Fallout: New Vegas and DLCs (Part 1)
Fallout: New Vegas came out in 2010, with four DLC expansions offering new areas through the following year to 2011. So why am I reviewing this now? The answer is simple - the Fallout 4 announcement trailer got me in the mood to revisit this game, which I didn't love the first time around, to see whether first of all I was wrong in my initial assessment, and to discover what the DLC had to offer.
I will preface this by saying I was a big fan of Fallout 3, which was my introduction to the Fallout universe. I have gone back to Fallouts 1 and 2, but I wasn't able to get into them; the gameplay differences were too severe. I was therefore pretty excited by the prospect of Fallout: New Vegas, and was fairly let down when it came out.
I think this is for a few reasons, primarily the main story quest. The game starts off with you rising from the grave, having been robbed and then shot in the head during the introductory cut scene by a man in a checkered suit. The character creation sequence takes the form of a physical by the doctor that cured you of being-shot-in-the-head-itis, and then you're dumped into Goodsprings, a singularly boring town. You're told that you should head south, because if you head in any other direction there are nasty monsters and sure enough, if you head off the path you're told to take you will die pretty quickly. This is the route you have to take to get to New Vegas, which bear in mind is the place the game is named after and where the game really begins, in my opinion at least:
As you can see, it's quite a distance. This takes at least a couple of hours of gameplay and probably more like five or six hours the first time. Re-playing through this part of the game I realised I may have been a little uncharitable the first time round - it's not that nothing at all happens, but the interesting events are spaced pretty far apart. In addition, once you get to Vegas and finally confront the man who shot you, Benny, the confrontation is somewhat anticlimactic. You can find him more or less immediately, and kill him fairly shortly after (or allow him to escape if you want, although you'll run into him later and have to finish the job). It's at this point the world opens up, as you start to gain levels far more rapidly and the main conflict of the story begins to emerge.
The rest of the main story deals with the war between the New California Republic, a semi-legitimate government moving in from the West whose grip on the areas surrounding Vegas is tenuous at best, and the Legion, a collection of tribes from the East who have been united by a dictator/warlord calling himself Caesar and taking trappings of the Roman empire. In the middle of this is New Vegas, which is ruled by Mr House, a shadowy figure lurking in the depths of the Lucky 38, a casino that hasn't been open to the public for many years - except for the player character.
The Legion are preparing to attack Hoover Dam for the second time, having been barely turned back the first time by the NCR. The second half, or rather two-thirds, of the game is you deciding which of the factions to back at the battle of Hoover Dam - the NCR, the Legion, or Mr House - and gathering support from various splinter groups around the Mojave wasteland.
I was not overly enamoured of this part of the story either, which boils down to you visiting each group in turn, doing quests for them until they agree either to help or at least not oppose your chosen faction, and then going back to find out what's next. This is broken up by the wider variety of sidequests available at this point in the game, and in the case of my playthrough, by the DLC areas. These are done during the course of the main story, and involve the player character travelling to a new map for an unrelated side story. There is a recommended order in which they should be played, and these are my thoughts of each of them in that order (although I actually swapped around the first two during my playthrough).
Dead Money
Dead Money starts with the character entering an abandoned bunker, being knocked unconscious and waking up at a fountain beneath a stormy sky in a ruined village. You are informed by a hologram of an old man named Brother Elijah that he has kidnapped you, taken away your belongings and fitted you with a bomb collar that will explode unless you help him rob a casino that has been empty since the nuclear war that is the backdrop of all Fallout.
This is essentially the survival horror DLC package. Its main features are unkillable or hard to kill enemies (of two varieties!) and areas which are harmful or just kill you if you stay in them for too long. Whilst this may appeal to some players, the stark departure from the usual Fallout gameplay made this a frustrating slog to play.
To go into more detail, the main enemies of the area are the Ghost People, who are humanoids dressed all in black. When you kill them, they fall unconscious rather than die and must be hacked apart within around 10 seconds to make sure they stay dead. Individually, this is not too bad, but when there are two or three together it's very hard to finish each of them off before they come back to life. After playing this, I found out that there is a bug with the Ghost People - apparently they are given Perception 0 which should make them easy to sneak past and avoid fighting altogether, but instead this gives them infinite Perception and they will notice you as soon as you are within range, and perhaps if this was working as intended they would be a more interesting challenge.
The other main enemies are the security holograms, which are holograms of security guards. They can't be killed through normal combat, and have to be turned off at nearby terminals or emitters.
This means that on the face of it, the game wants you to sneak around slowly and avoid combat where ever possible. Unfortunately this is where the area control aspects come in to play. There are two: radio speakers, and The Cloud. The speakers interfere with the bomb collar, which will explode if you are near them for too long. This generally manifests itself by getting a message that the collar is beeping, and then having to retreat until it is not, then peering into the room to find the speaker. Invariably it will not be visible from outside its range, so this results in a series of sprints further and further into the dangerous area to find it and destroy it. Even then, some speakers cannot be destroyed and must be turned off remotely.
The Cloud is a poisonous cloud that covers certain areas and will drain your health as long as you are in it, and also obscures your vision. This leads to mad, half-blind dashes through Cloud covered areas which in my case at least often ended with a death and re-load. Of course, both the speakers and The Cloud forcing you to move fast attract the attention of the Ghost People.
You may be thinking at this point that I didn't much care for Dead Money, and you would be right. It was not without its redeeming features, however. The story is broken into two parts - the first part in the village outside the casino, trying to break in, and the second inside once you have managed to open it. The second half is a vast improvement, mainly due to much reduced numbers of Ghost People, and less Cloud and speakers in general. The story is also pretty good, and Father Elijah is a compelling character who I am reluctant to refer to as a villain, even though that's pretty much what he is. On balance, however, I disliked Dead Money to the point where I almost gave up and re-loaded a previous save so I didn't have to finish it, and I think on any further playthroughs I will be skipping it altogether.
This post is much longer than I thought it would be, so I'm going to leave it here and revisit the rest of the DLCs and give my final thoughts on New Vegas later.
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