Fallout New Vegas

This pains me to write but Fallout New Vegas is a broken game. I can say that with authority because I played this game for easily 50 hours (according to my wife it was considerably more time). I know what you are thinking, “why in the world would anyone play a broken game for more than 50 hours?” The answer to that question is complicated so I’ll do my best to explain.

My desire to push forward with New Vegas stems from my love of Fallout 3. I picked that game up and instantly fell in love with the story, action, and inventory system. The phrase “you are over encumbered and cannot run” meant it was time to slow down the breakneck pace of the game and figure out which items to combine, use, or toss. It sounds mundane, I know, but it was seriously fun for some odd reason. Action was intense, almost any weapon ever imagined was available for use to kill mutated insects, feral animals, and other crazy creatures you’d come across in the irradiated waste of post nuclear war USA. The story was pitch perfect, you play as a naive young man looking for his father in the remnants of the nations capital.

Fallout New Vegas had the action and the inventory system but the story was convoluted to say the least. You play as a courier who was left for dead then basically raised from it. You then go into the wastes of Nevada and meet all the groups vying for power. They all want you to work towards their goals to feed their ambitions for the area. It is a really neat setup for a game but I could not help but feel as though my choices were ultimately forced upon me and the openness promised was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

There is a a karma system in the game which tells you whether or not your actions are good or evil. If I was attacked by a group, meaning they shot first, and I managed to survive I would receive bad karma not for killing people but from stealing by stealing their possessions after they died. I found that to be an odd moral code. But if that was my only problem I’d soon get over it. Non-playable-character’s (NPC’s) want your head on a stick if you shoot another NPC in front of them which makes sense, however, they also attempt to kill you if you take a soda out of their fridge. What’s worse, if you fight back and kill them after they’ve attacked you for being a mooch you’ll get back karma for the soda and the NPC deaths on your hands.

However, it was not until I came across a character known as E-DE that I realized New Vegas was not held to same quality control standards as Fallout 3 (which admittedly had problems of its own). I loved E-DE. It was a flying robot which brought death from above to all who dared to attack me. It was encoded with a message from the Enclave that I was attempting to piece together when it disappeared. I don’t mean wandered off and forgot to come back, I mean literally disappeared from the game. The robot showed up on my map, at the Boomer Base, but everywhere I wandered it would elude me.

I spent hours searching for that bot until I finally broke down and consulted an online guide. On message boards I found out that E-DE was not gone because of something I did, but rather this was a frequent glitch with the game. The only suggested remedy was going back to a previous save. Sadly I did not have a previous save, because in my search I did various other tasks to break the boredom and I lost E-DE permanently. Since E-DE was technically in my party, meaning I still had the perks of its company, I was unable to recruit another character to my cause.

Once E-DE was gone, the bloom was off the rose. The game crashed almost hourly with no rhyme or reason. This would hamper my progress significantly and put me in a catch 22. I could save often and possibly add another bug to my play through or not save until I know everything was kosher but risk a freeze and lose all progress. On other occasions, I would complete a task only it would still be active on my Pipboy and characters would act as if we were right in the middle of action that was not happening. It got so bad that I began to assume things that were actually supposed to happen in game were glitches.

For example, the NCR kept attacking me even though I did nothing aggressive to them and I reset the game half a dozen times trying to get it to work right. It turned out that I was wearing armor of a faction that they were at war with and that is why I was accosted, which is actually a really neat game mechanic. Unfortunately, because of my continued frustrations with this game I thought, “this game is so busted” and tried an external remedy.

The next paragraph contains spoilers about events near the end of the game. Skip if you are sensitive to such things!

Currently I am at Hoover Dam about to go the independent route to victory. I spent the entire game courting the NCR and even got them to begrudgingly spare the Brotherhood of Steel. Yet for reason, which I cannot explain, the mission to save President Kimball ended without ending. The characters froze in time and no amount of resetting could bring them to the present. Being unable to finish that mission meant I had to beat the game with help from Yes Man, whom I dislike passionately. Once the NCR started shooting at me for following Yes Man’s directions I powered my Playstation down and started writing down my thoughts as a way to release my frustrations with this unfinished game.

Fallout New Vegas could have been spectacular, unfortunately in my experience it is mostly just a broken game.