K-SCORE: 50
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher: Bethesda
Director: J.E. Sawyer
Writer: John Gonzalez
“It’s my story.”
Starring: Ron Perlman, Wayne Newton, Matthew Perry, Kris Kristofferson, Felicia Day, Dave Foley, Danny Trejo, Rob Corddry, Wil Wheaton
Spoiler Level: None
If what you’re looking for is an assessment of the quality of the narrative and gameplay of Fallout: New Vegas, look elsewhere - I suggest my review for Fallout 4. New Vegas, though created by a different development studio, plays very similarly to that game, which doesn’t speak highly of Fallout 4 at all since Bethesda made so little meaningful progress in the years between this game’s release and that one’s. If anything, the gameplay of New Vegas is better simply because it’s less bloated. Still bloated. The amount of entertainment one can extract from the gameplay is horrifically mismatched with the amount of story content contained within, but it’s less of a problem here than in the likes of Fallout 4, which is a genuinely terrifying reality. It means that the industry has pushed towards, not away, from the concept of quantity over quality. More locations, more quests, more guns, more garbage cluttering your inventory, more factions, more companions, more, more, more, more, more, and who cares whether any of it is well-written, well-conceived, challenging, or fun.
But that’s not what I’m writing here. This is more of what it’s like for me to try to play video games in general these days. It’s my story. Replaying Fallout: New Vegas, a game I didn’t actually beat when I first picked it up years ago, taught me valuable lessons.
Ever since I first took hippogriffs across Kalimdor in World of Warcraft, I’ve liked the concept of open world games. I was craving one, and decided to pick up New Vegas because I burnt out the first time I tried to play through it. First thing I did was research the trophies so I could tactfully avoid getting locked out of achieving any of them, and the second thing I did was research the character creation mechanics, the hidden math and strange development choices made by designers in seconds that greatly affect the experience of playing, so as to optimize my character. Then I loaded it up, set the difficulty to very hard, and embarked, doing whatever quests I came across almost at random so long as they didn’t make any factions of NPCs mad at me and thus prevent me from picking up other quests further down the line.
“just running between load zones and talking to NPCs, convincing them to abandon all their evil plans through the power of 100 points in the speech skill”
This process continued for a few days of playing. Rarely did I make any choices that made me nervous I’d screwed something up irreversibly, but I still cycled between four or five different save files just in case one became corrupted or something weird happened (Bethesda’s game engines are notoriously glitchy), I didn’t want to lose too much progress. About a third of the way through my time with Fallout: New Vegas, I was close to what was originally the game’s max level before the downloadable content that came pre-loaded with my version. Even on very hard, my loadout of armor and weapons was nigh unstoppable. I took down legendary deathclaws and super mutant masters with ease. Still, I looted every corpse and pillaged every location for unique items just to keep myself from getting bored even though my favorite thing to do was hide in the shadows and blow the heads or arms off my targets from a great distance, out of VATS, which makes the game even simpler. At this point the map was nearly entirely explored, but the number of quests I had left to complete was huge - so many that they didn’t all fit on the same screen on my pipboy. The main story, the main quest, I had hardly progressed at all. With the ability to fast travel pretty much anywhere, I started with the companion quests, knocking them off one at a time, so I could kick the companions out of my party and prevent their stupid AI from ruining my battle plans. Then I did all the faction side quests that wouldn’t enrage other factions. With regard to the city of New Vegas, this meant no combat whatsoever, but just running between load zones and talking to NPCs, convincing them to abandon all their evil plans through the power of 100 points in the speech skill.
Around this time, I started to notice that the game would lag or freeze up periodically and it would force me to restart my PS3. It wasn’t that bad at first - not enough to bother me, so I powered through without looking into the issue.
“I was... at first excited at the concept of micro-narratives set within the Fallout universe”
After my personality mirroring, megalomaniacal Courier protagonist had helped all the static characters in the Mojave desert with their petty problems, and after she’d stockpiled all the munitions and consumable goodies in a fifteen mile radius in her magic wardrobe of endless gear storage, it was time to move on. I started to knock off the DLCs one at a time. The first one, Dead Money, took me about ten hours of gameplay to complete. I found the story engaging, the characters much better designed than the boring attempts in the main game, and was at first excited at the concept of micro-narratives set within the Fallout universe. But even when they stripped me of all my possessions, my skills and stats trivialized difficulty and beating the DLC became more of a grind than a challenge. And Dead Money’s bleak tone was unrelenting, eroding my enjoyment slowly.
The second DLC, Honest Hearts, I recognized quickly as utterly half-assed. Next to no engaging story was put in place, and bland outdoor settings were recycled as were enemy assets. It was around this time that I started watching Californication while grinding through Fallout: New Vegas’s content.
The third DLC, Old World Blues, delighted me initially because it starts with an hour (admittedly too long) of hilarious dialogue from goofy robot mad scientists who have lobotomized your character and are perplexed that you’re continuing to live and communicate. The story is a quest to re-acquire your brain. It’s ridiculous, but funny and fresh, surely the best of the best of the whole game experience. However, the location, Big MT, seemed to be coded in a way that put a greater strain on the game’s system than other areas. Huge amounts of lag hampered my experience. Anytime I transitioned between indoors and outdoors, I met a long load time, and I started to have to restart my PS3 two or three times every hour I was playing. When I finished the story with the power of 100 points in the speech skill, I was only relieved, for I could move past the zone of technical problems and into other areas.
In the final DLC, I literally hit max level. Well before this point, I had 100 (the max) in every single one of the game’s skills. The game gives you five options to do anything, so being able to flawlessly do any of those five options is just five times redundant. Who cares if you can pick the very hard lock if you have the alternative of hacking the very hard terminal or repairing the very damaged door or smashing the very resilient generator with your very powerful fists. Better yet, tell the very dumb NPC with your very powerful speech patterns that there’s no reason to go to that very dangerous sub basement in the first place. To my disappointment, the last DLC gave me similar performance problems as Old World Blues, but they no longer seemed to be tied to a location. While I was staring at the spinning roulette wheel indicating the game was loading, I took to researching the issue.
It turns out, whoever coded the game’s save system failed to put in place an automatic system for defragmentation. For those who don’t know, file defragmentation is the process of removing redundant bytes of data from files. I don’t need to get too technical, but basically computers aren’t automatically smart enough to really efficiently use space on hard drives, writing and rewriting the same code over and over because it just looks for the closest (not really the right word) chunk of space it needs to store what you’re trying to store. Most PCs, phones, game systems, etc. defrag automatically. Something went very wrong with Fallout: New Vegas, and the game files, the more you play, get wildly too large for the system to actually handle. It wasn’t just certain areas like Big MT or Red Rock Canyon causing lag and crashes, though those were the worst, it was running slower because I’d played too much, overwritten too many saves, all in my quest to finish everything.
“I still hadn’t advanced the main quest, the main story”
By the time I reached the end of Lonesome Road, the last DLC, this problem had become debilitating. I was struggling mightily to get a game to run when the gameplay, which had never been too tough, had become meaninglessly easy. Yet, I still hadn’t advanced the main quest, the main story, because of that issue of not wanting to enrage conflicting factions. The final dozen or so trophies in the game that I looked up at the start required finishing the main quest line by devoting your character to one of four causes. To see all the ends, finish all the quests, I had to beat the main story not once, but four times, now in a game that ran as if both of its legs had been crippled by a frag mine.
As I restarted my PS3 for the tenth time while pursuing the first of four endings, I took a minute in reality to seriously reflect on what I was doing. I decided I didn’t know what would feel worse: draining another ten to twenty hours of my life basically watching a system load and periodically navigating to an arbitrary endpoint, or giving up, saying this isn’t worth it, and for the second time in my life opting to not see what conclusions to the New Vegas story Obsidian entertainment wrote. Both seemed unsatisfying. I kept on, beating the game by supporting Mr. House, then by supporting Yes Man, then by supporting the New California Republic, then by supporting Caesar’s Legion. My first great battle of the Hoover Dam, I took the time to explore and kill my adversaries with all my fancy, hard-found unique weapons. By the fourth great battle of the Hoover Dam, I used my 100 stealth skill and stealth boys to run past every enemy I found, trying to get to the next insanely long, insanely broken load zone as soon as I could. At this point, I was spending 5% of my thought processes on Fallout: New Vegas and 95% on phone calls with my brothers, Christmas shopping, and Californication, a show consumed by its own terrible problems that I’m sure will be thoroughly documented on this website in the near future.
In my last playthrough of the main quest, fighting for Caesar’s Legion, I discovered that getting to the last enemy, General Oliver, required passing through an area that has large Hoover Dam pipes gushing with water. Graphically, these pipes are the most intense thing coded within Fallout: New Vegas. Despite ten or more attempts, I realized that my massive, inefficient save files couldn’t get anywhere near them. I had to do the entire battle a fifth time and take a circuitous route and truncated final quest before I finally talked Oliver (with the power of 100 speech skill) into leaving his post and retreating. Relief flooded me as the final credits rolled and the journey of my teal-haired Courier came to an end.
“Oh the thrill of watching your video game avatar take a nap!”
My journey with Fallout: New Vegas, however, wasn’t quite finished. There was one more trophy I’d failed to collect and that was to beat the game on Hardcore mode. Hardcore mode mandated that you find beds for your character to sleep in, drink water and eat food so as not to succumb to dehydration and starvation, and, for realism's sake, added weight to the ammunition you carried for your guns. When I started my character, this didn’t sound like fun. Oh the thrill of watching your video game avatar take a nap! What I would give to see her bend over and drink from a water fountain. You might say that some realism helps gameplay by adding meaningful choices and necessities, but you’re talking about a universe where, after thirty, fifty, a hundred hours of gameplay, has an entirely eroded sense of realism anyway. All the characters are the same exact height and weight! None of them except you move from place to place! Every single one of their extremely urgent quests can be completed moments after receiving them or after in-game months of playing Blackjack at the casinos! If you’re in the middle of fighting a giant fire-breathing ant with a katana and you accidentally click on some guy standing at the side of the road, the ant will freeze and listen as he says to you, “Hey there friend! Care for a game of Caravan?” It’s not a realistic environment. I had no interest in adding time to my foray into New Vegas scrounging for Gecko steaks to relieve my fictional hunger. There are plenty of disgusting post-apocalyptic bathrooms in Fallout: New Vegas. Are you going to make me periodically go and take fictitious shits too?
So I looked up speedrunning Fallout: New Vegas and made a new character on hardcore mode with the intention of beating the game as fast as possible, just to knock out this last trophy and get my moronically coveted platinum. I found a bunch of guys that play on PC and know how to glitch the game to zip across the map, but still I learned some things and was able to get my hardcore playthrough down to about two hours, specializing of course in ignoring all skills except speech so that I can finish the final quests by convincing the Legate of Caesar’s legion to surrender at the very end. And what did I find when the credits rolled - the hardcore trophy didn’t pop! I didn’t get it. I have no idea why. I must have glitched it somehow. I tried looking up the problem, found a few forums with scattered reports of this happening to other people, and no solutions.
What could I do? What is left for a man such as me? The real world has rejected me, and now I have found that even an apocalyptic version of the hive of depravity known as Las Vegas has rejected me. Where do I belong? What can a man so skilled, yet so useless do with his time and energy? Staring at the rolling credits for the fifth time, I felt I’d reached a personal low point. My house was quiet, my street the same. It snowed all day and I didn’t have a snow shovel, so I literally couldn’t leave. It was cold and windy, but still I took my dog out and we played. She danced in the powder and rubbed her face around, biting at white clumps with glee. And when that was too tiring, I went back inside, approached my PS3, and hovered my finger over the eject button, then the power button, then the eject button, then the power button. Video games are certainly the prime art form of my generation, but too often, when I play them, I’m left with the ultimate question: why?
