Lots of new previews out there. Kotaku expands on its earlier notes.<blockquote>Like the town of Primm, which sits near the California-Nevada border. It's notable for having a big roller coaster, which makes an appearance in the game. Instead of an amusement park ride, however, it served as a platform for a vicious gun battle. Obsidian showed off more of Fallout: New Vegas' arsenal, including the Caravan Gun—a double barrel shotgun—and a grenade launcher, which Obsidian described as "a hoot" to use.
From Primm, we traveled to Novac, home to Dinky the Dinosaur, the local gift shop and defensive stronghold. From Dinky's mouth, we got a far-reaching view of New Vegas' landscape, including the home to the Caesar's Legion faction. Caesar's Legion a slaving organization, Obsidian says, is one half of the game's central conflict, with the New California Republic representing the other half.</blockquote>Joystiq.<blockquote>One of the most significant new gameplay mechanics in Fallout: New Vegas comes in the form of the companion wheel, which is designed for easy access to Companion Commands, including access to companion inventories and behavioral orders. If you want your companions to attack everything in sight, you can set them to be aggro. Or, on the flip side, you can have them be very docile.
From what I saw, this new radial menu system is a very easy to navigate and is much neater and quicker to access than the companion system in Fallout 3. In fact, the companions themselves will talk to you now and tell you if you've done something stupid, like arming a gun expert with a melee weapon. Companions also offer benefits to you in the form of perks, so you'll want to choose carefully when picking a buddy to go exploring with you.</blockquote>1up.<blockquote>New Vegas project director Josh Sawyer points out that it builds, expands, and sometimes inverts on the mechanics and expectations that Fallout 3 established. He starts with the inversion, by noting that where Fallout 3 begins with a birth and a childhood within a secure Vault, New Vegas begins with a bullet in the head and a burial in the desert. The basic premise is that the player is a courier that is targeted for his cargo and left for dead -- a "TV robot" named Victor digs you up and hauls you over to the nearby (and very "Olde West" in style) town of Goodsprings. There, your revival and convalescence at Doc Mitchell's house provide a shorter and tighter version of the Fallout 3 tutorial. Here is where you quickly use a machine to determine your SPECIAL stats (the core statistics that make up your character); here is where Doc Mitchell uses Rorschach Inkblot Tests and Word Association (one particular awesome pairing: being prompted with "Mother" and answering that with "Human Shield") to determine which skills to focus on. At this point, where Fallout 3 was the personal quest to find your abandoning father, New Vegas gives you the more immediately pressing "find out who shot you and why" quest. </blockquote>Eurogamer.<blockquote>Appropriate to its location, New Vegas has a Wild West, frontiersman feel. Dust devils cross your path, an old prospector called Easy Pete rocks his chair on a porch, and Trudy, the down-home saloon-owner, wants help against the bounty hunter Joe Cobb and his gang who are holding the town to ransom. This is all after you go hunting for Geckos (one of many references to Fallout 2 Obsidian is folding into the game) to learn, or re-learn, your way around the real-time, first-person combat with optional tactical pauses via VATS.
The carefully-crafted prologue ensures there's a low-level weapon for every weapon skill in the area, and conversational options for all the possible powers of persuasion in the mission to defeat (or, of course, side with) Cobb's gang. It introduces you to the new special abilities unlocked with every melee weapon in the game - a nine-iron golf club comes with a destructive blow called "Fore!" - and New Vegas' biggest new element, a reputation system.
A new entry in the Pip-Boy gives you a perk for a particular location or faction if your reputation with a faction changes. Defeat Cobb and you earn "Accepted" with Good Springs - "folks have come to accept you for your helpful nature". Ultimately, this system plays into the game's principal narrative struggle between the New Californian Republic (NCR) militia, based at McCarran, and a group of slavers called Caesar's legion. If you know Vegas, you can probably guess where you'll find their HQ. Whichever you side with, the other will be your principal enemy in the game.</blockquote>G4TV.<blockquote>We only saw the dialogue checks several times during the demo, but it appears that in certain situations, barter (and possibly other passive skills) can be used in a similar capacity to speech and you can rely on the skill you have higher points in when another doesn’t cut it. Interestingly, the game will also show how many points you have in a specific skill area versus what you need to pass the check in the dialogue tree. Seems like it will make the game less punishing for those who don’t pump points into their speech skill (fools!).</blockquote>GameSpot.<blockquote>Using a varmint rifle, we watched several overgrown geckos' heads explode with a few quick shots. There's a kill cam that can be set, which slows down the final shot and makes your kills feel more cinematic, but this can be turned off if you don't like seeing limbs fly in slow motion. Sawyer said that geckos were a favorite from Fallout 2 and that there will be tougher versions to fire at later in the game. The core controls, as well as the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), remains mostly the same, and we later found out that special skill options have been added for melee attacks. Sawyer explained that there wasn't a lot of development time for New Vegas, and because a lot of people played Fallout 3, the developers didn't want to make any drastic changes--just improvements to the existing controls. He also said that aiming should be more responsive, reactive, and predictable. To discourage players from always aiming for the head, certain weapons will be more effective against limbs. At times, a red shield icon will appear to let you know that you're dealing less damage per shot and that it might be a good idea to switch targets to conserve precious bullets. </blockquote>Gameinformer shares some notes as a teaser to a preview/interview in an upcoming issue of the magazine.<blockquote>“We’ve introduced a new dialog perk called terrifying presence,” says Sawyer. “It allows you to, when someone basically confronts you, instead of talking your way out of a fight you terrorize the person who’s threatening you to the point where they all run. It initiates combat, but they all run for the hills. Some guy comes up to you and says, ‘Man, you just screwed with the wrong guy,’ and you’re like, ‘I’m going to f---ing cut your head off and wear it as a hat,’ and they’re like, ‘Holy s---!’ and he freaks out and as soon as it ends he and all of his crew just run. It gives you about five seconds where they’re just running in terror from you so you can just go off on them. But it’s just one of those things where every once in a while it just comes up in conversation and you can just lay it down.”</blockquote>
From Primm, we traveled to Novac, home to Dinky the Dinosaur, the local gift shop and defensive stronghold. From Dinky's mouth, we got a far-reaching view of New Vegas' landscape, including the home to the Caesar's Legion faction. Caesar's Legion a slaving organization, Obsidian says, is one half of the game's central conflict, with the New California Republic representing the other half.</blockquote>Joystiq.<blockquote>One of the most significant new gameplay mechanics in Fallout: New Vegas comes in the form of the companion wheel, which is designed for easy access to Companion Commands, including access to companion inventories and behavioral orders. If you want your companions to attack everything in sight, you can set them to be aggro. Or, on the flip side, you can have them be very docile.
From what I saw, this new radial menu system is a very easy to navigate and is much neater and quicker to access than the companion system in Fallout 3. In fact, the companions themselves will talk to you now and tell you if you've done something stupid, like arming a gun expert with a melee weapon. Companions also offer benefits to you in the form of perks, so you'll want to choose carefully when picking a buddy to go exploring with you.</blockquote>1up.<blockquote>New Vegas project director Josh Sawyer points out that it builds, expands, and sometimes inverts on the mechanics and expectations that Fallout 3 established. He starts with the inversion, by noting that where Fallout 3 begins with a birth and a childhood within a secure Vault, New Vegas begins with a bullet in the head and a burial in the desert. The basic premise is that the player is a courier that is targeted for his cargo and left for dead -- a "TV robot" named Victor digs you up and hauls you over to the nearby (and very "Olde West" in style) town of Goodsprings. There, your revival and convalescence at Doc Mitchell's house provide a shorter and tighter version of the Fallout 3 tutorial. Here is where you quickly use a machine to determine your SPECIAL stats (the core statistics that make up your character); here is where Doc Mitchell uses Rorschach Inkblot Tests and Word Association (one particular awesome pairing: being prompted with "Mother" and answering that with "Human Shield") to determine which skills to focus on. At this point, where Fallout 3 was the personal quest to find your abandoning father, New Vegas gives you the more immediately pressing "find out who shot you and why" quest. </blockquote>Eurogamer.<blockquote>Appropriate to its location, New Vegas has a Wild West, frontiersman feel. Dust devils cross your path, an old prospector called Easy Pete rocks his chair on a porch, and Trudy, the down-home saloon-owner, wants help against the bounty hunter Joe Cobb and his gang who are holding the town to ransom. This is all after you go hunting for Geckos (one of many references to Fallout 2 Obsidian is folding into the game) to learn, or re-learn, your way around the real-time, first-person combat with optional tactical pauses via VATS.
The carefully-crafted prologue ensures there's a low-level weapon for every weapon skill in the area, and conversational options for all the possible powers of persuasion in the mission to defeat (or, of course, side with) Cobb's gang. It introduces you to the new special abilities unlocked with every melee weapon in the game - a nine-iron golf club comes with a destructive blow called "Fore!" - and New Vegas' biggest new element, a reputation system.
A new entry in the Pip-Boy gives you a perk for a particular location or faction if your reputation with a faction changes. Defeat Cobb and you earn "Accepted" with Good Springs - "folks have come to accept you for your helpful nature". Ultimately, this system plays into the game's principal narrative struggle between the New Californian Republic (NCR) militia, based at McCarran, and a group of slavers called Caesar's legion. If you know Vegas, you can probably guess where you'll find their HQ. Whichever you side with, the other will be your principal enemy in the game.</blockquote>G4TV.<blockquote>We only saw the dialogue checks several times during the demo, but it appears that in certain situations, barter (and possibly other passive skills) can be used in a similar capacity to speech and you can rely on the skill you have higher points in when another doesn’t cut it. Interestingly, the game will also show how many points you have in a specific skill area versus what you need to pass the check in the dialogue tree. Seems like it will make the game less punishing for those who don’t pump points into their speech skill (fools!).</blockquote>GameSpot.<blockquote>Using a varmint rifle, we watched several overgrown geckos' heads explode with a few quick shots. There's a kill cam that can be set, which slows down the final shot and makes your kills feel more cinematic, but this can be turned off if you don't like seeing limbs fly in slow motion. Sawyer said that geckos were a favorite from Fallout 2 and that there will be tougher versions to fire at later in the game. The core controls, as well as the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), remains mostly the same, and we later found out that special skill options have been added for melee attacks. Sawyer explained that there wasn't a lot of development time for New Vegas, and because a lot of people played Fallout 3, the developers didn't want to make any drastic changes--just improvements to the existing controls. He also said that aiming should be more responsive, reactive, and predictable. To discourage players from always aiming for the head, certain weapons will be more effective against limbs. At times, a red shield icon will appear to let you know that you're dealing less damage per shot and that it might be a good idea to switch targets to conserve precious bullets. </blockquote>Gameinformer shares some notes as a teaser to a preview/interview in an upcoming issue of the magazine.<blockquote>“We’ve introduced a new dialog perk called terrifying presence,” says Sawyer. “It allows you to, when someone basically confronts you, instead of talking your way out of a fight you terrorize the person who’s threatening you to the point where they all run. It initiates combat, but they all run for the hills. Some guy comes up to you and says, ‘Man, you just screwed with the wrong guy,’ and you’re like, ‘I’m going to f---ing cut your head off and wear it as a hat,’ and they’re like, ‘Holy s---!’ and he freaks out and as soon as it ends he and all of his crew just run. It gives you about five seconds where they’re just running in terror from you so you can just go off on them. But it’s just one of those things where every once in a while it just comes up in conversation and you can just lay it down.”</blockquote>
