Why is Fallout New Vegas considered good?

[Lemming42]

What do you think about the DLCs? Don't they try to tell their own stories?

For New Vegas? I thought Dead Money was pretty good and definitely leans into the weird surrealism that Fallout does best. Honest Hearts has some interesting stuff but I seem to remember the gameplay side of things being kind of a drag. Not a fan of OWB or Lonesome Road, though the visuals in Lonesome Road are very cool.

The DLCs do feel more satisfyingly self-contained than the main game, I guess - same for Fo3, where stuff like Point Lookout and The Pitt felt a lot more coherent than the base game.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Also I really like the idea of a ZAX AI that's been left on too long and managed to confuse itself and become some kind of weird caricature of an "ideal" US president while still being forced to follow out its original directive, feels like something suitably pulpy and surreal in the vein of Fallout 1 (though obviously the actual conversation the player has with Eden is totally nonsensical and the story never uses the concept well). Those fake idyllic childhood stories it tells on the radio station are great in retrospect when you realise that Eden is just a glorified large language model smashing together random shit it read in presidential biographies, and that nothing it's saying is meant to make a great deal of sense.

I agree that it was a decent idea. The problem I have with it is that it's "The Enclave". There's no reason, a good one at least, that it should be "The Enclave" right down to the same tech that they had in Fallout 2. I have a feeling they wanted the Enclave and accidentally came up with a decent back story, but they should haven't used the Enclave at all. Of course, the other problem is that even though the backstory is decent, it does almost come off as they took the bad guy from Fallout 2 and the bad guy from Fallout Tactics and someone combined them.

I think the people at Raven Rock are all refugees from the California Enclave. If I remember it right, Eden was basically alone in Raven Rock for a couple centuries, which is why it's ended up going crazy and adopting the Eden persona. When it learned of the destruction of the Oil Rig, it sent out an order to all remaining personnel to flee to Raven Rock (in vertibirds, I guess). I might be completely wrong about this, it's been a while since I played it.

It's been too long for me as well. I didn't like Fallout 3 enough to play through it a second time, but I beat it once. But even if they claim that they're from California, which I don't think they do but I did assume it through most of the play since everything else took the cross country trip, it still doesn't make sense. Here's the generic wiki on Raven Rock:

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Raven_Rock

 

[Lemming42]

Went looking around on the wiki and found this on the page about Eden:

After gaining self-awareness, Eden would learn of the destruction of the Enclave Oil Rig and the death of incumbent President Dick Richardson, leading him to establish contact with the remaining Enclave forces in the former state of California. Ordering a tactical retreat to the government safe haven of Raven Rock, Eden would declare himself the incumbent president of the United States and assume control as a figurehead for Enclave forces all over the country. With the fleeing Enclave forces under the command of an Enclave scientist known as Autumn Senior, they soon connected with Raven Rock, where Autumn Sr. would make personal contact with President Eden and would be the only Enclave member to discover the shocking truth of Eden's origins. With the rest of the Enclave oblivious to Eden's status as a self-aware AI, Autumn Sr. would pass the torch to his militaristic son Augustus Autumn. After Autumn's promotion to colonel, he and Eden would inherit this relationship, with Augustus remaining somewhat partial to Eden's claims of perfection.

Which I suppose also answers the question of why the Enclave follow an AI, albeit in the usual Fo3 way: it makes sense overall and is technically lore-compliant, but requires a bunch of weird coincidences and suspensions of disbelief.

 

[CHEMS]

FNV vanilla is kinda nice

What makes the game worthwhile playing is the modding community, i've spent thousands of hours playing through modded content and never get bored, it's the modding community that makes FNV atrocious engine bearable

 

[jf8350143]

I blame the meh gameplay (and graphics) on the creation engine. It's basically impossible to create decent combat using that engine.

Still Obisidian did a decent job to create interesting perks and build variety is pretty good(espeically comparing to Fallout 3 and 4).

 

[Machocruz]

I like NV for the same reason I like 1 and 2: quest structure. Quests with multiple starting points, multiple solutions, and multiple outcomes. Something developers like Bethesda don't have the brains or skills to implement, and something almost no other AAA rpgs have.

 

[Jaesun]

If New Vegas was ported to the Fallout 2 engine, we would have 3 good Fallout games.

 

[9ted6]

Having like three good quests and four good NPCs out of dozens of each isn't much of an achievement. Most of New Vegas is badly written and the gameplay's almost identical to FO3 but with less enemy variety.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Which I suppose also answers the question of why the Enclave follow an AI, albeit in the usual Fo3 way: it makes sense overall and is technically lore-compliant, but requires a bunch of weird coincidences and suspensions of disbelief.

I like the "After learning of the destruction of the oil rig". That requires a LOT of suspension of disbelief, particularly from the people who expect us to think that the NCR couldn't have been communicating with the Mojave because it's "over there", but somehow a computer in Washington D.C. finds out that an oil rig was blown up in the ocean off the West Coast. Keep in mind that Navarro was a refueling base for Vertibirds. They'd fly from the oil rig to Navarro, fuel up, and then head on their mission in to Fallout 2's territory. We don't know how far out the oil rig was, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the width of the United States.

If New Vegas was ported to the Fallout 2 engine, we would have 3 good Fallout games.

Now that you say it, I'm shocked no one has done this.

 

[Ol' Willy]

I never understood the "enclave was destroyed duude, they couldn't be in sequels" type of reasoning

Enclave is post-war US goyvernment, do you really think they would have only oil rig and Navarro as their bases? It is natural that they would have various bases all over the Kwa

The real problem is how lame the return of Enclave is in F3. They are introduced as generic bad boyzz and targets for the player, nothing else

Instead they should be their own faction with characters and quests

 

[Butter]

You shouldn't want the Enclave back because it always fucking sucks when they resurrect a villain. The Joker stops being intimidating when Batman punches the shit out of him for the 10th time.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I never understood the "enclave was destroyed duude, they couldn't be in sequels" type of reasoning

I would say it stems from their "Kill Everyone But Us" thing that they were doing at the end of Fallout 2. It might make sense if they kidnapped the Vault 13 people as a control group for the toxin and the Arroyo group as the "I hope they die" group, but the second you cross the rubicon of wanting to kill the people in the vaults too, you kind of set the idea that the Oil Rig was it for the "Enclave". If the vaults aren't good enough, and you're still worried about the people in the vaults ghouling out, what shelter would be good enough?

Enclave is post-war US goyvernment, do you really think they would have only oil rig and Navarro as their bases? It is natural that they would have various bases all over the Kwa

Could there be other groups that were remnants of the government? Sure. The Brotherhood of Steel is a U.S. Army remnant. The problem is them being "The Enclave".

The real problem is how lame the return of Enclave is in F3. They are introduced as generic bad boyzz and targets for the player, nothing else

If they were going to introduce it, they probably shouldn't be The Enclave, as I've said. Bethesda kind of fucked themselves by bringing The Enclave back as The Enclave in Washington, D.C. They ruined their chances of really doing any type of "former U.S. government" right then and there. Imagine if there were a government faction in Washington, D.C. that were different than the Enclave. In fact, they had no idea about the Enclave. Congress is supposed to go to the Greenbriar where there's a big vault waiting for them. They could have done something with that. Even made them a large enough of a faction at the time of Fallout 3 to where they could sustain a set back to make them a reoccuring faction in later games. Well, you're going to have to imagine that, because Bethesda fucked themselves on ever doing anything like that by setting Fallout 3 in Washington, D.C. and using "The Enclave" again.

They also screwed themselves with the retcons of the Vertabird and Advanced Power Armor being pre-war things. Basically, that means just about anyone can have that stuff now. It's also completely retarded how many working Vertibirds there are in the newer Fallouts if those things have been around for two hundred years. Cars don't work, because they're rotting husks, but those Vertibirds are really resilient! Vertibirds only make sense if they're new. Same thing goes with the Advanced Power Armor.

I'll let the criticism of Kimball having a Vertibird in New Vegas slide just because of the "Bear Force One" thing. Again, though, it makes sense he would have one if they were new and acquired from Navarro. Also, props to New Vegas for not showing working Vertibirds all over the place.

 

[Ol' Willy]

You shouldn't want the Enclave back because it always fucking sucks when they resurrect a villain. The Joker stops being intimidating when Batman punches the shit out of him for the 10th time.

Not as villain though.

Remember that "kill every impure with a virus" plan from F2 was pretty much a hush-hush affair, and everyone except the Chosen One who knew about it died...

Let's say a new guy (vice pres?) takes over and decides for more peaceful approach to restore control over US. This brings Enclave into a conflict with NCR and you can choose the side you want to help. You can play around with real life federal government and states rights in this context

One of the quests will be you digging deep into some Enclave bunker and finding dirty laundry on their former virus project

You can use it to help NCR and destroy the Enclave's reputation or use it to blackmail Enclave into giving you some shiny toys - or simply not tell anyone about this.

And if your choice is blackmail they then send a team of hitmen on your ass

 

[Cryomancer]

If FNV was made today, joining legion would be a possibility for the player? No, or obvious no?

And before anything, I never did a legion run. IMO Mr House is the best faction and I always sided with him.

 

[Bulo]

Enclave is post-war US goyvernment, do you really think they would have only oil rig and Navarro as their bases?

Yes. Fallout 2 establishes as much. Blame the original writers for their short-sightedness (and stop defending the first two games so vehemently, because although they're very good games, their worlds fall apart under the slightest scrutiny)

Saint_Proverbius is right. Fallout 3's antagonists should have represented another branch of the US military, or even one of the intelligence services. Think the Enclave is bad? Try a version of the CIA that is free to operate openly inside US borders, who see themselves as the rightful inheritors of the nation and mean to secure a monopoly on violence at any cost, and who now literally as well as figuratively glow in the dark because they're still being led by the same ghouls that murdered Kennedy. As always, this stuff writes itself (unless you're Emil Pagliarulo)

Elevator pitch:

This image, except the armour is T-51b painted black. Out of frame, there's a child wincing in fright (the USA is run by paedophiles)

 

[CHEMS]

I never understood the "enclave was destroyed duude, they couldn't be in sequels" type of reasoning

Enclave is post-war US goyvernment, do you really think they would have only oil rig and Navarro as their bases? It is natural that they would have various bases all over the Kwa

The real problem is how lame the return of Enclave is in F3. They are introduced as generic bad boyzz and targets for the player, nothing else

Instead they should be their own faction with characters and quests

FO2's Enclave is to this day one of the most intimidating and mysterious antagonist i've seen in any game. When i was a kid and saw that talking had with advanced power armor while approaching navarro's entrance i almost shat a brick

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

(and stop defending the first two games so vehemently, because although they're very good games, their worlds fall apart under the slightest scrutiny)

I'd say the first Fallout holds up pretty well. Fallout 2, not nearly as much. I really don't think the Enclave was foreshadowed enough given the length of the game and how much involvement they had with things. Maybe it's enough, but I didn't seem like enough for me. Their involvement with New Reno didn't make a lot of sense to me either. You'd think they would have attempted some sort of relationship with the NCR right off the bat. Of course, Fallout 2 was a very, very rushed product.

New Vegas was also fairly rushed, but the world building in that game is very well done. Especially when you compare it to Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and even Fallout 2.

Try a version of the CIA that is free to operate openly inside US borders, who see themselves as the rightful inheritors of the nation and mean to secure a monopoly on violence at any cost, and who now literally as well as figuratively glow in the dark because they're still being led by the same ghouls that murdered Kennedy.

I think the big problem is trying to write something from the perspective of a 1950s sci-fi author in a post-Watergate world. There's quite a few things that happened in the 1960s through today. Kennedy's assassination, the Operation Mockingbird hearings in Congress(which oddly enough aren't mentioned in history classes), Alger Hiss but somehow the Red Scare was fake?, and so on.

 

[Bulo]

I'd say the first Fallout holds up pretty well.

1. The vault premise (which Tim Cain came up with even before Fallout 2) makes little sense. Experiments designed to help the US government colonise space? Predicated on the collapse of humanity? So that they can put all of their eggs in an even smaller and more fragile basket? A plan that the President believes in wholeheartedly? Such single-minded hubris is beyond satirical, it's farcical. Compare that to the Super Mutants, the Master, and the Unity: pulp villains and a comically evil plot that, after learning the story of Richard Grey, you cannot help but believe (and fear). It would have made more sense for President Richardson to say, "Oh, the vault program, yeah. That was just one of a thousand contingencies we cooked up during the War. After the bombs fell, our priorities shifted and we decided to allocate our resources elsewhere." Thousands of lives, total bureaucratic apathy. The Enclave in Space is like something Emil would do, slap something dreadful in bright colours and play it for laughs

Pre-emptive edit #1:
The space colonisation plan makes sense coming from House because he's a single man, and an egomaniacal one at that. It doesn't make sense for an entire branch of government

2. Chris Taylor and Tim Cain, the two leads of Fallout, hold opposing positions on whether FEV or radiation is responsible for the wasteland's various ecological changes. Both positions have their merits, and neither answers the following question: Why is there only one population of ghouls? OK, yes, Vault 12 under Bakersfield had a faulty door. What about the other survivors on the surface, who were probably exposed to similarly low but steady levels of radiation? (If the dose was too high, they would have died or become unable to reproduce.) Not every survivor came from the vaults

Pre-emptive edit #2:
Todd helpfully negated the need for this question by just putting ghouls everywhere in the sequels. (Fallout 2's ghouls, found in Broken Hills and Gecko, were all from Necropolis originally.)

I think the big problem is trying to write something from the perspective of a 1950s sci-fi author in a post-Watergate world. There's quite a few things that happened in the 1960s through today. Kennedy's assassination, the Operation Mockingbird hearings in Congress(which oddly enough aren't mentioned in history classes), Alger Hiss but somehow the Red Scare was fake?, and so on.

Doesn't need to be that nuanced. At most, it needs to present a conundrum (like the Legion). Is slavery unconscionable? Vote today

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

1. The vault premise (which Tim Cain came up with even before Fallout 2) makes little sense. Experiments designed to help the US government colonise space? Predicated on the collapse of humanity? So that they can put all of their eggs in an even smaller and more fragile basket? A plan that the President believes in wholeheartedly? Such single-minded hubris is beyond satirical, it's farcical.

I can't say I've ever been a huge fan of the experiment angle on the vaults. If you've just been in a nuclear war, you're going to need as many people as possible. If you're willing to screw with the chances of survival of half of those people that are secure in vaults, and your enemy doesn't do that, guess what happens next. At some point, you have to wonder why bothering fighting a war if your end goal is to eventually lose? If you want to explain it away as a test for generational space travel, then there's a whole lot of those experiments that just don't make a lick of sense. It also doesn't make sense how they would set up some of those scenarios, either. The two vaults that utterly fail both of those cases are the ones where you have 999 of one sex and only one of the other. You're going to know who you're putting on that ship after all, and you're most certainly not going to pull something stupid like those two cases when you do it. Nor are you going to have a situation where 999 of one sex and only one of the other line up at that vault door when the alert is sounded.

2. Chris Taylor and Tim Cain, the two leads of Fallout, hold opposing positions on whether FEV or radiation is responsible for the wasteland's various ecological changes. Both positions have their merits, and neither answers the following question: Why is there only one population of ghouls? OK, yes, Vault 12 under Bakersfield had a faulty door. What about the other survivors on the surface, who were probably exposed to similarly low but steady levels of radiation? (If the dose was too high, they would have died or become unable to reproduce.) Not every survivor came from the vaults

Ghouls are probably something they're better off never actually explaining. Or at least, they shouldn't try. Ghouls just are. We know radiation was involved, but who knows what else. It could be the slow build up of radiation while rationing Rad-X and RadAway for all we know, since we're talking about Bakersfield and the vault door issue. I think the problem is that Bethesda can't help themselves from making concrete lore decisions without thinking about the implications for both the previous titles or future titles.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Todd helpfully negated the need for this question by just putting ghouls everywhere in the sequels. (Fallout 2's ghouls, found in Broken Hills and Gecko, were all from Necropolis originally.)

Crap. I missed this during my first read.

They also fucked things up pretty good by making a new, SECRET batch of FEV on the East Coast as well.

 

[Lemming42]

Nor are you going to have a situation where 999 of one sex and only one of the other line up at that vault door when the alert is sounded.

It was being talked about in another thread recently but this is the thing that destroys the stupid "vaults are evil experiments" idea - there's literally no way you wouldn't see the vault beforehand. Like, if most vault residents are wealthy elites or diehard preppers, they're going to tour the vault ahead of time. If they truly believe a nuclear war is coming - which they do, given they've bought vault places - they're going to meet the other residents ahead of time and check out the place and people they earnestly believe they'll be spending the entire rest of their existence with.

And even without that, people would have had to get to the vaults at least a day or two in advance prior to them being closed. They're so spaced apart across the country that there's no way everyone just ran to them as the nukes were already mid-air and heading toward America.

Which gives them ample time to think "hang on, everyone else here is a homicidal crackhead"/"hang on, this vault is made of rubber"/"hang on, I'm the only resident"/"hang on, there's no beds here, only cloning vats"/"hang on, all the food here is made of concrete" or whatever other shit.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

which they do, given they've bought vault places

That was one thing I thought that Fallout 4 really screwed the pooch on. The idea that Vault-Tec sells tickets for the vaults. It's been established that Vault-Tec was contracted by the government to build the vaults, so vaults should be considered "public space". Civil defense shelters created at the time of the Cold War weren't condos, so why would vaults be? And like you said, if they were selling space in the vaults, you'd think people would know way more about what was going to be going on them than they would otherwise.

 

[Jaesun]

If New Vegas was ported to the Fallout 2 engine, we would have 3 good Fallout games.

Now that you say it, I'm shocked no one has done this.

It would be almost impossible to do, in that a team could not under any circumstance use/distribute any of the art assets used in Fallout NV (in general). Exult however got around this by requiring the original game to be installed, and then they use several programs which alter the art assets of the original to work with the Exult engine. To do that for NV art assets to work with the Fallout 2 engine is probably just way too much work.

 

[Tyranicon]

If FNV was made today, joining legion would be a possibility for the player? No, or obvious no?

And before anything, I never did a legion run. IMO Mr House is the best faction and I always sided with him.

Lol if FNV was made today, the Legion wouldn't even exist.

 

[Ravielsk]

I think the problem is that Bethesda can't help themselves from making concrete lore decisions without thinking about the implications for both the previous titles or future titles.

From what I gather there is no real process at Bethesda for lore additions. They simply pitch a quest, if it sounds cool they make it. Lore does not even really enter the equation. They used to have a lore guy but he was fired around the Oblivion time so since then they have been doing everything freestyle.