Fallout: New Vegas will be with us on October 22nd, and the omens are good. Obsidian’s experience with the Fallout franchise is unquestionable, while the recent modernisation of the format by Bethesda is a template no one can ignore. The combination of the people who created the series with the people who polished it is one that has our fingers itchy over the VATs button already, but that’s not to say that we’re completely uncritical. Much as we adored Fallout 3 we still have a wish list, one born from many hours of yomping in the Capital Wasteland.
It would be easy to suggest when building New Vegas that Obsidian should avoid Fallout 3’s obvious failings-the dodgy physics, tacked on ending and woefully variable DLC quality (For the record: Point Lookout is a must have, Broken Steel is pretty good, The Pitt was fun, Operation Anchorage and Mothership Zeta stank so badly even Dogmeat wouldn’t touch them.) The thing is, those are the obvious failings, and as such we have faith that Obsidian will already have taken them into account, so we’ve gone for a few quieter amendments we’d like to see them make...
1. NPCs with a sense of perspective.
I played Fallout 3 for hours and hours and hours before anything happened to seriously dent the magic, but when it finally did, I couldn’t help that that first bit of tarnish could have been so easily avoided. See, in Megaton there’s a kooky shopkeep named Moira who likes to get you irradiated as part of her ‘research’. The relentlessly cheery Moira sends you on quest after quest, all while maintaining her upbeat, encouraging demeanour. The same cannot be said for the merc she pays to guard her shop. This surly fella was constantly sneering at me and telling me that he was keeping an eye on me. Now I’ve played postman for this town, I’ve defused the bomb in the town centre, run errands for and helped just about everyone in it, and have developed a good relationship with all the characters in the place, so the constant griping mistrust from the posing merc seemed a little unfair, in fact it started to rankle. But I wasn’t about to throw away my saintly reputation by shooting this guy, oh no. No, a little tap to his glass jaw would suffice to shut him up.
So, two minutes later I’m half dead at the top of the stairs in my house, the bodies of the merc, Old Nathan, Sherriff Simms and my own butler, Wadsworth, laying shell-torn at my feet and a trail of bodies lining the route between Moira’s and mine. My karma has gone through the floorboards and worse than all that, I felt awful. I really liked Sherriff Simms and the curmudgeonly Nathan, and I’d been compelled to slaughter them just because one annoying NPC responds to a punch on the jaw by pulling an AK47 and calling up a posse! Up until that point the many and varied ways you could approach Fallout’s missions had me convinced that the game would have a subtle, nuanced reaction to any player action, but one good massacre later and a little bit of the mystique was gone. So, NPCs with a sense of proportion, please?
2. Balanced beginnings.
Last time I looked at my stats I’d put in over 100 hours to Fallout 3. I strode the wastelands like an armoured colossus carrying machine guns so finely tuned they could take out everything from Super-mutants to Deathclaws with a single almost offhanded burst, and even the biggest, baddest problems could be solved thanks to a small stockpile of mini-nukes and a bazooka that can fire no less than eight of them at once. I am become death, destroyer of villainous NPCs.
It wasn’t always that way, however. Rewind to that first 10 hours or so, and my all powerful self was a terrifyingly vulnerable little prat in jumpsuit. I died every time I came into contact with someone whose lead pipe was marginally less rusty than my own. Hell, I got eaten by wild dogs at one point. Worse still, I got killed by a cockroach at another. In those early stages of the game a sidelong glance was enough to have me frantically shooting up stimpaks in an invariably fruitless attempt to stave off the inevitable.
Now don’t get me wrong. The single most addictive and enjoyable aspect of any RPG is levelling up. That feeling of carefully earning and investing points until you’ve honed your character into an unbeatable desperado wouldn’t be anywhere near as satisfying if you didn’t start off a feeble and helpless case. But please, please Obsidian, let’s have a little bit of balance to it. Even if I haven’t levelled up yet, being killed by something small enough for me to step on is a bit much.
3. Put the brakes on the breakages.
You know how I mentioned that there are times when it seems like the difference between life and death in some encounters comes down to a question of whos lead pipe is more polished? Well all too often that feels like the case throughout the game. Now I don’t completely agree with those people who think that weapons degradation in games is just padding, a way of creating busy work for players, but in Fallout 3 it did become something of a chore. There you’d be, your assault rifle gleaming at 100%, firing off inch-perfect VATS headshots at three or four Ghouls, and all of a sudden your weapon’s effectiveness has dropped by several percent in what would usually be the first encounter in a long and arduous sewer sweep or building clearance. By the time you emerge back into the sunlight two dozen dead baddies later your cherished rifle would apparently be made of loopipes and string, incapable of hitting Tenpenny Tower from two yards out until you’ve scavenged up the spare parts to make a repair. Now that’s too much even for my forgiving nature. I like the frisson of tension added by a weapons slow progress towards unreliability, but in New Vegas I’m really hoping it takes hours of combat rather than minutes.
4. Added assets
You don’t get 100+ hour of gameplay out of me by being tiresome or samey. In Fallout 3, every dot on the map is worth exploring, every building might potentially contain some hidden goody from spare parts to a text-based adventure game running on someone’s screen. Explore the wasteland long enough and you’ll find a satellite array that will allow you to rain down nuclear fire from the heavens, you’ll find a giant ant living in a car factory and a research lab full of people dreaming its 1957l. There really seems to be no end of interesting stuff in the capital wasteland, and you know what? It’s all at the end of the same hallway. The Wasteland seems to be composed of one type of cave, one type of corridor and one type of sewer. Now I know that disc space is at a premium, and I’d be the first to gripe if playable content had been lost in favour of squeezing a few more environmental assets onboard, but surely we can have just a tiny bit more variety than the same few green tinged, ash stained corridors? Honestly, take out some of the more annoying sidekicks if you need the room, I got bored of Dogmeat and Fawkes pretty quickly. Here’s hoping New Vegas draws inspiration from the real thing and throws some architectural variety at us.
5. Straight shooting
Finally, in Fallout New Vegas I’d like to see a slightly more forgiving approach to non-VATs combat. Sure, building the game around VAT’s slow motion allocation of action points is one the features that keeps Fallout 3 true to its RPG roots, and far be it from me to mess with that, but aiming without VATs was a complete pain. The tiny, slow moving reticle made it extremely difficult to draw a bead on baddies, and there were times when you didn’t want to have to use VATs. Using it to to ‘swat’ a meddlesome Bloatfly or dispatch an underpowered raider felt like overkill, especially when you’d reached a level of experience where you felt that such threats should just be brushed aside with an insouciant wave of a rifle barrel. Clicking in to VATs for low level threats was a flow breaker, and in New Vegas I’m hoping that improved freehand aiming will allow for minor irritants to be casually put down.
I played Fallout 3 for hours and hours and hours before anything happened to seriously dent the magic, but when it finally did, I couldn’t help that that first bit of tarnish could have been so easily avoided. See, in Megaton there’s a kooky shopkeep named Moira who likes to get you irradiated as part of her ‘research’. The relentlessly cheery Moira sends you on quest after quest, all while maintaining her upbeat, encouraging demeanour. The same cannot be said for the merc she pays to guard her shop. This surly fella was constantly sneering at me and telling me that he was keeping an eye on me. Now I’ve played postman for this town, I’ve defused the bomb in the town centre, run errands for and helped just about everyone in it, and have developed a good relationship with all the characters in the place, so the constant griping mistrust from the posing merc seemed a little unfair, in fact it started to rankle. But I wasn’t about to throw away my saintly reputation by shooting this guy, oh no. No, a little tap to his glass jaw would suffice to shut him up.
So, two minutes later I’m half dead at the top of the stairs in my house, the bodies of the merc, Old Nathan, Sherriff Simms and my own butler, Wadsworth, laying shell-torn at my feet and a trail of bodies lining the route between Moira’s and mine. My karma has gone through the floorboards and worse than all that, I felt awful. I really liked Sherriff Simms and the curmudgeonly Nathan, and I’d been compelled to slaughter them just because one annoying NPC responds to a punch on the jaw by pulling an AK47 and calling up a posse! Up until that point the many and varied ways you could approach Fallout’s missions had me convinced that the game would have a subtle, nuanced reaction to any player action, but one good massacre later and a little bit of the mystique was gone. So, NPCs with a sense of proportion, please?
2. Balanced beginnings.
Last time I looked at my stats I’d put in over 100 hours to Fallout 3. I strode the wastelands like an armoured colossus carrying machine guns so finely tuned they could take out everything from Super-mutants to Deathclaws with a single almost offhanded burst, and even the biggest, baddest problems could be solved thanks to a small stockpile of mini-nukes and a bazooka that can fire no less than eight of them at once. I am become death, destroyer of villainous NPCs.
It wasn’t always that way, however. Rewind to that first 10 hours or so, and my all powerful self was a terrifyingly vulnerable little prat in jumpsuit. I died every time I came into contact with someone whose lead pipe was marginally less rusty than my own. Hell, I got eaten by wild dogs at one point. Worse still, I got killed by a cockroach at another. In those early stages of the game a sidelong glance was enough to have me frantically shooting up stimpaks in an invariably fruitless attempt to stave off the inevitable.
Now don’t get me wrong. The single most addictive and enjoyable aspect of any RPG is levelling up. That feeling of carefully earning and investing points until you’ve honed your character into an unbeatable desperado wouldn’t be anywhere near as satisfying if you didn’t start off a feeble and helpless case. But please, please Obsidian, let’s have a little bit of balance to it. Even if I haven’t levelled up yet, being killed by something small enough for me to step on is a bit much.
3. Put the brakes on the breakages.
You know how I mentioned that there are times when it seems like the difference between life and death in some encounters comes down to a question of whos lead pipe is more polished? Well all too often that feels like the case throughout the game. Now I don’t completely agree with those people who think that weapons degradation in games is just padding, a way of creating busy work for players, but in Fallout 3 it did become something of a chore. There you’d be, your assault rifle gleaming at 100%, firing off inch-perfect VATS headshots at three or four Ghouls, and all of a sudden your weapon’s effectiveness has dropped by several percent in what would usually be the first encounter in a long and arduous sewer sweep or building clearance. By the time you emerge back into the sunlight two dozen dead baddies later your cherished rifle would apparently be made of loopipes and string, incapable of hitting Tenpenny Tower from two yards out until you’ve scavenged up the spare parts to make a repair. Now that’s too much even for my forgiving nature. I like the frisson of tension added by a weapons slow progress towards unreliability, but in New Vegas I’m really hoping it takes hours of combat rather than minutes.
4. Added assets
You don’t get 100+ hour of gameplay out of me by being tiresome or samey. In Fallout 3, every dot on the map is worth exploring, every building might potentially contain some hidden goody from spare parts to a text-based adventure game running on someone’s screen. Explore the wasteland long enough and you’ll find a satellite array that will allow you to rain down nuclear fire from the heavens, you’ll find a giant ant living in a car factory and a research lab full of people dreaming its 1957l. There really seems to be no end of interesting stuff in the capital wasteland, and you know what? It’s all at the end of the same hallway. The Wasteland seems to be composed of one type of cave, one type of corridor and one type of sewer. Now I know that disc space is at a premium, and I’d be the first to gripe if playable content had been lost in favour of squeezing a few more environmental assets onboard, but surely we can have just a tiny bit more variety than the same few green tinged, ash stained corridors? Honestly, take out some of the more annoying sidekicks if you need the room, I got bored of Dogmeat and Fawkes pretty quickly. Here’s hoping New Vegas draws inspiration from the real thing and throws some architectural variety at us.
5. Straight shooting
Finally, in Fallout New Vegas I’d like to see a slightly more forgiving approach to non-VATs combat. Sure, building the game around VAT’s slow motion allocation of action points is one the features that keeps Fallout 3 true to its RPG roots, and far be it from me to mess with that, but aiming without VATs was a complete pain. The tiny, slow moving reticle made it extremely difficult to draw a bead on baddies, and there were times when you didn’t want to have to use VATs. Using it to to ‘swat’ a meddlesome Bloatfly or dispatch an underpowered raider felt like overkill, especially when you’d reached a level of experience where you felt that such threats should just be brushed aside with an insouciant wave of a rifle barrel. Clicking in to VATs for low level threats was a flow breaker, and in New Vegas I’m hoping that improved freehand aiming will allow for minor irritants to be casually put down.
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