This post was triggered by a meme a friend I have IRL1 sent me about New Vegas, but this has been a long time coming. Not the meme being sent, since it was kinda funny. But it’s been obvious that New Vegas has been riding a hype train that’s only gotten larger and louder in recent years online, and I’m fed up. The worse part is, I know where exactly where it came from, but that’s for later. This game has earned the title of “THE BEST FALLOUT GAME EVERER” by a lot of people, and I feel that’s completely unwarranted, or at least exaggerated, when compared to the game itself. Especially considering the terrible reasons this game regularly gets that title for.
For now, I want to make clear what I think of the game overall: it’s pretty good. It’s one of my most played games on Steam, and is one of the only one’s I’ve completed all achievements for. I’ve played it on and off since 2019, but have preferred to play the Elder Scrolls series more as of recent. I’ve also played through Fallout 1 once and Fallout 2 multiple times, and have around a combined number of 25 hours between Fallout 3 and 4. Point is, I’m not speaking from a place of total ignorance when it comes to these games.
One thing New Vegas does have a clear advantage on is the roleplaying aspect, especially character building. Even ignoring Fallout 4, the reintroduction of the Traits system is a small but welcome feature that added a little more depth to designing your character, I can’t argue on this. Thoughever, I draw a clear line when it comes to claims like “New Vegas’s writing is so good, and its political philosophy are making people talk about it to this very day.” No it’s not. Stop saying that. Repeating it won’t make it any truer than it was before you said it. And we have the data on it. From the Steam achievements on New Vegas, we can see how players lean when it comes to choosing one of the four main factions to complete the main quest with:
24.6% go with one of the Yes Man endings
7.7% have completed the last quest for the NCR
6.2% have completed the last quest for Mr. House
4.5% have completed the final quests for Caesar’s Legion
There’s a clear mismatch here. One of the main reasons is that the writing, especially when it comes to fleshing out the factions, is “not that deep.” This is also seen in general discussions around the game. 80% of it is around the NCR. Even suggesting that you should play Caesar’s Legion is faced with accusations of Fascism and Slavery apologetics. While slavery isn’t always the nicest thing to do, neither is launching multiple nukes into the Wasteland or tricking a mutant clearly suffering from a split personality disorder to kill himself. If roleplaying is a boon to your game, the evil choices should be as embraced and compelling as the good choices.
But that gets back to the point: if the writing was as nuanced as the fans say it is, then why do the fans lean so heavily to one or two of the four choices, and disregard one of them to this extent? Mr House is mildly popular and has more of a mixed reception. He’s my favorite choice, and is probably the best example of what the writing can be in New Vegas. But the rest of the game clearly leans morally to one side, as do the fans. Where does the exemplary writing faction and politics come in? Perhaps my standards for this type of thing have been risen too high after being online for so long.
Then there’s the gameplay itself. Many A True Nerd touched on this in his video about Fallout 3, and I won’t step on his toes too much, but one of the points he brings up is how New Vegas has less collectibles to reward the player with and a seeming want for dungeons that are commonplace in other Bethesda games. This gets to a greater point with New Vegas’ map design. Let’s look at Fallout 1’s world map:
If you never played it, most of the game takes place in these main cities. Players zoom across the map when travelling between them in game time, and are sometimes stopped by random encounters. Usually, it’s just point A to B, with all the content being in the settlements. New Vegas is basically designed like this, but with a twist: you get to walk between these places.
The Mojave Wasteland is especially barren in most places, making going from town to town mind numbing. It’s not like you’re getting much out of the locations that are out of the way-it’s usually just unique gear that’s either completely useless or stupidly overpowered. To be fair, I can understand the cut in frequency of skill books since they give you more points per buck, but the game still suffers from giving the player little to explore, and less to reward the player from exploring. This makes less sense given the background of this area particularly. Mr. House blocked around 75% of the 77 warheads from exploding on impact. When compared to eviscerated cities like Washington or Boston on the East Coast, I fail to see why the settlements are as lackluster as they are when you see them in game.
Hearing any of this, you’re likely to hear the most common response when it comes to explaining why this game is such an underrated masterpiece- it was made in under 18 months! It couldn’t have the writing or a more interesting world because mean old Bethesda wanted to cripple Obsidian from making a game better than their own! There’s a lot of implications about the agreement between the Bethesda and Obsidian team to complete the game in this time that just isn’t true in reality. It portrays the development as some Herculean task, doomed from the start by such a short development time, when it just wasn’t the case. Relations between the two teams when it came to making the game is not as abusive as some make it out to be, at least according to Sawyer and Chris Avellone.
Here’s the issue that I have with this excuse: a lot of the game was already there for Obsidian to develop New Vegas with. The engine already existed, as did two games already made on it. It’s safe to say at least 60% of the assets were lifted from Fallout 3.2 A lot of time adding content to the Legion or giving out a more in-depth world to explore seems to have been freed up by the time saved with this arrangement. But it didn’t. And it certainly wasn’t used for Q&A testing. The game was pretty infamous for running especially bad, even compared to the Bethesda created Fallout 3 and Oblivion.
This isn’t just talking trash or being an armchair game developer.3 The team at Obsidian are obviously more skilled at their craft than I, and they ended up making a good game and consistently interesting DLC. But the line about giving the game a pass for being made in 18 months runs thin when it comes to the fact that there could have been a number of things which could have been worked on to make the game better, especially in places where New Vegas fans are so adamant to praise the game for.
Now onto the origins of this trend. This attitude already existed to some extent when the game released, with Fallout 1&2 fans finally getting a 3D Fallout game with some of the developers of the classic games working on it. It quickly rose in esteem among fans, surpassing 3 for many. This became even more so with the DLC, which—from what I’ve heard about the Fallout 3 DLC—is a major step up when it comes to writing and gameplay. And fair enough, I supposed. But the true fanboyism start with the release of hbomberguy’s truly horseshit video about trashing on Fallout 3. To not get into it that much, it’s a generally poor video that brings up nonsense charges against 3 and ignoring when these faults showed up in the other games, like quest compasses.
The modern popularity of this game started in 2019, though. It became a strange obsession with LGBT people and Reddit about how great this game is.4 Titrating the former group into the latter one gets you r/Gamingcirclejerk. This is the “We are literally never going to get over Hogward Legacy” subreddit, if you heard of that drama. It is here where one of the most damned lies about Fallout was begotten: “the entire series is a critique of Capitalism, akshually! You’re just an idiot for being a fan and not realizing it!” There are many issues with this argument, about zero of which mattered when it came to these people repeating it over and over again as the game got a resurgence in popularity.
And here we are today. Pretending New Vegas is the best Fallout game EVAR, all while being an exemplary piece of neo-Marxist theory. I was genuinely surprised about the news of Tim Cain saying the games weren’t all about being anti-Capitalist made the news, because I thought the meme had already died. But it clearly didn’t. Not only did it not die, it became a huge part of the current New Vegas fanbase. There is little else that can be done without being called a Bethesda shill, except for picking up the Elder Scrolls and still being called a Bethesda shill for liking Skyrim more than Morrowind.
In Real Life
This isn’t an insult or indictment or insult against Obisidion, or saying they were lazy. I’m just pointing out that these things wouldn’t have been a major time sink for them.
I assume most game devs do work in armchairs, or at least office chairs with arm support.
This is also when “trans girlies that love New Vegas” really became a thing.