Let’s be honest: So right off the bat I want to let you all know that I couldn’t finish the game. Halfway through the bugs were preventing me from completing certain quest lines that were required to complete the main story line. With that being said this game was a mixed bag for me, at parts there were some things I loved, and at other parts either during game play or research I rolled back in my chair, sighed, and thought, “here we go again, I’m back in Fallout Three”.
Bugs, Possibilities and More Bugs: Fallout New Vegas shines a hopeful light on a franchise that is always in need of constant repair. This game blurs the lines of racism with edgy sarcasm, and at points I muttered to myself "why, oh why". On the flip side, this game also makes characters immersive and fun to deep dive into their stories and backgrounds. It left me feeling to an extent both happy and irritated, which is I think what Fallout New Vegas was trying to achieve. The stories of the characters are rich, immersive and downright hilarious at points. The stories of the characters sucked me in and made me believe that this wasteland could exist. While this game has a lot of good to it, it also shows players that a basically unplayable game should be fixed by the fans if they want to have any hope of completing it. Mods are the greatest thing to have graced the gaming community, and I will forever be in awe of the people who make these mods possible to play basically broken games. Now I will say, I played what I could on PC, I’ve heard it plays better on console with less bugs. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but if I dare to dip my toes in the preverbal waters I may try it again at some point, this time on console. The controls I will barely be going into because those I really had no issues with, it was the getting stuck on doors, the game crashing, entering into a death loop when the game saved at a weird spot or the major one for me which led to the game just not working, which was not having major characters spawned when I needed them to spawn to complete a mission. Bethesda’s “It just works” Model hasn’t been working for a very long time. The community as a whole more relied on the fans to deliver an amazing mod/product then the company getting it right upon the game's completion because that’s just how it is. Even though I see a lot of potential in this game, and something that I could love, the bugs and story cloud the way and it makes it nearly impossible to enjoy the game for what it is.
So close, Yet so far: Shadows and dimly light hallways cloaked secrets of a characters past that, even the character is still trying to remember. In this installment of Fallout, I need to find the person that nearly killed me. That’s it. That’s the story. There’s no hidden theme, no monumental reason, I was just a courier taking on the wrong mission at the wrong time. The story has no drive for me as the player to continue other than that wanting to find the person who nearly killed me. Which first off why would I want to find this person who tried to kill me and risk death or possibly dying again? If I escaped death, I wouldn’t want to chase down the guy who tried to kill me just so he could finish the job. Let me live my life in New Vegas with cigarette smoke clouding my view, and some poor shmuck proclaiming he had won the lottery. It's a waste landers bliss. A lot of the side quests and stories in the game are funny, boring and one of them purely racist in regards colonization from what I've researched. “In the Fallout: New Vegas expansion pack, Honest Hearts, the player character travels to Zion - not the Zion of Israel, but what is presumably Zion National Park in southwest Utah. Zion is a very new name for the canyons; the land has a native human record dating back around 10,000 years, and it was named Zion only about 200 years ago, in the 1850's when Mormon colonists* first came into the area. Those Mormons disrupted the natural ecosystem that the Southwest Paiute, a somewhat broad native group with many constituent bands, relied on, forcing the natives off their generational lands after less than a decade.” -recognizeourart.blogspot.com
There is even and upgrade that is achievable where it states in the description of the upgrade, “you don’t take kindly to raiders, junkies or tribal’s trying to “stay alive” in civilized lands.” So many people say that this was supposed to be a joke, to be a caricature of the U.S. I see that a game can create humor in certain instances to poke fun and create a sort of comedic relief, but this was not something that I personally found funny, and/or comedic. It created a pit in my stomach in the same way Fallout Three did when I played it through. I know some people can see the humor in the Fallout game's poorly timed jokes or even laugh at the concept that the game may very well be trying to deliver. The game could easily be saying “hey racism is wrong you shouldn’t be a bad person” but the way in which Bethesda is delivering that message, to me at least has the opposite effect. I see their words and poorly timed humor as edgy just to be edgy.
The Journey Ends here: In the end, this game is a minefield and mixture of poorly written “jokes”, beautiful sceneries, funny one liners and a boring story. There are so many ways to approach this story, and there are so many beautiful things that this game has to offer with the opportunity to be literally anyone. It’s sad that Obsidian was left with a mess to try and work around and create something new from. This game could have been something because I see bits and pieces of beauty shine through a nightmare. The gaming community let’s this game pass because it’s Fallout, and because it is deemed as a classic. Its very nostalgic for those who grew up with it, and nostalgia most of the time is a drug that will tempt even the smartest person. Nostalgia creates a positive narrative in the mind and turns obvious red flags into rose petals.
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