Fallout: New Vegas Review
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Main Story & Setting The Fallout franchise has never featured much in the way of story-driven titles, and New Vegas is no exception. There are some node points like finding the man that shot you and resolving the battle for Hoover Dam but otherwise the plot is threaded by means of whatever power you choose to support, as New Vegas is a heavily faction-driven game. There are four main paths to choose from (NCR, Legion, Mr. House, and independent), and minor locations and factions each offer additional choices to make. Much in contrast to Fallout 3's weak endings, the New Vegas endings accurately reflect the different choices you made, and show how minor factions are impacted by the decisions you made regarding larger factions.
The odd thing for such an open game is that it starts off as a fairly linear game. You can explore early on, but the game clearly discourages it, and if you wander off in the wrong direction you get ripped apart by deathclaws. That kind of challenge is great in open world games and deathclaws are fully back to being as scary as ever but the game lacks ways to avoid this death zone early on, basically forcing you to follow the path it wants you to, circling around to the south-east before heading north to Vegas. This method of opening the game is solid in that it allows the player to get to know the factions in the way the developer means to introduce them, and your character is fairly set before the world is opened up, but it is a discouraging introduction to open world gamers. But they have something to look forward to: reach New Vegas and the world is blown wide open.
The main faction choices available were presented in PR as existing on a scale of gray, with no right and wrong sides existing. On the "good" end of the spectrum this certainly holds up, the NCR having some flaws highlighted throughout the game, from being overstretched in military capacity to suffering from corruption. Meanwhile, Mr. House and his independent Vegas will appeal more to libertarian-minded individuals, offering a future with wider freedom while leadership will carve a clearer path to the future under certified genius Mr. House. Of course, this option too suffers its drawbacks, from the lack of economic validity of Vegas being a "powerhouse" when it clearly is just a leech on NCR's growing economy to the apparent megalomania behind House's plans of a space program. There's no easy "this is the good guys" option, and that is great.
Where it all falls apart is in the "evil" option, Caesar's Legion. A sensible evil option should be based on a kind of inevitable bad for the greater good, which to some extent Mr. House provides in this game. Compare it the Master's plan in Fallout 1, which is based on the best intention and considering the state of the wasteland even seems like a good option until you discover why it can't work. Or Colonel Autumn's plan in Fallout 3 though in typical Bethesda logic you could not side with him using the water purifier as a power base so the Enclave could pacify a wasteland desperately in need of pacification.
Caesar's Legion, by contrast, is comprised of a bunch of psychopaths, a band of brutal slavers, butchering murderers and violent sexists, who aren't just evil by our current standards, they are clearly evil even by the relaxed standards of Fallout's world. If this group had been placed in the world in disarray of Fallout 1 or Fallout 3, you could at least argue they could be used to pacify the wasteland, but in this post-post-apocalyptic setting NCR has already proven to be a vastly superior option. It doesn't help when you finally meet Caesar, who is spoken of in tones of admiration and awe throughout the game, and he is simply a boorish old man with all the charisma of a plank, whose whole philosophy is based on a unconvincing and shallow expression of Hegelian dialectics. The overall effect is to introduce a faction to Fallout that has all the cartoonish villainy of Fallout 2's Enclave administration or Fallout 3's President Eden, which is a real shame in a game that otherwise does a good job of balancing on shades of gray.
As a final point of criticism in a relatively weak main plot, it should be noted that Obsidian uses some odd narrative tools at times. Even in a franchise with a rich tradition of badly explained McGuffins, the Platinum Chip is an all-time weak one, magically given new abilities whenever the plot calls for it. Locked door? Platinum Chip opens it. Upgrades needed? Platinum Chip has them. OS upgrade for the power net needed? Platinum Chip does it. I consider this bad writing, as it leads to the device and the Courier having a really odd role in the plot. At one point in the story, no matter what choices you make, Caesar has the Chip, and he knows where the bunker is that the Chip can open. He gives it to you, and then asks you to do a task for him, without sending in any of his men to help you or check up on whether or not you followed his orders. If the game added something as simple as a thumb print or DNA check, this would make sense, but it doesn't, and there is absolutely no reason for Caesar not to have his own men do the task rather than giving it to you. This shows exactly the problem with relying on a McGuffin as much as Obsidian did; it makes the plot extra sensitive to awkward plot holes.
Another odd but less painful tool Obsidian uses is the independent path. It's hard for the game to get a feel for the choices the player wishes to make without any feedback from the guy providing the missions, so if you circumvent the three main factions, the game provides you with Yes Man. Yes Man is a robot that essentially breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the player to get feedback on his choices and lead him to the endgame. A risky choice, but Obsidian pulls it off primarily because Yes Man is a delightfully amusing character, with some great voice acting and writing to help you ignore how it is just a tool for the plot.
Faction aside, New Vegas has some oddities in setting caused by the franchise's insistence on progressing chronologically. It makes sense for a sequel to be set at a later point than its predecessors, but the disadvantage of that for a post-nuclear series like Fallout is that you eventually run out of post-apocalypse, and New Vegas partially has, with The Strip and the NCR being an expression of post-post-apocalypse, while most of the surrounding wasteland feels more like a western-style game than a post-apocalyptic game. This is an issue the franchise will eventually have to find an answer for if they insist on moving forward chronologically, or it will move from post-apocalypse firmly into sci-fi territory.
The Strip is an odd spot setting-wise anyway, reminiscent of Fallout 2's New Reno in its shortcomings. We're supposed to believe that this area that produces absolutely nothing and does not function as a large-scale mercantile hub has economic validity in the wasteland. It offers pools and saunas while at the same time a community some miles to the south of it exists purely because it is near a water spring. There is a huge disjoint here, and the game never properly explains it. While gated communities are fine in the Fallout setting as Vault City amongst others proved New Vegas is never given a valid reason to exist, other than Mr. House protecting it with its robots, which is paper thin at best. New Vegas has issues with its gated communities in general. For instance, the Boomers are much too close to New Vegas for it to protect its independence, especially since its method of keeping outsiders away is shelling them with mortars and rockets, which doesn't make any sense at all where would they get such enormous stockpiles of ammo from so long after the war?
What's more, like Fallout 3 before it, New Vegas kind of mix and matches so that it can be hard to figure out when the game is supposed to be set. Fallout 3 was particularly egregious in this, asking us to believe that massive facilities were left unlooted 200 years after the war without any kind of protection. Obsidian does a better job explaining why specific spots have been left alone, and in general "makes more sense" as a setting than Fallout 3 did. But it still has problems. As Vegas wasn't hit by bombs, the entire area should have had a relatively dense population, but it is never explained what happened to all those people. Meanwhile, wooden pre-war houses are left standing as if they would not rot or long since be looted for materials and firewood. Similarly, the Vegas buildings particularly the Lucky 38 do not look like they should still be standing undamaged 200 years on. And, as mentioned, a slaver army like the Legion makes much more sense around the time of Fallout 1 than around the time of New Vegas. Overall, Obsidian is trying to sell us a setting that is both post-apocalyptic and post-post-apocalyptic at the same time, and, in my opinion, it doesn't really work.
