First Impressions: Fallout: New Vegas

Those are my first impressions on Fallout: New Vegas, three hours into the game... at which point my Xbox 360 controller's batteries died.

I guess it would be a bit simplistic to say that New Vegas is just more Fallout 3, but it kinda is. The game looks the same, sounds the same, plays mostly the same and I enjoy it about the same. It's both a good and a bad thing. Good because because I really enjoyed Fallout 3, but bad because that was two years ago. How come the issues that were plaguing the game two years ago are back?

Not that there is anything wrong with using old resources. Majora's Mask is mainly reused models from Ocarina of Time, but it's one of my favorite Zelda game ever. What made it work was the clever way they made the old stuff fell new. They used them in different ways and in different situations. They changed the overall style and feel of the game. New Vegas hasn't really done that yet for me. Sure, everything looks more orange, dusty and westerny, but it just feels like more capital wasteland and not its own place. Maybe that will change once I explore more and get to the strip. The other things that didn't change and should have are the glitches. I was lucky enough not to get into anything too crazy, like the spinning head doctor or the game files erase issue, but I still saw a gecko stuck in a wall, and one who had the mysterious qualities of a ghost -- couldn't hurt him and he couldn't hurt me BUT THERE HE WAS! The animations are still weird... two years after the facts. It has been said before and will be said again but Bethesda needs to get out a new engine, this one is starting to show its age. Oh and the hardcore mode is incredibly useless. Those bars never seems to go up.

On the good side, I mainly noticed two things in my short time playing. They added an interesting crafting system and the writing is way better. Not that the last point had a very high bar to go over but we'll take what we can get. The crafting system is a nice addition, even when I presume you can get through the game without ever touching it once. It will certainly fits a few players (like mine) play-style. It is all about collecting whatever you can find, get to a crafting apparatus, and see what you can make. It is certainly better than Fallout 3's handful of craftable items. I didn't get to experience much of the writing in my three hours, but what I got so far is atleast better than the first few hours of Fallout 3. I just had my first plot twist and boy does it already makes the game more intriguing than Fallout 3's convulsed plot about radioactive water, wild goose chase for a missing dad we don't even care about, and totally dumb use of a good GECK.

So yeah, if I am lucky enough not to run into any frustrating glitches, I think I will have a good time with this game, at least as much as I did with Fallout 3, despite all its flaws in term of writing and technicalities. Looks like Obsidian took care of one problem... and totally ignored the others. War never changes, and neither does dated engines I guess.

Beating the game

I found myself reading a few posts on the Fallout 3 gamefaqs board(that place is pretty horrible) and I was shocked when I discovered a trend in the messages. Everyone seems hell-bent on finding ways to do every quests in the game and not interfere with others in order to get everything in some kind of first round. They ask "did I just fucked up that quest", "will it affect this other quest", "how can I do both and get all rewards", "is it a bug?", etc, etc... . It is as they forgot that, like in real life, some choices needs to be made and opportunities are going to be missed.

But beyond the thematic of the game, I fear that these "over acheiving gamers" are just missing the fun of the game. Instead of enjoying the story the game provides or the stories the players can make for themsleves, they just go from quest to quest, get as much rewards they can, skip unuseful texts, complete the game, get the acheivments if they play on XBox 360 and get to the next. I sadly feels it is more of a symptom of consumerism than anything. I'm not saying they are not having fun. They probably are having fun getting 100% game completion. My problem is that I feel they are missing on other levels of the video games. They miss on the narrative level because for them "story gets in the way of gaming". For them, it's only a game that needs to be beaten, consummed, before getting to the next and repeat the cycle.

Richard Bartle distinguished four types of gamers : killers, acheivers, socializers and explorers. Of course, Bartle was seeing this through the lens of virtual world making the socializer and the killer types a little useless when talking about single player games. Sadly, there's no definitive list of gamer types and it's something I'm sure future gaming theoretician are going to explore. But for now, we see there's a clear opposition between acheivers and explorers. The first wants to get everything out of the game and collect every rewards the game can give, and the second wants to see every little details of the game world and immerse himslef in the fictional universe the game provides.

In the end, it seems like the best thing a game can do if it's goal is to get the widest range of gamer type as possible is to give something interresting to do and choices to make them that will please the most type possible. Games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion did just that. they gave something for both acheivers and explorers. It's important to remember that there is no "better" type of gamers. Altough I might feel like acheivers are missing on the narrative of the game, they can play however they want. I feel like this because I am not an acheiver like them. I am an explorer. In those type of games, I prefer to take my time, get myself involve in the story and universe provided to me, explore large worlds, even if it means I am missing some quests and not getting every rewards I could get. The important is to enjoy a game, no matter what you enjoy in it.