Before I give my brief rundown, I should admit that I have an unholy love for Fallout 3. It was the first RPG I’d played in many, many years and fell head over heels for it immediately. I was reading a lot of videogame theory and creative writing theory when I first started playing and, in many ways, Fallout 3 was the springboard for getting interested in using games for educational purposes. I had to wait about nine months between finishing Fallout 3 and really having a go at Fallout New Vegas.

Now I’m winding down with FNV and feel the need to reflect on what, overall, has been a fairly disappointing experience. I acknowledge I had impossibly high expectations going in, but the game itself is flawed in serious ways that Fallout 3 just wasn’t. Here are some preliminary observations:

• Familiarity breeds contempt.I thought I wanted the exact same game as Fallout 3 but with a new world. Ironically, this is close to what I got so perhaps I don’t have the right to complain, but it just goes to show how quickly a game can from being innovative to feeling tired in a short period of time. Games draw us in to their worlds by teaching us how to play them, and that quality of immersion wasn’t present for me in New Vegas the way it was in the DC environment of F3.
• Glitches kill games. Unfortunately you can’t talk about this game without talking about the bugs. I started playing about six months after the game’s release and hoped that patches would solve this problem. They addressed most of the major ones, but playing today I still routinely fall through rocks, get stuck in walls, have quests lock up, and experience frequent game freezes. Right now I’m having trouble with my companions losing all of their weapons after I exit a casino, even after I’ve had them wait outside to avoid this (which I also shouldn’t have to do). This not only makes the game a grind, but it also breaks whatever level of immersion the game has achieved to that point.
• The character still shifts too quickly from struggling to competence to god-like. Both F3 and FNV are at their best when your character is between Level 1 and maybe Level 12 or so. The areas in which you’ve chosen to specialize in still count for a lot at this stage, and you’re just getting to the point where you can navigate difficult situations with some ability. Even though you get fewer perks in FNV compared to F3, I still feel like many situations are no longer challenging. Wiping out an entire casino full of thugs, for example, is a bit of routine business completed in about a minute of gameplay.
• When the game gets challenging, it often gets stupider. Even though I’m on my way to Level 30, the highest level in the game, I still do find myself fleeing like mad from enemies from time to time, but usually for annoying reasons. When I’m using a flamethrower to torch a guy wearing only a tuxedo for protection, he should be dead pretty quickly; when he’s hitting me with a cane, that shouldn’t even scratch my suit of combat armor. But when I’m doing marginal damage and he’s beating my head in, that breaks any sense of immersion; I’m thinking, “Well, this is stupid.” Ideally enemies would get smarter or more well-equipped as you level up to make the game more complicated, rather than suddenly becoming irrationally strong bullet-sponges.
• Cazadores suck. Maybe I need to get over this, but I consider it a design flaw and a hugely annoying part of the game. Cazadores are insects with poison stingers who descend upon you quickly and in numbers. While that alone made them challenging (and annoying) opponents, the deal breaker comes with another piece of nonsense: if they poison your companions, they die. If you get poisoned you can take anti-venom, which makes sense; however if any human companion gets poisoned, there’s no way to get them to take the medicine and they die, even from a single hit. Which is stupid. Gamers suspend their disbelief to fill in the fictional holes in games all the time, and it’s not an issue–until it is. The glaring problem here is the ridiculousness of the situation: you have a cure, your partner needs it, but there’s no way to say, “Here, take a shot of this or you will die.”

Fallout 3 wasn’t perfect but I would need to think awhile to come up with a list of flaws; the above points rolled off the top of my head. I appreciate that the game tried develop a more complex story than F3, but this goes back to a key point in videogames: a good game can have a bad story, but a good story can’t save a bad game.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say FNV is a bad game per se; I have enjoyed playing it. But it’s flaws are too many and too serious for it to be another other than a pale shadow of its predecessor. Is this because the game was developed by Obsidian rather than Bethesda Softworks. Dunno. But Fallout 4 is rumored to be another Bethesda Softworks (F3) developed project rather than an Obsidian ( FNV) one, and hopefully that’s a good thing.