Fallout New Vegas:
2010 brought us many things: WikiLeaks, the FIFA World Cup and an Oil Spill off the Gulf of Mexico are but to name a few. More importantly however, 2010 brought the release of Fallout: New Vegas.
Now for those of you who aren’t aware, Fallout: New Vegas is an action role-playing game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks. It’s also my all time favourite game in the history of time and space its self. So, I guess the real question is, why?
New Vegas is set in the year 2281, four years after that of Fallout 3 and 204 years after the Great War of 2077. As the game opens, your character (The Courier) is seen left for dead and at the mercy of a mobster going by the name of Benny. When you wake up, you find yourself in the office of one Doc Mitchell. It is from this point onward that your adventure into the baron wasteland that is New Vegas begins.
I remember the first time I left the safe haven of Doc Mitchells house, slightly confused and with no view of what I was really meant to do for the next hundred or so hours that I would inevitably end up investing into the game. But it was at that point that I realised that I didn’t need a plan. In the world of New Vegas, there are no rights or wrongs. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t attempt to steer you into a certain direction, take the wrong path out of Goodsprings and you’ll soon be mercilessly corrected by the hive of Cazadors that nest nearby. However, if you are determined and patient enough to sneak, run and crawl past the dangers that lie around the Nevada Wastes, then they quickly open up into a diverse world of colour and beauty. New Vegas’ attention to detail when it comes to the players freedom is where it really thrives, if you wish to complete the entire game without harming a single soul, then that’s entirely possible, utilising skills such as speech, lock pick and sneak will help you to walk, talk and trespass your way to life as saintly courier. In the same sense if you wish for every mortal that graces the ground beneath your feet to perish in a storm of bullets, flames and plasma grenades then the game will grant you this, although I’d stock up on stimpack’s if your thinking about taking on the NCR.
Visually, New Vegas is stunning, from the colourful bright lights of the strip to the pre-post-apocalyptic appearance of Jacobstown it remains a refreshing and exciting upgrade from the endless subway tunnels of Fallout 3. Now this article hasn’t touched into the story or lore involved in the world of Fallout: New Vegas. But, that’s for good reason, New Vegas is a world brimmed with quests and clever characters that allow you to shape the story, and even the outcome of the game into how you want it. So, if the hefty triple A price is putting you off buying Fallout 4 and you haven’t experienced its predecessors before, then pick up a copy of New Vegas first, I promise, it doesn’t disappoint.
justjarhed 