Knights of the Cardboard Castle

It took 156 hours, according to Steam anyway, but I’m finally done with Fallout: New Vegas. Again, this is a playthrough of the whole game including all DLC on hardcore mode with the J.E. Sawyer mod enabled. I’ll focus my comments on the mod itself and overall comparisons between New Vegas and Bethesda’s Fallout 3.

• Despite using the same engine and being based in the same setting, the two games end up feeling very different. One poster on Broken Forum summarized it best. Fallout 3 was a Bethesda-style sprawling, open-world game focused on exploration and little chunks of quests and story scattered around everywhere. The main quest is optional and there’s no central theme tying it all together. But in New Vegas everything pretty much revolves around the conflict between the NCR and Caesar’s Legion. As such, although you have much more choice about how you want to complete quests, it’s still a more linear game, directed by quest objectives.

• It’s no surprise, given how much I like exploring, but I liked the worldbuilding in the earlier a lot more. It thrust you immediately into an interesting town to start with, Megaton, and the list of memorable locations just goes on from there: Rivet City, Tenpenny Towers, Tranquility Lane etc. I was actually bored at the beginning of the newer game and felt that the game didn’t really kick into gear until you reached the city of New Vegas itself. Even so, the locations in the newer game may be more realistic, but they’re less interesting to explore.

• On the other hand, the amount of quest scripting and dialogue writing present in Obsidian’s effort just staggers my mind. Quest lines entangle and twist so much it’s a wonder how the writers kept themselves from going crazy. No matter how crazy your solution to a quest is, the writers probably thought of it and incorporated it in their design. There are many, many different ways to complete quests, which affects the rewards you get, who lives and who dies, and which faction hates you and who likes you. It’s an ambitious design that doesn’t always hold up. You can kill Caesar for example and it turns out nothing much changes. But the courage to pull this off is still commendable.
• As a consequence, I found the first game to a much more combat-oriented and the second game to be much more talky. For this reason, I was more excited about new gear in the older game because the more frequent, and more difficult combat, made them more important. By constrast, I found that after a certain point, it barely mattered what gear I had and I favored esthetics over combat utility. In the newer game, skills are more important for solving quests in the best possible way.
• Most people make a big deal about how difficult the JE Sawyer mod makes the game, but I’m convinced that it’s the right way to play New Vegas. Without it, many items have no reason to exist and there’s almost no point in having such an extensive crafting system. I found the water requirement to be the most onerous but you can get the canteen from the Classic Pack easily enough and thirst is much easier to manage with it without being completely trivialized. Combat is already not that challenging. It would be pretty silly if you were allowed to bring infinite ammunition and stimpacks to every battle.

• I’m sorry to say that despite all the build up the Second Battle of Hoover Dam is less impressive than the final fight at the end of Fallout 3. You just can’t top Liberty Prime. On the whole, I thought that despite New Vegas being a newer game, Obsidian couldn’t push the engine as far as Bethesda could. It tries for an epic scale at times but never quite succeeds. I thought that Fallout 3 managed to fake a large battle much better. I’m disappointed that they reused so much of the earlier game’s art assets instead of creating new ones. Does every refrigerator and stove in the game need to look identical?
• Despite all the patches and DLCs released, I note that New Vegas still has its share of bugs. I was forced once to cheat using the console to complete a quest because an NPC’s dialogue had a bug. The game sometimes crashes when it loads a new area, and the crashes grew increasingly frequent the farther I progressed in the game. I’ve also seen quest-related NPCs stuck in a location and being unable to walk along their scripted paths.
• I also note that this engine is showing its age. Outdoor scenes still look acceptable and interior scenes look dated and flat, particularly when the room is just a box with no interesting geometrical features to enliven it.

Overall I have to say that while it’s great to have Obsidian get a crack at creating their vision of a Fallout sequel, I still like Bethesda’s version better. I prefer the exploratory aspect of having small bits of story scattered around the wasteland just waiting to be discovered to Obsidian’s attempt to weave together an epic tale. This is especially problematic when their scripted events can’t quite support the scale of the vision they evoke. But it does have hardcore mode, which is pretty cool. It’s a feature I’d love to see expanded upon in future RPGs.