Musings

In the previous post, I said I’d write about my experience with Bethesda and Obsidian’s newest entry to the series. Now, that I’ve sunk ca. 70 hours into it, is the time.

The tl;dr version: yes, it’s buggy as hell, and yes, it’s much of the same thing we saw in Fallout 3. It’s also a much better Fallout game. One could say that it’s the Fallout 2 to the previous game’s Fallout 1.

I’ve had the greatest of times playing for all but one of the game’s factions (the last one is still waiting), meeting old Fallout characters and their legacies.

And sure, there are bugs. The game crashed on me several times in a row while leaving Mojave Outpost, happily hopping down the hill. The game crashed on me repeatedly during the end sequence after completing the Wild Card storyline. Sometimes, vital quest NPCs disappear from their intended locations, apparently spawning inside mountains and the like, requiring me to use console commands to move them back to their proper places (thank god I’m playing on a PC for that).

And yet, despite all the bugs, the game is simply great. It drew me in right from the start, and made deathclaws so powerful that I couldn’t just stroll straight on to New Vegas on my fresh level 1 character. Some may say it railroads the player somewhat, and those that do aren’t entirely wrong. It does introduce some forced linearity into the storyline, so that you have to experience certain things before heading for the high roller lifestyle on the strip. That can’t be an entirely bad thing. After you reach a certain point though, the Mojave desert is your playground. There are several factions to work for, story-altering choices to be made all around, and Peggy Lee singing about a guitar player on the radio.

Which brings me to my only real disappointment with the game content: the radio and the music selections therein. The soundtrack does not, for me, quite live up to Fallout 3’s offerings. There are excellent songs there, certainly, but it’s a little bit less swing and a little bit too much country all together. At least there’s an Ink Spots song. Where Fallout 3 had happy songs about Easy Living, being in love, Mighty Men and jungle people, New Vegas has songs about cowboys, spurs, and the midnight range. It just doesn’t compare for me as a whole.

Inon Zur’s ambient soundtrack, the one that you hear when you turn off your radio, works very well, and I spent a greater amount of my playing time with it than with Mr. New Vegas. Despite all its bugs and crashes and some questionable game design choices, I enjoyed New Vegas immensely. It is a Good Game. Play it.