April 27, 2010 - For many fans of shooters, Fallout 3 was unquestionably the 2008 Game to Play While Waiting for Another Map Pack. Developer Bethesda Softworks managed to take the classic Fallout formula and toss it in the trash with the first-person RPG formula it had botched in games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The game was a huge hit with people who have no taste, and a sequel became all but inevitable when you realized they had paid huge sums of money to wrestle the license away from Interplay’s cold, dead hands. Two years later, everyone’s basically forgotten about it. However, jaded NMA-types who will buy the game just for the privilege of accurately bashing it will only have to wait until the end of the year to return to the world of Oblivion With Guns when the spinoff, Fallout: New Vegas, hits stores.
Although Bethesda has handed the development off to the shamed RPG titans who are kept alive by their names and Bioware’s goodwill, Obsidian Entertainment, much of Fallout: New Vegas will feel familiar to those fools who slogged through the last game. The core game remains unchanged - you still play a mentally retarded jack-of-all-trades character who wanders a fairly uninteresting brown environment, taking on braindead fetch quests and interacting with denizens of the uncanny valley by either blasting their heads off or ironically using the Intelligence stat. However, New Vegas also has major changes in both the butchered setting and what little gameplay exists. New Vegas wasn't hit directly by nuclear weapons in the war, due to Bethesda wanting another filled-to-the-brim world similar to the Capital Wasteland, and Obsidian not wanting to look stupid by creating a basically in-tact post-nuclear world and saying it was hit by nukes. The world utilizes more bloom, the color palette is upped to Commodore 64 standards, and mutations are less obvious except for the hordes of mutants standing in for orcs and zombies that you’ll be fighting. However, that doesn't mean that New Vegas is any less dangerous than the Capital Wasteland and its combat encounters every few steps. Fortunately, you'll have several new of those modern tricks that would have been considered cheats ten years ago at your disposal to keep you from ever dying.
The turn based abortion known as V.A.T.S. system from Fallout 3 is returning in New Vegas, because it’s built into the engine, which allows you to freeze the action and watch slow motion dismemberment up-close. A new upgrade to V.A.T.S. adds special attacks with unique effects to non-guns that makes them comically overpowered. For example, a hilarious golf club weapon called the 9 Iron has a special attack that can potentially knock the feet off your enemies in glorious gory detail, and fits right in with all those quirky and totally original weapons you could get in Fallout 3. If getting up close and personal isn't your thing, New Vegas still has plenty to keep your brain from ever reaching its full potential. In true RPG fashion New Vegas features twice as many firearms as Fallout 3, none of which have been play-tested, including stupidly impossible and ridiculous weapons like a rapid fire Golden Gun that shoots grenades and a hand held Death Star. You can even customize your weapons with scopes, larger magazines, and more in case they weren’t cheaty enough for your sad, pathetic soul.
Along with the additional weapons, several other eye-rolling features debut in New Vegas. After you create your character, you'll be asked if you want to play in Hardcore mode. Despite the name, this isn't a new difficulty setting, indeed the “never make anything challenging, at all” rule is a strict Bethesda policy - you can play the oxymoron Hardcore Easy or the redundant Hardcore Hard. Should you select this option, a few important tweaks will be activated. First, stimpacks will heal over two seconds instead of instantly. You won't be able to fix a crippled limb with stimpacks, either - you'll have to visit a doctor or use the numerous specific healing items that are placed in every mailbox and cardboard box just for that task. You'll also have a dehydration meter that will function much like the radiation meter; over time it will deplete and you'll lose a single point of health every two hours until you rehydrate. These are meant to give the illusion of challenge so the ritalin kids can still overwhelmingly succeed without failing and crying and going to buy an even dumber game.
Another new superfluous feature streamlines how you communicate with and command your meat shield slaves, which will come in handy as you interact with New Vegas' various one-note faction quests. The way you interact with different groups, either killing them or performing their trivial delivery tasks, will affect whether or not they frown or smile when you talk to them. Doing a single bad thing in a town will make the entire populace want to kill you instantly, while rescuing said town from that one scripted invasion sequence will cause them to hail a generic heroic title when you walk by. The trademark Karma system, which makes a killing in licensing fees from those quirky Indian religions, will return as well, and obviously will tie in as generically as possible with the same-as-old-but-let’s-dress-it-up-all-nice-and-new-like reputation system by giving you discounts at stores and affecting the smiles and frowns.
The reputation system is a good yardstick for Fallout: New Vegas as a whole. It, along with most of the other changes, seems like banal extensions of the core lowest common denominator gameplay. Fallout: New Vegas looks like it will offer up more of the same shit that players tolerated in Fallout 3 between bouts of huffing household cleaners and masturbating their cats, while offering up new expensive DLC that keeps things as fresh as digested roadkill while feeling as out of place as inhumanly possible. More of the same would be enough to make another Fallout travesty one of our most anticipated titles of another year spent in a drugged up stupor. The fact that Obsidian helped further degrade the once great name of classic RPGs by sticking a super mutant in a dress makes us want to attend that noose crafting class even more.
By J. Matthew Babynuts
CCC Jobless Bum
