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On quests and role-playing
As you probably know, you were delivering a package, but instead of the payment, got a bullet in your head and a comment that the game was rigged from the start.
You wake up in Goodsprings, a small Wild West-looking and -talking settlement. A local doc patches you up and sets you on your way. Fortunately (once again), you are not concerned with missing relatives past their prime. You want to know why you got shot and who did it. That’s a pretty good and very promising beginning. Such things are subjective, of course, but I prefer stories that revolve around you and your problems, not the world’s. The main quest will lead you to the aforementioned Strip and into the impending scrap between the three main factions.
<table align="left" width="305px" bgcolor="#333333" border="1"><tr><td><center>
</center></tr></td></table>As mentioned before, it’s a huge game that dwarfs Fallout 3. Naturally, when it comes to 160+ quests, your mileage will vary and IF you insist on doing all of them, you’ll spend a lot of time delivering all kinda shit, from radio codes to love letters. However, the majority of quests are very well designed (probably reflecting the amount of time Avellone and Sawyer spent on Black Isle’s VATS-free Fallout 3 which, sadly, didn’t get to see the light of day) and will offer you a truckload of different options at every step. It’s a superb implementation of the “do whatever the hell you want” approach. In Bethesda games it means you can travel east or you can travel west. In New Vegas it means that you’re always given a choice and can shape both your own story and the future of the Mojave any way you want.
Let me illustrate it with the first few quests:
Goodsprings, the “starting” town, had offered refuge to Ringo, a Crimson Caravans’ trader who survived an attack by Powder Gangers, a gang of convicts who broke out of the NCR prison. The convicts have tracked him down and want the town to hand him over.
You can side with the gang and kill Ringo for them. You can even talk them into raiding the town (they aren’t interested at first, because the town is poor and there isn’t much to take). I got this quest when I had already done a few jobs for the Gangers and I was planning to continue, so siding with them was fairly tempting. Alternatively, you can protect Ringo and convince the townsfolk to stand up to the convicts. It would be better if failing the skill checks and fighting the convicts without the town’s support was actually an almost impossible fight, but the low difficulty rears its ugly console-shaped head once again.
Siding with the convicts destroys the town and gives you an appropriate ending – “Travelers continued to stop by Goodsprings Source for water on the Long 15, but rarely would anyone venture into the ruins of Goodsprings itself.” Siding with Ringo and the townsfolk isn’t enough to save the town. Various actions throughout the game will determine which of the four other endings you get for Goodsprings.
The endings deserve a special mention. There are a LOT of them. Most locations and factions get 4-9 different endings that are determined by a mix of the outcomes from several key quests involving them. This is a huge step up from Fallout 3 where the individual locations were ignored and you were treated with a handy summary of your heroic adventures:
“But it was not until the end of this long road that the Lone Wanderer learned the true meaning of that greatest of virtues – sacrifice. Stepping into the irradiated control chamber of Project Purity, the child followed the example of the [middle-aged] father sacrificing life itself for the greater good of mankind.”
Anyway, next stop – Primm. It’s your first step on your way to find out what the hell you were delivering when you were ambushed and almost killed. It’s a town taken over by more convicts, although unfriendly from the start and not associated with the Gangers. The NCR is waiting outside to see what develops because they don’t have enough manpower. Since, you, on the other hand, have more than enough manpower, courtesy of the jarring discord between the realistically designed situations and a consoletard-friendly difficulty level, you just casually stroll in, armed with extreme prejudice and a burning desire to loot some corpses, and liberate the town.
Then things got interesting. In the best western traditions, the town needs a lawman. Your choices are:
- a former sheriff who's currently spending quality time at the detention facility.
- the NCR
- a robot who could be reprogrammed to enforce the laws
The ex-sheriff was jailed for "speeding up the justice one too many times." He hasn't learned any lessons so if he comes back he doesn't want to "waste time on due processes". Good man! Sorta. Whether or not he’s a good choice for Primm, depends not only on what you think about “due processes”, but on how a guy like him would fit into the future of the Mojave. Let’s say you side with the Legion. They aren’t exactly the “due processes” types either, but their vision of the frontier justice is very different:
“Hot-headed to the end, Sheriff Meyers choose to oppose Caesar's takeover of Primm with a standoff. Though the citizens take out a few Legionaries, the town quickly falls to Caesar, its citizens utterly wiped out.”
Quests often involve different factions, so working for one faction usually means acting against another faction. Quests are also interconnected and one quest can often lead to another. For example:
The Gangers are concerned about the NCR presence in the area and wants you to talk to the locals and see if they know anything about the NCR plans. Passing a check tells you that they do plan to attack. Now you can go back to the convicts’ leader and help him defend the facility, or you can go to the NCR and offer your services.
What's interesting is that if you side with the NCR and help them take over the detention facility, the ex-sheriff will refuse the job offer because he doesn’t welcome the NCR’s involvement in the local affairs. This kind of interactivity and quest options opening up or closing up because of something you did in other quests is very refreshing.
Considering that what you do is bound to affect NPCs and factions (you’ll end up acting against them directly or indirectly, which is the best way to handle faction gameplay), you'd definitely have to play the game at least twice to see the mutually-exclusive paths and aspects. When it comes to the main quest, the game is definitely more replayable than any of the previous titles.
You get options for pretty much anything, ranging from choosing an outcome to choosing how you’re going to achieve that outcome. For example, if you get involved into the Van Graffs (energy weapons’ dealers competing with Gun Runners), at some point they will ask you to either kill Cassidy (the daughter of Fallout 2’s Cassidy and one of the casualties of the caravan wars) or bring her in to be killed. You may decide that you’d rather keep her alive and trigger a rather difficult fight via a dialogue or you may talk to Cassidy and pursue a different quest branch revolving around figuring out why Van Graffs want her dead, in which case once again you get two different options.
Overall, the game is best played not as a sandbox where you explore the world without caring much about the main quest, but as a more traditional RPG where you explore the main quest, which, depending on your choices, will send you to a variety of locations. Shorter games where you wrap things up around lvl 20 are definitely recommended.
And in conclusion
<table align="right" width="305px" bgcolor="#333333" border="1"><tr><td><center>
</center></tr></td></table>New Vegas is a huge game. I can probably write another 6 pages examining New Vegas’s various aspects, but I’d rather play the game some more. Like any other game, it’s far from being perfect and has many flaws. If you share my opinion that quest design is the most important aspect of an RPG, then you’ll like New Vegas a lot. If you think that RPGs are all about character system and/or combat, your opinion will depend not so much on New Vegas, but on whether or not you liked Fallout 3.
I think it’s an excellent RPG and when it comes to shaping your story and making decisions, instead of following a pre-determined path, New Vegas can easily compete with the original games and is definitely top 10 material. If the combat was more challenging, and surviving in the wasteland wasn’t so disappointingly easy, the game could actually have competed for the #1 spot.
New Vegas does have a few technical issues and may require you to tweak the ini files. If having to copy-paste a few lines and updating your drivers fill you with murderous rage, then I’d suggest waiting for a patch.
For the record, I played it on my 5+ year old computer:
Pentium D processor 930, Dual Core, 3GHz, 800FSB
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM, 533MHz
nVidia GeForce GTS 250. 1GB
* * *
Special thanks to Andy (one of the Codex’ old guard) for his help with the review.
<center>[ Page 1 ] - [ Page 2 ] - [ Page 3 ]</center>
On quests and role-playing
As you probably know, you were delivering a package, but instead of the payment, got a bullet in your head and a comment that the game was rigged from the start.
You wake up in Goodsprings, a small Wild West-looking and -talking settlement. A local doc patches you up and sets you on your way. Fortunately (once again), you are not concerned with missing relatives past their prime. You want to know why you got shot and who did it. That’s a pretty good and very promising beginning. Such things are subjective, of course, but I prefer stories that revolve around you and your problems, not the world’s. The main quest will lead you to the aforementioned Strip and into the impending scrap between the three main factions.
<table align="left" width="305px" bgcolor="#333333" border="1"><tr><td><center>
</center></tr></td></table>As mentioned before, it’s a huge game that dwarfs Fallout 3. Naturally, when it comes to 160+ quests, your mileage will vary and IF you insist on doing all of them, you’ll spend a lot of time delivering all kinda shit, from radio codes to love letters. However, the majority of quests are very well designed (probably reflecting the amount of time Avellone and Sawyer spent on Black Isle’s VATS-free Fallout 3 which, sadly, didn’t get to see the light of day) and will offer you a truckload of different options at every step. It’s a superb implementation of the “do whatever the hell you want” approach. In Bethesda games it means you can travel east or you can travel west. In New Vegas it means that you’re always given a choice and can shape both your own story and the future of the Mojave any way you want.Let me illustrate it with the first few quests:
Goodsprings, the “starting” town, had offered refuge to Ringo, a Crimson Caravans’ trader who survived an attack by Powder Gangers, a gang of convicts who broke out of the NCR prison. The convicts have tracked him down and want the town to hand him over.
You can side with the gang and kill Ringo for them. You can even talk them into raiding the town (they aren’t interested at first, because the town is poor and there isn’t much to take). I got this quest when I had already done a few jobs for the Gangers and I was planning to continue, so siding with them was fairly tempting. Alternatively, you can protect Ringo and convince the townsfolk to stand up to the convicts. It would be better if failing the skill checks and fighting the convicts without the town’s support was actually an almost impossible fight, but the low difficulty rears its ugly console-shaped head once again.
Siding with the convicts destroys the town and gives you an appropriate ending – “Travelers continued to stop by Goodsprings Source for water on the Long 15, but rarely would anyone venture into the ruins of Goodsprings itself.” Siding with Ringo and the townsfolk isn’t enough to save the town. Various actions throughout the game will determine which of the four other endings you get for Goodsprings.
The endings deserve a special mention. There are a LOT of them. Most locations and factions get 4-9 different endings that are determined by a mix of the outcomes from several key quests involving them. This is a huge step up from Fallout 3 where the individual locations were ignored and you were treated with a handy summary of your heroic adventures:
“But it was not until the end of this long road that the Lone Wanderer learned the true meaning of that greatest of virtues – sacrifice. Stepping into the irradiated control chamber of Project Purity, the child followed the example of the [middle-aged] father sacrificing life itself for the greater good of mankind.”
Anyway, next stop – Primm. It’s your first step on your way to find out what the hell you were delivering when you were ambushed and almost killed. It’s a town taken over by more convicts, although unfriendly from the start and not associated with the Gangers. The NCR is waiting outside to see what develops because they don’t have enough manpower. Since, you, on the other hand, have more than enough manpower, courtesy of the jarring discord between the realistically designed situations and a consoletard-friendly difficulty level, you just casually stroll in, armed with extreme prejudice and a burning desire to loot some corpses, and liberate the town.
Then things got interesting. In the best western traditions, the town needs a lawman. Your choices are:
- a former sheriff who's currently spending quality time at the detention facility.
- the NCR
- a robot who could be reprogrammed to enforce the laws
The ex-sheriff was jailed for "speeding up the justice one too many times." He hasn't learned any lessons so if he comes back he doesn't want to "waste time on due processes". Good man! Sorta. Whether or not he’s a good choice for Primm, depends not only on what you think about “due processes”, but on how a guy like him would fit into the future of the Mojave. Let’s say you side with the Legion. They aren’t exactly the “due processes” types either, but their vision of the frontier justice is very different:
“Hot-headed to the end, Sheriff Meyers choose to oppose Caesar's takeover of Primm with a standoff. Though the citizens take out a few Legionaries, the town quickly falls to Caesar, its citizens utterly wiped out.”
Quests often involve different factions, so working for one faction usually means acting against another faction. Quests are also interconnected and one quest can often lead to another. For example:
The Gangers are concerned about the NCR presence in the area and wants you to talk to the locals and see if they know anything about the NCR plans. Passing a check tells you that they do plan to attack. Now you can go back to the convicts’ leader and help him defend the facility, or you can go to the NCR and offer your services.
What's interesting is that if you side with the NCR and help them take over the detention facility, the ex-sheriff will refuse the job offer because he doesn’t welcome the NCR’s involvement in the local affairs. This kind of interactivity and quest options opening up or closing up because of something you did in other quests is very refreshing.
Considering that what you do is bound to affect NPCs and factions (you’ll end up acting against them directly or indirectly, which is the best way to handle faction gameplay), you'd definitely have to play the game at least twice to see the mutually-exclusive paths and aspects. When it comes to the main quest, the game is definitely more replayable than any of the previous titles.
You get options for pretty much anything, ranging from choosing an outcome to choosing how you’re going to achieve that outcome. For example, if you get involved into the Van Graffs (energy weapons’ dealers competing with Gun Runners), at some point they will ask you to either kill Cassidy (the daughter of Fallout 2’s Cassidy and one of the casualties of the caravan wars) or bring her in to be killed. You may decide that you’d rather keep her alive and trigger a rather difficult fight via a dialogue or you may talk to Cassidy and pursue a different quest branch revolving around figuring out why Van Graffs want her dead, in which case once again you get two different options.
Overall, the game is best played not as a sandbox where you explore the world without caring much about the main quest, but as a more traditional RPG where you explore the main quest, which, depending on your choices, will send you to a variety of locations. Shorter games where you wrap things up around lvl 20 are definitely recommended.
And in conclusion
<table align="right" width="305px" bgcolor="#333333" border="1"><tr><td><center>
</center></tr></td></table>New Vegas is a huge game. I can probably write another 6 pages examining New Vegas’s various aspects, but I’d rather play the game some more. Like any other game, it’s far from being perfect and has many flaws. If you share my opinion that quest design is the most important aspect of an RPG, then you’ll like New Vegas a lot. If you think that RPGs are all about character system and/or combat, your opinion will depend not so much on New Vegas, but on whether or not you liked Fallout 3.I think it’s an excellent RPG and when it comes to shaping your story and making decisions, instead of following a pre-determined path, New Vegas can easily compete with the original games and is definitely top 10 material. If the combat was more challenging, and surviving in the wasteland wasn’t so disappointingly easy, the game could actually have competed for the #1 spot.
New Vegas does have a few technical issues and may require you to tweak the ini files. If having to copy-paste a few lines and updating your drivers fill you with murderous rage, then I’d suggest waiting for a patch.
For the record, I played it on my 5+ year old computer:
Pentium D processor 930, Dual Core, 3GHz, 800FSB
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM, 533MHz
nVidia GeForce GTS 250. 1GB
* * *
Special thanks to Andy (one of the Codex’ old guard) for his help with the review.
<center>[ Page 1 ] - [ Page 2 ] - [ Page 3 ]</center>