Overall world coherence is one of the biggest issues with bethesda games. With the Elder Scrolls, it's not too bad. But, Fallout is one series where I feel they consistently fail to present a believable, grounded world. From what I understand, part of the problem stems from the original plans for Fallout 3. You see, when making Fallout 3, the plan was to set it long before the events of the originals. Which is why the world of Fallout 3 has been far less ''reclaimed'' than what we saw in the originals.

But, then people complained about the absence of stuff like the Enclave or the Brotherhood of Steel. So, rather than sticking to their guns. They decided to keep the same world and art desing, but artificially push the story further up the timeline. Decisions like these are at the core of why Bethesda's take on Fallout fell flat to hardcore fans. There's also the issue of leaning too far into binary good or bad choices. You always get the option of doing something bad, but you're almost never presented with a real moral quandry. The decision to blow up megaton is a bad decision, it has no nuance.
Still, on it's own, Fallout 3 is an impressively ambitious game. There really was nothing like it at the time. The amount of freedom was unparalleled. Fallout 3 is one of the only games that I not only finished twice, I finished it twice in a row. So, while certain people can be harsh at Fallout 3 for how limp the story feels or how inconsistent the world is. I think it is still a fantastic accomplishment of a video game. On its own, it's perfectly fine.

But, we're here to talk about New Vegas. Simply said, New Vegas is everything that was brilliant about Fallout 3 plus 15 piles of genius added on. The most standout element of New Vegas has to be its ability to give greater context to everything. Not a single enemy is placed half hazzardly. Everyone in the game has an origin, a crew, a place where they belong. There is no such thing as a generic human enemy in New Vegas. Even the few raiders that do exist aren't placed randomly across the map for maximum engagement. Instead, they have their own territory that they must realistically protect.

New Vegas feels like a real place where people realistically live.

Simply put, world coherence is far from being an issue in New Vegas. In fact, it's the opposite. New Vegas might have the most believable, most internally consistent open world I've ever seen. Everyone and everything feels part of a cohesive whole. And that helped by strong writing and narrative desing.

Speaking of which, the game opens up with your character dying. A contrast to the previous game, which opened with your birth. Basically, there's this wise guy giving a speech about how its nothing personal kid, before shooting you in the brain and burrying you. Seemingly not realising that, in the fallout universe, it takes at least 4 headshots to take down anybody. So, a robot digs you back up, brings you to a doctor. And, after you've chosen your personality, race and gender, you're just set free...

Fallout New Vegas doesn't waste your time setting up the story for 2 hours. It has an intro that's very much designed to get you into the world as quickly as possible. I did find a mod that changes the intro. But its main goal isn't to bypass annoying stuff, it's to introduce more possible scenarios from which you could start the game. And the quality of New Vegas' intro doesn't stop there. While you can just wander anywhere you like from the get go, New Vegas isn't designed to be an open sandbox where every new location is an awesome gunfight for you to win.

New Vegas doesn't care about killing you. It will put giant, terrifying insects that hit like Sean Connery when the dinner's cold in your way if it doesn't want you to go somewhere. Fallout 3 just had a 'do what you want, when you want' attitude. But New Vegas simply doesn't. And that's a good thing. New Vegas lets you know that wandering the mohave with nothing but a pair of overalls and a BB gun is a recipe for getting torn to ♥♥♥♥. As a role playing game, New Vegas isn't lenient. It will ask you to make choices, to form alliances with groups you probably shouldn't.

Speaking of which: The Ceasars Legion. A bunch of barbaric, slave owning totalitarians who deserve every death you'll give them. They can be joined. As can the former inmates or the paranoid boomer ♥♥♥♥♥ that nuke everyone. The only group you can't join is the raiders. In short, New Vegas doesn't want you to feel comfortable in some power fantasy. It understands that its main purpose as a role playing game is to immerse you into the role you're playing.

It's hard to feel like a proper human being when everyone treats you as the obvious protagonist and hands you the keys to ♥♥♥♥ their wives after every sidequest, which is what Bethesda games are like. Obsidian, though, likes to treat the player as a regular person. Side quests aren't given to you because you're the most important person who has to do everything. I mean, unavoidably, you do have to be the one who does everything, more or less. But, there's never a sense of providence. Like everyone's just waiting for the player to show up.

New Vegas is great in its ability to make you feel like a small part of a bigger story.

Now, given that I love New Vegas so much more than Fallout 3. You'd expect me to have finished it multiple times by now. Afterall, it is one of the few PC games I bothered buying a boxed copy of. But, the truth is that, despite having amassed over 100 hours in the game by now, I never actually finished New Vegas on PC. I actually only ever finished the game once, on PS3, around the beggining of 2020.

Why the PS3? Well, mostly because the console ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks, and is terribly ill fitting when it comes to running something like New Vegas. You can tell that the hardware isn't a fan of the Creation Engine. Also, there's the fact that, the more you play, the bigger your save file gets until it starts eating so much ram, the game goes to a crawl. Usually, those would be the reason not to play that version. But it is, partially, that pushing upward syndrome and this ticking clock element that helped me buckle down and enjoy the game as is. To me, a game is more impressive and fun when you feel like its straining the hardware.

Because, on PC, New Vegas isn't an impressive game. It pretty much never was. With stuff like the lack of shadows or real dynamic lighting; New Vegas just doesn't look as sleek as its predecessor. Not that Fallout 3 had shadows but, if there's one thing Fallout 3 did well, it was constructing a visually attractive world. Every rock in Fallout 3 feels like it was meticulously placed. Yet, New Vegas is much more utilitarian in it's desing. Far more focused on creating a world that feels real, rather than making one that simply looks attractive.

So, why did it take me so long to finish this game? There's multiple factors. I think the biggest one is that the game came out 6 days before my 16th birthday. Not that I celebrated my birthday, being that my parents were jehovah's whitenesses, but that's the story for another day. Basically, I was young and dumb and, by contrast, New Vegas was smart and mature in ways that I wasn't ready for. New Vegas is a deeply intellectual game, filled with nuance and big questions that can't be boiled down to simple good or evil.

In short, I had to get good intellectually. Form a political and personal identity first, before I could tackle a story like New Vegas. Simply wanting to do the right thing will only get you so far, here. Because, even the most benevolent path, namely siding with the NCR, will still place you in between a rock and a hard place. They will command you to do things you won't feel comfortable doing. I've never had a game deal with morality this extensively.

Overall world coherence is one of the biggest issues with bethesda games. With the Elder Scrolls, it's not too bad. But, Fallout is one series where I feel they consistently fail to present a believable, grounded world. From what I understand, part of the problem stems from the original plans for Fallout 3. You see, when making Fallout 3, the plan was to set it long before the events of the originals. Which is why the world of Fallout 3 has been far less ''reclaimed'' than what we saw in the originals. But, then people complained about the absence of stuff like the Enclave or the Brotherhood of Steel. So, rather than sticking to their guns. They decided to keep the same world and art desing, but artificially push the story further up the timeline. Decisions like these are at the core of why Bethesda's take on Fallout fell flat to hardcore fans. There's also the issue of leaning too far into binary good or bad choices. You always get the option of doing something bad, but you're almost never presented with a real moral quandry. The decision to blow up megaton is a bad decision, it has no nuance. Still, on it's own, Fallout 3 is an impressively ambitious game. There really was nothing like it at the time. The amount of freedom was unparalleled. Fallout 3 is one of the only games that I not only finished twice, I finished it twice in a row. So, while certain people can be harsh at Fallout 3 for how limp the story feels or how inconsistent the world is. I think it is still a fantastic accomplishment of a video game. On its own, it's perfectly fine. But, we're here to talk about New Vegas. Simply said, New Vegas is everything that was brilliant about Fallout 3 plus 15 piles of genius added on. The most standout element of New Vegas has to be its ability to give greater context to everything. Not a single enemy is placed half hazzardly. Everyone in the game has an origin, a crew, a place where they belong. There is no such thing as a generic human enemy in New Vegas. Even the few raiders that do exist aren't placed randomly across the map for maximum engagement. Instead, they have their own territory that they must realistically protect. New Vegas feels like a real place where people realistically live. Simply put, world coherence is far from being an issue in New Vegas. In fact, it's the opposite. New Vegas might have the most believable, most internally consistent open world I've ever seen. Everyone and everything feels part of a cohesive whole. And that helped by strong writing and narrative desing. Speaking of which, the game opens up with your character dying. A contrast to the previous game, which opened with your birth. Basically, there's this wise guy giving a speech about how its nothing personal kid, before shooting you in the brain and burrying you. Seemingly not realising that, in the fallout universe, it takes at least 4 headshots to take down anybody. So, a robot digs you back up, brings you to a doctor. And, after you've chosen your personality, race and gender, you're just set free... Fallout New Vegas doesn't waste your time setting up the story for 2 hours. It has an intro that's very much designed to get you into the world as quickly as possible. I did find a mod that changes the intro. But its main goal isn't to bypass annoying stuff, it's to introduce more possible scenarios from which you could start the game. And the quality of New Vegas' intro doesn't stop there. While you can just wander anywhere you like from the get go, New Vegas isn't designed to be an open sandbox where every new location is an awesome gunfight for you to win. New Vegas doesn't care about killing you. It will put giant, terrifying insects that hit like Sean Connery when the dinner's cold in your way if it doesn't want you to go somewhere. Fallout 3 just had a 'do what you want, when you want' attitude. But New Vegas simply doesn't. And that's a good thing. New Vegas lets you know that wandering the mohave with nothing but a pair of overalls and a BB gun is a recipe for getting torn to shit. As a role playing game, New Vegas isn't lenient. It will ask you to make choices, to form alliances with groups you probably shouldn't. Speaking of which: The Ceasars Legion. A bunch of barbaric, slave owning totalitarians who deserve every death you'll give them. They can be joined. As can the former inmates or the paranoid boomer fucks that nuke everyone. The only group you can't join is the raiders. In short, New Vegas doesn't want you to feel comfortable in some power fantasy. It understands that its main purpose as a role playing game is to immerse you into the role you're playing. It's hard to feel like a proper human being when everyone treats you as the obvious protagonist and hands you the keys to fuck their wives after every sidequest, which is what Bethesda games are like. Obsidian, though, likes to treat the player as a regular person. Side quests aren't given to you because you're the most important person who has to do everything. I mean, unavoidably, you do have to be the one who does everything, more or less. But, there's never a sense of providence. Like everyone's just waiting for the player to show up. New Vegas is great in its ability to make you feel like a small part of a bigger story. Now, given that I love New Vegas so much more than Fallout 3. You'd expect me to have finished it multiple times by now. Afterall, it is one of the few PC games I bothered buying a boxed copy of. But, the truth is that, despite having amassed over 100 hours in the game by now, I never actually finished New Vegas on PC. I actually only ever finished the game once, on PS3, around the beggining of 2020. Why the PS3? Well, mostly because the console fucking sucks, and is terribly ill fitting when it comes to running something like New Vegas. You can tell that the hardware isn't a fan of the Creation Engine. Also, there's the fact that, the more you play, the bigger your save file gets until it starts eating so much ram, the game goes to a crawl. Usually, those would be the reason not to play that version. But it is, partially, that pushing upward syndrome and this ticking clock element that helped me buckle down and enjoy the game as is. To me, a game is more impressive and fun when you feel like its straining the hardware. Because, on PC, New Vegas isn't an impressive game. It pretty much never was. With stuff like the lack of shadows or real dynamic lighting; New Vegas just doesn't look as sleek as its predecessor. Not that Fallout 3 had shadows but, if there's one thing Fallout 3 did well, it was constructing a visually attractive world. Every rock in Fallout 3 feels like it was meticulously placed. Yet, New Vegas is much more utilitarian in it's desing. Far more focused on creating a world that feels real, rather than making one that simply looks attractive. So, why did it take me so long to finish this game? There's multiple factors. I think the biggest one is that the game came out 6 days before my 16th birthday. Not that I celebrated my birthday, being that my parents were jehovah's whitenesses, but that's the story for another day. Basically, I was young and dumb and, by contrast, New Vegas was smart and mature in ways that I wasn't ready for. New Vegas is a deeply intellectual game, filled with nuance and big questions that can't be boiled down to simple good or evil. In short, I had to get good intellectually. Form a political and personal identity first, before I could tackle a story like New Vegas. Simply wanting to do the right thing will only get you so far, here. Because, even the most benevolent path, namely siding with the NCR, will still place you in between a rock and a hard place. They will command you to do things you won't feel comfortable doing. I've never had a game deal with morality this extensively.