Wicked Wanderers, Wistful Wasteland
Hi there. Taking a moment from bashing my face against D&D books and alternately bashing my face against my novel to share some thoughts on a video game.
Let us begin.
I can honestly say that Fallout: New Vegas is the buggiest, glitchiest, worst-programmed piece of shit that I have ever truly enjoyed playing. New Vegas is a good game in many regards - it's fucking Fallout, okay, as long as we pretend that stupid Brotherhood of Steel game NEVER HAPPENED (and if we overlook Fallout Tactics which, frankly, I loathed - what is it with Brotherhood of Steel games sucking, anyway?) then if it says Fallout on the tin then it's going to have some good things going for it. However, New Vegas feels to me like it's an over-sized DLC for Fallout 3 - and a really damn buggy one at that.
I have avoided Hardcore mode because frankly, keeping track of dehydration, starvation and sleep deprivation (just imagine 3 Dog saying that... ha ha, good times) and having to count my bullets because they each contribute to the aggravating encumbrance system just doesn't sound like fun, it sounds like work. AI companions are buggy idiots at the best of times, and having my AI sidekicks rush to their deaths over and over forcing me to reload would not bring me any joy. In "Casual" mode (I really detest that, but more on that in a later rant) at least Veronica and Rex's suicidal urge to ignore orders and die as quickly as possible only results in their having a little lie down, and recovering after I have finished destroying whatever mean mean monster hurt my friends. It has proved impossible to control my compatriots for four reasons:
1. The "Wait" and "Follow" commands do not mean shit if an enemy is nearby. I don't know how many times my awesome cyborg attack dog (Fallout: It's Good Shit) has decided to ignore my order to wait on the stairs and has instead sprinted past me into the Overseer's office in Vault 34 - only to promptly get knocked the fuck out by the waiting Mk V turrets that fill the doorway with lead. Or how many times I've asked Veronica to wait somewhere, only to discover she has apparently taken herself off Wait status (!!!) and has wandered off to make passionate kung fu to a passing Raider or Feral Ghoul.
2. If that's the "passive" mode, then I can only assume that "aggressive" turns my followers into bulging-veined, pipe-hitting, 'roid-ragin' Red-Target-Syndrome-having mean-murder-machines running all over the place, repeatedly smashing the hydraulic striker of a Power Fist into passing children, kicking dogs over fences, and tearing out the throats of Deathclaws with their teeth - and I don't just mean Rex the dog with that last one. My companions are some bloodthirsty motherfuckers, and they don't know the meaning of restraint. Cassidy, Veronica, Rex and ED-E all basically feel that the Prime Directive can go to hell: if it's red on the radar, it's open fucking season, and to hell with what Courier Six says. In the case of Boone the sniper (my second favorite companion character) he generally limits his psychotic bloodlust to passing Legionnaires, whom he has an excellent reason to murder. Frankly, I never turn down a chance to Ave my right armored caliga up Caesar's ass, myself. But that is a minor exception to a major PITA rule.
3. My compatriots operate under the control of a very badly implemented control wheel. To issue commands, access the inventory or heal my brothers-and-sisters in arms, I have to chase them down and interact with them in the middle of combat. This is both unwieldy and basically worthless in the heat of battle. Mass Effect has a serviceable system for commanding Shepard's squad and for healing them; you can access a control wheel with the touch of a button - which even even allows you to AIM the special abilities of your dudes! - and you can heal the entire squad by simply tapping a single button. Now, every fucking button on the controller does something in FONV; most of them actually do two things, such as tapping X to reload a weapon and holding it to draw/holster it, or tapping B to bring up the Pipboy and holding it to use the screen as a flashlight. Even the usually-ignored Back button on the 360 controller serves the function of using the Wait command which Bethesda imported from the Elder Scroll games. However, I can't say that I see where it would be impossible to include a Companion Control Panel in the Pipboy menus: I bring up my Pipboy all the time in combat to use drugs like Buffout or Med-X or Turbo or Stimpaks, to switch to a non-hot-keyed but suddenly useful weapon (sometimes you don't keep your missile launcher on the hot-key and you suddenly want to shove an anti-armor rocket up someone's nose) or to do an emergency "which-way-did-I-leave-that-choke point-that-I-cleverly-mined-earlier?" check on the (astoundingly useless) minimap. So asking me to bring up the Pipboy so I could issue commands like "Hey retard-o-bot, ignore the bark scorpion and help me kill this asshole over here" or "Veronica, time for your shots, dear, you're full of bullet holes" or "Cassidy for the love of anything, stop throwing dynamite at me!" would not make me cry, I promise you. You can't specify targets for your punch-drunk band of merry murderers to murder, you can't heal them without having to run them down. It's a damned nuisance.
4. The AI coding was based on ninjas. What I am mean is, sometimes my AI compatriots glitch, flip out, and start killing people. More on insane AI goofs in a moment.
Having covered why companions drive me insane, let's talk for a moment about the glitchy AI in FONV.
Civilians will freak out and attack me for no known reason, and sometimes my companions will randomly decide that they have a bone to pick with the NCR. The probable worst offender is the moderately helpful shopkeeper NPC, Old Lady Gibson. OLG sells junk from a scrapyard and can be used to kick start the incredibly random ED-E loyalty quest, “ED-E My Love.” She also has a pack of junkyard dogs who can be used to acquire an exceptional dog brain to repair Rex, which gives him improved attacks, and who will defend her if you bring the pain to the ol' missus. She also wields a rather painfully powerful unique sawn-off shotgun called Big Boomer. However, the thing about OLG is that sometimes, for no discernible reason, she will leave her scrapyard, travel about two miles north to the HELIOS-ONE facility with her entire pack of dogs (I theorize that she actually teleports there) and then immediately aggro on the player character and any NCR nearby. She does this no matter how nice you are to her, no matter if you're Idolized in the town of Novac, friends with the NCR, and have a karmic rating so, well, good that they call you the Symbol of Order. Sometimes you will walk out of the HELIOS-ONE facility and boom, there is OLG and her pack of dogs, locked and cocked and here to bring the noise. This isn't a mere random glitch that happened once: this happens almost regularly, requiring you to reload your quick save from exiting the building if you don't want to put the crazed woman on permanent blast. Why does this happen? No one knows.
Freezing, crashing, corrupting files, and generally failing to run are some of FONV's more aggravating errors. The game will simply lock up while loading, and sometimes it starts back up, sometimes you have to reset the console. Sometimes when it does this, it completely corrupts your last quick save, so you have to remind yourself to save constantly while playing this Fallout, because it might just decide to eat your auto-saves. Walking between any zone - and there are a LOT of zones in FONV - will initiate a rather lengthy loading sequence... and any time there is a load, there is the possibility that it might take (no exaggeration) eight or nine minutes to load or it might just lock the game up entirely. And any time the fucker locks up, there is the chance that FONV might destroy your file. That's just awful, Bethesda.
The anti-gravity glitch is a fun one. I've had this less often than some of my friends online, having only encountered it once, but here's how it went down: I was walking past a three story building in the wasteland outside New Vegas, checking to see if the building could be accessed (there are a HUGE number of structures in the game that look completely intact, and have the doors nailed shut so you can't explore them - boo to that.) when suddenly I was launched four stories into the air! My character hung in midair, maybe sixty feet in the air, as though standing on the ground. I was puzzled and looked around to see exactly where I was situated (I also wanted to see if I could land atop the building, out of curiosity if they bothered to make the roof solid) when suddenly I dropped, my character slamming into the ground, shattering both legs and losing all but 3 hit points. The character only survived because she's tough as goddamn nails; a lower level character would likely have been blasted out of existence by the impact, forcing a reload. Essentially FONV “forgot” where the ground was, like an airplane whose artificial horizon has been tampered with, and decided that I should be standing atop an invisible mountain. When it realized its mistake, or when I stepped off the thin column of anti-gravity, I dropped to Mother Earth's extremely firm bosom. As an isolated incident, it's only noteworthy for its weirdness, but as one more glitch in an incredibly tall pile of glitches, it takes on a more aggravating tone. I've encountered lesser anti-gravity a couple times; I stood on thin air over Lake Mead after phasing through the retaining wall atop Hoover Dam, and I sprinted across a small gulch without falling - so fast even gravity is my bitch! (Actually, my power-armored meleeist is a lumbering, nigh-indestructible humanoid main battle tank, so I didn't so much sprint as stomp determinedly across the gulch to fuck someone's Christmas all up.)
Sometimes area of the game will simply not render, and the game “blacks out” leaving you staring at a blank black screen, not even an insanely long loading screen. The game just crashes out from you trying to enter an area. Take that.
Sometimes quest NPCs will stop talking and stand still, staring off into space, not really reacting to you and refusing to continue dialog or movement. Nothing for it but to reboot. Again.
I could literally stand here all day on my soap box talking about the bizarre glitches and bugs of FONV, but the main point I am making with this is that while a decent game, it is seriously flawed. Bethesda has already announced a DLC for it, due in December, but has made no overt movements towards patching the incredibly lengthy list of bugs I and other wasteland warriors have bumbled into.
From a storytelling perspective, FONV does not move me like Fallout 3 did. A lengthy and admittedly boring chase (okay, not so much a chase as a slow trail-following) for the asshole who shot you in the head is the opening story of FONV. Courier Six awakes to find his/her latest parcel jacked, a friendly wasteland body-doc having hacked fragments of 9mm FMJ out of his/her skull, and apparently stripped to the skivies; you're wearing clothes in the opening movie, then you're in your briefs when you wake up, and Doc Mitchell gives you a Vault jumpsuit as starting gear for no more reason than because Fallout main characters wear Vault jumpsuits. After taking some initial tips on wasteland survival - uh... because Courier Six has no idea what he/she is doing, since the character is hinted to be a veteran Mojave Express courier who has been as far west as Reno and therefore doesn't know how to handle a gun or cook food or repair his own gear... *forehead slap* - from the likable (and neatly-named) Sunny Smiles, the world is your extremely hostile oyster. The Mojave wasteland is a vast and empty sun-bleached place where the wind sighs over the stones, the insects are weirdly tough and the world is hassled by the pushy opportunists of the New California Republic and scared shitless of the slaving, puppy-kicking, mustache-twirling Caesar's Legion. Oh, and there's regular folks out there just trying not to die of radiation poisoning day to day, weird relics of the Pre-War era, the cowering remnants of the once-bulletproof Brotherhood of Steel, and a lot of other things if you know where to look in the rocks. I feel no urgency about my quest, no real desire to pursue the next step. Sure, the guy who dumped nine upside my head is a feminine hygiene product one might use when feeling less than fresh on a summer's eve and the bag it came in, but fuck 'em. I know where he is. He ain't that hard to get to. Sooner or later I will kick the door to his casino in, grab some part of his anatomy that seems hard to live without, pull it off and slap him to death with it. No big deal. Oh, and get my platinum chip back.
In Fallout 3, my quest was personal for me: November, my child prodigy alter-ego in the Capital Wasteland, wanted to know where her father has gone, has been driven from the Vault she has lived all her life in, and in the process, having learned compassion and duty from her father, was inspired to take up “the Good Fight” by a charismatic radio dj and from a renegade chapter of the Brotherhood, took up the mantle of defender of the wasteland. A lost young woman who just wanted to find her father became a product of the wasteland, scarred, hardened and even mutated by her environment but still determined to drive off savage super mutants, defeat vicious raiders, stop the predations of psychotic cannibals, defeat the looming menace of a lingering, malevolent pre-War shadow government, and bring pure drinking water - and with it, vital hope - to the Capital Wasteland. My choices and alliances made my Fallout 3 character a hero.
My FONV characters are also good-aligned, willing to help others where they can and fight off the aforementioned slaving, puppy-kicking, mustache-twirling Caesar's Legion. However, most good deeds I do in FONV just scan as jobs - Courier Six is a mercenary wastelander, trading in expertise with science, lockpicks, explosives and repairs along with being next-in-line-to-Deathclaws in terms of sheer deadliness. I have no real opponent to face off against and be inspired to fight; I'm presented with a series of choices that are usually either obvious "don't be a dick" moments, or else mostly just shades of gray. The problem with shades of gray is that if it's the only color you paint with, your result is uninspiring. I've provided the explosion-happy isolationist Boomers with what may eventually be a functional B-29 bomber which they will happily bomb the shit out of whoever they please with. I don't feel that guilty about it, mostly because I can't really tell if the Boomers were supposed to be "bad guys" or not. The Brotherhood is a one note song of bull-headed stagnation and isolationism, hardly the complex organization one would expect of two hundred plus years of hereditary military service and a mission that seems to have slowly lost its importance and meaning. Yes, the Legion is complicated - at least, when viewed following a single conversation with foul-mouthed, embittered, brawling, hard-drinking caravaner Rose of Shannon Cassidy, who admits that the Legion at least brings order to a chaotic world, but at a cost she is unwilling to accept - but they're no seductive and imposing Enclave with promises of dragging America out of her post-atomic ruin. They're just bloody-handed slave-dealing misogynistic violent assholes who piss me off whenever I see them, and who are rewarding for pissing me off by getting a big hole ripped through their ranks whenever I cut their trail. My mission is a simple one of vengeance, and if it gets more interesting and complicated when I get to New Vegas itself (why is it New Vegas? It's the same fucking town, most of it was apparently spared nuking, not that you can tell, actually) then I haven't really noticed. Mr. House is creepy and aloof, but he's given me no real reason to support him or to oppose him. Maybe the game will show me more as I make my way further into the story, but so far I've had more interest in the side stories than my character's own, from bright-eyed Brotherhood of Steel optimist Veronica to the vengeful Cass (who has lost her livelihood and the lives of her employees to a greedy rival) to the sad story of Boone, a man who just wanted to leave the painful memories of his soldier's life behind, only to lose his wife and unborn son to a treacherous neighbor's greed and now harbors both a vengeful fury towards the Legion and a very honest deathwish. Eventually I'll recruit Arcade Gannon, Raul and whatever other companions are available - because their story is more interesting than mine, and that's a shame.
Mechanically, yes, there's about a hundred things I'd love to add to a Fallout game. A sprint function to allow me to hit a higher top speed temporarily to outrun enemies or flee the area of powerful explosions. Followers with unique attacks like the special VATS commands the player can perform when using unarmed or melee weapons. A Fallout game made for co-op questing of the wastes - not the same game as a single player Fallout because it is my personal theory that the inclusion of multiplayer to a story-driven single-player game is nearly always to the detriment of the single-player experience. A Fallout where you can play ghouls or super mutants or even an intelligent, thinking robot like Armitage from Fallout 3. A Fallout where you can choose your origin, be it Vault-Dweller or Wastelander or whatever. Working vehicles - the wasteland in FONV is dotted with dozens of intact motorcycles, intact airplanes, intact trucks, and enough spare parts to Mad Max a working car. (Don't talk to me about it being unrealistic to get a 200 year abandoned nuclear-powered motorcycle working. I've hacked 4,000,000 two century old computers. Wastelanders regularly eat 200 year old Salisbury steak and the only side effect is that they get a little irradiated.) A Fallout where you can claim one of a handful of locations in the wasteland, fortify it, improve it and create a new town of your own. The games we love most are the ones we constantly come up with new dream features for.
Oh, and as an aside, I hate the radio music in FONV, and Mister New Vegas is nowhere near as cool as Three Dog.
Yes, FONV is an indelibly flawed game. Maddeningly buggy, somewhat inferior to its predecessor in terms of story, and somehow less fulfilling (for me at least) as an experience, it is still an excellent game in many areas and worth playing. It is chock-full of shout-outs to the older games in the series, including another appearance from my favorite sidekick in Fallout 2, the intelligent super mutant Marcus who talks about his adventures with the Chosen One in FO2, which gave me a nostalgic joy.
Hopefully Bethesda will get around to patching it soon, because it drives me slowly insane as is.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
”Shhh... we're huntin' schitheadsh.”
Let us begin.
I can honestly say that Fallout: New Vegas is the buggiest, glitchiest, worst-programmed piece of shit that I have ever truly enjoyed playing. New Vegas is a good game in many regards - it's fucking Fallout, okay, as long as we pretend that stupid Brotherhood of Steel game NEVER HAPPENED (and if we overlook Fallout Tactics which, frankly, I loathed - what is it with Brotherhood of Steel games sucking, anyway?) then if it says Fallout on the tin then it's going to have some good things going for it. However, New Vegas feels to me like it's an over-sized DLC for Fallout 3 - and a really damn buggy one at that.
I have avoided Hardcore mode because frankly, keeping track of dehydration, starvation and sleep deprivation (just imagine 3 Dog saying that... ha ha, good times) and having to count my bullets because they each contribute to the aggravating encumbrance system just doesn't sound like fun, it sounds like work. AI companions are buggy idiots at the best of times, and having my AI sidekicks rush to their deaths over and over forcing me to reload would not bring me any joy. In "Casual" mode (I really detest that, but more on that in a later rant) at least Veronica and Rex's suicidal urge to ignore orders and die as quickly as possible only results in their having a little lie down, and recovering after I have finished destroying whatever mean mean monster hurt my friends. It has proved impossible to control my compatriots for four reasons:
1. The "Wait" and "Follow" commands do not mean shit if an enemy is nearby. I don't know how many times my awesome cyborg attack dog (Fallout: It's Good Shit) has decided to ignore my order to wait on the stairs and has instead sprinted past me into the Overseer's office in Vault 34 - only to promptly get knocked the fuck out by the waiting Mk V turrets that fill the doorway with lead. Or how many times I've asked Veronica to wait somewhere, only to discover she has apparently taken herself off Wait status (!!!) and has wandered off to make passionate kung fu to a passing Raider or Feral Ghoul.
2. If that's the "passive" mode, then I can only assume that "aggressive" turns my followers into bulging-veined, pipe-hitting, 'roid-ragin' Red-Target-Syndrome-having mean-murder-machines running all over the place, repeatedly smashing the hydraulic striker of a Power Fist into passing children, kicking dogs over fences, and tearing out the throats of Deathclaws with their teeth - and I don't just mean Rex the dog with that last one. My companions are some bloodthirsty motherfuckers, and they don't know the meaning of restraint. Cassidy, Veronica, Rex and ED-E all basically feel that the Prime Directive can go to hell: if it's red on the radar, it's open fucking season, and to hell with what Courier Six says. In the case of Boone the sniper (my second favorite companion character) he generally limits his psychotic bloodlust to passing Legionnaires, whom he has an excellent reason to murder. Frankly, I never turn down a chance to Ave my right armored caliga up Caesar's ass, myself. But that is a minor exception to a major PITA rule.
3. My compatriots operate under the control of a very badly implemented control wheel. To issue commands, access the inventory or heal my brothers-and-sisters in arms, I have to chase them down and interact with them in the middle of combat. This is both unwieldy and basically worthless in the heat of battle. Mass Effect has a serviceable system for commanding Shepard's squad and for healing them; you can access a control wheel with the touch of a button - which even even allows you to AIM the special abilities of your dudes! - and you can heal the entire squad by simply tapping a single button. Now, every fucking button on the controller does something in FONV; most of them actually do two things, such as tapping X to reload a weapon and holding it to draw/holster it, or tapping B to bring up the Pipboy and holding it to use the screen as a flashlight. Even the usually-ignored Back button on the 360 controller serves the function of using the Wait command which Bethesda imported from the Elder Scroll games. However, I can't say that I see where it would be impossible to include a Companion Control Panel in the Pipboy menus: I bring up my Pipboy all the time in combat to use drugs like Buffout or Med-X or Turbo or Stimpaks, to switch to a non-hot-keyed but suddenly useful weapon (sometimes you don't keep your missile launcher on the hot-key and you suddenly want to shove an anti-armor rocket up someone's nose) or to do an emergency "which-way-did-I-leave-that-choke point-that-I-cleverly-mined-earlier?" check on the (astoundingly useless) minimap. So asking me to bring up the Pipboy so I could issue commands like "Hey retard-o-bot, ignore the bark scorpion and help me kill this asshole over here" or "Veronica, time for your shots, dear, you're full of bullet holes" or "Cassidy for the love of anything, stop throwing dynamite at me!" would not make me cry, I promise you. You can't specify targets for your punch-drunk band of merry murderers to murder, you can't heal them without having to run them down. It's a damned nuisance.
4. The AI coding was based on ninjas. What I am mean is, sometimes my AI compatriots glitch, flip out, and start killing people. More on insane AI goofs in a moment.
Having covered why companions drive me insane, let's talk for a moment about the glitchy AI in FONV.
Civilians will freak out and attack me for no known reason, and sometimes my companions will randomly decide that they have a bone to pick with the NCR. The probable worst offender is the moderately helpful shopkeeper NPC, Old Lady Gibson. OLG sells junk from a scrapyard and can be used to kick start the incredibly random ED-E loyalty quest, “ED-E My Love.” She also has a pack of junkyard dogs who can be used to acquire an exceptional dog brain to repair Rex, which gives him improved attacks, and who will defend her if you bring the pain to the ol' missus. She also wields a rather painfully powerful unique sawn-off shotgun called Big Boomer. However, the thing about OLG is that sometimes, for no discernible reason, she will leave her scrapyard, travel about two miles north to the HELIOS-ONE facility with her entire pack of dogs (I theorize that she actually teleports there) and then immediately aggro on the player character and any NCR nearby. She does this no matter how nice you are to her, no matter if you're Idolized in the town of Novac, friends with the NCR, and have a karmic rating so, well, good that they call you the Symbol of Order. Sometimes you will walk out of the HELIOS-ONE facility and boom, there is OLG and her pack of dogs, locked and cocked and here to bring the noise. This isn't a mere random glitch that happened once: this happens almost regularly, requiring you to reload your quick save from exiting the building if you don't want to put the crazed woman on permanent blast. Why does this happen? No one knows.
Freezing, crashing, corrupting files, and generally failing to run are some of FONV's more aggravating errors. The game will simply lock up while loading, and sometimes it starts back up, sometimes you have to reset the console. Sometimes when it does this, it completely corrupts your last quick save, so you have to remind yourself to save constantly while playing this Fallout, because it might just decide to eat your auto-saves. Walking between any zone - and there are a LOT of zones in FONV - will initiate a rather lengthy loading sequence... and any time there is a load, there is the possibility that it might take (no exaggeration) eight or nine minutes to load or it might just lock the game up entirely. And any time the fucker locks up, there is the chance that FONV might destroy your file. That's just awful, Bethesda.
The anti-gravity glitch is a fun one. I've had this less often than some of my friends online, having only encountered it once, but here's how it went down: I was walking past a three story building in the wasteland outside New Vegas, checking to see if the building could be accessed (there are a HUGE number of structures in the game that look completely intact, and have the doors nailed shut so you can't explore them - boo to that.) when suddenly I was launched four stories into the air! My character hung in midair, maybe sixty feet in the air, as though standing on the ground. I was puzzled and looked around to see exactly where I was situated (I also wanted to see if I could land atop the building, out of curiosity if they bothered to make the roof solid) when suddenly I dropped, my character slamming into the ground, shattering both legs and losing all but 3 hit points. The character only survived because she's tough as goddamn nails; a lower level character would likely have been blasted out of existence by the impact, forcing a reload. Essentially FONV “forgot” where the ground was, like an airplane whose artificial horizon has been tampered with, and decided that I should be standing atop an invisible mountain. When it realized its mistake, or when I stepped off the thin column of anti-gravity, I dropped to Mother Earth's extremely firm bosom. As an isolated incident, it's only noteworthy for its weirdness, but as one more glitch in an incredibly tall pile of glitches, it takes on a more aggravating tone. I've encountered lesser anti-gravity a couple times; I stood on thin air over Lake Mead after phasing through the retaining wall atop Hoover Dam, and I sprinted across a small gulch without falling - so fast even gravity is my bitch! (Actually, my power-armored meleeist is a lumbering, nigh-indestructible humanoid main battle tank, so I didn't so much sprint as stomp determinedly across the gulch to fuck someone's Christmas all up.)
Sometimes area of the game will simply not render, and the game “blacks out” leaving you staring at a blank black screen, not even an insanely long loading screen. The game just crashes out from you trying to enter an area. Take that.
Sometimes quest NPCs will stop talking and stand still, staring off into space, not really reacting to you and refusing to continue dialog or movement. Nothing for it but to reboot. Again.
I could literally stand here all day on my soap box talking about the bizarre glitches and bugs of FONV, but the main point I am making with this is that while a decent game, it is seriously flawed. Bethesda has already announced a DLC for it, due in December, but has made no overt movements towards patching the incredibly lengthy list of bugs I and other wasteland warriors have bumbled into.
From a storytelling perspective, FONV does not move me like Fallout 3 did. A lengthy and admittedly boring chase (okay, not so much a chase as a slow trail-following) for the asshole who shot you in the head is the opening story of FONV. Courier Six awakes to find his/her latest parcel jacked, a friendly wasteland body-doc having hacked fragments of 9mm FMJ out of his/her skull, and apparently stripped to the skivies; you're wearing clothes in the opening movie, then you're in your briefs when you wake up, and Doc Mitchell gives you a Vault jumpsuit as starting gear for no more reason than because Fallout main characters wear Vault jumpsuits. After taking some initial tips on wasteland survival - uh... because Courier Six has no idea what he/she is doing, since the character is hinted to be a veteran Mojave Express courier who has been as far west as Reno and therefore doesn't know how to handle a gun or cook food or repair his own gear... *forehead slap* - from the likable (and neatly-named) Sunny Smiles, the world is your extremely hostile oyster. The Mojave wasteland is a vast and empty sun-bleached place where the wind sighs over the stones, the insects are weirdly tough and the world is hassled by the pushy opportunists of the New California Republic and scared shitless of the slaving, puppy-kicking, mustache-twirling Caesar's Legion. Oh, and there's regular folks out there just trying not to die of radiation poisoning day to day, weird relics of the Pre-War era, the cowering remnants of the once-bulletproof Brotherhood of Steel, and a lot of other things if you know where to look in the rocks. I feel no urgency about my quest, no real desire to pursue the next step. Sure, the guy who dumped nine upside my head is a feminine hygiene product one might use when feeling less than fresh on a summer's eve and the bag it came in, but fuck 'em. I know where he is. He ain't that hard to get to. Sooner or later I will kick the door to his casino in, grab some part of his anatomy that seems hard to live without, pull it off and slap him to death with it. No big deal. Oh, and get my platinum chip back.
In Fallout 3, my quest was personal for me: November, my child prodigy alter-ego in the Capital Wasteland, wanted to know where her father has gone, has been driven from the Vault she has lived all her life in, and in the process, having learned compassion and duty from her father, was inspired to take up “the Good Fight” by a charismatic radio dj and from a renegade chapter of the Brotherhood, took up the mantle of defender of the wasteland. A lost young woman who just wanted to find her father became a product of the wasteland, scarred, hardened and even mutated by her environment but still determined to drive off savage super mutants, defeat vicious raiders, stop the predations of psychotic cannibals, defeat the looming menace of a lingering, malevolent pre-War shadow government, and bring pure drinking water - and with it, vital hope - to the Capital Wasteland. My choices and alliances made my Fallout 3 character a hero.
My FONV characters are also good-aligned, willing to help others where they can and fight off the aforementioned slaving, puppy-kicking, mustache-twirling Caesar's Legion. However, most good deeds I do in FONV just scan as jobs - Courier Six is a mercenary wastelander, trading in expertise with science, lockpicks, explosives and repairs along with being next-in-line-to-Deathclaws in terms of sheer deadliness. I have no real opponent to face off against and be inspired to fight; I'm presented with a series of choices that are usually either obvious "don't be a dick" moments, or else mostly just shades of gray. The problem with shades of gray is that if it's the only color you paint with, your result is uninspiring. I've provided the explosion-happy isolationist Boomers with what may eventually be a functional B-29 bomber which they will happily bomb the shit out of whoever they please with. I don't feel that guilty about it, mostly because I can't really tell if the Boomers were supposed to be "bad guys" or not. The Brotherhood is a one note song of bull-headed stagnation and isolationism, hardly the complex organization one would expect of two hundred plus years of hereditary military service and a mission that seems to have slowly lost its importance and meaning. Yes, the Legion is complicated - at least, when viewed following a single conversation with foul-mouthed, embittered, brawling, hard-drinking caravaner Rose of Shannon Cassidy, who admits that the Legion at least brings order to a chaotic world, but at a cost she is unwilling to accept - but they're no seductive and imposing Enclave with promises of dragging America out of her post-atomic ruin. They're just bloody-handed slave-dealing misogynistic violent assholes who piss me off whenever I see them, and who are rewarding for pissing me off by getting a big hole ripped through their ranks whenever I cut their trail. My mission is a simple one of vengeance, and if it gets more interesting and complicated when I get to New Vegas itself (why is it New Vegas? It's the same fucking town, most of it was apparently spared nuking, not that you can tell, actually) then I haven't really noticed. Mr. House is creepy and aloof, but he's given me no real reason to support him or to oppose him. Maybe the game will show me more as I make my way further into the story, but so far I've had more interest in the side stories than my character's own, from bright-eyed Brotherhood of Steel optimist Veronica to the vengeful Cass (who has lost her livelihood and the lives of her employees to a greedy rival) to the sad story of Boone, a man who just wanted to leave the painful memories of his soldier's life behind, only to lose his wife and unborn son to a treacherous neighbor's greed and now harbors both a vengeful fury towards the Legion and a very honest deathwish. Eventually I'll recruit Arcade Gannon, Raul and whatever other companions are available - because their story is more interesting than mine, and that's a shame.
Mechanically, yes, there's about a hundred things I'd love to add to a Fallout game. A sprint function to allow me to hit a higher top speed temporarily to outrun enemies or flee the area of powerful explosions. Followers with unique attacks like the special VATS commands the player can perform when using unarmed or melee weapons. A Fallout game made for co-op questing of the wastes - not the same game as a single player Fallout because it is my personal theory that the inclusion of multiplayer to a story-driven single-player game is nearly always to the detriment of the single-player experience. A Fallout where you can play ghouls or super mutants or even an intelligent, thinking robot like Armitage from Fallout 3. A Fallout where you can choose your origin, be it Vault-Dweller or Wastelander or whatever. Working vehicles - the wasteland in FONV is dotted with dozens of intact motorcycles, intact airplanes, intact trucks, and enough spare parts to Mad Max a working car. (Don't talk to me about it being unrealistic to get a 200 year abandoned nuclear-powered motorcycle working. I've hacked 4,000,000 two century old computers. Wastelanders regularly eat 200 year old Salisbury steak and the only side effect is that they get a little irradiated.) A Fallout where you can claim one of a handful of locations in the wasteland, fortify it, improve it and create a new town of your own. The games we love most are the ones we constantly come up with new dream features for.
Oh, and as an aside, I hate the radio music in FONV, and Mister New Vegas is nowhere near as cool as Three Dog.
Yes, FONV is an indelibly flawed game. Maddeningly buggy, somewhat inferior to its predecessor in terms of story, and somehow less fulfilling (for me at least) as an experience, it is still an excellent game in many areas and worth playing. It is chock-full of shout-outs to the older games in the series, including another appearance from my favorite sidekick in Fallout 2, the intelligent super mutant Marcus who talks about his adventures with the Chosen One in FO2, which gave me a nostalgic joy.
Hopefully Bethesda will get around to patching it soon, because it drives me slowly insane as is.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
”Shhh... we're huntin' schitheadsh.”