Audra Bowling
Fallout: New Vegas was my first foray into the Fallout series, and it is one heck of a great starting point. I’m not always a huge fan of some of the dated gameplay mechanics: why can’t I lug around as many jugs of purified water as I want and still fast travel, darn it?!? But the choice-heavy narrative, humor, and characters were all gloriously on point. Love to Arcade, Raul, and Veronica especially!
I was blown away by the sheer number of permutations to every single scenario, and I struggled with my ending choice well after making it; the game provides so many nuanced shades of gray throughout, which is the sign of a game with lasting power and replayability if I ever saw one. My journey through the Mojave wasnāt necessarily perfect, but Fallout: New Vegas still left a lasting impression on me. I can’t sing its praises enough.
Matt Wardell
Returning to New Vegas after a decade and a half was like slipping into an old pair of cowboy boots. Sure, itās a bit stiff in places, what with bugged quest progressions, too many featureless horizons, and consistent performance hiccups. But, replaying it, I was once again spurred on by the engrossing freedom of choice that makes it one of the few games to truly deliver on the Western RPG promise of playing a role of your choosing. Iāve been a gun-toting boy scout in the Mojave; Iāve been an intimidating, bazooka-wielding thug working for some faction or another; now Iāve been a silver-tongued cannibal who raked all the chips in for himself. Even at launch, the game was ugly as sin, yet the core fun I felt playing it as a teenager remains. If a remake is not in the cards for New Vegas, then I hope the next Fallout game carries the torch of its narrative design philosophy.
Though New Vegas may have troubles by the score, each day I love it more.
Jono Logan
The Fallout series, and New Vegas in particular, offers a breathtaking amount of content. But even the most devoted fan of New Vegas will eventually hit a wall where there is nothing new to discover in the game. Thankfully, Fallout and Bethesda have an ace up their sleeves: mods!
Over the years, a passionate fan base of modders has steadily released brand-new content for New Vegas (and the other Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles), ranging from new weapons to bug fixes to entire DLC-sized quests. If you are one of those fans who loves New Vegas but thinks theyāve explored every empty corner of the Mojave Wasteland, I have good news. For modders, those empty corners offer nothing but opportunities for new adventures. Here are some of my favourites:
If you want something that will instantly improve your next playthrough of New Vegas, I canāt recommend JimmyCM123ās Fast VATS and Kill Camera enough. It does exactly what it says: speeds up the cutscenes that can happen after a kill. You get the same āimpactā of the kill, but at twice the speed!
This quest mod by BaronVonChateau was so professionally polished that it āinspiredā Bethesda (allegedly) to add a suspiciously similar side quest in Fallout 4: Far Harbor. While wandering the Mojave, you discover a new Vault filled with nothing but books and self-aware robots. Over the centuries, they have achieved sentience and dedicated themselves to protecting their home and the old-world knowledge contained within. But books arenāt the only thing you will discover in this Vaultā¦you’ll also find MURDER! Time to put on your detective hat and question some robots because the game is afoot!
This is the first mod in a tapestry of quest and follower-related mods from Someguy2000, a retired New Vegas modder (although apparently he is back under a new name). The first New Vegas Bounties is pretty simple: you become a bounty hunter and are tasked with tracking down the worst that the Mojave has to offer. But from this modās simple beginning, Someguy2000 builds an entire new corner of the wasteland filled with new lore-friendly quests, unique weapons, and bad guys to gun down! I recommend everything he has created, but itās best to start here.
The New Bison Steve Hotel and Lucky Casino
One of the most interesting locations in the early game of New Vegas is the Bison Steve Hotel, inspired by the real Buffalo Bill’s Hotel in Primm, Nevada. Unfortunately, after you finish clearing it of raiders (and the most annoying deputy in gaming history), the area is finished. But with this mod you can go out of your way to bring prosperity back to the little town of Primm by renovating and reopening the casino! I love mods that add features that feel like they always should have been in the game, and modder Mike Hancho pulls it off beautifully.
Extended New Vegas Radio Generator
I donāt think many folks will contest the fact that you can only listen to Johnny Guitar so many times before he starts to grate on your nerves. Thankfully, modding offers a solution. With Jarolās radio generator mod, you can create your own New Vegas radio station, adding hundreds of new songs to jam out to on your journeys through the Mojave. If you want to go pure lore-friendly, you could always add the soundtracks of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. But if you want to give this retro-future apocalypse an extra kick in the head, I recommend buying and adding every album from Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox. This astonishingly talented musical collective takes the hits of today and transposes them into the styles of the ā30s, ā40s, ā50s, and 60s. Frankly, I am a little surprised that Bethesda hasnāt already tried to partner with them for Fallout soundtracks because hearing āTitaniumā belted out by a 1940s crooner just feels right!
Aleks Franiczek
Few RPGs have reached as widespread an audience as Fallout: New Vegas. Modders have tinkered to preserve the game by remolding it from a semi-broken, misunderstood gem to one of the most celebrated and persistently played RPGs of the modern age. It brims with so much imagination, attention to detail, player freedom, and intellectual nuance across its design and writing that you only need to pass a trivial Perception check to overlook its obvious flaws.
New Vegasā defining strength is probably the way it pulls players back in to roleplay a different character or discover new ways to approach the gameās impressive non-linear structure. Yet focusing on the DLCsāwhich each expand on one of the gameās core strengthsāthis playthrough exposed me more fully to the authorial vision of the developers. This was a team that not only wanted to entertain its players but make them reflect on our world. Itās a Rorschach test of sociopolitical ideas. The development may have been unfortunately rushed, but you can sense that this is a game stuffed with a decade of percolating ideas that continue to speak to players and creators alike.
Zach Wilkerson
Thereās a saying a lot of critics use that I donāt much like, but in this case itās aptāFallout: New Vegas is a game I respect more than I love.
Donāt get me wrong: New Vegas is an incredible game, one that accomplishes so much of what people always promise me WRPGs are āabout.ā Whether you mostly want to do the ārightā thing (insofar as that exists here), play a straight up killing machine, or never enter combat at all, thereās always another way to approach it, another way to āget byā a particular challenge. Whether I was burning all my Stealth Boys to go up a mountain I wasnāt ready for or turning allies against each other, I was almost always having a good time.
So, I guess I donāt have much to add to the praise my colleagues have heaped on the game above. Instead, Iāll do something slightly different: talk about what I donāt like about New Vegas. I think VATS are clunky and generally useless except to get your bearings in combat. Weight load and management is onerous, and the penalty for carrying too much is overly punishing. I also think the open world creates some weird balancing issues; the excellent game design in the much tighter DLCs only furthers that opinion.
But my biggest issue is the gameās themes. While philosophically rich in many ways, they are ultimately an immature cop-out. Discounting the truly despicable Legion, thereās a lot of āboth sides-ismā where all the factions and the results of your choices are almost equally bad. Iām not saying I need a clean, tidy, neat narrative, and maybe Iām too much of an optimist, but āWar Never Changesā just doesnāt do much for me as a central thesis and strikes me as intellectually lazy.
To be clear, none of this takes away from what a monumental accomplishment Fallout: New Vegas is. Itās just not a monumental accomplishment I totally jive with.
