Finished the game, with the one choice of ending that is clearly the most awesome. The main story with its various choices is great, the writing is very good, and most of the side quests are solid as well. Otherwise, though, I’m rather underwhelmed, or at best most middlingly whelmed.
Granted, I’m no fan of either the Fallout setting or open-world games in general – I only got New Vegas in the first place because I wanted to see what Obsidian had done with the setting. But New Vegas is even worse than Fallout 3 when it comes to endlessly wandering through boring wastelands and labyrinthine buildings, in search of a quest target or the next fast travel trigger. The early game is so boring, I nearly quit multiple times during the first ten hours. The game would have been twice as good if all areas were ten times smaller. And do I really have to go through the “please leave your weapons” dialog every single time I enter a casino?
Strangely unclimbable fences and rocks often force annoying detours, but still don’t keep quests in their proper order. The King offered me as his grand reward a pass to the Strip – too bad I got in ten hours earlier since the requirements were so trivial! I only visited the north side of Vegas shortly before finishing the game, in case I was missing something, as the game presented me with no reason to go there. There I promptly met an NPC giving advice to newcomers to Vegas, and records of another NPC related to an already deceased one. The mutant radio quest also lost much of its punch when I happened on the station during my wanderings, only to later find another mutant who thanked me for helping him on a quest I didn’t know existed.
As the enemies got tougher towards the end of the game, VATS targeting became completely useless. Fights that get me killed with VATS are suddenly easy when I just shoot with manual aiming. As someone who likes VATS I found that a rather significant downgrade of the combat system. Doesn’t help that the enemy scaling comes perilously close to Oblivion’s bandits in glass armor – good luck if your level 20+ character meets random cazadores without some anti-venom!
Speaking of giant flies – bugs, bugs everywhere. Aside from the persistent bath room lockup I got maybe twenty crashes at various places plus several quest bugs. Whenever some quest was really great I inevitably hit either a crash or some other bug. Even the end credits gave two contradictory vignettes about the fate of the super mutants: Jacobstown was first abandoned and then thriving. It’s also annoying that some quests are only available as notes without linked map locations or completion confirmation.
Being able to talk your way out of most confrontations is nice, but this feature seems to compensate for the sometimes absurdly difficult combat. Maximizing just your speech skill wins encounters that would otherwise require not just multiple high stats but also the absolute best equipment in the entire game. When my level 29 character – guns & energy 80, plasma caster & combat armor mk2 – tried to killed the two end bosses of my game it was completely hopeless. Without a Speech skill that could be buffed to 100 I would have had to drop the difficulty below Normal, despite very decent stats and very rare equipment.
For me, this is also the first game on a Bethesda engine where I have to agree with the general chorus: yes, the character faces and animations are absolutely terrible, and I really hope the “new engine” for Skyrim is significantly improved here. I didn’t mind the character graphics much even in Fallout 3, but they are really obsolete now. On the upside, despite being annoying to walk through, the landscape is really quite impressive to look at. So I guess enjoyment of the game is directly tied to how much you always wanted to hike through a virtual Mojave desert.
