Fallout: New Vegas doesn't railroad you at the beginning (rant)

Okay, I know it's at least two years old at this point, and in video game dog years is thus an ancient game, but I want to talk about Fallout: New Vegas for a minute.

Fallout: New Vegas is one of my very favorite computer RPGs ever. It's up there with Torment and Baldur's Gate 2. I really really really love this game. It has an interesting story, ample opportunity to explore (despite some delusional gamers' claims to the contrary), and it is one of few games where I truly feel like I go where I want when I want, and my decisions have real consequences. Plus lesbian monk punching monsters for the win.

I realize not many people love the game like I do, and I accept that people have different tastes and different preferences in games. All I ask is that if you dislike the game, dislike it for reasons that are not just plain wrong.

One of the wrongest reasons to dislike Fallout: New Vegas is the claim that the game "railroads you" because the characters and world design encourages you to travel east instead of north from your starting location. A good friend, whose opinions I usually respect, made this claim just recently, even stating it was a reason he never finished it, which makes my heart break, because if you like good RPGs, it is a game so very worth finishing. He said, "It forces you to follow the main plot and won't let you go straight to New Vegas." (Spoiler: New Vegas is what lies straight to the north of your starting point.)

Here's the thing: if you go straight to New Vegas, you TRIGGER THE PLOT FASTER. There is a reason why certain major plot characters are in New Vegas (your first hint that this is going to happen: the game is called Fallout: New Vegas), and you can very easily skip past early elements of the main plot (which are largely inconsequential) and suddenly find yourself right smack in the middle of the main plot before you are actually ready to be.

The truth of why the game strongly suggests (but does not force) you to go south or east instead is in fact, to encourage you to explore the game and get a feel for the world. The closer you get to New Vegas, the more you get wrapped up in the goings on in the world. If you are the kind of person who likes Fallout games because you can explore and find weird locations and fight monsters and talk to people in little towns and get a sense of what's going on in the world before you get involved, it's actually better to follow the game's advice and go any direction but north. It's in fact much easier to leave the game's main plot by hanging out in that central eastern/southern region and discovering the very many areas around there and doing the very many sidequests you find there.

But the thing is, you want to dive straight for New Vegas, you can! Yes, the game design does border the northern roads with several swarms of giant death flies, to discourage you from going that way. The game ALSO puts not one but TWO Stealth Boys in easy reach of you in the area you start in. You do the math. If you're determined to go north, you can do it. You have to be careful, you have to be observant, and you have to have good timing, but you can do it, and it's not that hard, because I did it, and I am the farthest from leet ninja game maneuverings as you can be and still be able to play video games at all.

I am in a game right now where I have a 4th level character hanging out in Freeside. She got that way by going straight north from Goodsprings and being careful. Levels 3 and 4 were earned in the New Vegas vicinity. She has a crappy Stealth score, for the record, as her frequent head injuries inflicted by Fiends with plasma weaponry will show you. But she is there, and she's alive, and she's slowly gathering the friends, caps, and supplies needed to do the various quests she's picking up in and around there. She's not ready to charge Fiends in head on quite yet but she's getting there (she can certainly pick off stragglers easily enough). And I'm sure someone who plays ballsier than me could be past the Vegas gate by now.

Could they have designed the game where you started in a different starting point so you'd have to travel far to get to New Vegas, forcing you to explore on the way one way or the other? Sure. But I think that'd actually be more railroady. Interesting thing is, this way gives you a choice--take the hard but fast road to get to the plot (and bigger guns and such) faster, or take the slow and easy road and take in the sights along the way. I guess if they made a mistake, it's that they didn't make it clear enough that this was in fact a choice, not a railroad. At least, that's how I see it, and I'm living proof you can play the game however you like.

I can count on my hand the times I felt deeply railroaded in F:NV. Once was through a single particular plot late in the main plot, where you are forced to give up an item and not given options to try and sleight of hand it or whatever. The other is through the majority of the Dead Money DLC, and especially the way the endgame works (there's a character who is unkillable until a certain trigger, and there's no good reason for it). (Mind, I loved Dead Money, but it is what it is.) Most of the DLCs by their nature are also "railroady" because you have to get to the end before you're allowed to return to the main game area, but that's also kind of the nature of the beast anyway.

But it was definitely not in the beginning.

So: hate on F:NV if that's what tickles your fancy. But not because the "beginning railroads you" -- because it doesn't, and you're wrong. And if you don't like it, I'll send Veronica in to punch you, so there.

Fallout: New Vegas: Lonesome Road - An Informal Review

So Dead Money was Fallout's take on survival horror, Honest Hearts was straightforward wilderness adventure, and Old World Blues was an especially awesome and often hilarious dose of retro sci-fi horror, Lonesome Road follows as Fallout's take on... a dungeon crawl.

And don't get me wrong, as a dungeon crawl, Lonesome Road is exceptionally well designed. You have dark dank tunnels to run through, traps to disarm, phat l00t to find, undead and constructs and aberrations to fight, and a big bad who taunts you through magic messages. That the "dungeon" is a devastated military facility and nearby town, and one exceptionally built at that, is just fabulous. If I were to set out to build a dungeon crawl game and I made it similar to Lonesome Road, I'd have done a great job.

But Lonesome Road is also supposed to be the essential finale to the Fallout New Vegas story. Sure, we all know the actual end to the story is the end to the main game (all of the DLC stories take place before the story's end). But if we played the game plus DLC in order of release, Lonesome Road is last. It's the big shabang everything was leading up to. The Big Bad gets name dropped early on in the main game, and most of the DLC all mention Ulysses and/or the Divide and the Courier's inevitable showdown involving that man and that place. For months, the hype has been built: what's going to happen at the Divide is going to be mind-blowing, reveal-all, amazing.

And instead of a mind blowing finale, we get a dungeon crawl.

The story is a loose blob of cryptic messages that strings together your purpose for traveling through the maze of twisty passages, all alike. There's only one human person in the story, and his sole purpose is to taunt you so that you remain annoyed enough to traverse the Divide so you can shoot him in the face before he sets off a nuclear missile strike (which he could have done without inviting you for the show). And that's it. You don't learn very much--Honest Hearts gave better insight both to the history of the Legion and important characters in New Vegas's backstory as well as shed light on life at the edge of the apocalypse. And it's easy to miss a lot of the clues there are. I found them, but it still doesn't fill in many blanks, and in some cases just leaves open more questions and seeming discrepancies (for example, Ulysses seems to imply the Courier accidentally wrecked the Divide, but evidence you find suggests it's always been an unlivable hellhole ever since an earthquake went off before the Great War started).

Ultimately, because the story is both piecemeal and contradictory, the point of playing through Lonesome Road feels much less like bringing history to a close and revealing more about the Courier, and more like an excuse to go hunting deathclaws in a post-apocalyptic ruin. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with hunting deathclaws in a post-apocalyptic ruin, but it shouldn't have been marketed as anything more than that, and it shouldn't have been the finale.

Purely gameplay wise, Lonesome Road is solid. The environments are exceptionally well built--there are a lot of toppled buildings and you have a lot of freedom of exploration (with minimal risk of falling through the infrastructure like Fallout world design tends to incur). If you're the kind of person who plays Fallout mostly for the shooter aspects of the game, you'll love Lonesome Road--fantastic areas to go hunting monsters in. I'd say Lonesome Road is even most enjoyable when you ignore Ulysses' ramblings and just explore and kill things.

I did experience some memory/slow down issues (on a brand new computer), although some of those were resolved after a graphics driver update. So make sure you're up to date on everything before you play. I didn't encounter many gameplay bugs.

The mechanical add ons are a mixed bag. There's a handful new weapons and armor, and you'll be very happy in particular if you like heavy weapons (my pistol toting light armored sneaky gal had less to make use of). There are several crafting recipes I wished I had about 30 levels ago, and there are several perks I'd wished I'd been able to build my character up to (there are notable exceptions in the form of a set of perks only available at level 50, which are very cool perks at that). This further makes Lonesome Road frustrating as a capstone piece--most of what it has is great for low-mid-level characters, but it's a high level adventure that came out when most who've bought it first have played through the game and are going to use their highest level characters to play through it. I seldom do multiple playthroughs, although Fallout New Vegas in general has high replay value, so I imagine the most I will get out of Lonesome Road is not the adventure itself, but the perks (literal and figurative) it will offer to new characters.

Oh yes, of course, there's also ED-E. You encounter a similar eyebot and can upgrade him (of course, by the time you finish upgrading him, you lose him). Any upgrading you do to Lonesome Road's ED-E transfers over to your companion back in the Mojave, if of course you weren't one of the people, like me, who had him randomly disappear in the middle of the Wasteland and never come back. I guess it's cool to get ED-E's backstory, but to me he'll always be a floating bucket of bugs more than anything else, and being a floating bucket of bugs with extra perks isn't much better. I'm also a very character-driven RPG player and I prefer the humanoid companions anyway. And on that note, frustratingly, ED-E also gets a perk which makes Veronica's workbench perk redundant (I guess maybe it's fair because Veronica also gets an "upgrade" perk from Dead Money... or it would be if her bonus perk applied to her actual preferred mode of combat).

In summary: the designers deserve a lot of credit for environment design and providing a lot of opportunity for both action and exploration (something which is hard to balance). Gameplay add-ons are a decent touch. But story and character-wise, Lonesome Road is far and away the weakest of the Fallout New Vegas installments. If you play the game for the story, you can skip it without losing much. Honest Hearts was a less bland foray into adventuring and had more main-game plot relevant. Dead Money was much more tense and terrifying, and Old World Blues was far more entertaining with an infinitely better set of antagonists. If you can only afford one DLC, make Lonesome Road your lowest priority. If you have all the DLC or are planning to get the Ultimate Edition in February, play Lonesome Road as soon as you can (which is still not until level 25) and save the better DLCs for later.

Fallout New Vegas: Crowning Moment of Awesome... for Veronica

Hello, neglected blog. I needed a place to nerd out about video games, and then I remembered: here you are.

While I have grand plans to do a comprehensive review of Fallout: New Vegas (a year later, why not?), I decided to wait till I finish Lonesome Road first.

In the meantime, I want to share my crowning moment of awesome for my favorite F:NV companion. The following contains spoilers:


So, there we were, having infiltrated the Legion Camp, and I (Jinx, the Urban Space Cowgirl, AKA "Courier") was about to face Darth Vader Legate Lanius himself. I had read about how tough he was on the Internetz, how the very best at tactical fighting and FPS type players were killed over and over by him, how he was a BEAST. While I was very high level (44?) I am not the very best at combat, and was going for drama in terms of equipment (Joshua's armor and pistol). I thought, I've got Speech out the wazoo, hopefully I can talk him down.

Marching behind me were my backup: a bunch of creaky-kneed retired Nazis in power armor, and Veronica Santangelo, also clad in Enclave armor, courtesy of Arcade Gannon.

I talked to the Legate. I passed speech checks! But I got saucy with him anyway, and he decided to attack.

Except he ran past me, toward my backup crew.

Veronica stepped forward, sending an uppercut to his masked jaw that would have made a Deathclaw weep. He was thrown into the air, landed, turned around, and ran back toward me as if to scream, "Mommy."

I caught him in VATS: he was below half hit points. I finished him off with a shot to the arm courtesy of a Light Shining in Darkness.

The giant cazadors in Zion gave me four times as much trouble. And probably? Because I couldn't take Veronica with me.

The moral of the story: bow down and worship the lesbian techno-monk, fools. All hail Veronica.