Fallout: New Vegas Review
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Then there's the new "hardcore" gameplay mode, which I found fairly underwhelming. Despite its name, most of the changes it offers do not actually change gameplay by making it more "hardcore", they simply add an element of tedium by making you drink some water or eat some food at regular intervals. The reason this doesn't add a feel of classic RPG mini-management is that food and water are very plentiful in the wasteland, and even a person not focused on scrounging should have no problem fulfilling his or her needs (and if you have the Vault 13 Canteen, well, it's pretty much a non-issue). The only way I can imagine this becoming a problem is if you spend too much time very early in the game exploring as much of the Mojave wasteland that's immediately within your reach. It does offer some meaningful changes, namely the change of Stimpaks from instant healing to gradual healing, which means you have to be more cautious about running into combat. On top of that, followers become mortal and can permanently die, but this change primarily just makes them a pain the ass as their inferior AI makes them run off and die despite the combat orders you give them. Hardcore mode would have been much better if it was not just an on/off switch, but rather consisted of a number of menu options, so players could opt to turn on those elements they feel add to their experience, and turn off the tedious ones.The casinos are an easy source of caps if you do find yourself short of supplies, and supplies are very cheap and plentiful, which contributes to an overall lack of difficulty. Even with the anti-cheating measure, which just adds tedium, breaking the bank on casinos is fairly easy. The game's overly complex mini-game, Caravan, is similarly broken due to limits to enemy AI, and easy enough to exploit to win every time.
And, finally, the bugs. I don't feel it's worth as much attention as it has been getting, but as this is an Obsidian title a buggy experience was expected and is being highlighted all over the place. And I did run into some painful ones, from semi-frequent CTDs to the dreaded savegame-destroying bugs which has since been fixed. It is certainly rife with minor glitches, from collision detection flaws to NPCs switching voice actors mid-conversation. There are also a number of quest-breaking bugs, but while I had bad luck running into a few, they don't seem frequent enough to be much of a problem. In general, New Vegas reminds me of Fallout 3 in its general lack of technical polish, as both games were rich in glitches and crashes on release.
Quest & World Design
The game puts more emphasis on resolving quests to improve your character than on grinding in combat. You'll have a large variety of quests logged in your PipBoy fairly early in the game, with additional minor quests being logged as notes. Most quests have multiple ways of resolving them, and while combat remains an important part of the game, Obsidian does a great job in opening up the game to different builds, as a variety of stat and skill values open up specific dialogue options or quest paths. Speech is the most important skill here, but you'll bump into options to resolve quests or improve your chances tied to pretty much every skill. Furthermore, quests are filled with different choices depending on if you care more about caps than doing good, or who you wish to side with.
The usage of skills for multiple solutions are well done throughout the game, but do come with two drawbacks. The biggest one is that the options marked by skills like [speech] or [science] are always positive options, if not auto-win options, where by one speech check you "win" the conversation and convince someone. The writing doesn't always support that well enough as it is closely packed together, and it takes out a big part of my role as a player in convincing NPCs. The other drawback is that the game gives you full information on how many skill points you need to pass a test, making it easy to go back, use a skill-book and try again.
We'll discuss the factions in detail later, but it's worth noting here that Obsidian did an excellent job in offering many opportunities to choose to support or harm factions, while also allowing you to work for multiple factions for quite a long time. Faction reputation is much more important than the ill-used karma, which is sadly still present. Karma is as nonsensical as it was in Fallout 3, and still takes hits at completely illogical moments (killing gangers means a boost to karma, but then taking their stuff means you take a hit in karma). The game also tends to provide way too much information on when you take reputation and karma hits, or when actions close off certain quests. This means you can find out who a mysterious man is working for by killing him and then reloading, and it also means if you kill a certain NPC the game actually tells you what quests you just closed off, an overload of information that detracts from the significance of choice and consequence.
The game suffers from having an overly large amount of really tedious (courier) quests. Fetch, deliver, scout, whichever, all it generally consists of is going somewhere else on the world map, talking to an NPC or if you're lucky fighting some enemies. Every RPG has a few of these typical fetch-model quests, but I don't think I've ever seen a game that has quite as many extensive and tedious quests as Fallout: New Vegas, from Still in the Dark to Ada Daba Honeymoon. They're generally peripheral to the main quests, but even in the main quest you're likely to run into one where you're sent scurrying across the map carrying love notes.
On top of problems with fetch quests, this game has very poor world map design. The Gamebryo-Oblivion engine that this game is based on has always been more adept at creating large pieces of static scenery than at maintaining a high density of NPCs in that area. One method Obsidian uses to work around this is to split large locations into segments, which works against the feel of impressiveness of a spot like The Strip, but is as effective a quick fix as is available. Less practical is when they keep sprawling areas, but sparsely populate them, such as Freeside or Nellis Air Force. This gives the locations an empty feel that doesn't fit well in the post-post-apocalypse setting as presented throughout most of the game, and what's more, it adds to the tedium of having to walk through these empty, uninteresting areas over and over.
Puzzling map design is a problem throughout the game. The world map is rich in mountainous barriers, being set in the cliff-filled Mojave desert. That makes sense, but this game does not offer clear hints on where mountains are passable something the Gothic games excelled at, for example other than the main roads indicated on your PipBoy map. This means you can spend a lot of time jumping against mountainsides and hitting invisible walls on terrain that to the naked eye certainly look passable, which ultimately ends up being an exercise in frustration. Similarly poorly designed are the vaults and similar large underground mazes. I rarely enjoy underground mazes in first person games, but the usage of multiple levels by Obsidian and the similarity of different spots within the maps make the vaults exceedingly frustrating, the PipBoy map and quest pointer being absolutely no help in these areas. It's a shame because New Vegas features some of the more better-written vaults in the franchise, particularly Vault 11, which in idea and writing stands as one of the better gaming experiences I've had in the past decade.
On top of its bugs, this game feels rushed at points in design as well. This significantly decreases the interest in specific locations that feel rather unfinished, such as the Brotherhood of Steel's Mojave chapter or Primm, to name some examples. Furthermore, a lot of locations are really uninteresting unless you have a specific quest tied to it, which counter-intuitively makes this a quest-driven game on an exploration-driven engine.
In fact, the quest and world design overall seem ill adapted to the engine Obsidian was working with. I don't really need fetch quests to get me to explore in an engine that tempts you with far-off vistas and map markers, thought it does help direct me past the invisible mountain walls. Nor does having a map compartmentalized by mountains and Vaults designed like mazes work well. Meanwhile, any sense of scale in the larger locations is either marred by being compartmentalized (such as The Strip) or made tedious and weird by being empty (Camp McCarren, Nellis, etc.). Even without any preference as a Fallout fan, I can't help but feel this game's design would have fit better in BIS' Jefferson engine or anything with a similar top-down viewpoint and map-based world exploration.
