Meanwhile my lonely ass been sitting over here absolutely loathing Fallout: New Vegas since its release. I did not like that game. I probably would today if I got over myself and tried playing it again.
Meanwhile my lonely ass been sitting over here absolutely loathing Fallout: New Vegas since its release. I did not like that game. I probably would today if I got over myself and tried playing it again.
This is kinda what I see from most people that dislike New Vegas. It’s definitely not a post apocalyptic game.
In fact, before Fallout 3, 1 was the only real post apocalyptic game in the series imo. Fallout 2 is a continuation of the world’s lore, so all the tribal villages have developed into societies. New Vegas expands upon this, with the societies becoming imperialist states.
So yeah, if you like exploring rubble then New Vegas is NOT the game for that, and Fallout 3 does that much better.
But, if you’re more interested in how society would develop after the apocalypse, New Vegas definitely tackles that question head-on.
Fallout 3 was my first, and I do love all the insane shit you can find in the wasteland. It will always have a special place in my heart. But to me, the NPCs are what really give RPGs life, and New Vegas has some of the most well-written, realistically motivated people I’ve ever seen in video game format. While the Battle of Hoover Dam may not be as grandiose (even though you can put in the legwork to make it fucking awesome) as the Liberty Prime antics in 3, it feels like the culmination of decades of real conflict. It’s not good guys vs bad guys, it’s 4 distinct groups that all believe they have the best plan to carry humanity to the point at which it existed before the war. I love it for that.
It really goes away with pretense of things being in eternal stasis of everything bad - which is great. Fallout games should have been set in 20-50 years after the end so it would not clash with visuals. But NV problem is it clashes horribly with aesthetics, soldiers a talking about mono-rail line from California while everyone lives in half burned (for no reason) wooden houses that are at least 200+ years old and in abandoned convenience store you can pick something like food or medicine cabinet with drugs in bathrooms, and so on. And the map is dense with events, it should be at least 2 times as big to not feel as gamey.
But New Vegas is the frontier, it’s still largely unsettled. Of course there’s still abandoned stuff, the only superpower in the area for a while only cared about the Vegas city limits. The “clashing of aesthetics” is deliberate here. People still live in somewhat disarray, and an advanced state with manufacturing abilities is moving in. Even in New Vegas, The Strip is in luxury and the rest is destroyed. It highlights part of the class struggle present in the game’s world.
New Vegas’s (and classic Fallout’s) thesis about the apocalypse is “Yes, there was an apocalypse. Nuclear bombs were how the world ended, but it wasn’t because of nuclear bombs, it was because of the behavior of humanity.” And then you get to see those same behaviors play out again and again, even after the apocalypse. Constant resource struggle, faction alignment, pushing ideologies. “War never changes,” etc. There is no shame in preferring a cool wasteland that you get to explore, like in Fallout 3 and 4, but I think it’s a tad unfair to point to the clashing of aesthetics like it’s a flaw when the main factions of the game are Romans vs WWII America. It’s pretty intentional for the story.
And I’m sorry but it is a video game at the end of the day. I’m not fond of wandering for hours with nothing to do or see in my free time. New Vegas has plenty of empty space as it is, in my opinion. It’s actually a downgrade (exploration-wise) imo from the awesome worldspace of Fallout 3. Whatever you like is whatever you like, but this has got to be the first time I’ve ever heard someone say game worlds are better when they’re less dense.