Canard PC Fallout: New Vegas preview

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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Always a local favourite, the French gaming mag Canard PC has previewed Fallout: New Vegas. Thrud sent in a summary of the preview:

<center></center><blockquote>It's a five page-long hands-on and is focused on the Repcon quest.

The later is given by Boone : you have to clear the Repcon Site from all these ghouls. The quest seems relatively bad written at first sight : just come and obliterate all the ghouls.

Once arrived in Repcon, the player is surprisingly welcomed by a human, the scientists of a ghoul hubologist-like cult. Their goal is to find "another plan of existence" while flying in space. First odd thing : the scientist deeply believes that he's a ghoul.

He asked you to get rid of "invisible monsters" living in the basements. These are a group of NightKins. The journalist's character was pretty weak in combat (Strengh 3, low Gun skill). Moreover, he played on harcore mode, and the combats were rather tough. He was killed quickly by the leader of the Mutants. Then, he tried another way to deal with them : he sneaked and managed to reach their leader... who was friendly ! You could talk to him. The NightKin leader was quite insane : he talked to a buffalo skull which he workshipped as a god. Thanks to his high speech skill, the journalist managed to find a compromise : these Stealth-Boy addicted Nightkin believe the a pre-war shipment of their precious drug was to be find in the higher levels of the site.

The only problem is that the shipment is guarded by a ghoul sniper... who was friendly as well ! He would give info to the player if the later accepted to find a lady ghoul (he wanted to have sex with her... urgh !) who was trapped in the basement when the NightKin came. With little investigation, it came out that the poor lady ghoul was lying dead in a basement's room, attached by the NightKin.

Thus, the ghoul sniper revealed that the Stealth Boy shipment never arrived in Repcon. When the NightKin leader knew about it, he got mad, but the high speech skill of the player managed to avoid the confrotnation. Finaly, the NightKin left the base. The cultist's human scientist congratulate the player about the news, but another issue appeared : the ghouls wanted the player to convice the human scientist that as a human, he could not survive in space.

Whan the player told the scientist that he was a human, the latter did not believe him. The lie was so anchored in his insane brain that the player had to give him an evidence. Which was in that case, his non-resistance to deadly radiations (the site is filed of those). The truth was unavoidable, and the scientist got even more crazy : in order to revenge, he wanted to fail the take-off and kill all the ghouls. Through a long an intense conversation, the player managed to calm down the scientist and save the ghouls.

Other tidbits : the journalist managed to solve the Primm Quest by disguising as one of the convicts.
Vault 69 is confirmed, and is filled with armed amazons-like.

Journalist's impressions

One important note : he's an absolute fan of the first two episodes, but hated the third one (gave it an overall mark of 4/10 if my memories are correct). Then, his point of view differs from the regular video game press, what is rather interesting.

While he played the four hour-long demo, he first believed and feared that New Vegas would be another copy of Fallout 3. Nevertheless, the more he played the game, the better it get. According to him, the game is very deep : the quests are well-written (better than FO1&2's !), the characters and dialogues are pretty good, and so is the music. The Repcon Quest was deep and complicated and could be solved in numerous ways. For instance, you could manage to set every group (cultists/Nightkin/ghoul sniper) against each other and end up in a general fight.

His conclusions are rather excellent : he's extremelly enthousiastic and impressed by the game. </blockquote>Note that while the previewer talks about Vault 69 being in, he likely got confused with Van Buren or is just wrong, as Jason Bergman notes.<blockquote>Hey guys: Vault 69 is not in Fallout: New Vegas.

Sorry! That article was probably just mentioning something about Van Buren. </blockquote>
 
Yeah, I knew they were ghoul cultists, no surprise there. Cool preview, hopefully we can get some scans, and perhaps more tidbits.
 
Brother None said:
One important note : he's an absolute fan of the first two episodes, but hated the third one (gave it an overall mark of 4/10 if my memories are correct). Then, his point of view differs from the regular video game press, what is rather interesting.

While he played the four hour-long demo, he first believed and feared that New Vegas would be another copy of Fallout 3. Nevertheless, the more he played the game, the better it get. According to him, the game is very deep : the quests are well-written (better than FO1&2's !), the characters and dialogues are pretty good, and so is the music.

[snip]

His conclusions are rather excellent : he's extremelly enthousiastic and impressed by the game.
This gave me hope. I'm trying to resist the pre-release hype, but FO:NV just sounds better and better...

Thanks, BN.
 
Don't thank me, thank Thrud.

For those with short memories, Canard PC have had good contact with NMA before, weren't the biggest fans of Fallout 3 in previews (don't recall their review but apparently it was negative), and refused to publish a "review" of Fallout 3 because of the circumstances they were playing under (in a hotel room with a dev looking over their shoulder), instead publishing a fairly vituperant almost-review.
 
You may ask CanardPC to scan the preview.
The redactor allowed it for the precedent New Vegas preview.
 
Sounds like CanardPC like to keep their feet on the ground when reviewing titles shrouded in hype. Good. That's very good.

And yeah, thanks Thrud for the summary ;)
 
Maybe they should consider starting an international (in English) edition. A gaming mag unafraid to scrutinize mainstream titles may have an audience outside France.
 
DexterMorgan said:
Maybe they should consider starting an international (in English) edition. A gaming mag unafraid to scrutinize mainstream titles may have an audience outside France.

They are independant. They don't have the strength for an international edition I think.
 
DexterMorgan said:
Hm, I dunno, online only with subscription for starters?

I think you can. When I was in Canada, I imported an issue.
But it's only in French, obviously.
 
Damn, i was preparing a very big piece of article with numerous threads from CanardPC and some other from PCJEUX (another french magazine).

Especially on this article from CanardPC, there are several quotes that are much more interesting than what's quoted here :

(After solving Repconn quest)

"While the rockets went up to heaven, I pursued my way to New Vegas thinking of the depth of this quest. I came here to hunt a bunch of bugs and pests and I found one thousand leaf (NB: french cake) plots, characters and plot twists more interesting than the main quest in Fallout (NB: the first). A real pool based solely on the ability to not rely on first impressions. Moreover, if I chose to play the white knight, I had seen that each dialogue, I had the opportunity to turn things into sour sauce and pushing everyone against each other. I now almost certain to be in front of a true Fallout. And I found it hard not to see the relationship with the Ghost Farm questline near Modoc in Fallout 2: A quest seemingly obvious, pointing to an ideal bad guy that gradually became more complex. Brilliantly written and spoken, all decisions never Manichaean, smart twists and never ridiculous ..."

More coming.. Sorry for bad english, i've just translate it at my job's office during the past 15 minutes

I'm still transcripting/translating a lot more, so stay tuned :D
 
Just like Hawk_Eye said, the whole article is much more interesting than my summary. Unfortunately, it's pretty long (5 pages of text) and too well-written for me to translate. Thanksfully, Hawk_Eye is less lazy than me ! (belle traduction d'ailleurs !)

There are a few screenshots (Benny and a NightKin) but the pics are a too small to be interesting.
 
HawK-EyE said:
Damn, i was preparing a very big piece of article with numerous threads from CanardPC and some other from PCJEUX (another french magazine).

Sorry for beating you to the punch, wasn't aware you were working on it.

We'll edit in your stuff over the current post (hope Thrud doesn't mind) when you're done, aight?
 
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