Fallout: New Vegas is a Fundamentally Flawed Game
Varg Vikernes is a famous black metal musician, an esoteric cultist, a former murderer, a neo-Nazi, a probable arsonist, a video blogger, and a convicted anti-Semite. Due to his reputation as a reactionary musician he has gained a weird online following of edgy kids and reactionaries over the years. And before he was banned his video blogs were kinda mundane as he shared his opinions on media and politics, but infused with an ideology that mixed paganism, traditionalism and fascism.
His YouTube channel was deleted last year as part of a push by the company to reduce hate speech on the site, which seems to have worked so far. Varg still has a twitter account somehow, and he recently shared his edgy opinion on Fallout: New Vegas, and it proven to be a bit controversial among his followers since many of them really seem to like that game for some reason.
Despite being a fascist with left-wing characteristics Varg’s assessment of the game is completely correct and valid. He might be a deranged pagan Nazbol, but he is still a real human being, and a gamer, and I think most people would have an similar negative reaction from just playing the opening of that game.
The gameplay in Fallout: New Vegas game is just mediocre, the overall visual style is pretty bad, the featureless desert environment is just empty and drab, and the main story is not impressive at all, especially during its first hours. The game has a few redeeming qualities such as interesting factions and branching questlines, but I think that all the positive elements in the game are completely overwhelmed by all the negative elements.
“Y a este propósito dice Plinio que no hay libro, por malo que sea, que no tenga alguna cosa buena; mayormente que los gustos no son todos unos, mas lo que uno no come, otro se pierde por ello.” — Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes
The bad elements in New Vegas are really bad. The thing that you first notice when starting the game is that the game looks completely hideous, not just the cutscenes but the desert environment looks absolutely appalling during the day, and I think there is no excuse for that since there are plenty of games that have beautiful desert environments. This game being ten years old is not an excuse either since very nice-looking games like Just Cause 2 and Mass Effect 2 were released the same year.
The absolutely disgusting look of the game is purely the result of bad art direction and terrible use of color, and this is the first thing anyone will notice as they start the game. The game looks less bad at night or in certain areas, but the overall look of the game is just really terrible.
Fallout: New Vegas has a cult following among some gamers, and so you would think that the gameplay, music, or story would be so good that it compensates for the lack of polish, or the serious lack of good art design. But this is not the case, especially since the gameplay is also bad, with the combat mechanics in particular being extremely rudimentary and don’t consist of more than shooting enemies with very poor AI until they die, with the only challenge being that some enemies are bullet sponges, such as the final boss of the game, which is awful unless you optimize your build, or have high speech skills that lets you press a button to win the game. It also doesn’t help that the menu interface is very clunky and makes selecting items very tedious.
The counter to this would be that this game is meant to be a story and dialogue-oriented game, which is partially true. The game has a lot of bad combat encounters, but many of them can be skipped with dialogue prompts that are purely dependent on skill checks, so if you raise some skills like barter and speech you can avoid many combat encounters. Which sounds interesting, in theory, but in practice this just means walking around empty environments looking for NPCs that provide the right dialogue prompt to progress through each quest.
The problem is that just walking back and forth around a big and empty open world environment with bad level design is just boring, especially if the climax of each quest is just a dialogue sequence or a bad combat encounter. The design of the world itself is not the worst thing ever, but it feels like they just took the hub-based design of older RPGs and put those hubs into a big desert sandbox, which means that exploration is mostly pointless unless you want to do a specific quest that’s related to a specific area.
If there wasn’t a fast travel option the game would be insanely tedious to play since a lot of quests mostly involve walking back and forth between distant locations, and there is no vehicles either. It’s also necessary to walk or “run” across the desert in order to reach a location at least once before it’s possible to fast travel to it, so this game involves a significant amount of slow and boring walks through an ugly environment. It doesn’t help that the music in most radio stations is not good or memorable.
I personally don’t get how anyone could tolerate all the bad things in this game, but if they can then the writing of the game should make the experience worth it, but I don’t think the story is good either. Although, the guys who wrote the game are not actually bad writers: The lore of the game is interesting, some characters and factions are memorable and a few of the jokes are good. But the story itself is not unique or memorable, the main quest basically consists of a short trek through the desert looking for the person that tried to kill you at the start of the game, then acquiring money to enter New Vegas, then finding that this was part of a greater conspiracy between multiple factions to take control of New Vegas.
But that’s just a summary, in theory this could make for a great story if handled well, but in practice it consists of just traveling across empty desert to reach New Vegas, and once you are there you meet each faction before picking one to side with, and then you have to literally spend endless hours just doing chores for the faction you picked before a quick final battle, which involves an awful boss battle, at least unless you max out certain dialogue skills. The factions themselves are amusing, but the story doesn’t have any unique twists. It’s just a bland, generic, and poorly paced main quest.
Fallout: New Vegas is a game about walking back and forth across a big and empty and ugly landscape doing chores that masquerade as quests, and those quests usually end with either a mediocre combat encounter, or a dialogue sequence that allows you to skip said combat. It’s the kind of game design that maybe could be seen as acceptable in a text-based adventure game, but for an action RPG it’s just dull and boring.
More importantly, a story cannot be separated from the medium by which it’s told, and a video game’s story is told through the game itself. If a game consists of walking around back and forth around a big and ugly environment then that’s what the story is about, having a massive amount of quest and dialogue trees does not change this fundamental issue.
“The story is part of the game. It doesn’t exist as a separate script that is handed off to game designers which they are expected to somehow make compelling through puzzles and combat…the story develops while trying to solve the problem of how to make a fun game.” — Marc Laidlaw
