Fallout: New Vegas is a Miracle

Fallout: New Vegas was technically the first game I finished this year. Last year, as a part of a New Year’s resolution (perhaps making me the only human on earth to have actually followed through with one), I logged every game I completed in the year. It was a good experience, and I decided to do it again this year. When I rounded out my list, I made a top 10 of all the games I played in 2020, and wrapped it up quite nicely. Then Hbomberguy’s video came out and I instantly got the urge to play it (though, this review is not an attempt at restating the points made in that video). Because I had already finalized my list, I decided it would be funny to finish the game just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, so I could log it as the first game I finished in 2021.

I had attempted to play FO:NV for quite some time now. It’s not that it’s a bad game (if the title didn’t give that bit away), just that I was playing it wrong. In my previous playthroughs I was attempting to speedrun it, which was a very, very bad idea. It led to me getting stonewalled at the ending of the game woefully underleveled and underskilled against the final boss. My gravest sin of all, though, was not playing the DLCs. For this playthrough, I decided to rectify my past mistakes. Then it ended up becoming one of my favorite games of all time.

For disclosure’s sake, I did not play FO:NV in it’s pure, unmodded form. For one, the game is buggy as all hell (for reasons which will come up later), and the combat is very stiff, even for the time. I remedied these problems by installing various bug fix patches, and Project Nevada, which enhances the game’s combat in some key ways. I added A World of Pain and Jsawyer as well but ended up interacting with almost none of the areas the former added and uninstalling the latter after realizing it made the game way too hard. I also finished the game before the disaster known as The Frontier officially released, so I never touched that particular can of worms. But this is enough preamble, it’s time to get into why this game is truly special.

FO:NV succeeds by giving the player choice. Some people say that games are series of choices, which I don’t disagree with, fundamentally. Where FO:NV succeeds is through choice in the plot. The most apparent version of this is the four major paths you can go on in the story. Fallout takes place in a world ruined by a nuclear apocalypse. You, as a courier, have survived being shot in the head, and now must make a choice that will change the fate of the wasteland. The four main paths all compete over one central idea: How should the Mojave (the setting of the game) be governed? All four factions fight over one key to this: Hoover Dam. Whoever controls Hoover Dam, controls the Mojave. The most apparent option seems to be the New California Republic, which is a democratic group attempting to return to pre-war ideals and rebuild society. Caesar’s Legion is a fascistic dictatorship attempting to rule the Mojave by force. Mr. House is the current owner of the Vegas Strip, a primary location in the Mojave, and wishes to make the Strip as good as it can be. The final faction is an interesting one: none at all. Yes, in FO:NV you can choose to side with none of the other three factions and make the Mojave independent. Overall, this conflict is incredibly compelling, but it does have some issues.

While Ceasar’s Legion is very clearly the evil option, they feel underdeveloped compared to the other factions, specifically the NCR. Many areas in the game are NCR territory, and most companions are at least sympathetic to them. The Legion, however, has one area, and zero companions to their name. The ideal of this Legion content would not be to make them sympathetic or agreeable, because they are not sympathetic or agreeable, but rather to make for a more interesting and developed faction. Their less fleshed out nature is an unfortunate side effect of the game’s development, which left them unfinished due to it’s nature (which I will go into later). The good thing about FO:NV, though, is that while the main conflict is prominent, there is still space given to other, smaller factions, such as the Brotherhood of Steel, a reclusive group of tech collectors who wish to protect it from those who may misuse it (whether this is a good thing to do or not is, obviously, up to the player), or The Kings, a group of Elvis impersonators who idolize him. Regardless of faction, though, all of them are well written and have engaging quests attached to them.

The quest design is FO:NV’s strongest point. Almost every quest has branching pathways that result in different outcomes, and some quests have no perfect solution. Even the first major quest, where you protect the town of Goodsprings against raiders, allows you to side with the people besieging the town instead. The very next major quest tasks you with picking out a sheriff for the next town over, and while the outcomes are similar, the player’s choice feels important. Another major choice in FO:NV is how you build your character’s stats and skills, and this ties into the quests too. Speech is a powerful skill, and it lets you reach peaceful resolutions to conflicts some of the time (you can even talk down the final boss this way in an incredibly satisfying moment). However, it is not the only skill you can use in dialogue. Almost every skill has at least a handful of checks where it’s relevant. This is practically unheard of in most RPGs (at least in the games I have played), and it makes FO:NV special for that reason. Some of the best of FO:NV’s quest design, however, is found in the DLCs.

I consider the DLCs to be an essential part of playing FO:NV. The first DLC, Dead Money, is the only one of the four I don’t like, and that’s only for the gameplay aspects. The story it tells is just as compelling as the other three, a story about a closed-down casino filled with untold riches, and the man who forces you and three (or four depending on how you count) others to help him open it, but it fumbles when you have to actually get from place to place, which is plagued by arbitrary death zones that will instantly kill you if you run the timer. There are also invincible guards who, when alerted, can very easily kill the player. Because of these, I don’t plan on revisiting this one on a replay like I do with the others. The rest of the DLCs, though, are all amazing.

The second DLC, Honest Hearts, tells the story of Joshua Graham, a former Legion commander who was left permanently disfigured by them and presumed dead after failing Caesar. The plot centers around the conflict his tribe faces. Another tribe, the White Legs, have been assaulting his tribe and others for a long time. The central choice of the arc is siding between Joshua, who wishes to violently fight back against them, and Daniel, who wishes to peacefully leave their homeland for greener pastures instead. Joshua is probably my favorite character in the game, and if not he’s a close second. It helps that the voice acting for him (and almost every other character in the game) is expertly done. The area you get to explore is interesting too, and there’s even a good number of sidequests you can do.

The third DLC, Old World Blues, is wildly different from the others. You find yourself having your brain, spine, and heart replaced by five super-intelligent scientists who have become brains in jars in an attempt to further their research. Your brain has been stolen, though, and you have to get it back from the nefarious Dr. Mobius. Along the way, you can meet several robots made by the scientists, who have their own particular quirks. The plot is almost like a B-movie, and it works very well at that. It’s by far and away the funniest of the DLCs, and is a wild shift in tone from the rest because of it. The robot helpers are all hilarious (especially Muggy, a robot cursed to love cleaning coffee mugs), and Dr. Mobius and the rest of the scientists are all very entertaining as well.

The final DLC, Lonesome Road, is my favorite of them. In it, you brave a dangerous area known only as The Divide, while an enigmatic man known as Ulysses talks to you, making it clear he has a grudge for something you never remember doing. Ulysses is an incredibly compelling character, and his writing and voice acting is top notch. It’s notable that he is the only character, besides your robot companion, in the DLC. That’s right, the last DLC has only one character in it. As you go further into The Divide, Ulysses talks to you more and more, and you learn more about him. It’s a character study, and a very good one at that. It’s also the hardest of the DLCs (besides Dead Money), and is very fair in it’s difficulty.

Speaking of difficulty, though, it’s time to talk about FO:NV’s development. The game was produced in 18 months, using Fallout 3 as a base. These time constraints really hurt the game in a lot of key areas, such as Caesar’s Legion, as I mentioned earlier. If FO:NV were properly finished, the game would be perhaps one of the greatest of all time. This doesn’t mean what we got is bad, though, far from it. But when you play the game with that context, a lot of things make sense. Many of the game’s flaws make sense when you realized there was almost zero time to address them. The bugs are one example of this. Obsidian didn’t get nearly as much time as they needed to iron them out, so you have to install fan patches to help finish the job. The bugs are also an example of Bethesda’s almost malicious management. Due to the bugs, the game received a lower Metacritic score than Bethesda was wishing for (by one point!), denying them a bonus. The spitefulness continued into the DLC, where Bethesda only gave them 10,000 voice lines to work with. This resulted in some clever workarounds where some characters would be mute or otherwise nonverbal in order to save space.

This is why I call FO:NV a miracle. It is genuinely amazing that a game that got treated so poorly by the higher-ups managed to push through and become a widely beloved classic. By all accounts, the game should have been a failure. But through the determination and talent of the team behind it, it’s a game so impactful to so many people that it still gets talked about even to this day, ten years after the fact. Very few games have that honor, and FO:NV is a miracle for being able to.