing quests and defeating enemies, you'll gain skill points to customise your character. These skills include: Small Guns/Energy/Explosives, Speech, Barter, Repair, Medicine, Science, Stealth, Lock-picking. Every two levels, you also choose a perk which can enhance these skills further, or tweak other mechanics like bonuses for using certain guns.
Your base attributes are known as SPECIAL: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. These attributes are mainly fixed, but there is a perk that allows you to add 1 more point, and expensive enhancements to purchase when you find a certain doctor. These attributes influence at least a couple of mechanics each; a brief overview is as follows: Strength determines melee strength and how much you can carry; Perception affects if enemies appear on your radar; Endurance gives you health, and radiation resistance; Charisma affects your influence in dialogue; Agility improves your reload speed and success in the VATS combat mechanic; and Luck improves critical chance.
The Pip-Boy is basically a menu system where you can view your attributes, skills, your quest log, view maps, and change equipment. Activation stops the game, allowing you to change weapons without danger. You can assign weapons to the 8 directions on the D-Pad. Outside of battle, it provides a basic light that you can turn on and off at any time. Navigating menus remains cumbersome and I found it hard to compare equipment. I was incredibly surprised they hadn’t bothered changing this when it was obviously a problem in Fallout 3.
Dialogue is handled similar to Oblivion with a number of dialog options to select. Your character is a silent protagonist, but other characters are voiced. Instead of just relying on the charisma attribute, there can also be options that rely on other SPECIAL attributes such as Perception and Intelligence, but many more are available for the Barter skill and sometimes Stealth.
When you have choices to make, these can affect your karma or your relationship with the many factions that make their home in the region. Doing side-quests for one faction apparently hurts your reputation with others. I seemed to be liked with most factions until the final moments of the game. Also it is worth noting that as part of the story, you are “pardoned” by a couple of the factions, so it doesn’t make as big a difference as the game makes out.
The world seems larger than Fallout 3, but it often felt much duller. There were plenty of times I was walking across large flat areas, or even some hilly areas, but there were no monsters in sight, and no buildings to explore.
I really miss the fights that often break out with bandits and mutants that roam the environment. Surprisingly, there aren’t any traditional mutants that I saw, which is weird because they seemed quite an important part of Fallout 3. Instead the main non-human enemy seemed to be Fire Geckos.
The placement and frequency of bandits was also great in Fallout 3. You’d walk under a bridge and bandits would snipe you from the top. Often they would also have laid bear-traps, trip-wires or mines; so it felt like a realistic world where they are killing passers-by to loot them. You always felt in danger. “New Vegas” has next to none of this.
Outside of this main city, you can quick-travel to previously visited places using the map - be it a village, cave or petrol station.
I thought the design of the city New Vegas was very frustrating. You can quick-travel to certain sections, but it was often a few minutes walk to get to the buildings that the sidequests told you to return to over and over again. One of the gang leaders alternates from being on the ground floor, or being on the 2nd floor, but navigating the building feels like a maze, and you have to navigate both directions (get in, then get out). There’s times where he will send you to talk to someone, then you have to go straight back. It ain’t fun, it is pure tedium. Going to Lucky 38 casino requires the following steps: Quick travel to gate, loading screen, open gate, loading screen, walk 20 seconds to casino and open door, loading screen, walk to lift, loading screen. Who thought that was good design? At least put a quick travel point at the casino. Additionally, it would be nice to let you quick-travel out of these buildings.
You will need to keep picking up weapons and ammo and switching between them. Weapons and armour degrade when used, but if you find a duplicate item, you can then use it to repair your current item. I found that weapons didn’t seem to degrade as quickly as Fallout 3. Although I did run out of ammo early on, I felt ammo was more plentiful in this game, so the more I played, the less I switched. There are several weapon categories, and the same category uses the same ammunition. So it is somewhat beneficial just to carry one weapon from each category.
The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS) lets you freeze the action to target an enemy’s limb. You are shown percentage indicators to show you the chance of hitting, and you spend your “Action” points which regenerate . Depleting the health bar of a limb “cripples” it, which means the enemy struggles to move if you shoot their legs, they drop their weapon if you shoot their arms. I think head crippling lowers accuracy. Your limbs can be crippled too, and you can use a Stimpack to heal a particular limb. The combat can end up with slow-motion decapitations, or “gibbed” enemies.
You also have to manage your radiation level which increases when near a radiation source.
This can be 1 or 2 points per second. Every type of health-recoverable food found is toxic as well. I never got the meter up more than around 30% so I don’t know what the repercussions of this feature was. There are more than enough Rad-X curing items to keep the value low. In “New Vegas”, food seems to heal you way more than it did in Fallout 3. The fact that food is plentiful meant I didn’t use many stimpaks. I rarely even used the beds to fully heal, so this game is way easier than Fallout 3.
In Fallout 3, I found a “companion” right near the end of the game. In “New Vegas” I found one half way through the game, and she has such an overpowered punch; enemies had no chance. Also, you could get her to carry loads of equipment. This further decreases the difficulty.
The choice of colours aren’t as dull as Fallout 3, and the change of main UI colour from Green to Amber makes it less dull too. Despite that, I preferred the aesthetic of Fallout 3. The graphics hold-up well enough today although the game has some inconsistent textures. The retro theme (it is set in the future, but it definitely feels retro) reminded me of Bioshock in places. The radios play old music or radio broadcasts which is a similar sound-design to Bioshock.
The game crashed several times in my playthrough, and I saw plenty of glitched characters. Sometimes it was path-finding where enemies would just run into walls/rocks. Certain creatures like the scorpions would rotate and point vertically whilst sliding along the ground, and sometimes they just fell through the ground. The dogs often ran a few feet above the ground.
If you like the game mechanics of Elder Scrolls, then I think you should enjoy this game. Obviously, the theme is different, and there’s some new mechanics like the VATS system that offers a slight tactical element to the battles. Since I played Fallout 3 recently, I think that meant this game felt “been there done that”. Even though there’s some new ideas here, I don’t think it has actually changed things for the better - it seems to have made the game easier. However, the final boss has an insane spike in difficulty - it’s absurd. Then there’s the bugs which I didn’t encounter in Fallout 3.