Fallout: New Vegas Is Genius, And Here's Why

the first two fallouts are still two of the best games ever two of the most engaging worlds and stories ever crafted for players to explore so the developer went bankrupt the fallout intellectual property was then sold to bethesda there were those who had minor problems with the direction they took the series but when you shoot a guy just right his guts go everywhere so overall the game did very well a lot of people liked fallout 3 then again a lot of people liked clerks too so humans aren't really viable as a species but then less than two years later fallout cheated death [Music] developed by obsidian entertainment with a team including people who worked on the original games fallout new vegas represents everything great about the original series along with all the good stuff from three that was worth keeping in addition to being one of the most incredible games ever made it's also really interesting to talk about from a design perspective it's not just a game it's a flipping game design doctor and it's here to put on a clinic i didn't write that line it just appeared in the script new vegas is the sort of game where you can open a manhole cover expecting like a sewer level and instead discover that the local people have formed a cult dedicated to blood and retrofitted the sewers into a fighting arena come on there has to be a boring quest here okay the lady who runs this place wants me to find her some mantis eggs fetch some eggs that's got to be the most boring quest there could possibly be okay the eggs are in this abandoned vault great looking for eggs in some gray corridors that sounds wait it's overgrown with plants and there's environmental storytelling warning me not to go in oh man this vault is cool it's overgrown and there's a bunch of stories on the computers about the experiments that went on in there and it's creepy and way more visually interesting than you'd expect a vault to be and is that oh [Music] one of new vegas's best features is its ability to make you invested in its quests and locations vault 22 is one of the many parts of the world that sounds on paper like somewhere familiar which then goes out of its way to be completely unlike you expect in every possible way players of three will already have an intimate awareness of how volts can be having been forced to walk around in one for an hour before the game even starts and several side quests also take place in very similar vaults with slightly different aesthetics and different enemies in them instead of officer mack you get officer gary the most interesting vault in three is full of people called gary who yell gary at you i mean it's pretty funny on a surface level it's easy to see why vault 22 is a more compelling place to explore it's a bit nicer to look at with its spots of overgrowth in the halls and plants everywhere the cave network it gives way to and it's more run down areas and it's populated with enemies unique to this one location called spore carriers which look like humans but creepily hide in foliage and can't be targeted by vats while they're hiding meaning you have to be able to spot them through their camouflage in order to fight them which makes them genuinely creepy and ugh and while the unique aesthetic and cool enemies are fun what makes vault 22 a good case study in obsidian's design philosophy is the ways it creates a strong narrative experience for players and uses its mechanical elements to enhance player engagement with the story firstly just for convenience's sake the vault can be discovered in more than one way six different quests lead you to this vault you don't necessarily come here looking for those delicious eggs one guy wants you to find the secret of how they're growing all these plants so easily since you know growing plants in the wasteland is a pretty big deal somewhere on a computer system in the vault are files on how they managed all this but on your way out of his office another scientist stops you and says he's sent like 10 other guys there already and none of them have come back and asks you to find out what happened to another researcher who went there this is a trick the game pulls often with its quests even something as simple as download some files from me please is given extra layers of narrative meaning you're actually being sent to a dangerous place without proper warning and other people are missing there this creates a sense of anticipation to the level the vault has tons of computer logs detailing the work they did the events with mind controlling spores that led to everyone's death or infection and a bunch of new logs left by the researcher who went missing when she came here and because you're actually trying to find out what happened to the researcher it's much harder to ignore the story that's going on here than it would be otherwise the player is also being given mechanical rewards that really incentivize exploring and engaging closely with the material there's a unique laser rifle you can't get anywhere else in the game hidden in this vault on some poor guy's corpse the game never draws attention to it it's not like a reward you get for beating a boss or something it's just hidden in a corner somewhere and the genius of this kind of design is that once players have found something like this once they're gonna realize there could be stuff hidden anywhere suddenly they're paying that much more attention to the environments that they're traveling through and partaking more in the stories of the place you might not really care that much about the story of little side quests like this but if you know there might be a cool gun in here somewhere you're paying a lot more attention than you might have been some of the quests technically put an objective marker in the corner leading you to the necessary part but when vault 22 has worked its magic you forget it's there the true beauty of great game design is when all its artificial justifications quest indicators loot to find experience points to earn melt away and you really feel like you're in a creepy place looking for answers eventually you find the researcher is alive and can help them flood the lower floors with gas and blow up the spores so they don't pose a threat to anyone else good you survived then she decides to delete the computer records the person you optionally saved as a result of exploring wants to delete the data you actually came here for if you already downloaded it she asks you to delete your copy too so this mistake can't be repeated and if you refuse she attacks you even simple seeming fetch quests have twists and the sense of a story you're taking part in and making choices about because there's a real moral dilemma here do you really trust this guy with research that killed a bunch of people already we're with the government for goodness sake have a little faith in it you have to be good at science in order to reason out with her that it's probably good to have a record of the mistake so people don't repeat it what could have been a simple fetch quest to find some data ended in making an ethical decision about whether the information you found deserves to exist the advantages of this design are clear when you contrast with the gary vault in three the enemies are kind of cool for a little while but there's no quests or story or choices to make so the experience isn't particularly involving you don't really have any reasons to be here there's a really useful piece of loot in this vault a bobble head that permanently increases your charisma and even though it's technically quite hard to miss it's just sitting on a table deep in the vault getting to it requires trawling through the rest of a location that has nothing else worth finding and enemies whose gimmick was wearing thin after gary 3. i'm willing to bet most players got bored and left before they found it if you found this be honest you didn't find it because the location was so cool it made you want to look around and see all of it you found it because you were using a guide to find all the bobble heads thanks carl eventually players lose interest in picking through empty buildings full of locked easy safes in case there's something interesting in them oh boy a bottle cap meanwhile vault 22 isn't even the coolest vault in new vegas vault 11 is straight up an incredibly well-written piece of fiction and it's just hiding off in a little nook waiting for you to be sent there as part of a quest for the brotherhood of steel i need you to go on this important quest for me our air conditioner is broken yup yup yup great great i'm going to destroy this faction this approach to quest design is all over the place offering you very simple and straightforward seeming things and then pulling the rug out from under you honestly there are probably too many it's at the point where if you happen to pick up enough cute little bottle caps with stars on them you stumble into a quest to discover a legendary treasure you get random encounters with people murdering each other over them after you find your first one this guy malcolm eventually tracks you down and tells you about the quest he's kind of notorious for doing it at really unexpected times you might notice he seems to be at a weird angle looking down at me that's because on this playthrough i was crouching preparing for a fight when he found me hello there it was actually kind of terrifying but i admire his dedication now give me the caps okay i'm gonna be nice about fallout 3. there's some good stuff in there and some of these quests are genuinely good like when a talking tree asks you to kill it in spite of its existence bringing people hope or resolving a dispute between two broken people masquerading as comic book characters and harassing a town or when an old woman asks you to find her the world's last remaining stradivarius violin a handful of the quests in fallout 3 end up being genuinely good funny and even touching at times if anything they annoy me in a particular way because they made me see how amazing a game would be if it was filled with quests like these new vegas is a game filled with quests like these but hey maybe it's a quality over quantity type thing i mean even if you don't like the quest in three at least there's a lot of them obsidian only had 18 months to make new vegas so there's no way they could make that many questions but hold on to really explore what makes the gameplay in these quests so much more engaging we should cover some of the more serious core mechanical changes between these supposedly similar games and to do that we should go back to how in the quest having a high science skill affects dialogue actually no we should probably go back to the beginning of the get let's just start again who wrote a stranger one fine day get it it's like a clever reversal of the chapter in the fallout 3 video it doesn't matter new vegas's opening character creation process and first area are just the best i've ever seen a game introduce itself and it's core gameplay let's take a look at some of the things it does pressing the new game button causes the player to get shot in the face new vegas seemingly goes out of its way to begin with the logical opposite of something as cliche as the main character's birth you're then revived by doc mitchell who put you back together after a robot cowboy yes i said that right robot cowboy this is the best game ever dug them out of their shallow grave the opening gives the player a deliberate barrage of questions what was i shot over who was this guy what was he saying about a delivery why were the guys with him so differently dressed he referred to them as khans who are they or if you've played fallout 1 and 2 what are they doing here these mysteries are a really compelling hook you know how a lot of players ignore the main story in open world rpgs and go do something else that's because the story didn't interest them going in search of benny and the platinum chip he shot you for sounds really cool so a lot more players are going to want to find him even the way benny talks in like an old 50s vegas style briana think dig the fact he's wearing a cool checkered suit in the post-apocalypse all of this stuff really makes you want to track him down and find out what his deal is what in the goddamn benny and his motivations and personality are really cool to learn about it helps that he's voiced by matthew perry too john gonzalez the lead writer for new vegas did a really fantastic job with him and while i'm at it gonzalez is like an unsung hero on all the games he works on like he co-developed the nemesis system for shadow of mordor you know like the best thing in that game actual quote from gonzalez's linkedin i was the lead story guy on fallout new vegas thank you god no john thank you did i just imply that i'm god players are much more likely to actively take part in a story if they have questions they actually want answering also did i mention the robot cowboy fallout 1 and 2 had the right idea when character creation was one screen long and then the game just started right away there you are in the world have fun try to get further than ed did granted the character creation screen was also evidence black isle didn't have a ui designer literally every first time fallout player has accidentally named their first character non because they were supposed to type it into here but still they were onto something here one of my biggest gripes about fallout 3 was how long it took to start the opening sequence deciding your character's stats and learning the basics of the gameplay takes 19 years of in-game time and honestly it feels that long before eventually your father realizes he's forgotten to do the main quest and escapes and you go after him it's only when you finally leave the vault that the game properly opens up to be explored fallout new vegas's opening is as smooth as butter and not the butter you keep in the fridge the butter your parents keep in a little dish by the table so it's already smooth and melty when you need it and it's just so spreadable and every time you visit them you make a mental note to get one but you forget again as soon as you after the opening cut scene you're talking to doc mitchell where you make your character and then walk outside his house and bam the game begins fallout 2 opens by forcing you to complete a dungeon that's pretty repetitive after the first few times through it's one of the few things most people don't like about two and players often use mods to skip it entirely can you imagine having like a decade of hindsight on all the criticisms people had to fall out to and then making a game where the opening is like three times as long that would be a bit silly wouldn't it uh i'm sure they'll learn the lesson for fallout 4. the character creation process is really fun too you pick your starting stats to a really cute device called the vigor tester and then you get a psych exam which involves an honest-to-god rorschach test which is just great some players actually modded in what they saw as options that's it that's all it does it lets you pick two bears high-fiving for one of the images 22 000 downloads including me that's definitely two bears high-fiving when you get to pick your tagged skills though you'll notice the list of skills is a little different from three big guns and small guns are missing for example there's just guns now but in addition to this all these skills have much more uses than they did in the previous games too when you say i love you okay look we all love speech right kudos to the series for making a video game where talking was a skill worth putting points into it all but a problem plaguing fallout games since the beginning was that one skill made you the master of half the game's main form of interaction which really wasn't ideal games have tried to section off speech into different types of speech but let's be honest none of them have really worked new vegas goes for the opposite solution it keeps speech as is while giving other skills the chance to influence dialogue the game is also cleverly using its opening area goodsprings to great effect in tutorializing players about this feature the first real quest in the game is to prepare for an attack on the town this quest has multiple optional components where you can ask the townspeople for help and each of them needs convincing using a different skill this whole quest is basically the game showing you how many different ways you can play it like hey if you were good at barter you could have talked this guy into helping all the players who took this quest know that barter can influence dialogue and not just how much things cost and minus boilers barter can be used to beat the final boss i'm not even kidding that's how many options you have here if you want easy pete to share his dynamite with you you have to prove you wouldn't blow your head off if he did he doesn't need 10 words to convince him he needs you to prove you're better at throwing explosives than these clowns now that's what i call a he blew himself up checks like this for other abilities are all over the game speech is still really useful but conversations are so much more varied in what they ask of player characters and that's great medicine a skill i ignored in every other fallout game now unlocks some of the best dialogue options because it turns out being a doctor in a post-apocalypse is really really good at opening doors for you what other game lets you do therapy at a cannibal chef until he has a breakdown and quits his job players are more likely to feel like the type of character they made had a tangible impact on a conversation which creates a rewarding sense of control on top of all of this the way dialogue actually works has been changed significantly from three in three if something required speech even if you had the maximum amount of speech the game could still randomly decide you've failed the check so you could build your character around speech and still just not get to use it or you could build your character around everything else and just reload the game until you got it anyway in new vegas if you have the required skill it works it just works it even tells you if you don't have enough and in a choice that someone should have won an award for it gives you a worse line to say as a result i really like this because it means you can pick bad options on purpose and see what happens it's great finally i can role play as a complete loser because i'm so sick of winning in real life so now speech is useful based on how many points you put into it not whether the game decides it which makes this character creation feel way more tangible and substantive the points feel like they actually matter right after this comes another big change from three after picking your tagged skills you get to pick up to two traits which well these were a really cool feature in the early fallout games traits would optionally give you some kind of interesting bonus and a downside to go with them so you could be a one-hander so you're a bit more accurate with one-handed weapons but a whole lot less accurate with two-handed ones to compensate some of them were just mild changes like bloody mess which makes every death animation always the most violent one for whatever weapon you were using i really love jinxed which vastly increases the amount of critical failures an otherwise pretty rare occurrence for everyone in the game including you traits led to vastly different ways of playing the game right from the outset they were a really cool addition to the rpg formula everybody loved them and fallout 3 removed them for no reason which was a shame because traits were the spiciest part of character creation they're a chance to make a character worse at something in exchange for a reward and that's a really interesting decision to give to players i really like four eyes which reduces your perception by one but you get it back and one more once you find a set of glasses once you account for that it's kind of like getting an extra special point but there's also a secret downside you don't realize at first you can't wear glasses with power armor helmets and stuff like that so it affects what stuff you end up wearing later in the game too plus as a guy who needs to wear contact lenses all day or he'll fall over and die i feel very seen by this trait having that kind of control over what your character is like making them as unique as you want is kind of one of the central features of role-playing games what sort of character the player makes is one of their main forms of expression and it's so nice having them back one of the traits is wild wasteland which actually let's give it its own the fallout games have always been a very strong mix of serious themes and ideas desperation and survival your bones are scraped clean by the desolate wind but the series also has a tremendous sense of humor i was in bad shape and well i passed out how did you survive didn't got killed this is one of the most important conversations in the canon of fallout and there's also just tons of silly [ __ ] like randomly happening upon a talking cow or finding a tardis or a crashed spaceship with a picture of elvis on an alien's corpse wild wasteland optionally makes things a little bit weirder if you're serious about role playing and realism or just hate fun it's nice that you can avoid these things by not picking this trait but it adds a lot of great stuff little references and in-jokes and comedic things most of which i don't want to spoil some of which are too obscure to bother explaining but i love it it's also really clever to make it a choice so everyone gets the experience they prefer half of this stuff is so weird it makes sense it's optional not everyone wants to reenact a monty python sketch in the middle of some post-apocalyptic scavenging am i getting mugged by three old ladies oh veronica no wild wasteland even references that mod i mentioned earlier in the game's dlc i love this game anyway during the early questing and prepping for the attack on the town you're going to level up and get to choose your first perk and by the way [Music] in his gdc retrospective on the first fallout original creator tim kaine talks about the impact of perks on playtesting uh qa loved that they could make characters that were different than the guy sitting right next to me qa and they could play the game very differently because of it here's a game design term for you horizontal progression vertical progression is when the numbers get higher and yeah sure numbers going up can be fun and pleasing in its own way but giving someone a new power a new thing they can do is usually way more rewarding they actually came up with perks to give players more to do when they level up brian fargo took the game home played it for a weekend came back and said i love it except when i go up a level skill points aren't enough for me to do in other words according to fallout's original creator perks exists in order to make leveling up feel more substantive than just putting points into stats pause for effect a lot of the perks in fallout 3 just add more points into stats so you level up you assign your points and then oh i guess i can put five more points into science and medicine or i can put five points in small guns and repair oh i can put 15 points into big guns that almost makes big guns a feasible skill that doesn't need deleting from the game do you like when the numbers get higher i hope you do could i have a more interesting form of progression please i mean let's be fair there are some good perks like animal friend so certain animals even some of the really dangerous ones will just hang out with you now or even defend you in battle if you take it twice which is cool black widow and ladykiller are pretty nice too it's certainly better than having five more sneak and lock pick come on first off literally all of the boring perks have been deliberately removed from new vegas like there were so many and they're all gone it's like you can tell someone who knows what they're doing looked at three's perks and said these ones are bad take them out but here's the thing right new vegas gets to make its perks way more interesting and cool because they've changed the way they're used in the game in new vegas perks have more demanding requirements before you can take them meltdown is a ridiculously cool perk that causes enemies killed with energy weapons to explode in a burst of damage which can often cause massive chain reactions okay that's a bit much to be honest this perk is hella horizontal hella what a great word it makes specializing in energy weapons feel amazing you're blowing people up left and right it's great but you can only get this cool overpowered power that's if you have 90 energy weapons skill which is a really steep requirement especially considering new vegas gives you a lot fewer skill points per level and you only get to pick a perk once every two levels now which is how it was in the original games too that's another thing three changed for some reason cool perks are a reward for how you built your character players are incentivized to plan ahead and think about what sort of character they want to make and what perks they want to end up with which is intensely engaging only one perk in three requires a skill as high as 80 and most have no skill requirements at all there's a very real sense of progress to building up a character in new vegas because perks add genuinely unique things also this is a small thing but in fallout 3 there was a perk that let you get some more romantic dialogue with characters of the opposite gender so you could play a womanizing man or a manonizing woman it'd also let you deal 10 more damage to that gender for some reason i'm sure it was unintentional but the existence of these perks implies bethesda don't think gay people exist in the fallout universe which is quite funny new vegas added a same-gender version of the perk so you could play as a gay character or you could take both which at that point gave you a 10 damage bonus against almost everyone and was also a really nice piece of representation you were at that point role playing a bisexual character in a video game in 2010 which was super cool i should have led with that and not the damage bonus back in the days of fallout 3 people loved modding in more severe survival elements fallout wanderers edition is the most downloaded mod for three by a pretty wide margin and it's a great mod it makes the game much more engaging and challenging it also came with a built-in alternative start options you didn't have to [ __ ] do the vault again new vegas gives players who like that sort of thing an option built into the game on your way out of the front door you're given the choice to use hardcore mode it makes stimpaks heal over time so you can't pause the game and get all your health back in the middle of a fight you have to manage thirst hunger and sleep now companions can die which is terrifying veronica no and even bullets affect your carry weight now it really isn't messing around either in the middle of a normal playthrough i tried turning it on and suddenly i was at three times my maximum carrying capacity i had to drop all this stuff just to be able to move don't look at me like that veronica it's not littering anymore the world's ended this little extra optional realism adds a lot to the experience for people who like that sort of thing i'm personally a really big fan of when developers add things into games because they know that people would want them there and mod them in if they weren't like people also modded iron sights into fallout 3 a lot fallout 3 didn't have iron sights for some reason it just zoomed in a bit but guess what new vegas has iron sights now it's great in fact this actually reveals another problem with fallout 3's design you can't aim down the sights of certain guns that were made for fallout 3 because whoever designed them at the time forgot to put sights on them like they didn't think about how a person would use them look at the laser pistol for example there's just like a nub and a little rail there what am i looking down here's the laser rifle it's a pretty nice looking gun but it wasn't built with consideration for how a person would actually use it in third person when you right click the character doesn't aim down sights animation but there's no sights there what is she doing bethesda noticed this too because they redesigned laser weapons and four to have sights on them another thing people frequently modded into fallout 3 was the ability to upgrade and modify weapons that's a bit of a confusing concept modding in weapon mods the base game in new vegas comes with the ability to modify weapons now you can upgrade and customize your equipment it's great hilariously one of the mods for the laser weapons is working iron sights this is the weapon upgrade version of a subtweet combine that with the fact there's way way more weapons in new vegas and different ammo types for the weapons too and all of a sudden you have so much more room for choice in how you build your character and what weapons you use optimized ammo baby okay i got distracted there and talked about a bunch of other stuff but that's because new vegas is so good at tying everything together the opening quest at goodsprings is a really well designed introduction to the ways the character you've built and your skills and traits and perks can be used as you prep for the town's big battle and the final thing it has to teach you is that being the good guy isn't the only option because you can align yourself with the gang and help them take over the town instead and this gets you cred with the gang which can really help you out with a lot of stuff later in the game the story is essentially this side quest in slow motion with larger stakes a series of preparations for the second battle of hoover dam a battle in which you get to choose a side and recruit others to your cause and now even playing through the story the first time the player knows what kind of choices to expect and prepare for it's a tutorial but without telling you it's one it's very sneaky it's a bit like how in stalker clear sky you what are you doing get your hands off me anyway now that i've created my ultimate warrior i'm ready to march straight north to new vegas and have myself a grand old time there are some rad scorpions in the way but that shouldn't be so oh they're really resistant to my oh jesus okay so to go through this pass i just have to defeat these tiny flies that should be fine oh [Music] open world games where you can basically go wherever you want right away are really hard to give a meaningful sense of pace and challenge to the point where most developers just give up and make the game do it procedurally so they make enemies scale in damage and weaponry in accordance with the player's level and so on this hopefully results in players being never given insurmountable obstacles and never being too strong that everything becomes too easy this is an okay solution but it's a solution to a problem created by earlier design decisions i think a really useful pointer for this comes up in original fallout creator tim kaine's gdc retrospective said we don't care where people can go they can go anywhere they want if they go into some area that's too strong for them to get killed and then learn learn not to go in there yet and they look forward to the challenge of being able to go back in about a sentence kane instantly sums up one of the most important ways of giving open world games a solid relationship with the player in fallout 1 you can technically go wherever you want in fact just west of the starting area is one of the final objectives and you can technically go there right away and beat half the game however if you try doing that you'll probably run into an 8 foot tall mutant with heavy weaponry who can kill you instantly at least i made it further than ed now you might call this a horrible way to die but i call it good game design it creates an immediate and direct relationship between the player and the environment this is a harsh and deadly wasteland that wants to kill you and you know this now because it literally has as you get stronger these areas become more manageable and you get to tangibly feel stronger because you know how dangerous this is blowing up the super mutant base after all the times they blasted your body in half or casually killed your entire party feels like a real achievement now in fallout 1 finally killing your first deathclaw is so satisfying because the first time you meet him he ruins you but hours later you're finally ready for more and he still kills you because it's fallout 1. try knocking him down first that usually helps oh and don't use melee weapons this was a terrible idea these encounters with death claws and mutants sound unfair and yeah that's the point they give players a really textured view of the game's landscape it influences the entire experience to a tremendous degree when the gun runners say they're having trouble getting weapons out to people because of all the death claws nearby you really feel for these guys you know in ways that are only possible for someone who's been killed by one before just how much it would suck to live nearby a nest of these things that's rough buddy if deathclaws and mutants and other tough enemies scaled down with the player to be largely doable even at low levels fallout would lose a huge chunk of what made it so compelling deathclaws would be just another enemy this game's sense of harshness makes it immensely fun to play because when you win it feels like you struggled for something people tell me other games are better and insist fallout 1 has aged but there's just nothing else in games quite as intense as moving across the northwestern side of the world map in fallout 1. oh for [ __ ] sake fallout 3 broke pretty far from this formula and that means it's bad i'm joking obviously bethesda just have a different ethos when it comes to designing worlds one which i actually think is quite nice in its own way they want you to be able to go on tour of their majestically massive maps and serious spikes in difficulty would get in the way of that i've spoken for an embarrassingly long amount of time about a game i thought wasn't that great but an important thing to remember is that if you approach it a certain way there is fun to be had in three players who ignored the main quest which wasn't that much fun anyway and just wandered around dealing with whatever they happened to find doing the occasional quest here and there those people basically made their own fun with the game and fallout 3's open world and dedication to not making any areas too challenging even for starting players was especially conducive to this you could walk around and go wherever you felt like going now you can criticize how this was implemented or whether it fits a game set in a post-nuclear wasteland as well as it fits a traditional fantasy world but either way it resulted in a wasteland rambling experience a lot of people remember fondly i can criticize the story and quests in fallout 3 until i'm blue in the face and i did but once my lungs recovered and i left hospital it didn't stop the fact lots of other people still had a good time with three wandering around and just checking stuff out at their own pace battling raiders and super mutants and deathclaws procedurally levelled to never be too challenging to stop them in their personal freeform tracks bethesda went for a particular experience and in a lot of respects they nailed it despite being built in the same engine as fallout 3 new vegas has an entirely different philosophy in mind when it comes to its world it's a bit more like a classic rpg like baldur's gate or icewind dale or um fallout it's set in a harsh environment full of mutants and monsters and it means it casadors i've heard some people call them cassadores so sorry if i'm saying it wrong are super dangerous two of them can pretty consistently go toe-to-toe with a death claw and against humans forget it and they're used in a genius way because they're insects they make players think of the incredibly early game bug enemies from fallout 3 that died in one hit like rad roaches and bloat flies in fact right before you first meet them you pass through an area with bloat flies to lull you into a false sense of security and the landscape is perfectly arranged so when you first see them they're far away and you assume they're small and probably weak considering the nearby enemies by the time you get close enough to realize they're really quite big you're already dead because they're about as fast as the trucks they hit like this is the game playing a joke on you by messing with your expectations the other route to new vegas takes you through quarry junction which has been shut down because it's been infested with death claws the first guy you run into there says hey buddy uh no you'd have to be the meanest toughest roughest bastard in the wasteland to have any chance against them and i don't think that's you and these aren't fallout 3 deathclaws they're somewhat manageable enemies that scale down so even at low levels they're not too hard these guys will kill you instantly and they do not care if you wanted to do some sightseeing here being absolutely obliterated at the start of the game might seem a little excessive but for me it's like being welcomed home tons of areas in the mojave wasteland will happily kill you if you go there unprepared you struggle and die and find new equipment and level up and as you do you're given a very powerful sense of actually getting stronger fallout 3's heavy reliance on level scaling and deliberately not making enemies too strong solved the potential problem of players running into enemies they weren't prepared for by making everything too easy so the player can go wherever they want but everywhere they go will be roughly the same experience with little to no sense of danger or challenge you can walk up to a guy with a flamethrower and beat him to death with a baseball bat even at the very start of the game getting stronger in fallout 3 honestly sucks it makes a game designed to be easy even easier and after a few hours the whole combat system is boring no wonder millions of people downloaded the mods that make it harder in new vegas you start out pretty weak and fragile and this game's raiders are setting up actual ambushes hiding in hills with rifles utterly tanking the damage of early game weapons they're up on the ridge firing down at you with grenade launchers and they're setting traps for you on the road this one actually got me okay new vegas is really amazing at using traps fallout 3 had some good moments with these but a lot of the time they felt like an afterthought like someone looked at one of the many identical offices they'd made that day and went this needs to be more unique let's put some landmines in the middle of the floor you can defuse easily there level design if you have any peripheral vision 90 of this game's traps are just free landmines and xp new vegas really goes hard on making traps actually feel like traps like here with the traffic cone i forget about these and get caught by at least one every time or two because they're so well placed that they're difficult to defuse even if you know where they are welcome to nevada look at these easy to disarm bear traps oh [ __ ] they're even used for environmental storytelling caesar's legion are especially clever with their traps and also immensely evil so in areas they've raided they're hiding landmines under bodies that's morbid what's fantastic is the game pauses in menus so stuff like this can happen oh [ __ ] okay ready go go go no my bones the game is never scared to mess with you in a cave there's a locked gate which needs a hundred lock pick skill and it has a ton of good stuff inside so master lock pickers get some great rewards for wait what was that sound and what perk did i just get that's the perk you get for breaking your limbs 50 times oh no the loot boxes and hard lock pick check distract you completely from the trip wire attached to a grenade bouquet hidden right behind the gate you can almost hear the level designers laughing at you this combined with the willingness to put tougher enemies in your way and make regular enemies just a bit more dangerous and clever gives the world a real feeling of being unpredictable and the extra difficulty makes the game way more fun you've had a taste of the brick wall now and it tastes great being hard in places creates meaningful challenges it gives the player something to get stronger for finding better guns is especially engaging here because they might really be the thing that makes the difference in combat i have a mechanical and emotional relationship with this cool gun with the physics scribbled on the back this thing has saved my life in a few situations i love him and being deliberately too hard in some places creates a sense of apprehension and anticipation for what you'll run into next and if you'll be able to deal with it this is a world where just by the wayside there's an encampment of really strong robots you're not ready to take on yet guarding some great loot you might want to try for anyway or which you'll want to come back for later and now you have something to look forward to it's important to recognize here that none of this is really too hard quarry junction isn't actually blocking you off in any way you can sneak past the death claws or master the weaponry available to you in the early game and head right to new vegas it's fairly tough but that's what makes doing it so fun and feel like a real achievement and if you can't make it past them right now coming back at a higher level with better equipment and some friends collecting that delicious egg so the nice lady there can perfect her omelet recipe it's just so satisfying because these deathclaws started out legitimately terrifying and not like piss easy to kill even at the [ __ ] start of the game holy [ __ ] the sense of growth is so staggering and it feels amazing you really feel like the meanest tough the thing the guy said you know for real how tough these guys can be and still are if you make the mistake of fast traveling into the middle of an occupied area oh jesus this is a crunchy yummy relationship to have with the game's world the early difficult areas and the other spikes throughout the trip make the mojave into a truly curious and eventful place you genuinely don't know what to expect or if you'll be ready for it the difficulty of the two shortest paths to vegas incentivizes players to take a long way round which is more manageable and puts you more on the trail of the man who shot you i mean he's a guy in a suit with a nine millimeter he couldn't even kill you with that gun he's not taking corey junction going this way gives you quests to learn more about who he is and where exactly he's headed this also introduces you to the main factions you'll be dealing with in the mojave like the ncr and caesar's legion and it has some companions to help you out thanks for taking a chance on a naive young girl from california with stars in her eyes and a pneumatic gauntlet on her hand using challenges only more advanced players will be able to get past the game is giving beginners a strong gameplay and narrative experience that helps them get their bearings get a little stronger and learn more of the details of the setting and plot and while there are quests leading you through the main areas on the long way to vegas what's great is you can find these places without ever needing to follow a quest marker to make the journey feel more like a trip you chose to go on with places you just happened across on the way the developers have used really clever world design to make its key locations stick out on their own and naturally attract players you can get sent to the repconn facility as part of the main quest but you might also find it by yourself it's a huge rocket silo with a big building with a model rocket outside it's pretty easy to see it from elsewhere and wonder what it is the story directs you to prim but even if you ignore the story and you're just walking around you're gonna see the huge roller coaster and want to go see what's up the game's just begging you to come in and look around and find the other robot cowboy yeah and when you're in the southern part of the map it's hard not to see the giant sculpture of two rangers shaking hands and go find the ncr base up there [ __ ] monument and almost everywhere you can see the lucky 38 one of the most important locations in the game the strip is one of the few places in the world lit up at night it's visible almost anywhere on the map staring at you waiting for you oh mate where's my platinum chip one thing that we learned by looking at fallout 3 they try to make sure that there's always at least three landmarks visible the developers credit fallout 3 for giving them this idea and there are some places that really do visually stick out well in three like there's 10 penny tower megaton uh the big boy overlooking paradise falls big boy man i forget his name there's definitely some good points of interest here but new vegas really pushes this into overdrive maybe you didn't find novak because anyone in your travels happened to mention novak maybe you just found a giant model dinosaur and wanted to see what was up head north toward novak look for a big dinosaur can't miss it dinky the dinosaur is based on two actual dinosaurs out in the desert well not actual dinosaurs they're models there's this one mr rex and the other one dinny the dinosaur it's cute but it's also inspired by another real life location baker on the road to nevada is home to the world's largest thermometer here i am in 2019 having a great time i mean what did i expect it's literally called baker i know it's named after someone so dinky the dinosaur also doubles as the world's second largest thermometer now here's the really clever thing about making this cool place that sticks out this is where you continue the main quest and find a potential party member no not a building in the same area literally this dinosaur if you go inside dinky you'll find either manny or boone on guard in his mouth using just clever visual design by building a cool dinosaur the game is saying hey come check this out pal there's some fun stuff here let's talk about how important this kind of world design is imagine four programmers on the edge of a cliff game design works the same way [Music] is there a plane going overhead right as i start recording okay it's gone right there's another big problem open world games that give the player a lot of freedom have to solve your game could have a bunch of great stuff in it only for players to miss most of it and get bored and assume there's not much to find i call this the onboarding problem if players can go anywhere and do anything how do you help them find all the cool stuff you made while quest markers and railroadies stories can help make sure most people find the core stuff what about all the side content i think a good case study here is fallout 3 because like i said three has some great stuff in it some of the quests the superheroes and canterbury commons finding a violin for agatha and deciding the fate of the oasis are interesting and often meaningful stories they're genuinely good quests if you can find them fallout 3 has some well-designed quests but its world design leaves a lot to be desired many of its best locations are often strange places that are hard for players to reasonably find on their own and in many cases nowhere in the game world ever tells you about them the oasis is hidden at the far north edge of the map and obscured by a bunch of rocks the only help the player is given in finding this quest is there's this one weird sniper guy in the middle of nowhere with the address on his body if you kill him the fallout wiki insists there are random encounters that can point you towards it so the game decides at random if it's going to show you the cool quest there's a really good reason why most players remember 10 penny tower and that's because a it's a big tower people are gonna find it and two there's a guy in the first location you go to in the main quest sitting in the corner going hey come over here and he tells you about tenpenny tower look just tell people where the fun quests are or at least don't make finding out about them random canterbury commons is a tiny town in the middle of nowhere that's easy to miss and the most interesting solution to the superhero quest requires having found a page of text on a specific computer in a building on the other side of the world at no point does anyone or anything mention you can do this i i'm literally gobsmacked ow fallout 3 is a really fun game to read the wiki about and find out how fun it might have been if players could find half of this [ __ ] while they were actually playing it there's very little onboarding to quests in three the good content which is in the game is effectively hidden from players unless they happen to run into it far off the beaten track the violin quest is great but starting it means finding a secluded house in the middle of nowhere i've discussed this game with friends a lot over the years and when i bring this quest up over half the people i talk to say i didn't know about that quest the only way to get involved in one of the best things in the game is to just happen to stumble onto it in the middle of a massive wasteland and a huge portion of players never even knew it was there it's such a shame can you imagine making the best most heartfelt quest in the game and discovering the surrounding world was designed to make it incredibly difficult to find whoever made that quest should be given a gun fallout new vegas uses a radical new technique called game design to ensure that players find all of its cool stuff remember when i said six quests send you to vault 22 that's just the tip of the quest berg one of the many cool as hell locations in new vegas is the helios one solar power plant which the player can talk their way into and initiate a quest to help get up and running and then get to decide where to send the power in addition to being a giant cool building with a big sign and a huge solar panel array which is very easy to find just by walking around three other quests also take you here while you're doing them which gives you an opportunity to find this one for example this guy michelangelo at vegas gives you a camera and asks you to take pictures of some cool signs he's heard of a quest which leads you to five locations including helios one quests like this are basically the developers handing you a juicy list of places to go and stuff to do no wiki required baby the game will show you a good time instead one of the game's companions veronica is a member of the brotherhood of steel and if she sees enough interesting things while traveling with you eventually she asks you to help her find some technology which might help her change the mind of the brotherhood of steel elder the computer which points her in the direction of this tech leads you to three different places with their own solutions to the quest one of which is helios one and another one for the record is this guy's office where he sends you to vault 22. this game's quests in addition to being fun and interesting and often thought provoking are also designed to be found this ensures that players get to see all the fun stuff in the game and and this is really clever it helps to create the sense of a cohesive world because going to helios one has consequences for other quests one group we'll get to later need to repair their solar panels and if the player's been to helios before they can mention they've been there and salvaging some panels from helios one becomes an optional solution to the quest it creates a cool sense of taking part in a cumulative and reactive story you're being given an alternative solution to a quest specifically because you have knowledge of a place with a bunch of solar panels i just can't get over how cool it is that the player is never put in a situation where they have to find the fun you can hardly go anywhere without learning even more things to chase up later or picking something up that comes in handy somewhere else it contributes to what's still the most alive feeling and reactive world there is i'm utterly astounded malcolm you scared me this one random line from an ncr guy really sums up new vegas's design philosophy it's really hard to miss all of the great locations and quests in new vegas and that's wonderful the quest you get from visiting the dinosaur is really cool too or should i say really ghoul i shouldn't manny a guy who has info on the man in the chequered suit won't tell you what he knows until you go deal with the ghouls at the rep contesting facility and the ghouls there turn out to be a cool weird cult with a bunch of fun characters to deal with god but are you ugly it's also pretty challenging in the early game it's a great place to get beaten to death by invisible super mutants helping them finish their rocket and blast off to their supposed promised land making a last-minute course correction so they're more likely to get wherever they're going before you activate the launch or maybe you want to play a fun prank on your new friends your little stinker is a really fun reward for coming here on its own never mind the fact it'll get manny to help you and what makes this feel even more heroic is the fact that i really was doing them a favor by choice because you don't have to do this quest to progress the story i mean you could just talk him into telling you or pickpocket the information off him or kill him and get the same information off his corpse or you could just check out his computer in his room i love computers when a character has a quest for you in new vegas it's always optional it's really just an invitation to take part in a cool quest if you want to hell even killing all of the ghouls because you don't want to do their quest and then coming back counts as far as manny's concerned he just wants the ghouls out of there there are so many ways around doing this quest okay i'm done beating around the bush let's talk about the absurd level of control the player has over the direction of the story but first don't forget to smash that like button [Music] there's a fairly important character in fallout 3 called three dog he has info on where your father went and to get it you either have to do a really boring quest for him or pass a speech check which you can still fail if you blah blah blah you've heard this bit but something i really like about three is that if you kill three dog this is for demonstration purposes under no circumstances should you kill three dog before learning what he knows the game's main quest updates to say uh alright find your dad somewhere i guess good luck and you no longer have an objective marker telling you where to go because you don't know this wouldn't be a super great quest to go on since as previously discussed fallout 3 has a significant problem showing you where to find things but this willingness to let the player mess this quest up this badly and account for that is still pretty cool the sad thing is three dog is one of the few characters in the game that you can do this with some of the brotherhood of steel members right outside his office are for some reason too important to die so if you nuke them all to take their stuff a couple of them just get back up and aren't even hostile toward you after all they need to complete the main quest for you later the brotherhood of steel are just too important for their part of the story to change so the game says no they're literally [ __ ] invincible you can't even ah i'm having trouble believing i'm the master of my own destiny here and i think this points towards an obvious solution make it possible to kill all these characters give the story ways of accounting for that but that would be an absurd amount of work sure it would be cool to have that level of control and freedom but what sort of game could possibly okay so in new vegas you can kill everyone that's right i didn't just mean you can kill manny i meant everyone everyone except for children you have to wait for them to get older oh i'm coming for you mccready one of the game's most impressive achievements is that even though its story is incredibly well written it's also designed to account for the player killing anyone in it sometimes the plot does without characters in simple ways like having notes and diaries on their corpses in case they die sometimes though it's incredibly complicated like if you kill caesar tons of characters have things to say about his death hey you're the one who slayed seasoned that son of a [ __ ] that'll come wish i could have been there to see caesar die what an [ __ ] if we weren't in khan territory i would kill you where you stand caesar will be avenged and his death and the fact you killed him are even things you can bring up in important dialogues nobody springs back to life because otherwise the story wouldn't work don't want to do a quest for someone for information [ __ ] him deputy beagle needs rescuing before he'll tell you where the man who shot you went nah that's alright good luck don't like the imposing weirdo telling you how cool the legion is and then walking off dramatically yeah he's just too important if you shoot him he takes a knee and revives after a few seconds you can only kill him at the end of a really long boring multi-stage quest just kidding [ __ ] blow him up he's dead he's supposed to come talk to you later during the main quest and now the legion has to send someone else to do it the replacement even mentions they had to do this your crimes against the legion including the death of the fearless wolfpace in kulta are hereby forgiven the level of choice you have goes much deeper than this though once you make it to vegas either by taking the long way around following benny's trail or by getting there right away by being a total badass you learn how pivotal the platinum chip benny stole is to shifting the balance of power and you fall into the multifactional struggle for control of the vegas strip and the hoover dam finding out who benny is and getting to the new vegas strip and meeting its master mr house is just act one of the story the other two thirds can play out completely differently depending on which faction you decide to align yourself with the ncr want to strengthen their hold on hoover dam recruit some outside factions to help out knock house out of the picture and gain control of new vegas caesar's legion wants to weaken the ncr kill house and take the dam in vegas for themselves mr house the strip's current owner is a libertarian so he wants to lower the age of consent wants to turn new vegas into a proper free economic zone and use the chip to make his robot army powerful enough to kick both factions out you can even pick a fourth faction none of the above and use benny's pet robot yes man to hijack mr house's plan for yourself i mean yes man won't judge you well he will but he's not allowed to say it i'm gonna help you accomplish so much whether i want to or not so you have all these factions prepping for the battle of hoover dam and you're here figuring out who you want to side with but even then player freedom doesn't end with the choice of what side to take let's say you're doing the main quest for the ncr and they ask you to help recruit the boomers to their cause so you go to meet the boomers and their leader is like okay look do some stuff for us and we'll think about it help fix our power generator oh our solar panel help me get a girlfriend um find my teddy bear great yeah and then you're sitting through a kid telling you his people's history and you realize they're just awful like they're heavily armed reclusives who want to live in seclusion forever viewing everyone different from them as backwards savages and whose ultimate fantasy is having the power to blow up everyone who's foreign i wonder if there's some kind of social commentary going on here with the uh boomers you know what i don't think i feel like helping these people yeah that's right you can go scorched earth on these [ __ ] you can kill all these people annihilate their machines raid their armory you can even tell a tiny child her bear is dead no not mr cuddles wow that's messed up you can do some evil stuff in this game what's the word with the boomers have you talked to them yet i don't think it's gonna work out sorry damn i guess we'll just have to do without and the main quest continues the thread of prophecy isn't severed this doesn't make the ncr's questline impossible it just means we don't have that faction on our side it's great stuff one of the later quests is to make sure the ncr's president doesn't get assassinated seems to be going pretty well i think he's got this oh shucks i forgot about the sniper well that sucks what's next the game doesn't make you go back and fix this the ncr just continues preparing for the battle of hoover dam while down a president they're not happy about it but this isn't a fail state you can continue doesn't make you look good though unless of course i was working for the legion this whole time and i was the sniper hold on i can do better than that oh oh man i just love killing the president my producer has asked me to remove this joke but i don't think she'll sit through the video to check but there's another really important element at play here with the choices you're making and this is the thing that makes them fun in ways i still don't think any other game ever has come close to achieving it's a pretty simple topic uh human concepts of morality and political theory okay everyone open your foucault to page 451 video games are like prisons the war has arrived at the gates of hell no not like that like in the friedrich nietzsche the game asks moral questions okay it's fun to be evil sometimes everyone's blown up megaton at least once to see the explosion graphics and then loaded a save or watch someone else do it on youtube when i was trying to record this scene the game crashed twice so that's good lots of games let you theoretically choose to do a bad thing and it's nice to have the choice but be good and be bad aren't incredibly meaningful decisions and when the choice is between a binary good and evil with maybe a sarcastic or neutral option or whatever most people are generally gonna go with what makes sense in the story which is usually just good and if they're feeling spicy sarcastically good this isn't just me saying that either it's a science fact the mass effect games for example reported back to bioware what choices people made and according to designer jon ebbinger 92 percent of players picked paragon choices the goody two-shoes nice guy options lots of players say they went back and tried the renegade stuff on later playthroughs and enjoyed it but the issue here is not many players over the course of a normal playthrough saw that choice and went yeah i should do that barely anyone thinks deliberately letting the entire galactic government die for example is a good idea we all kinda know that's the bad thing to do so yeah a handful of players will go back and see what the consequences of that choice look like but in real life very few people tend to go around going i'm gonna be a bad person just to see what happens i know it might not seem like that sometimes but moral choices in many games amount to would you like to be good or bad which isn't really an interesting question to be asked and which most players seem to answer with uh good i guess this is a bit of a problem if players are being put in situations where on the whole most of them are going to make the same choice they're not really being given an interesting choice video games are more engaging when they ask you something you have to think about to give an example in one quest in new vegas you'll notice the farmers at some ncr run farms are complaining about not getting enough water and at risk of losing their jobs because they can't meet their crop quotas if you look into it your search leads you to the parts of new vegas that aren't run by the ncr where independent folks have successfully started a cooperative farm growing their own food to help support themselves and prevent the ncr muscling in under the pretense of feeding everyone a farm in the wasteland is obviously a great thing especially if you don't like the idea of the ncr running the place but if you do a little digging you learn the farm is run with the help of water someone is siphoning off from the pipes meant for the ncr farmers and the player has the option of telling on them and having the water cut off so what is the actual right thing to do here are you supposed to shut it off and let a farm die and its people suffer because someone technically stole the water or are you supposed to let the ncr's farmers not get all the water they were promised just because you don't want to cut off someone else who isn't even supposed to be using it also it's a bit more complicated than i let on because an ncr soldier had been looking into the water shortage and went missing when you talk tom anderson into admitting he stole the water he also admits he killed the guy when he found out to try to cover up the theft turning him in for his crime means the water will be cut off for sure and westside will suffer greatly the worst thing is anderson clearly regrets doing it and if you turn him in for this it'll all be for nothing alternatively you can cover up the death and pin it on a gang but this means a murder is never brought to justice and if you do this later one of their farmers tells you he's heading back to california because he's about to be fired for not meeting a quota he can't possibly meet with the water he's getting trying to help the people who need it more ruins several other people and requires you to help cover up a murder even if a person decides what they think is the right thing to do here they still have to live with the people who get hurt as a result of that choice and i'm sure there are players who think they know the objectively correct thing to do about the water in this situation but the point here is not everyone will agree on what that is you as a person have to choose what you believe is the right thing to do this is incredibly involving because it makes the player actually think about the world and their impact on it there's no huge far-reaching consequences for this decision like the death of a town you could have visited there's no secret better solution as a reward for happening to visit the one computer in the world with relevant info on it the game doesn't need gimmicks like this to make the quest engage with players because at its core is a really interesting question which requires the player to decide for themselves what the right thing is this is more than a chance to be good or bad and see what happens it's an opportunity to figure out how you would really act in a situation like this and questions like this are happening on a constant basis here is it a good idea to preserve incredibly dangerous but potentially useful research by putting it in the hands of a self-interested politician who should receive the power from helios one if you get it up and running the people who need it most the people the ncr tells you to give it to or maybe everyone should get a little bit but not really enough to help anyone there's even a really tantalizing selfish choice a kid on the streets of vegas sells you a toy gun he found and if you're paying attention the gun is actually the targeting system for an orbital laser which you can power instead so now you can do this boom half the country has no electricity euclid c finder is such a great weapon i love it so much it comes in really really handy it's great for taking out huge hordes of come on come on i utterly love the game's ability to give you the freedom to do whatever you want including just killing everyone in the wasteland and being done with any sort of traditional questing whatsoever but simultaneously offers a story experience to its quests that leaves room for you to figure out what's right to you when the ncr tell you to recruit the boomers and you meet them and they're a bunch of messed up weirdos who all pretend to remember woodstock even though none of them actually went you have to ask yourself if you think recruiting them is a good idea is there help worth getting their facilities back up and running and getting them a weapon capable of realizing their vision or is this compromise necessary for the greater good or could working with the ncr give them a chance to open up and develop a healthier relationship with the outside world because doing quests for them isn't the only option to progress the story you have plenty of chances to ask yourself how you want to deal with them well spoilers this is footage from my evil legion playthrough they don't give a [ __ ] what faction you're aligned with once you do a few things for them they'll work with ncr or the legion if you ask sure we'll depose a democratically elected government it's basically all we do but first how do i change the wallpaper on my phone later the ncr tell you to wipe out the great khans the khans are a nuisance to the ncr and have an allegiance with caesar but it's a shaky one if you know the legion you know the main thing they do is conquer other tribes and annihilate their identities so you can start talking their leadership into not wanting to work with caesar the fact you can use pretty simple diplomacy to get the khans to change their minds is a pretty serious criticism of the ncr i mean they just asked you to kill them all for them they're basically an organized family of drug dealing raiders but does that mean it's okay to wipe them all out will you do what the ncr wants just to help them hold the hoover dam and in the big picture which faction should you side with what's the right answer i think the degree to which these questions are compelling is evident in how much longevity they've had i've seen people argue online for a decade now but the independent route is the only morally good option and i've also seen others say those people are naive and doomed to be destroyed by the much larger factions and it's better to do your best to support the ncr and try to help them improve because there's no other suitable long-term power structure and for all their problems pissing them off and going rogue is not a real solution to the fact you don't like them arguments about sides in this struggle are often deeply heated because they tie into people's actual understandings of the world around them their sociopolitical beliefs and their personal sense of pragmatism being questioned on these levels by a computer game is basically still largely unheard of the rare occasions a game really goes for exploring these ideas it sweeps the game awards and instantly becomes a modern classic meanwhile other games are still in the paddling pool of like oh was it bad to murder a bunch of people with a knife a lot of people think politics can be a turn off for gamers but i've done some research and discovered that politics is objectively fun and all gamers love it all the time and the people who say they hate seeing them in games actually love politics even more they just wish they were seeing different politics this might just be my opinion but i think it's good when video games are about something and have ideas no one's going to rethink any aspect of their life because of the story of uncharted sponsored by subway there's a reason why the best narrative games are made by people who take big ideas seriously enough to actually reckon with them the kind of people bad ass enough to name drop marks and angles in their victory speech and marx and engels for providing us the political education thank you you don't see stuff like that normally at the game awards also sponsored by subway fresh indie game presented by subway fresh indie game more like eat fresh india [ __ ] slit my throat clear cut wow can you tell i'm from yorkshire clear cut good versus evil choices are easy and require little to no thinking so no matter how fun it is to be evil in your game or how nice it feels to be good the moral decision itself isn't engaging when you give someone a choice where there's no easy right answer or where the right thing in the situation is complicated enough that different people will have different answers you've given people something truly gripping to think about the ncr seem like the obvious good guys compared to caesar's legion a fascist tribe of ancient rome cosplayers going around crucifying and enslaving people but half the game is spent dealing with the fact the ncr just aren't that great either a lot of areas here are independent and really aren't into the idea of being annexed by these outsiders coming in declaring themselves the government towns like goodsprings and prim don't stay independent for long not if you've got something the ncr wants one of the first characters you meet sunny smiles says that she's heard a lot of bad [ __ ] about the legion but mostly from the ncr and as far as she knows they could just be making that up to justify being here the ncr are doing poorly in the region because of a lot of internal politicking the republic senators want to keep their seats and aren't interested in supporting an unpopular war the best troops are off fighting other battles including defending the interests of the rich brahmin barons who have a lot of sway almost every soldier or ranger you run into has a story about being stretched too thin not having the supplies they need the enemy being stronger than they were told the horribly understaffed correctional facility has long since been taken over by its own prisoners their quarries are full of guys sitting and waiting for help because no one's dealing with the death clause there's like five different gangs of raiders in the area so they're not really keeping the peace too well they just don't have the manpower to deal with all these problems the fact there are so many quests you can do for them is actually a really important plot point they're so overrun they're farming out stuff that needs doing to whoever comes along and offers to lend a hand the ncr are certainly not doing a good job of proving that their society works and it's not like they have clean hands here anyway one of the main reasons the khans are willing to join with caesar to fight the ncr is because the ncr massacred a bunch of them the khans haven't been the good guys in any of the fallout games but they have a lot of legitimate grievances and reasons to want to harm the republic for the supposed good guys the ncr really love killing and subjugating anything in their way over on the western side of the map they're hiring mercenaries to harass the peaceful super mutants into a fight so they can justify killing them off or driving them away the ncr is the biggest gang of thieves in the mojave only difference is they pass laws to make their crimes legal before they commit them almost every group in new vegas is attempting to rebuild the world in the image of one that came before the ncr are obviously emulating the united states a society that had its upsides sure but which also destroyed the world and in the game as well the ncr's problems are mirrors of real world societies problems because that's what they're trying to build and doing their best to replicate the power structure of a society that ended in nuclear armageddon is a bit of an ambiguous idea isn't it democracy is good but this entire series is all about the well fallout of that system's failures if you want to see the fate of democracies look out the windows if you decide to help them you have to compromise your values in the hopes that eventually they'll work things out i think this is a reason why so many people think the independent option is better like if you're going your own way you don't have to answer to these [ __ ] caesar's legion on the other hand are a really interesting faction because despite being basically awful the more you learn about them the more you understand why they're like this caesar is obviously trying to rebuild things more in the image of ancient rome a society which for all its problems lasted a long time in some form or another and also minor point didn't destroy the entire world the early romans built a civilization out of what was basically nothing and in a world where technology and culture has all been blasted back to square one using one of the first properly successful societies as a blueprint for starting again isn't the worst idea caesar makes the case that his autocratic brutal dictatorship is the best method of surviving and thriving in the wasteland and he makes some really interesting arguments why this is the case he cites ancient roman history and even hegelian dialectics in his defense and this is a really fantastic moment because of how many layers it has firstly a game being willing to engage with players on a philosophical level even going as far as invoking the work of georg wilhelm friedrich marzipan hagel is just wonderful and it's so much more thought-provoking than anything i'd come to expect from games at the time when i'd played it but then there's the question of whether you agree with his interpretation of that philosophy is he just trying to sound clever does he really think he's that smart because he's read a few books he even drops historical references to fallout's events as well tandy a character you met in the first two fallout games essentially made the ncr what it is and served as president for 50 years by the way the group you rescue her from in fallout 1 they're the khans the ncr has been having to deal with these guys since before it even really existed and you know what it was weird that she was still president by the time of fallout 2. caesar points this out he makes the point that the ncr worked really well when it essentially had a strong leader no one dared to pose and the infighting and corruption that emerged when she died would have been avoided if they just had dictators this is an actual salient criticism of liberal democracy say what you want about fascist autocracy but at least it means a bunch of ignorant people can't accidentally vote in a [ __ ] and completely destroy their society instead you have one strong charismatic leader destroying your society every member of the legion besides caesar has a horror story about how they ended up here broke us by throwing our dogs on the fire lucius the head of caesar's praetorian guard happily tells the story of his tribe being conquered by the legion the women of his tribe were turned into slaves and all of the men and boys who weren't fit for the military were killed and he's completely fine with all of this because he's been told to believe since that day that this made him more civilized lucius has been made into an obedient servant he isn't even capable of recognizing that a wrong was done to him and his people perhaps the legion's greatest evil is that it convinces some of its worst victims it did them a service and to make them do it to others in its name but forcibly integrating conquered peoples like this is arguably why they're such a successful post-nuclear society they violently make people obey them in a way that creates a very particular kind of well peace caesar's camp has a trader in it who loves trading in legion territories because their lands are safer than the ncrs there's no raiders or criminals and that's a problem you've experienced firsthand for the whole game the ncr are so poorly run that when you commit a crime they send you to a really lax prison and give you a bunch of dynamite to break out with the legion's brutality keeps everyone in their territory in line what's great about this is it's simultaneously a criticism and a defense of the legion you know they're bad and they crucify people but at least there's no crime can't argue with results your bones but also it's you know proof the legion is terrible and has killed everyone the best thing is this is based on actual roman history the ancient romans saw themselves as bringers of law and order to the world peacekeepers if you will romans would frequently inscribe peace given to the world on medals awarded to soldiers serving the empire but here's a funny thing about history people tend to assume that rome was this bastion of morals and intellect mostly based on historical records written by romans their enslaved and murdered neighbours might not have felt the same way about their ethics tacitus a roman senator and one of history's most important historians really famously has a quote from a chieftain who fought the roman army making this exact point for me they plunder they slaughter and they steal this they falsely name empire and where they make a wasteland they call it peace the legion keep the peace better than the ncr and in a historically accurate fashion they do it by killing everyone just as my namesake campaigned in gul before he crossed the rubicon so have i campaigned and we'll cross the colorado by couching the legion in actual history and giving its leaders a comprehensive philosophy and having people who feel like they benefit from their actions they stop just being the bad guys you can join if you want and start reflecting a real world view that has a lot to say for itself and despite seeming like an absurd and ridiculous faction there's still a lot of social commentary going on here too the legion are actually a more scathing criticism of a real world group than the ncr because here's the thing about edward sallow a guy who just [ __ ] called himself caesar because he read a book about ancient rome and decided it was cool and he could totally do that the guy's a larper he's stealing valor he doesn't really know what he's doing he just thinks he's got a licence to rule the world because he knows what a rubicon is like the ncr he idolizes a specific moment in history he's decided is good even though rome fell apart too in the end caesar's a really interesting criticism of all the losers out there in the real world who think they're smart because they've read about ancient rome you know the kind of people who name their discord server athens to make themselves feel a bit smarter the story doesn't pretend both sides are equally as good relentless horrible murder and crucifixion is bad actually that's literally how they killed jesus but by giving caesar a lot more to say for himself actual arguments to think about and respond to this makes conflict much more involving you have to have reasons why you oppose the ideas these people are putting forward and even if you think they're wrong you at least understand why they think their ideas work which is very strong characterization project director josh sawyer and lead writer john gonzalez did a really good job with making the legion make sense and this means siding with them is really interesting because you can feel the difference between working with them and the ncr it helps that so many quests for each faction mirror each other so well at mccarran airport you're helping root out legion spies or you're helping those spies weaken the ncr because the game has really laid the groundwork for these conflicts and you have so much freedom when it comes to how to take part in them all your actions within the story feel meaningful man i love preventing the assassination of the president there are you happy cat i got both sides in there your choices also affect your reputations with the factions of the game which massively changes the experience if you side with the legion at a certain point you can't even go too far into the strip without a disguise because the ncr start fights with you to be fair i did assassinate their leader or in other playthroughs maybe the legion are sending kill squads after me because i blew up one of their most important commanders and then kept shooting their soldiers these squads are nasty too like going to war with the legion is not pretty it feels like a genuine consequence to choosing to be hostile toward them like this every single time their assassins turn up and tell you you shouldn't have messed with them and it's time to die the player is being given a reactive reminder of the choices they personally made this is what role-playing games are about it's just great it's also terrifying oh my god he's so fast thanks veronica because there are so many different choices so many different ways of experiencing this story every choice that you make feels so much more genuine you really know for certain in this game that this whole thing could have gone differently since you're never being forced to do anything everything you do feels that much more personal because on some level you made a choice the player isn't forced to join the brotherhood of steel as part of the main story you can choose to join them if you want to steal all their stuff but the choice feels personal because you don't have to they aren't the main characters of the story here in fact all the other factions ask you to blow them up man can you imagine having the guts to write a story where all three of the game's big factions ask you to kill the most iconic group in the series that's not how you write a fallout game that's how you write the best fallout game i know my home is waiting for me by the river how can i help them when they won't accept it we're not bloodthirsty mutants a group called the enclave what's this reunion all about them you better get moving kid there's bad guys to kill new vegas strikes a perfect balance between fidelity to the stories and groups of the previous games and doing different things with them and then adding new stuff to the setting entirely and this is admirable because it's apparently very tempting to copy paste things for the sake of fan service or change things in ways that come off as cynical attempts to rewrite the story to be something else a great case in point here is bottle caps caps became an iconic part of the early game setting they were a really novel idea for currency back in fallout 1 but by fallout 2 times have changed the ncr have been making their own money for years now fallout 3 went back to bottle caps which felt really insincere like it hadn't invested much thought into its world beyond borrowing what seemed cool from previous games new vegas as a result of its creators thinking about how its world would work has three different currencies because the ncr are here their money is here too and hey look who it is on the 100 bill it's tandy that's really cool but it's not been adopted into the mainstream they don't run the place yet and a lot of people don't trust their money and still use the caps that were used in this area before ncr people only pay you for doing quests in ncr money which they mention is worth less than it should be here because people don't fully trust it the ncr's money is almost a threat they're insidiously making their way into nevada and as the legion creep their way west their money's here too the game is using currency to show the developing tensions and politics of the post-post-nuclear world how cool is that by bothering to write explanations and justifications for their setting new vegas gets to have its caps and eat them too and what i love about this game is it puts an equivalent amount of thought into every other aspect of the series canon the brotherhood are given a treatment befitting their belief system the brotherhood of steel's purpose in fallout games has been to hoard technology and their bunkers in case the future needs it which is cool but canonically they've been doing that non-stop for hundreds of years at a certain point they're just hoarders so by now they're in hiding living under permanent lockdown after losing a ton of people battling the ncr over helios one almost every faction wants you to dispose of them because they're just not worth dealing with but once you get inside you find out they're having internal struggles over the future of the chapter and one possible way of saving them requires a ton of work but it allows them to get over themselves a little and lift their lockdown and declare a truce with the ncr it's really beautiful how much of a struggle it is to get them to change their ways and how small a part of the story they manage to be these are the guys who normally end up on the box of fallout games with less original things to say for themselves and here they are playing a tiny role in the main story living in existence that comments on their behavior in previous games if you find their secret base and try to get in with a password you found on the corpses of one of their patrols they capture you and put a bomb on your neck until you prove that you're trustworthy and then they send you all around the world doing busy work for them before they even consider making you a member and hearing you out on a truce with the ncr but you know what's really cool when you first come here you could have a companion with you who's a member of the brotherhood of steel hold on i've got this so instead of getting captured you get the best scene in the game we gave you a password veronica it's for your safety i know where you live ramos open up pete's sake opening up welcome back veronica and this skips the quest they make you do with the bomb they actually thought about what would happen if you had veronica when you came here it's great and speaking of veronica her quest to try to get the elder to rethink the direction of the chapter is truly fascinating because no matter what technology you help her find she fails and has to decide whether to remain with the only family she ever knew supporting them even though she feels like they might be doomed or try to make a new life elsewhere come on i can't listen to this anymore the player doesn't have control over whether veronica succeeds in this situation instead their control is so much more personal through how they talk to veronica about these ideas during the course of the quest they help veronica decide what to do with her life this story is so personal and thoughtful and sad and it's a way of looking at the brotherhood and its members relationships that's completely unique and speaking of doomed technologically advanced factions i really like how the game treats the enclave the enclave were destroyed in fallout 2 despite what some games will tell you and even though they're an iconic and cool faction they keep them destroyed here the remnants are just a handful of old people who happened to survive the fall of navarro and have at this point been out of it longer than they were ever in but if arcade ganon a really cool companion character by the way trusts you enough at a certain point he tells you he's the son of one of the remnants and you and him can recruit the rest to take part in hoover dam and help arcade decide how he should feel about his relationship with his father's old crew along the way the story involved here is simultaneously really epic and goes really deep into the lore of the fallout universe but it's also about this guy figuring out where he stands with his history and at the battle of hoover dam along with all the other factions you recruited the remnants triumphantly turn up in an old enclave vertibird and wearing the few suits of enclave power armor in the whole game world and they help in the fighting seeing the survivors of the enclave making this very small and easy to miss appearance in the game giving them the chance of a small sort of redemption it just feels so good also this is a really small thing uh but it meant a lot to me um ganon and veronica are both gay and it barely comes up like it's a small part of their lives and that was a really big deal to me playing this game when i was a bit younger i don't know they really spoke to me um thanks the super mutants are given really thoughtful use throughout the game as well they're so cool even though their stories are mostly sad most of them are hanging around in jacob's town separated from the rest of the world nightkin were a big deal in fallout 1 invisible super mutants some of the toughest enemies in the game but they haven't really got much of a look in in future games until now addiction to and withdrawal from the dangerous ancient technology that powered their invisibility stealth boys is seriously affecting their minds at this point and many of them don't even like being looked at by people i really like how every fight with super mutants in this game is justified and understandable the mutants you fight at the repconn facility are losing their minds and searching desperately for a shipment of stealth boys they heard were sent there by accident long ago you can talk to their leader and find a peaceful solution but not if you killed too many of his friends then you have to fight him if you play very straightforwardly you kill a bunch of mutants fight their leader who's obviously angry about this and then later discover the stealth boys they came here looking for were sent back you kill all of these desperate people and find out they came here for nothing it's so bleak a peaceful solution means sneaking past the ones that are too far gone to be talked down and finding this out for them is sad human i can go now find stealth boys in other places even when you have to fight super mutants there's a story to it and you feel really sorry for them there's a super mutant companion who has memories of her grandchildren from long long ago oh someone wants to hear grandma's stories and who isn't taking her medicine because she doesn't want to forget them like that's just so sad and such an interesting thing to explore especially for characters who in the previous game were used as enemies to shoot it just feels so human you know black mountain is one of the other places mutants are hostile at least to begin with and in addition to being really tough and heavily armed they're aggressive for a reason their leader is deliberately positioning herself as a new master and relying on the mutants desire for a leader and ordering them to attack humans on sight there's a peaceful solution to this too and when you come back the mutants are just hanging out i love neil neil is one of the first mutants you're likely to run into and he's written to be an introduction to the more subtle and complex mutants of this game he basically runs up to you and says hey we know what you think but we have a complicated history many of us are just as intelligent as basic humans and the rest don't really have any choice in the matter do they he's like a tutorial for players who expected mutants to just run around randomly killing people i really like how if you insult him and then apologize he's like okay since you apologized like he doesn't just attack you the instant you say something mean he's you know a character with motivations he's here because the radio broadcast attracting more easily manipulatable mutants is obviously a problem and he's trying to send them to jacob's town instead i just really love seeing mutants with comprehensible motivations and actions again i feel bad for any of the mutants i end up fighting in one of the more slumlike areas surrounding vegas there's a friendly super mutant hanging out serving as the area's protector from gangs of raiders there's no quests related to him he's just a part of the world chilling out fighting bad guys and being cool if i have one criticism of new vegas it's i wish there were a few more casual super mutant npcs in the world apparently there was going to be a super mutant ncr ranger but he got cut for time what the ncr does have though are ghoul rangers we won't go quietly the legion can count on that at this point pre-war ghouls are ancient and most of them are either really really good at what they do or bored as hell so they're serving as some of the ncr's finest or working as top scientists like the one that went to vault 22 or the one at jacobs town who casually mentions she's made new identities for herself and moved on when she got bored with whatever she was doing they've really thought about how ghouls would work in this setting i mean how do essentially immortal people live their lives it's really cool raul a ghoul companion is a really good mechanic but that's just his latest skill on top of that he has a lifetime's worth of experience as an honest-to-god cowboy and convincing him to go back to his roots makes him the best companion in the game combat wise the game never rests on the laurels of the existing setting instead coming up with ways to evolve and add to the material stuff that you wouldn't have expected at all like an army of larpers or new vegas itself a glowing symbol of pre-war decadence and its robot security guards answering to a man on a tv screen fit right in and add to fallout's greatest creative strength which is the sense that anything could happen in this world god mr house what a sweet addition to the story this character is voiced by the late great renee oberginois he knocks this character out of the park while being even more literally a face on a screen than the other characters give me 20 years and i'll reignite the high technology development sectors 50 years and i'll have people in orbit also and this is a small thing but i love that new vegas 1ups three's major character turns out to be a computer twist john henry eden is on the radio the whole game and talks about being the president of america growing up in kentucky and so on but then when you meet him he's a computer it's sort of a twist and new vegas rolls around and mr house is a major player and people talk about him like he's a real person but you get there and he's a face on a tv screen and he also insists he's a real boy who has somehow been alive for like 260 years which yeah right of course but then if you get into the basement you discover no he's a real person kept alive in a pod hooked up to all these computers i just like the little double twist there oh and if you kill him this triggers a mass email obituary he wrote himself detailing how accomplished he was and how the world is screwed now but i guess when your faction is basically you and your robot friends you might start to get a little self-obsessed like if you want to see how to make a fallout game there's a lesson here don't rehash the iconic stuff everyone already knows come up with something completely new like a faction of robot security guards who answer to a pre-war ultra-capitalist businessman don't ask what the fallout setting can bring to your creativity ask what creativity you can bring to the fallout setting i mean the man who shot you benny is such a fun personal antagonist for the player he's consistently funny and surprising you can choose to forgive him and he seems sincerely affected by this but then he tries to have you killed again anyway but if he gets captured by the legion when you and him get a quiet moment he tells you his entire plan to take over the strip and says you should do it instead the guy knows he's done for so he hands you his whole scheme so someone else can be his legacy what an interesting character if the legion get their hands on him you can choose how he dies and i think it's fitting given all we've been through together to take him on in single combat just him and me just make sure your companions aren't positioned with a view to the arena arcade no and speaking of his scheme yes man a reprogrammed house robot who can be used to take his place is so cool i was programmed to be helpful and answer any questions i was asked i guess nobody bothered to restrict who i answer questions for that was probably pretty dumb huh he's really judgmental of your choices but he's programmed not to be able to disagree with anything anyone says okay consider them forgotten along with projections that predict they'll be our biggest enemy forgotten john gonzalez is completely killing it here with this guy all of these additions to the universe will make any future fallout game that doesn't include them or make similar levels of additions of their own feel empty and lacking in vision by comparison after new vegas the bar has been raised so high that they should probably just stop making video games now there isn't even time to get into the fact you can actually gamble in the new vegas strip or you can play caravan which i definitely know how to play those bastards got ringo in the end after all what a shame it just keeps being engaging and thought-provoking right up until the very end the final confrontation takes place at the second battle of hoover dam the game's complex and branching story means that you can be fighting on either side in this battle and even then you might really just be playing the ncr so house gets what he wants or what you want with yes man's help the end game feels like the ultimate reward for all the other work you did if you fired up the sakuratrons a huge army of them is here to help out if you've recruited the boomers to whatever side you're on they're out here blowing stuff up for you if you didn't deal with the khans earlier in some form or another you have to fight them here and if you're fighting for caesar they genuinely do turn up and help you out it's pretty cool the end game goes out of its way to feel like the culmination of lots of choices you've made although it is a bit of a steamroll if you recruited everyone you could to the ncr that feels good too since it's a reward for the work you did in any of the three main story paths that end up siding against the legion here you eventually fight your way to their main camp where their commander is waiting leget la nieus has been talked about for the whole game as a ruthlessly dedicated leader and incredibly dangerous fighter and he genuinely does command you if you side with the legion but the build-up to actually fighting him after all this time is really cool and tense before the final battle he engages you in conversation you again [Music] okay so maybe we should try talking an envoy of vegas yet you carry yourself a battle if so you cannot truly be of that city of cowards oh man his voice is so good he's so cool the news seems completely unwilling to back down so totally invested in victory at any cost that he'd rather die than give up even caesar's death isn't enough to deter him if you try to talk him out of fighting he's very resistant lanius's entire system of morality is so different from yours that you can't just say no please don't be bad to talk him out of a fight you have to pick choices that actually convince him of something you can point out that even if he wins the sheer size of the western territory makes controlling both it and the east far too difficult and would eventually doom the legion as a whole hoover dam is but a place i will not have it be the gravestone of the legion whether quickly or as you described slowly by attrition this is fascinating because it's based in actual history too one of the real roman empire's problems was that it was too big to effectively control without falling apart and eventually it split in two there are other ways out too like using bluff to convince him there's a trap up ahead or even using barter to convince him of the lack of supply lines the multiple different ways of convincing him is a really nice way of rewarding players who approached the game differently i genuinely can't believe that they managed to make barter one of the most useful skills in the game lanius fulfills a real mechanical challenge both in dialogue or if you fight him but he still manages to make sense as a person even if you have a hundred speech after convincing him you can still say the wrong thing and make him attack you again anyway this final big conversation of the game feels super cinematic it's such a cool finale to the story made even cooler by the knowledge that if you'd made different choices he'd be the guy you answered to while you fought across the dam in the other direction despite being really just a series of speech checks in a dialogue tree the quality of the execution of this final encounter makes this last conversation feel like a real argument with a real person then if you're independent you can throw the ncr general off the dam as of today it's been 10 years since fallout new vegas was released well not literally today i wanted this video out on the day of the anniversary but come on it's me we all knew that wasn't going to happen my producer cat carved an ncr ranger pumpkin back when we thought we were going to get this out in october it's not looking so good right now to be honest it's one of these very special games where there's tons of choices you could plausibly make for how to resolve the main quest and so many other side quests with tons and tons of different endings for how you interacted with every major faction and the amount of variation is fantastic by itself but when it really comes down to it its real success is that it makes those choices so interesting and compelling that i enjoy making choices i made already just to see them play out again and sure maybe graphically it's showing its age there's some bugs here and there and it has some issues getting running on windows 10 and high refresh rate monitors but when a game has this much to say for itself it manages to stay timeless this game really gives me hope in a way it's proof that games like this can exist and i can't wait for there to be another one like it i genuinely don't understand how they made this game in 18 months one of the most magical things about new vegas is that even when it was done and the developers could have moved on some of them didn't people likely developer josh sawyer have continued to be active sawyer's been responding to questions about the game on twitter and tumblr for years after the game's release even now in fact justifying his decisions taking and responding to criticism going into detail about what went into the development process doing charity streams where apparently he said i was reading way too much into that smirk he did that one time and yeah i really [ __ ] up that what a dumb mistake to make i'm so sorry i don't know maybe this is a bit naive a bit of a wishy-washy statement but new vegas is great because at every given moment it feels like a game made by a bunch of people who would happily spend 10 years answering questions about it in their spare time you know i've never sat down and tried to figure out what i think the best games ever are but i know for a fact that fallout new vegas is my favorite game and it has been for a long time honestly i'm kind of getting bored of waiting for other games to come along and beat it so um i guess for now i'm willing to say that fallout new vegas is the best game of all time let's start a new list right now here it is number one and i'm gonna update this with every game that i ever mention in any of my videos from now on so eventually we can have a list of every game from best to worst since i'm gonna be doing this forever and i will never die so there we have it fallout new vegas is objectively the best game of all time and for that it gets my highest score ever 84 out of 100. it's been 10 years but it honestly feels like it just got here fallout new vegas might sometimes run out of memory and crash but that's only because there's so many moments worth remembering oh my god i left that in the script [Music] oh thanks for watching all the way through folks um i had a really good time making this video it's uh really nice getting to discuss about how much i love a thing that is really close to my heart i'm sorry that i haven't made that many videos this year i meant to make more but it's been a really tough year um i had a few projects that required me to fly out to interview people and stuff like that and they all had to be cancelled when kobit happened and people started getting sick so that's it's not been ideal i got pretty sick too but i don't think it was the virus i think it was something else god even though the video is finished now there are so many things i'm like i should have mentioned this there's like so much stuff like the way they reworked how guns work uh the way damage has been changed the reintroduction of damage threshold all that stuff i mean there's so many even like really tiny things that really stick out to me like if wild wasteland is turned on then in the credits of new vegas uh dead money the name of one of the dlc's is just dead monkey like just weird cute little things like that just constantly it's just really good have you figured out that i like this game yet i have a couple of videos that are really close to being finished in fact one of them will hopefully be out before christmas and then i'm gonna have one done in mid-january i think so um it's good to be back up to speed and uh show people what i've been doing all this time honestly the video coming out in january might be the best video i've ever made and i'm so annoyed that this video took so much longer than i expected because i just can't wait to show it off however it's about an issue which will be more pressing in january so it's almost like i planned it that way but it's not it was a terrible mistake and i wish i could have done sooner anyway i'm i'm just rambling now um i hope you all have a good christmas tune in in like literally three days when a video about christmas comes out i'm not even joking see you then anyway i guess that's it i'll see you all um in hell and thank you all so much for watching the video all the way through and if you're a patron thank you for supporting me uh it's been very nice being able to continue drinking sparkling water even during an apocalypse um i have one of those soda streams where you um you can take the the canister back in for a discount on a replacement canister and every couple of months you know i put on a mask and brave the trip to the one store that replaces the canisters and that's basically my only interaction with the outside world right now i've noticed that uh the credits are obviously quite long considering how long i've managed to talk during them so i'm thinking of maybe doing some kind of thing where people can send me questions and i'll read them out in the credits that seems like it makes sense instead of these rambles or maybe people like me just talking about whatever it's fine anyway i'm gonna go watch colombo and take a nap so you all have yourselves a great evening [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: hbomberguy

Views: 2,920,703

Rating: 4.8955688 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: gzF7aHxk4Y4

Length: 97min 42sec (5862 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/CommandoDude]

Never watch the VGA but the fact that Marx and Engels get shouted out and applauded is pretty based.

I was a bit shocked to hear that 96% of people who played Mass Effect were Paragon. Although I guess that makes more sense if you count anyone as playing Paragon if their Paragon score is higher than Renegade (personally I had a very split score)

[u/NorrisOBE]

If anything, it's sad that there hasn't been more official Fallout games exploring The West Coast for 10 years now.

Bethesda has stated that they will stick of East Coast Fallout because of their knowledge in the area, and I'm already sick of East Coast Fallout. Sure, there's Fallout Frontier and Fallout Cascadia, but I want it to be OFFICIAL games, not mods. And that's the problem.

[u/akoslows]

The fact that Obsidian hasn't developed a single Fallout game since this one is an absolute disgrace.

[u/Neutral_AI]

Hbmob mentions Veronica a lot and probably because she has one of the more fun companion quests, at least in my opinion. After progressing far enough in her companion story, Veronica reveals that she is torn between leaving the Brotherhood of Steel for the Followers of the Apocalypse or sticking with them despite their faults. I picked the Followers, since in my mind they are doing the best for the wasteland, but that doesn't mean they are the best option for Veronica. It means leaving her friends and family behind. She even mentions that even with a bunch of assholes there are still her friends. My brother, who I share a very similar worldview with, decided that Veronica should go with the Brotherhood because that was best for her.

You can, and I do, argue that the Followers are the better choice because she will actively be making a difference in the wasteland and helping people survive with all the knowledge she learned in her time with the Brotherhood of Steel.

If you don't pick a side for her, she ends up choosing the Brotherhood over the Followers because she just can't leave her friends and family behind. This could be argued that the correct choice is that Veronica should stay with the Brotherhood since that is what she wants. After all, there is that small sliver of hope that the Brotherhood can be salvaged (and hopefully not ending up being unironic fascists in a later game with a cool robot).

There isn't a correct option as far as the game is concerned either, no moral points awarded for choosing one side and decision is largely self-contained to just Veronica. You could argue that the Followers are right becuase it turns the Brotherhood will murder the Followers that recruit Veronica because they are worried about Brotherhood information getting out to people. These people murdered someone to stop them from gaining knowledge that would improve their lives, but they can’t allow it because it interferes with their tech cult. However, these deaths are avoided if you choose the Brotherhood instead since those members of the Followers never meet Veronica.

It’s amazing one quest for one companion can make you think about actions and consequences that don’t have a lot of impact on the game but a lot on a character that, by the point of completing the quest, you have been traveling with for a good chunk of game time now. There really isn’t a correct side for Veronica since both choices have merit and that is what is great about it. It’s amazing what they were able to accomplish with this game in so little time. Stuff like this is what makes New Vegas so great and this is all of an optional side quest in this game. In the roughly 90 minutes of video dedicated to the game it’s incredible how much of this game Hbomb didn’t get around to.

[u/VictorM51]

I downloaded the game and played it again cause of this video and while as Harry mentions the graphics are a bit aged, it’s still a fantastic game. It’s literally the pinnacle of what an RPG should be.

All of the factions are shades of grey even if they are more morally good or bad. The Legion shows that they do keep control and peace in the area they control, but the cost is a brutal fascist dictatorship. The NCR shows all the different kinds ineffectiveness that a Republican style of democracy can have. Hell, the time they were the most popular and efficient was when they essentially had a dictator as their first president for decades. Even all of the more minor factions and gangs have their complexities. As Harry points out, it really is a game that’s morality is deeper than just here is the good choice and here is the bad one.

It’s far more replayable than 3 or 4 in my opinion as is a game that more RPGs should try and emulate.

[u/Jozarin]

Wait - Vulpes Inculta is an important character? Holy shit I kill him in every playthrough.

[u/SlaugtherSam]

I am currently playing Outer Worlds and I am having a hard time believing the same people made FO New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny.

If someone told me OW was a game by bethesda I would believe it immediately. There is barely any world building going on. The aesthetic of the game is literally "we wanted to make a fallout game but don't have the licence". The quests are soooo bland. Like literally everything is a fetch quest. Also you need to have quest markers on at all times or you can't find the often tiny thing they are asking for that lies in a nondescript shelf somewhere. Even the Npcs look very similar with 3 main quest givers basically using the same female model. Aside from Parvati and Ada I don't like any of the companions the game gives you.

They had complete creative freedom on making the game but somehow ended up with something that is much worse than Fallout new Vegas which they cobbled together in under a year.

[u/Radical-Reviewer]

I liked this video....buuuut what makes it, "Breadtube"?

Just because Hbomb and other big channel have uploaded political content doesn't make every single one of their videos "Breadtube".

[u/Quarto_Azul]

If Im going to play the game should I mod the graphics or it is not worth it?