Fallout: New Vegas Previews

Yet another pair of E3-based Fallout: New Vegas previews have surfaced on the web, though you'd be hard-pressed to find any new information in either of them.

PALGN:
Companions were one of the more interesting aspects of Fallout 3, and they return in a big way in Fallout: New Vegas. There are several more companions you can recruit and who can help you out throughout the game, and now thanks to a new 'companion wheel' it's even easier to command them and get them to do what you want them to do. Simply walk up to a companion and activate the wheel to choose from several helpful options, such as using ranged or melee attacks. Another update to the original gameplay is the slow-motion 'kill cam'. Whereas originally it was a treat reserved for kills made using the VATS system, now it's seen after every kill. This may annoy some people, and it can be turned off, but for us it was extraordinarily fun for such a simple addition. It meant we could do things like shotgun someone in the face and watch the giblets fly without having to resort to VATS, or plant C4 all around an unsuspecting character, then detonate it and watch them fly over a nearby house in slow motion.

However, there are some bigger additions to the gameplay of Fallout 3 such as the new power struggle between three factions in the game. The New California Republic (NCR), New Vegas and Caeser's Legion are all factions who are at war with each other over control of the city, and your actions on missions will actively affect which sides trust you or dislike you. It basically boils down to completing tasks for one side will obviously endear you to them, while carrying out missions against other factions will make you an enemy and a target in their eyes. For fun, we tried shooting the faction soldiers who were helping complete one of our missions, and sure enough they instantly turned against us and the game informed us that we had lost status with that faction. How this will affect the overall story at this stage, we are not sure, but it seems to add a new layer of strategy to the proceedings, forcing you to pick your battles carefully.

And Gamepur:
New Vegas, which agrees well with its geographical location, gives the impression of a Wild West frontier town. Tornadoes dust cross your path, an old prospector named Pete Easy swinging in his rocking chair on a porch, and Trudy, the proprietor of the saloon downstairs from you, wants help against the bounty hunter Joe Cobb and his gang extorting the city. All this happens after you went hunting geckos (one of many references to Fallout 2 Obsidian has crept into the game) to learn, or relearn, how does the real-time combat and first person view with breaks offered by the tactical optional VATS.

In the prologue carefully prepared, it is in the zone a low level weapon skill for each weapon and call options for all possible powers of persuasion in the mission to defeat the gang Cobb. It introduces new special abilities unlocked with each close combat weapon - a 9-iron golf club makes a sudden destructive called "Warning!" - the new and most important, New Vegas, a reputation system.