Rant 651 / FNV

Just completed Fallout: New Vegas (FNV). And before I forget, SPOILER ALERT!!

Was not exactly what I expected, but the differences made sense.

Fallout: New Vegas is a darker game. Fallout 3 was about a boy who became a man. Fallout: New Vegas, like Fallout 1 and 2, is about...

War. War never changes.

If my guess is correct, no matter what the player does there will always be casualties among the innocents.

I, too, unintentionally caused harm to people who shouldn't have been harmed. The first mistake I made was in getting the NCR to protect the town Primm.

Initially I thought since the NCR was the "good" faction, I should help them expand. Later when I learnt about Mr House, I realized I wanted this guy to be in charge.

It's true that the NCR is good in that it tries to provide for its people and protect them, but the Republic behaves like a bully towards anyone who isn't a citizen.

On the other hand, Mr House is the CEO of RobCo since before the Great War, the corporation that made just about every single robot in the Fallout series. That makes him the best businessman and leader alive in the Fallout universe at that point of time as far as I know. Who better to rule than him?

There was also the option of myself, but being king wasn't my goal in the game. I did consider this for some time but wanted to see Mr House win in this run. Not to mention on this path I get the House advantage.

I'll kill Mr House in the next run just for the different ending. The House can't always win, right? :P

Anyway, back to Primm. Since I let the NCR protect Primm, apparently Mr House decided to punish the town for supporting them. It was not even their fault since I was the one whom they requested to pick a sheriff for them :(

Another unintentional victim was the Kings, a gang that had monopoly over the personal bodyguard service in Vegas. They weren't bad guys. In fact they maintained order over Freeside, a town just next to the Las Vegas Strip, while impersonating Elvis Presley without knowing who he was. I had helped the NCR to take control over the faction so, in the end, Mr House annihilated them all for supporting the wrong side.

The Brotherhood's case was slightly different. They had to die. The faction isn't evil but it exists only to acquire pre-War technologies. If I were to take over Mr House's network of (seriously overpowered) robots, they would pose a significant threat to me. That wouldn't do.

Even if I had sided with the NCR and forego the benefits of having an army of Securitrons, they would still be bullied around since they had been fighting each other since before the game began.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure how they could have had a happy ending in FNV. Everyone wanted them dead or gone and I couldn't find a way to make them leave the region.

Too bad.

Maybe the only way would be to make myself king without using House's Securitrons. That would probably be pretty hard.

As for the bad guys, Caesar's Legion was an interesting faction. The Legion, led by a man named Caesar, wasn't evil in the sense that the members wanted to destroy everything. That role was for the raiders. The Legion was really trying to save the world by radically changing society into a very extreme version of Singapore.

The area controlled by them was said to be very safe, with all criminals either dead or chased off (imprisonment was not mentioned). Drugs and alcohol were outlawed, and anyone caught possessing them would be crucified literally (as shown during one quest) on a cross, except they were tied with ropes instead of getting nailed like Jesus.

But like Mr House said, the entire faction was not following Caesar's ideals, but Caesar himself. Such an organization would fall when the leader is gone. Also, they owned slaves and burnt entire towns as punishment for being not being virtuous. That's not very nice.

Now that I've completed the game, I can confidently say that the plot doesn't exactly suck you in until the end when you finally see the real big picture. It got boring in the middle because I wasn't sure where I was going. The large number of quests overwhelmed me and got me a little frustrated. However, the game got a whole lot more interesting when I learnt about the master plan that the House had in mind.



Now I come to the gameplay. Not too different from Fallout 3. Sniping is very fun in this game because of one of the companions who can increase your detection range by 50%. I thought it was great in the early game when I was sniping with a 9mm pistol, but it just blew my mind when I bought a Sniper Rifle in late game. With this epic gun, I was seeing heads explode everywhere I go. It was so interesting, I went out of my way to snipe any hostile creatures I detected along the way to completing quests.

The hardest to snipe was probably the Deathclaws west of the Quarry, which were blocking my way to some Khans there. Due to their location, they kept being erased from the screen when I went to the other mountain (sniping from a high ground = tactical advantage) because that's how the game works.

When something reaches a certain distance from you, they get erased to lower memory usage. But to cut a long story short, I managed to find out by trial and error that if I kept looking down while climbing the mountain till I reach my perfect sniping spot, they wouldn't be erased when I looked up. The reason why is the long story, and it's cut.

I had designed my character to specialise in Melee in the beginning but because of this I eventually placed many more points on Guns instead. My melee attack was still powerful but it was not as easy as it used to be in Fallout 3.

Since I also played in Hardcore mode, all the ammo had weight. It was slightly annoying but challenging too. I was almost always carrying my maximum weight and in several cases, I had to make multiple trips to sell my loot. I just couldn't resist selling most of the guns I find later in the game that I couldn't use.

Despite this, I was still running out of ammo from my 10mm and 9mm guns in mid-game when I obtained the submachine guns (SMGs) for these calibres.

Hardcore mode also made healing gradual instead of instant, such that no healing items gave an immediate boost of HP. Instead, they regenerate HP over a small period of time. For example, Stimpaks gave me 6 HP per second for 6 seconds even at the end of the game due to my average Med skill. This is a major reason why I found melee attacks to be less useful than guns in FNV compared to FO3.

Teleporting has also been made easier. It used to be that even hostile creatures far from you would stop you from teleporting. Now you're only prevented from it when they're close enough to be visible (ie in direct line of sight), I believe.

The Speech skill has also been given a huge priority, which reminds me of older RPGs. By maintaining a high Speech level, I was able to save lots of lives and skip some very difficult battles.

The missions in this game were better IMO compared to those in FO3. For example, when I was supposed to protect the President of the NCR, I really had no idea who or what was going to happen other than a few clues. For example, the quest merely told me to watch the snipers because the secrecy of their positions may have been compromised.

I did comb the entire place but found nothing, so I gave up the pre-emptive security sweep without much result (expected to find and arrest/kill enemy infiltrators). In the end, I managed to snipe the guy who killed one of the snipers to impersonate him and then found the bomb in the Presidential chopper just before the President returned to it to fly home. Close. I was actually expecting a suicide bomber though, and half-expected to fail the quest.




Now for music. I didn't turn on the radio during the game this time because I found that it kept covering up the NPCs' voices. The ambient music, this time, wasn't so good. One of the new pieces was similar to Arcanum's music, too somber.

Voice-acting was not as good as it used to be in Fallout 3. Somehow I just noticed that the voices were kind of dead. In some cases, they were droning on without pausing over the punctuation marks. Pauses give impact, and without them the sentences had little force.

This absence was especially striking in the final conversation I had with NCR's General Oliver when I convinced him that it was to his and his Republic's best interest to agree to the terms of surrender in my hand. I think he was supposed to sound breathless and excited but he sounded too monotonous to give his speech any sort of emotion. The result was that he basically droned through his script without any pauses.

In FO3 you could hear the warmth from the father's voice and the crazy enthusiasm in the voice of Moira Brown, but in FNV there was no such NPC. Lily (the Nightkin companion) had a voice that was both funny and creepy at the same time though. She spoke just like a stereotypical senile granny, except in a Super Mutant's voice.

The DJ on the only radio frequency I tried to listen to was also horribly boring. Three Dogs in FO3 was interesting because of his antics, but this DJ sounded bored and like he was mumbling.



Bugs! I encountered some bugs, had some crashes. Fortunately I saved like mad, accumulating over 230 saves during this run. Thanks to this obsession to saving, I managed to solve all bug problems I found.

The biggest was with the chef Phillipe being absent from the game. I kept reloading from several previous points to no avail. In the end, I managed to find out that it was caused by taking multiple quests at once. On one hand I was about to expose Mortimer for being a cannibal but simultaneously I had agreed to help Mortimer cover up the murder.

The former was to be completed during a speech he was going to made. The latter was to be completed before he even makes the speech. I think the contradiction made the game go crazy. Took me a day to figure that out because the game is so new that nobody seemed to have encountered this problem.


Replay value of this game is much better than that of FO3 due to the different endings. I don't believe it's possible to see everything in even two runs, so it takes quite a bit of replaying. This is because when you complete a certain number of quests from one faction, you'll inevitably ruin your standing in another faction, making them stop wanting your help. There are 3 major factions plus myself in this game as I see it: the NCR (good guys I guess), the House (neutral), myself (Wild card, not a faction) and the Legion (evil), so it will take at least 4 runs to see everything.



One major improvement over FO3 was probably the humour. Some of the jokes were actually funny.

Overall, it's a very good game but also a much darker one than FO3. Can't say if it's actually better or worse because it felt like a different game using the same engine.

Still, it probably won't be as good a game for the younger players. Even without the deeper philosophical questions some Japanese games use (in the past), this is still pretty much an adult game (and not because of sex).












Lindt Extra Dark with soft filling is epic.













If cloud computing does succeed, computers will be revolutionized yet again. In Singapore, that would still require a big improvement in coverage and mobile modem bandwidth though.