"War does not change". To this phrase, which has already become popular, I would like to add a couple more words: “War does not change. People don’t change either". And everything else is just decoration created to demonstrate evidence of this statement.
Well, since there’s a wave of reviews, am I a leftist or something?? If I hadn’t suddenly been knocked out of sleep yesterday, I would have posted the review yesterday, because it was 90% ready, all that remained was to attach the pictures and add the finish.
(There was a Flash player, but since 2020 Flash is not supported by browsers)
As usual, let’s start with the history of the phenomenon, so to speak. The first part of Fallout was released in 1900 and was one of those rare Role Playing Games where the emphasis was placed not on Game, but on Role. Number of different options for events, excellent dialogue, S system.P.E.C.I.A.L. — all this and much more determined the success and, as a consequence, the release of the sequel. Fallout 2 came out exactly as expected. It was a refined, in-depth, significantly expanded project, in which old ideas did not go away, and new ones took root as if they had always been here. Due to a series of tragic and extremely unpleasant events, the Fallout brand was bought by Bethesda, famous for its The Elder Scrolls series. Various legal battles went on for several years with varying success, but in the end, in 2008, Bethesda released Fallout 3. Long-awaited and therefore beloved in absentia. It receives decent (even very) ratings in the press, sells well, but various fights constantly happen on the forums. And the whole reason is that two categories of dissatisfied people appeared: the first are those who played TES IV: Oblivion to the core and saw only Oblivion in Fallout 3, but only with pistols and shotguns, the second are those who played the original Fallout 1&2 to the core. The latter, to varying degrees, did not like the transition to full 3D, the impoverishment of the role-playing system, the almost linear plot and many other innovations. These people were shouting something about the "lost spirit of Fallout", and I was one of them.
That’s why the announcement of New Vegas was like a sudden gust of fresh air for me. The people responsible for Fallout 2 are taking their own brainchild into their own hands – this is pleasing. Strongly. Then there was a lull and almost nothing was reported about Vegas. There were a couple of reports that it would be possible to play as a ghoul and drive around the Wasteland in a car, but ultimately it all fell off.
…with a machete in the grass?
Everyone knows – Simon Frost!
The first thing that blows you away in the new part is the absence of any immense pathos. We all remember that memorable moment when the Vault Dweller took the first step into a new, unknown world. So this is not here. Here we are not shown one of the most interesting locations right at the exit from the temporary Shelter. Worse still, there isn’t even a Vault here. We begin not as the Chosen One, not as a descendant of the Chosen One, but as a very simple person. And our profession is courier.
The story starts out interesting, although it is not some kind of heavenly revelation – we are instructed to take a strange platinum chip somewhere, but as a result of a series of planned events, our body ends up in a specially prepared grave, and the chip ends up with a certain comrade in a checkered jacket. Then some robot named Victor digs us up and brings us to the nearest settlement, where there is an excellent doctor who, in fact, saves our skins. It is on this doctor’s couch that we begin the game.
It is worth noting that the beginning is a little less interesting than its predecessor, Fallout 3, where we were allowed to get a very good feel for that very life in the Vault. Everything happens extremely quickly here. We remember our name, look at our restored face, approach the machine that calculates our physical and mental parameters, pass a psychological test and… that’s it. Walk, Vasya, while your legs are still running.
Moreover, at first it may seem that freedom is still somewhat limited, but after a few hours you realize that in fact you are the only one limiting yourself. And after these very few hours, you suddenly catch yourself thinking that you actually sat down just to see what the game is and how it is in general. That’s when, for the first time, the realization comes of what the comrades from Obsidian managed to do, what programmers, designers, artists and other game makers from Bethesda failed to do.
…after another drinking https://nongamstop-casinos.uk/review/betfoxx/ session.
The main and main thing that happened in the Wasteland, for which I want to immediately and on the spot erect a monument to Obsidian interactive, is the disappearance of sharp boundaries. Now everything and everyone does not have one and unambiguous assessment. Robot Victor – a friendly piece of hardware that saved us, despite all his perkiness, sometimes looks very suspicious. Friendship with any one group will certainly affect relations with its enemies, and each group has its own philosophy, its own goals and its own methods of achieving its goals. The halftone collapsing system has even reached such things as food intake. Now you can’t just eat a piece of meat and hope that GG gets off with a small dose of radiation. Often, simple raw meat gives various negative effects such as reduced Strength, Perception or Stamina. But if you cook this meat with various herbs and roots, which now grow abundantly in the vast wasteland, then you can get rid of the negative effects.
In general, the idea of various drugs manufactured by the player himself has finally received a worthy embodiment in New Vegas. The number of different recipes is impressive, and the range of their effects is wider than it might seem at first glance. Here there are both simple recipes like steak made from gecko meat, and exotic drinks that allow the hero to enter a kind of slo-mo (it looks very impressive if, after three bottles of this product, you try to kill someone with a machete).
But you can’t survive in the Wasteland on bean pods and mutafruits alone. The weapons branch has also received decent development, where you can now modify both weapons and ammunition. I’ll tell you about the latter separately. The fact is that the cartridges finally began to differ. In addition to the usual ones, armor-piercing and expansive ones appeared. Everyone knows why armor-piercing cartridges are needed – by changing the shape of the bullet itself, they are capable of penetrating thick armor, but cause less damage than conventional cartridges. Expansive cartridges are just the opposite – they are designed for unprotected targets. And this seemingly small moment gives the shootouts in the game the necessary depth. No, shooting without WATTS is still a problem, although they added the ability to aim with a real sight on a weapon in the manner of all self-respecting first-person action games.
Green Silent Hill
But it’s never Silent or Hill, but rather a depression.
Since we’re talking about shooting, it’s worth mentioning what and who you can shoot at. Since the third part, the menagerie has expanded very, very significantly – both old favorites (geckos of all stripes, praying mantises) and new species (night hunters, bighorns) have appeared. And all this has undergone one very useful change – everyone has their own habitat halos and strictly defined parameters. And some animals now have quite adequate AI. For example, bighorn sheep will now appear hostile by default. But if you keep your distance from the young animals, then no one will touch you and they will let you pass peacefully. The appearance of little things like bighorn sheep lambs and coyote puppies transforms the game. The animal world absolutely suddenly acquires some required depth, which is why sometimes you try to avoid unnecessary skirmishes so as not to kill puppies.
And right here comes the joy for those who criticized Fallout 3 for completely mediocre super mutants, big, but stupid and flimsy. The super mutant in Fallout: New Vegas is a real super mutant. The models were chosen so that these creatures really look like a kind of Hulk in a post-apocalyptic world. And this hulk can cause very, very problems. Especially if we talk about a new type of super mutants – shadow super mutants. The trick is that they can become invisible.
In conclusion of the introductory part, I would also like to note the fact that the game has an order of magnitude more weapons than there were in its predecessor. And the weapons are often real, not fictitious.
… wandered among the stars in a dark pasture. The tavern was on the left. On the right there was a forest… Oh. Well done :3
Well, it’s time to talk about the role-playing component, because whatever one may say, the game’s genre is RPG. Here, I tell you, everything is in perfect order. There are no quests in the spirit of “go get it” or “go kill those ants”. And even if there is, it will eventually turn out that these ants are disguised members of the Brotherhood of Steel, searching for forgotten technologies. And if it doesn’t, then it turns out that there are ten ways to kill ants. As a result, it turns out that each quest can be completed in at least two different ways, but most often there are even more of these ways.
There are no interesting quests without something? That’s right, without competent, interestingly constructed dialogues, without prominent characters and thousands of other details. And here Obsidian again treats Mother Bethesda like kittens. Dialogues, characters, stories and everything that happens around are much more. No, not even “much”, but simply orders of magnitude better than similar ones from the third Fallout. And this becomes noticeable from the very first location, where a guy is hiding in a town and is being chased by robbers. There, the guy is not a saint, and the robbers are not exactly monsters, so everyone chooses the solution to this situation for themselves.
But what Fallout 3 definitely lacked was humor. There was a pronounced problem with jokes. There is complete order here. There are jokes, there are a lot of jokes and funny characters. What is the value of one Sunny Smile (from English – Sunny Smile), which never even closes a smile?.
You can’t miss another global innovation that hardcore fans will appreciate: the appearance of a “hardcore mode” checkbox. The essence of this mode is not that everyone around will have 100,500 lives and killing every monster will turn into a real epic. No, the Hardcore mode, like the Realism mode in Left 4 dead 2, simply updates the gameplay. In Left 4 Dead, halos around players and their nicknames disappeared, which is why you had to watch your party members much more closely. At the same time, it was possible to switch the difficulty of simple monsters. Also New Vegas. Hardcore mode adds 3 new scales – thirst, hunger and lack of sleep. Failure to pay attention to all these parameters can and regularly leads to various negative consequences, the most negative of which is death.
… among local residents they fly away just as beautifully.
But it’s too long to talk about all the changes, because there are a great many of these changes. So let’s move on to what is probably the only thing left untouched – the graphics. And that’s right. Personally, I think that the graphics in the game should be such that they are not annoying. In New Vegas the picture is exactly like this. A role-playing game like Fallout, where there is no ambition for some kind of crazy pretentious cinematography, does not need a picture from Crysis 2 at all. On the other hand, nowhere else is there such a beautiful realization of all these air currents and dusty air, small tornadoes and other air tango. And now various light filters are turned on much more often and more appropriately.
For all its unpretentiousness, Fallout New Vegas is still impressive. Designers and cartographers did a great job. The locations and interiors came out just great, and some are absolutely gorgeous. The wasteland turned out to be deserted enough so as not to seem like a motley blanket, but not deserted enough to be too boring and uninteresting. Now ask yourself, what would happen to all this if Obsidian decided to overhaul the graphics?? Wow, that’s right.
Let’s beat the money: Fallout: New Vegas at first strongly resembles Fallout 3, with the same graphics, the same flaws in the action component, and then suddenly reveals itself in all its splendor and does not let go of its tenacious clutches. New Vegas doesn’t try to seem like an expensive RPG like its predecessor tried to seem, it turns around and hits you right in the heart with its incredible liveliness. Fallout: New Vegas fully reveals the phrase “War never changes” because, ultimately, Fallout is not a game about good guys fighting bad guys (a subtle hint at Fallout 3), but a thousand different stories about how people survive in new conditions. And not only people. This is a game about people.
And probably most importantly. You may not notice all of the above. Fallout: New Vegas is a game with which you need to communicate, and not expect it to give you the whole plot and all the tasty goodies that it has for what you wanted in a monologue downloadbuy it.
Pros: a huge Wasteland with interesting content (settlements, people, special places), deep non-linearity, good role-playing;
Cons: Graphics, not the most convenient combat system, rare bugs, not the smartest combat AI.
Final score: Masterpiece. The game definitely has the right to be called a descendant of the first parts of Fallout.
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