Fallout New Vegas: Blue Skies Over Post-apocalyptic Nevada

Is there anything more beautiful than the radiant desolation of the post-apocalypse? No, if you ask fans of the now long-established and well-known Fallout series of games. Admittedly, the series has gone through a lot of changes with entries that inherited the first two games of Interplay and Black Isle, respectively from 1997 and 1998, and among those changes were the sale of intellectual property to Bethesda Games and as a whole new approach to playing the games themselves.

The first two games were classic CPRGs played from an isometric perspective, as was the case with two Baldur’s Gate games and numerous other RPGs in the ’90s. Then, in the early years of the 21st century, we also got two Brotherhood of Steel spin-off games, which aimed to present the Fallout world in a new guise and with gameplay oriented in a different direction from the first two years.

A few years later, Bethesda jumped into the game, so to speak, buying Fallout from its original creators and putting into development Fallout 3, which attracted huge attention from gamers and the media in 2008 and introduced the retro-futuristic world of the Fallout series to a new generation. player. However, members of the previous development team, the then disbanded Blask Isle, in a new guise and under a new name, Obsidian Entertainment, were allowed to once again try to create a Fallout game.

The result was Fallout New Vegas, a game that has the most ardent supporters among the new series of games in the series. Eleven years after its release, New Vegas seems to have completely overshadowed its immediate predecessor, Fallout 3, despite several problems plaguing the game since its 2010 launch.

New Vegas owes its longevity to the experience of its creators. Among the ranks of Obsidian, connoisseurs of the PC gaming scene from the 90s and early 2000s will recognize some names, such as Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone. Sawyer left his signature in New Vegas as chief designer, drawing on his team’s experience in creating the world, characters, and story of the game.

Sawyer and his team have expanded the gameplay experience of Fallout 3 with additional dialog options, better-realized characters, and tasks to return "Role-Playing" to the Role-Playing Game formula, unlike Bethesda who started moving away from Fallout 3 after Fallout 3. philosophy.

After creating the character, the player is thrown without too much pomp into the Mojave Desert, further devastated by the atomic war that destroyed the old world a couple of centuries before the game began. But the survivors did not give in to despair, but after leaving they began to rebuild the world. It is the same color blend of the classic retro-futuristic aesthetics of the Fallout series, but with a dose of Old West themes, but also casinos and dazzling neon lights of Las Vegas, the City of Sin.

After testing his skills in the small town of Goodsprings, the player is free to continue with the main story or wander around the world - following the pattern of Bethesda's games. However, unlike Bethesda, Obsidian made an effort to present to the player the main story that is worth following, which will lead us along with the four corners of the map and meet many factions. The main story is so easy to start and then get lost in the wake of a side-quest, only to have that quest take us back to the main story, which only testifies to the good integration of the main story and side-quests.

The main premise of New Vegas is the frozen conflict between the two main factions, the Legion and the NCR, who have taken their positions and drawn the line in the desert sands. Alas, that line runs right through the headlines of the city, New Vegas, whose rulers gamble with tokens, platinum, and other types, but also with the fate of the entire Mojave area.

In the midst of all this, as an external force, a player arrives with an arsenal of weapons, tools, and dialogue options to calm the passions, or contribute to the confrontation as soon as possible, to derive ultimate benefit for himself. Are you not interested in political intrigue? Great! Invest in Survival Skills and venture into the wilderness, exploring remote locations and gathering the necessary resources to survive.

In addition to the usual tricks of an RPG game, New Vegas also offers an amazingly robust survival experience, in which almost every encounter with enemies can be the last, and death can find you due to a "mere lack" of water and food if you are not careful. True, the world of New Vegas, or Mojave, is less devastating than the devastated area of the American capital, but Obsidian has filled a smaller overall square with comparatively more content for the player.

Unfortunately, not everyone is so happy in Nevada.

The other side of the coin - or token - comes with the technical structure of the game. Taking over the old Gamebryo drive from Bethesda, Obsidian took over all the shortcomings of this game engine, but without the years of experience that the developers at Bethesda, hardened by work on TES III and IV, had working on Fallout 3. The geometry of the terrain is strange, to put it mildly, players will often be distracted by invisible walls put up by developers to prevent easy access to a field that otherwise seems quite accessible.

Even with the latest official version of the game, and an unofficial patch, as well as a couple of other mandatory modes you must have to make it easier to work on modern systems, New Vegas is not a particularly stable game. Crashes are a matter of time and circumstances, not possibilities. To make matters worse, some bugs can cause corruption of the save game file, which can easily thwart several hours of progress that the player has behind him before the last crash of the game.

Before launching the game for the first time, it is strongly recommended that you read at least a cursory reading of one of several stability guides created by dedicated New Vegas fans over the past decade. Finally, there is the issue of optimization for working on new systems. The version of the game available on Steam somehow works after the first launch. But if you try to push a few mods, the game will become very questionable, which can only be solved with an unofficial patch that allows New Vegas to use more than 4GB of the frame.