More frustrating are the absences where you know there’s meant to be an actual feature, but it was evidently forgotten or abandoned somewhere along the brief road to getting this game on the shelves.
Almost all of New Vegas simply has a quiet minimalism to it, which is probably for the best since there's a pretty awful bug with Windows 64 bit that dropkicks your framerate if you're standing close to several people at the same time. I took those screenshots from quite far back to get a sense of space, but they're not staged. It's just a disconnect between the scriptwriter and the whoever designs the actual areas.Īnd here’s a bustling casino floor in crazy New Vegas! Look, here's a shot of the incredible NCR sharecropper farms, the “pride” of the state! One of the guards working here told me that they have to keep the place well-defended, just so every wastelander walking past doesn't come in and stuff themselves. It can be hard to tell the difference between a lack of content and an authentically barren wasteland, but sometimes New Vegas is so impressively bold in its laziness that the distinction is clear. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking that a more bleak and empty and therefore a more “realistic” vision of the wasteland would suit you just fine. In my whole time with New Vegas, I found nothing as architecturally entertaining as Megaton, and nothing as eerie or inventive as Little Lamplight. There’s also a slim chance you’ll find nothing at all but a few irradiated creatures, since the game has entire acres of barren scrub and desert that you absolutely would not see in Fallout 3. Whatever direction you walk in New Vegas, you might find something interesting, but it’s much more likely you’ll find something pretty uninteresting, like an empty shack or an NCR army outpost where you'll hear two different potato-faced soldiers voiced by two different actors say the same line of dialogue about the Mojave being hot. Whatever direction you walked in Fallout 3, you felt confident you’d find something interesting. Then you had the independant towns, which were all built in or around visually striking setpieces, and Bethesda even built a labyrinth out of the subway system. It was populated by kooky, occasionally even cartoonish characters- it’s no accident that super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel featured so prominently. So, Bethesda went to great lengths to infuse their D.C.
I mean, you think wasteland, you think deserts, charred ruins and grumpy survivors wearing faded, drab clothes.
There is a heaving mass of character perks, just waiting to be unlocked as you progress through the game’s wide array of quests.īut something Bethesda were very aware of when they turned Fallout into a first-person game is that the wasteland is potentially quite a boring setting for the player to be set free in. There are four and a half shitloads of different weapons. There are (shh!) secrets to stumble across.
From the moment your character (a professional courier who gets attacked and left for dead in the intro movie) wakes up in a backwater town, you’re introduced to a sprawling wasteland even bigger than that of Fallout 3. Now, if it’s purely size you care about, New Vegas has you covered. I’m talking long distance, reversed charges, not-giving-a-fuck. It is the sound of Obsidian phoning this game in. Quieter than the cheery 1930s pop hits that warble from your radio, quieter even than the chirps of night-time insects, or the long gasps of wind blowing across the wasteland.
There’s a distant sound that can be heard throughout your time with New Vegas. But I see you there, perched atop that blasted rock, canteen in hand, waiting for the official RPS review. Obsidian’s pseudo-sequel to Bethesda’s Fallout 3 hits the UK tomorrow, arriving amid a raft of positive reviews.