What, you expected a breather? We're going under in a rip, riptide of previews. Shacknews.<blockquote>One such example is the addition of a red shield icon in VATS, which lets players know that their weapon isn't all that effective against that particular foe or part.
"Weapons that have a high rate of fire, they do a lot of damage with a lot of little bullets. If you hit a target that has armor, you'll see that red shield," notes Sawyer. "You're doing a little less damage per shot, you'll want [something] a little slower firing and heavier hitting. There's also stuff like ammo subtypes, armor-piercing ammo for shotguns."
In addition, certain weapons do better against certain parts of the body, for example, ones that work better against limbs but aren't that effective against the head--a change Sawyer hopes "will sort of shift things away from head targeting [in VATS]." </blockquote>VideoGamer.<blockquote>How ironic. Fallout 3 fans cringe at the thought of New Vegas being farmed out to a developer that knows nothing of the cult series, so the theory goes. How many Fallout 1 and 2 fans who idolise old Black Isle Studios legends Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart felt the same when they discovered that Bethesda was developing Fallout 3? And now the merry-go-round comes full circle as Avellone and other ex-Black Isle Studio developers find themselves returning to the world of Fallout. So, all you Bethesda-haters should be pleased, right?
It's not until Chris' presentation comes to an end that I realise just how misleading first impressions can be. Don't get me wrong: Fallout: New Vegas's visuals could be better than they are. But the game's strengths lie elsewhere. Wonky animations and ugly textures aren't the point; the point is that the quests and dialogue are so memorable and the game's post-apocalyptic Nevada setting is so atmospheric that all of New Vegas' imperfections melt away like the skin of a Ghoul.</blockquote>NowGamer.<blockquote>In addition to Karma, Obsidian has added a faction/location based reputation system to New Vegas (similar to that in Fallout 2) which will see you treated differently depending on how you engage with people. Successfully complete lots of quests for a community and they’ll welcome you with open arms in future, maybe even treating you to perks along the way. Bear in mind though, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction – the example we saw had us helping a slacker scientist get a power station to reach maximum efficiency – under the proviso we rerouted power to the strip. When we got to the command console however we had the option to power a handful of different areas exclusively, or all of them equally. Suffice to say disobeying instructions had a knock-on effect...</blockquote>Games Radar US.<blockquote>New Vegas’ environment is full of landmarks to help navigate, and isn’t just Vegas – it’s the whole surrounding area. A California-Nevada border town with a famous rollercoaster (which you can run around on), a cheesy giant Dinosaur, Helios One, and the Vegas strip itself are some of the highlights. We didn’t get to see the strip, which, at the time of our demo, was “still under construction, both literally and figuratively.” We did get a few hints as to its content, though. It won’t contain any real-world casinos, but will contain properly-themed ‘50s establishments, and gambling is available both on and off the strip.</blockquote>The Sixth Axes.<blockquote>The locations are plentiful and varied. Primm – a small town encircled by a rollercoaster based on a real-life place. No Vac – under threat from Caesar’s Legion, home to Dinky the Dinosaur and amusingly titled due to a few letters falling off of a ‘No Vacancy’ sign. Black Mountain – a dark and dangerous place filled with mutants. There is also a location known as the Helios One Solar Energy Plant. Occupied by the New California Republic, Helios One was built during the pre-war years by Poseidon Energy (from Fallout 2) and currently isn’t fully operational. You can choose to help get it up and running and divert power to the NCR, or you can spread the power out across different locations, or you can choose to use the Archimedes II orbital laser to turn against the NCR.
Enemies will present themselves in many forms, as they always do. One of the more fun elements demonstrated was the different types of mutants and how they interact with each other. There’s the 1st Gen Mutants – Fallout 1 fans will recognise them as the Master’s Army – smart, tough and strong, and then there’s the 2nd Gen Mutants – Fallout 2 fans will recognise them from the Military Base in that game – not as strong and very stupid; the 1st Gen Mutants affectionately call them ‘Dumb Dumbs’. If you can pit one off against the other, all you need to do is sit back and watch the chaos. But you will have to keep an eye out for Night-Kins – mutants who utilise Stealth Boys.</blockquote>GameDaily.<blockquote>Your journey will eventually take you to Novac, another town with a huge point of interest. In this case, it's Dinky the Dinosaur, the aforementioned T-Rex, complete with the Dino Bite gift shop and a sniper's nest inside of its mouth. This is where the developers introduce you to companions, characters who have their own storylines and will follow and fight for you; the first is Craig Boone, ex member of the New California Republic, or NCR. Not only is it good to have a buddy come along, but you can manage him or her using the Companion Wheel, examining their health, A.I. state and weapons used; you can give them weapons.
Over time, you learn that a crazy super mutant named Tabitha (essentially a dude in drag), AKA the commander of Black Mountain, holds a guy named Raul captive. So, you set off to kill everything in your path to save him; you'll run into the Nightkin, tough mutants with the power to cloak. That said, you should have acquired both the Anti-Material Rifle (a 50-caliber monster) and one of New Vegas' best weapons, the Grenade Machine Gun. This bad boy lives up to its name, as it spits grenades like an automatic rifle discharges bullets, one after the other. The mission concludes with you saving Raul and slaughtering Tabitha and her brood. And in case you ever wondered what a mutant would look like in a blonde wig and lipstick, it isn't pretty. </blockquote>Games On Net.<blockquote>Fallout 3 must be good. Look how well it sold. Look how many Game of the Year stickers it has on it. Look at the feeding frenzy of rampant hatred that begins if you dare to so much as casually suggest it isn’t the Supreme Being of first person RPGs.
So Fallout: New Vegas, which is by all accounts more of the same, has to be pretty decent too, right? Given my apathy towards everyone’s favourite post-apocalyptic hybrid, I confess myself as surprised as you to be answering that yes, it does look pretty damn good. Here’s why.
For one thing, they’ve cut out a lot of the waiting around. Fallout is not an action game, and you have to expect some exposition, but if you found yourself impatiently mashing the “next” button during Fallout 3’s interminable childhood sequence, you’ll be gratified by New Vegas’s approach. Apparently being dug up and patched back together after near fatal head trauma is a faster way to deliver a new character to actual gameplay than being born, growing up, having birthday parties and going to school. Who knew?
So the time between selecting “start game” and arriving at that trademark “the world is my oyster” moment is much less trying, but better than that, it’s a much more attractive sort of mollusc. I was blown away by the ruined desert landscape of Capital Wasteland – for the first ten minutes, after which I got a hankering for something different to look at. Having escaped the devastation of a ground-zero hit, New Vegas delivers a much more varied and interesting environment.</blockquote>
"Weapons that have a high rate of fire, they do a lot of damage with a lot of little bullets. If you hit a target that has armor, you'll see that red shield," notes Sawyer. "You're doing a little less damage per shot, you'll want [something] a little slower firing and heavier hitting. There's also stuff like ammo subtypes, armor-piercing ammo for shotguns."
In addition, certain weapons do better against certain parts of the body, for example, ones that work better against limbs but aren't that effective against the head--a change Sawyer hopes "will sort of shift things away from head targeting [in VATS]." </blockquote>VideoGamer.<blockquote>How ironic. Fallout 3 fans cringe at the thought of New Vegas being farmed out to a developer that knows nothing of the cult series, so the theory goes. How many Fallout 1 and 2 fans who idolise old Black Isle Studios legends Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart felt the same when they discovered that Bethesda was developing Fallout 3? And now the merry-go-round comes full circle as Avellone and other ex-Black Isle Studio developers find themselves returning to the world of Fallout. So, all you Bethesda-haters should be pleased, right?
It's not until Chris' presentation comes to an end that I realise just how misleading first impressions can be. Don't get me wrong: Fallout: New Vegas's visuals could be better than they are. But the game's strengths lie elsewhere. Wonky animations and ugly textures aren't the point; the point is that the quests and dialogue are so memorable and the game's post-apocalyptic Nevada setting is so atmospheric that all of New Vegas' imperfections melt away like the skin of a Ghoul.</blockquote>NowGamer.<blockquote>In addition to Karma, Obsidian has added a faction/location based reputation system to New Vegas (similar to that in Fallout 2) which will see you treated differently depending on how you engage with people. Successfully complete lots of quests for a community and they’ll welcome you with open arms in future, maybe even treating you to perks along the way. Bear in mind though, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction – the example we saw had us helping a slacker scientist get a power station to reach maximum efficiency – under the proviso we rerouted power to the strip. When we got to the command console however we had the option to power a handful of different areas exclusively, or all of them equally. Suffice to say disobeying instructions had a knock-on effect...</blockquote>Games Radar US.<blockquote>New Vegas’ environment is full of landmarks to help navigate, and isn’t just Vegas – it’s the whole surrounding area. A California-Nevada border town with a famous rollercoaster (which you can run around on), a cheesy giant Dinosaur, Helios One, and the Vegas strip itself are some of the highlights. We didn’t get to see the strip, which, at the time of our demo, was “still under construction, both literally and figuratively.” We did get a few hints as to its content, though. It won’t contain any real-world casinos, but will contain properly-themed ‘50s establishments, and gambling is available both on and off the strip.</blockquote>The Sixth Axes.<blockquote>The locations are plentiful and varied. Primm – a small town encircled by a rollercoaster based on a real-life place. No Vac – under threat from Caesar’s Legion, home to Dinky the Dinosaur and amusingly titled due to a few letters falling off of a ‘No Vacancy’ sign. Black Mountain – a dark and dangerous place filled with mutants. There is also a location known as the Helios One Solar Energy Plant. Occupied by the New California Republic, Helios One was built during the pre-war years by Poseidon Energy (from Fallout 2) and currently isn’t fully operational. You can choose to help get it up and running and divert power to the NCR, or you can spread the power out across different locations, or you can choose to use the Archimedes II orbital laser to turn against the NCR.
Enemies will present themselves in many forms, as they always do. One of the more fun elements demonstrated was the different types of mutants and how they interact with each other. There’s the 1st Gen Mutants – Fallout 1 fans will recognise them as the Master’s Army – smart, tough and strong, and then there’s the 2nd Gen Mutants – Fallout 2 fans will recognise them from the Military Base in that game – not as strong and very stupid; the 1st Gen Mutants affectionately call them ‘Dumb Dumbs’. If you can pit one off against the other, all you need to do is sit back and watch the chaos. But you will have to keep an eye out for Night-Kins – mutants who utilise Stealth Boys.</blockquote>GameDaily.<blockquote>Your journey will eventually take you to Novac, another town with a huge point of interest. In this case, it's Dinky the Dinosaur, the aforementioned T-Rex, complete with the Dino Bite gift shop and a sniper's nest inside of its mouth. This is where the developers introduce you to companions, characters who have their own storylines and will follow and fight for you; the first is Craig Boone, ex member of the New California Republic, or NCR. Not only is it good to have a buddy come along, but you can manage him or her using the Companion Wheel, examining their health, A.I. state and weapons used; you can give them weapons.
Over time, you learn that a crazy super mutant named Tabitha (essentially a dude in drag), AKA the commander of Black Mountain, holds a guy named Raul captive. So, you set off to kill everything in your path to save him; you'll run into the Nightkin, tough mutants with the power to cloak. That said, you should have acquired both the Anti-Material Rifle (a 50-caliber monster) and one of New Vegas' best weapons, the Grenade Machine Gun. This bad boy lives up to its name, as it spits grenades like an automatic rifle discharges bullets, one after the other. The mission concludes with you saving Raul and slaughtering Tabitha and her brood. And in case you ever wondered what a mutant would look like in a blonde wig and lipstick, it isn't pretty. </blockquote>Games On Net.<blockquote>Fallout 3 must be good. Look how well it sold. Look how many Game of the Year stickers it has on it. Look at the feeding frenzy of rampant hatred that begins if you dare to so much as casually suggest it isn’t the Supreme Being of first person RPGs.
So Fallout: New Vegas, which is by all accounts more of the same, has to be pretty decent too, right? Given my apathy towards everyone’s favourite post-apocalyptic hybrid, I confess myself as surprised as you to be answering that yes, it does look pretty damn good. Here’s why.
For one thing, they’ve cut out a lot of the waiting around. Fallout is not an action game, and you have to expect some exposition, but if you found yourself impatiently mashing the “next” button during Fallout 3’s interminable childhood sequence, you’ll be gratified by New Vegas’s approach. Apparently being dug up and patched back together after near fatal head trauma is a faster way to deliver a new character to actual gameplay than being born, growing up, having birthday parties and going to school. Who knew?
So the time between selecting “start game” and arriving at that trademark “the world is my oyster” moment is much less trying, but better than that, it’s a much more attractive sort of mollusc. I was blown away by the ruined desert landscape of Capital Wasteland – for the first ten minutes, after which I got a hankering for something different to look at. Having escaped the devastation of a ground-zero hit, New Vegas delivers a much more varied and interesting environment.</blockquote>
