Was Fallout New Vegas as good as I remember? -Revisiting the Mojave a decade later

well here we are again boys I've been collecting different video game collector's editions for a long time which in hindsight kind of makes it hard to move to another country si other things are making that kind of hard also so but among my collection I have a few favorites and Fallout New Vegas is realistically probably at the top the game made its debut two short years after fallout 3 and I can't tell you the amount of excitement that I had for it for me the game had an immensely different feeling to it than fallout 3 yet felt the same in a lot of ways where fallout 3 had Washington DC and a lot of ruined city type areas New Vegas had the desert the casinos the people my god the people Bethesda took that momentum that they had going for them with fallout 3 and and one of the best decisions they've ever made pitched the game over to the franchise's original creators obsidian who worked their asses off to get the game out in 18 short months I played New Vegas to hell and back so hard when it came out that I actually burnt out on it I know that's probably blasphemy to some people considering that oh one or two of you have been trying to get a video out of me on the game for a while but it's true I've only really touched the game one or two other times beyond that initial surge of playing it and I'll tell you guys right now I only played one of the DLCs also so considering all of that I had to wonder was Fallout New Vegas as good as I remember but first things first mods as always there's either criticism of me using mods because it's not true to the original game or there's criticism of me not using any mods in a Bethesda game on PC my stance will always be that I do not critique the game's graphics so I installed some texture mods and left the characters as they are I'll always be the first to say that the visuals of an older game won't look nearly as good as they used to so there's no point in evaluating them actually remove a lot of them later anyways new Vegas starts with the most powerful opening sequence I've ever seen in a Bethesda game it's theatrical it's compelling but most importantly it's concise and informational games like fallout three and four tell you where you are who the people are in front of you what you're supposed to do new Vegas tells you who the major factions are it introduces the new California Republic a group which represents democracy and standing for the people while finding common ground between them it brings up Caesar's Legion a totalitarian group of slaves and slavers who seek to dominate and rule over the wasteland through military doctrine it mentions the new Vegas Strip and the mysterious entity known as mr. house who runs the strip and lords over its citizens and the game tells you what's happened to you and what your role was before you got shot in the head it takes that moment of expectancy that moment of well who's gonna swoop in and save my character and flips it on its head or puts a bullet in it rather this is a fantastic introduction as the game then transitions into character creation when you wake up in a dusty clinic after being tended to after your near fatal encounter from here it's pretty much fallout as you know it you change your appearance you take a look at your special skills you pick out your tag skills and traits are reintroduced into the series the skills from three to new Vegas have changed ever so slightly and I would say for the better honestly firstly the big guns and small guns have been consolidated under the umbrella of a skill simply named guns which i think is a less tedious way to go about your weapon focus and secondly the outdoorsman skill from the older entries in the franchise makes its way back into the series kind of in the form of survival well it isn't the greatest perk in the world for a casual player it's a great addition for those who want to try their hand at a hardcore mode then we've got traits traits are those age-old trade-off perks which give you a negative effect in exchange for a positive one much of the time these types of things are seen in the top-down RPG adventure genre so it's kind of cool to see them adapt it into a first-person entry of the Fallout franchise I do miss bloody mess is one of the traits it still shows up as a perk later but at least Wild Wasteland still exists after going through a few psychological questions that don't really matter at all you shore up your character and Doc Mitchell sends you on your way pointing you in the direction of the robot which found your body and sunny smiles who hangs out at the saloon and drives her name from being the same color as the Sun old easy Pete here fills you in a little more about the NCR and the legion stating that the big issue with the NCR is that they try to make people a part of them no matter what and that if your small town has something valuable it's gonna be integrated democracy the legion on the other hand are described pretty much as mentioned before you don't want to be caught by them basically Pete also mentions the battle of hoover dam a fight that took place when the legion moved in on the dam hoover dam is an invaluable resource that more or less makes whoever controls it owned the entirety of new vegas as well so after this it's a bit of tutorial type stuff that's relatively standard followed by a run-in with the powder gangers these fellows are threatening this small town for harboring someone who escaped from them after they themselves broke out of the NCR prison the whole quest is a pretty simple introduction to the Karma and reputation systems of which the rep system has a much bigger impact so if we think about it this way New Vegas is karma system is the light version of Fallout 3's but the rep system is a much more comprehensive and elaborate one which is expressed through Fame and infamy every major town in faction and quite a few minor ones regard your character differently depending on how famous or infamous you are to them in this case the town of good Springs would consider me more famous if I helped them out of this Jam thus affecting the town's NPC attitude towards me and netting me better prices at the town's shops the opposite here would net me fame among the powder gangers and not much else free dynamite and I guess they won't eventually attack me randomly like they will if I help out good burger and continue to piss them off but the main takeaway here is that the reputation system is really goddamn neat there are 16 possible reputations which you can accrue with each faction and it really gives New Vegas a great flavor that other Bethesda own fallout slack say your fame is really high with a faction and you decide to do something particularly awful to one of the factions members a lot of the times if your fame is high enough the hit to your reputation won't warrant instant hatred and the faction will wind up seeing you as a pretty stand-up guy who occasionally makes a poor decision or if it really is the worst thing that you can do maybe your reputation will dip into the likes of wild child someone who's the embodiment of chaos and people have no idea what to make of you or what you'll do next but there's even more to it than that actually say you're vilified among the NCR but you have an NCR uniform you can actually disguise yourself as a random NCR soldier and have a decent standing in their ranks that said there are several NPC types which might be able to see through the disguise as well it's a very cool system so all of that being said I sided with the good guys because yeah I know this seems like such a silly and minor quest to get into detail on but it really does set up the game more than I thought it would so as soon as you decide to help out you also go to recruit Sonny she immediately says yes but also tells you that there are several other citizens of Goodsprings that might be coerced into pitching in this is where the beauty of this otherwise insignificant quest comes in all of this is totally optional you can steamroll through and ignore it and probably be okay to take on the powder gangers but if you do choose to visit each of these people most of them require a specialized speech check more specifically one speech check to convince Judy one explosives check for dynamite from ez P and one barter check from the general goods owner I'll admit barter is infinitely more useful already in New Vegas than the previous game and I'm actually considering dumping points into it I never do anyways the whole thing goes down with no issue and it's time to take flight from Goodsprings the next step to getting this thing rolling is heading over to prim and hopefully finding the whereabouts of the people that put you out of commission temporarily apparently this whole town's gone to hell with escaped prison convicts but the main bulk of prim is holed up in this old casino it's here where you're informed that you weren't initially going to be the courier to deliver a particular casino chip but once the other courier saw that your name was on the list he declined the job saying to give it to you instead you are one of six couriers all of which we're delivering various bits of gaming paraphernalia such as dice and chess pieces in order to find out more info you got a rescued deputy beagle from captivity across the way he tells you that the guy that you're looking for was headed to novak and mentions that they could use a new sheriff to protect the people in prim this gives you the option of asking the NCR or a former sheriff who turned powder ganger who was at the NCR correctional facility I decided to hoof it over to the prison because it was the closer option after the close by NCR decided that they need reinforcements before they'd help turns out being shunned by the powder gangers doesn't necessarily mean that they'll shoot on sight which is cool what isn't cool is this absolute ass load of lag that I started to take on when I loaded this area like holy [ __ ] I looked it up and yeah a lot of people had issues with this area and a few others so far New Vegas is great but my god you remember that 18-month development cycle well the 11-game crashes the sounds suddenly cutting out after a vats usage and now this horrendous lag which I've been put through so far in the first hour or so of the game are really a testament to that which I hate to see not only because of the technical issues but because knowing what I know now but that's the more or less outsource this game to obsidian and told them that the deadline was the end of 2010 no matter what because Skyrim was coming up after that thankfully after reloading the game I was able to talk to the guy out front who told me exactly who the powder gangers are who their leader is why they're here what he did to get here and what he wanted to be when he grew up I'm being facetious with that last bit because I honestly don't understand why someone who's involved with a bunch of hostile convicts would tell me all of this so openly I get that it's information but this kind of seems like one of those reputation speech checks or a persuasion moment in general I find it funny that this guy tells me all of them in a relatively polite tone it's west of here I think back in California and then he goes oh hundred caps to get in kid now get lost of course I did to pick his pocket and just mosey on in the former sheriff was someone who got put into this prison for bypassing due process a few too many times which sounds like a great qualification for running things out here what could go wrong what sucks is that I got played like a fiddle here and my quest to not go to the further location gets thwarted when I need to go there anyway for the pardon and then on top of that I need a speech check of 30 or a barter check of 20 to accomplish either of the two options here so I'm kind of Sol for now oh well to be continued and all that all right so onward to Novak which requires passage through Nipton nipped ins a strange place by I'm sure I'll figure out whatever the hell that's about eventually so Novak is a town named I presume after this no vacancy sign which I thought was pretty clever also t-rex you quickly learn that the sniper who watches over the town knows who the guy who shot you is and he offers to help you out with tracking him down if you go to eliminate some of the ghouls up the road at the rocket testing facility this leads to another quest where you're led to believe that you're just clearing out some Farrell's but it winds up being a brotherhood of ghouls with all of their faculties in check who have holed up in the facility and Kris who talks like a ghoul god but are you ugly get upstairs and talk to Jason before I throw up just from looking at you this quest is fantastic which is honestly something I wasn't expecting in a vanilla side quest the Deb's tip you off with a nightkin body containing a single stealth boy which is nice for shadowing basically these ghouls want to launch themselves into space I guess with a rocket but a group of invisible nightkin have stopped them from doing so the head ghoul in charge has you blow out these so-called demons so that they can move on to blowing themselves out into the sky also Kris thinks he's a ghoul stalking the nightkin is surprisingly tense and I'd be more leery of running and gunning instead of sneaking and peeking my only complaint is this God forsaken layout of an underground bunker but that's minor compared to the goods of this quest after dealing with the roving gang of Marvel villain rejects you're sought after for one more quest get this big ass cartoon rocket working for this you'll need some crazy radioactive isotope and a set of custom rocket controls I just like that my guy asks so is this thing ground to orbit or ground to ground and the lord of glow is like don't worry about that you silly [ __ ] what matters is that it's a goddamn rocket hell yeah dude the isotope is pretty straightforward and so are the controls technically but this old bat charges a steep 500 caps for them unless you know how to talk which I do not yet fortunately my characters been featured in a few episodes of Hoarders so I was able to make some cash off of her I do wish that Chris here would have said okay so do both of these at once because the game having a 50/50 chance of crashing when I load an area is kind of annoying to deal with twice as much at any rate the Rockets get repaired all of the ghouls say good morning to each other and Chris realizes he's a human the end of this quest is hilarious because these dumb idiots all suit up and you watches their Rockets very obviously spin out in a weird way likely smashing somewhere close by in the wasteland I just wish I could have seen them crash though I think if my science was high enough I could have arranged that when you return to no back mani tells you that the fella that you're looking for is named Benny and that he was last headed to Boulder City well Boulder city's in a bit of a lockdown to a standoff between the NCR and the great khans fortunately with the sheer amount of points I've been pumping into speech the quest is a small bump in the road as I'm able to broker peace between the two factions at least temporarily I also learned that the leader here was betrayed by Benny when he initially helped him to take me out Benny is apparently a chairman at the tops casino in the new Vegas strip and he used the cons to get the chip from me and attempt to murder me fortunately this whole exchange has gained me pretty good favor with both factions which is going to be helpful down the line so now it's onward to the ever-present glow that is the new Vegas Strip it's pretty goddamn cool to see this stark contrast between the dry and dusty desert landscape and the speaking of metropolitan glory basking the desert in its radiance the contrast to this illuminated infrastructure is Freeside which is the area surrounding the strip and a brick for brick replication of Cleveland Ohio circa 2010 the entire area is packed with less fortunate folks gang members and thugs looking to maul anyone it looks like an easy mark as much as I would like to push on through to the strip I actually can't for now the securitron guarding the outside requires you to either have a passport or 2,000 caps to gain entry which I kind of lack in both departments with that being said I thought it was time to focus this video a little more New Vegas does have different factions in the way that an elder scrolls game will have guilds but they aren't nearly as prevalent don't get me wrong there are plenty of factions to explore but most of them don't have a large amount of quests like say the dark brotherhood or the Thieves Guild would the main four factions of the game all lead you down the same quest lines to different endings which is really cool but I'm not going to replay the game from a certain point over and over to investigate them all so I decided I'm going to side with the NCR when I get to the point I've completed two runs before this one for yes-man and one for mr. house and I feel like the NCR is probably going to be the best route for this evaluation so where does that leave us now well I think I'm gonna hit some of the great khans quests while I'm still on their good side the first quest has me stumbling upon an encampment I guess it's a very loose definition of an encampment but the deal is that I can further my favor with the cons if I manage to track down some drugs it's a very cut-and-dry mission that has me traveling to two separate areas to track them down the most dangerous part of this quest is actually finding it my god if you ever just want to feel like you're made of paper start a new game of new Vegas and just begin wandering the giant radscorpions deathclaws and Cazadores are absolutely brutal and I found myself bitching out and taking advantage of poor AI pathing just to stay alive either way the actual quest is no big deal and the main cons areas shown to you as part of your reward so the great cons are a nomadic barbarian type tribe who value pillaging raiding and drug dealing their entire culture is built off of the mongolians of old and they're not outright hostile either they actually tend to keep to themselves when they aren't pillaging the rating has actually slowed down substantially for the time being as the NCR came in and drove them out of their former residence by a massacring many of their weak their women and their children this has caused their current leader papa khan to despise the NCR and to accept caesar's envoy for negotiations they've been promised tons of land for themselves if they help the legion dismantle the NCR the problem is that caesar has no intention of keeping this promise as evidenced by his scouts journal to convince papa khan to turn down the offer inside with the NCR instead i'm to talk to the other leaders of the cons and help them see the light as well this spins into another side quest which has me figuring out what happened to the lead drug creators runner when he went down to the southeast part of the map well turns out that he's cosplaying as Jesus out here at the Legion owned area so to cut to the chase all of these little quests kind of intertwine with each other and none of them are particularly compelling for a technical standpoint but from a story perspective there's a bit more going on I enjoyed the idea of the Great Khans their attitudes how they aren't just complete [ __ ] because their quote unquote bad guys they're more of a chaotic neutral veering towards evil rather than outright evil and to me that's an underrated faction quality anyways after doing all of the back and forth two of these quests wind up pointing you towards the next minor faction the followers of the apocalypse located in freeside the followers are a knowledgeable bunch of scholars doctors and scientists whose main goal is to help those in need with medicine knowledge and agricultural assistance they're actually the group who taught the cons stuff like how to read and farm and how to create medicine which they use to make drugs they're a good group of people who have plenty of services to offer the wasteland even if it's not always in the wastelands best interest I'll stick a pin in their quests for now as I take this new information back to the cons to hopefully help them find a new purpose with their lives as affection this is exactly the kind of symbol that cons could unite behind oh oh cool yeah those guys were historically good people I want to break here for just a moment to complement this game even further so I just ran through an entire minor faction side quests were they fun not really but these people the great khans and by extension the followers of the apocalypse they're very real in a way I can't say I felt this way very much at all when I played fallout 3 I mean sure there was stuff like Tenpenny tower quests and tranquility lane but these were interesting individuals interesting areas interesting quests and I'm not discrediting them at all but thinking back on stuff like Megaton and the like yeah sure they were cool towns and they were interesting to a degree but I can't think of any group of people that have felt more human and fun to pull the strings of like New Vegas has provided so far I know I'm rambling here but I really am impressed I do wish that the actual quest content for these factions would live up to the rocket fun times that I had earlier but we'll see how it all pans out I really can't blame a game this size for having strings of back and forth fetch quests especially when the payoff tends to be interesting background knowledge and character interactions also this was the part where I disabled a lot of my texture mods because this game has literally crashed 35 times now while disabling the mods does seem to make it a little more stable it does still crash which really sucks so now it's time to check out the followers a little bit more which has me talking to this guy at first he doesn't have any quests for me but he is pretty fun to talk to I'm sure julie farkas does though labcoat pointy hair answers to the name julie farkas strangely enough the most interesting thing that he fills me in on is the fact that Caesar used to be a follower before moving on to what he does now which I guess is crucifying people and [ __ ] Julie is the main person to talk to here and she fills you in on the idea of recruiting to junkies and getting them off drugs to help around the camp and that the crimson caravan or the folks at the atomic wrangler can probably help supply the followers with more medical supplies I know this is just a bethesda game thing but when you recognize a voice actor from somewhere else and then you hear him doing a bunch of other voices for other characters it really is distracting as hell I mean it's less of a complaint and more of an observation really but yeah I want to mention a few things up front prim is important to our trade up from California we can supply them with all the medics they need now it's not that I don't believe you ah you're such a saint hey do you mind I'm trying to drink myself to the ground right here why stop I feel great okay carry on the entirety of the followers quests are really more beneficial to Freeside as you fix up the various addicts broker trading deals between different organizations and the followers and solve ongoing issues that impede them from expanding they're helpful services throughout the wasteland it's interesting because a few of these objectives don't even show up as quests but still net you reputation bonuses regardless one of these quests bleed over into the Kings territory the Kings are a group of Elvis impersonators I guess whose influence is pretty high in freeside the board looking guy by the stage can't [ __ ] miss him I'm the king what can I do for you well I mean they don't all talk like that but they're pretty funny to interact with regardless the king himself wants you to investigate a bodyguard who's been taking all the business and repeat business for himself which has you hiring Liam or Horace to escort you from one end of free side to the other the whole thing involves a staged attack and you wind up reporting back to the king so that they can take care of it which leads you into a more important quest involving NCR troops beating the [ __ ] out of squatters in their free time turns out that some of the king's men dished out a beating to an NCR envoy first behind the Kings back which has raised tensions to a boiling point fortunately the NCR can be talked down and the King grants you one favor in exchange for easing this conflict the favors include joining the Kings forging a passport into the strip or 1,000 caps I'm taking the cap since it seems like the best deal of the three to me plus now I have both enough caps and science to make it onto the strip so it's about time that we see what new Vegas here has to offer besides non-stop crashing in freeside Wow it's even more beautiful than I imagined so the first thing that you're immediately directed to is the lucky 38 and by extension mr. house Victor here has popped up in several places seemingly following you after he pulled you from your grave the reason he did all of this was because he had orders from mr. house house has use for you as someone who can take out Benny who house was grooming to be his protege until Benny betrayed him there's something extremely important about the platinum chip which Benny stole but house won't tell you until you bring it back the more in-depth background of house was that he was the CEO of robco before spending extraordinary amounts of money to somehow keep himself alive later hiring a few different tribes to reestablish and run the strip after he offers you four times the amount of cash for the chip he sends you on your way presumably after Benny he also hooks you up with the Presidential Suite and access to the cocktail bar at the lucky 38 the Deb's did a really good job with the atmosphere of this place the weird eerie electronic music suits the absolute lack of human life in this gigantic empty space suited exclusively to house human life it just doesn't feel very welcoming despite how nice it looks which I thought was cool it would have liked it if there were more things to mess around with like little gambling minigames may be a robot bartender to mix custom drinks with some rare ingredients found in the Mojave something like that it would have also been kind of cool to have different exclusive foods to find around the presidential suite area as seeing a pot of squirrel stew is kind of off-putting but I don't know maybe that's all just part of it at any rate houses thirsting for the platinum chip and my desire for revenge on Benny coincide so let's get on with it well I guess we'll get on with it after the NCR messenger and this guy pedaling easy to hide weapons for casinos assault me with information the NCR guys message says that the principal wants to see me in his office and the trenchcoat does the weapon selling thing so onto the tops casino where I immediately get distracted by blackjack until they tossed me off the tables apparently having my decent chunk of luck in this game really helps with blackjack and which is kind of cool it's also funny seeing the different stages of whoa here's a drink buddy keep gambling - here's a nice meal keep gambling - oh here's a key to the high-roller suite just keep gambling and then finally they hit the a all right [ __ ] off anyways I get to Benny with 10,000 more caps in my pocket who shits his pants at the sight of me you'd think he would have seen me raising a ruckus at the blackjack table but either way he plays it off cool and tells me to meet him up at the Presidential Suite for answers and I tell him to lose the bodyguards it's easy to see how Benny has gotten as far as he has the guy is a smooth talker and is willing to meet your demands for answers without any bodyguards if you can smooth talk him back he fills you in on the platinum chip being some kind of data storage something that will beef up the security on to a point that they can defend the strip against the NCR the legion really any hostile forces the issue is that he really has no idea what exactly needs to be done he knows what he wants but he wants you to be the special agent who pulls it and knowing how ruthless he was with shooting you for the chip he's very likely to betray you down the line if you do his bidding that said I decided to Todd Howard him with a lie of my own and get him to believe that I'm on his side well for a moment or two with the platinum chip in hand I really only have three or so options one give it to mr. house and start to do his bidding to use it to install Benny's robot as the controller of the strip overriding mr. house or a three just hang on to it since I'm gonna be siding with the NCR I'll just hold on to the chip myself and let house believe that I'm working with him I mean the guy still gets a pretty big upgrade to security but it's not like I'm gonna be starting a fight directly on the strip I take my wife everywhere but somehow she keeps finding her way back I did it I know a guy his motto is love thy neighbor he lives next to a brothel Oh No I've been married after I bust out of the casino the followers have one more quest for me to tap into the lucky 38 systems and plant something that will hopefully give them some insight as to how houses stayed alive for so long I'm cool with that so I spin around and head back in only for the entire thing to be a fruitless endeavor good quest [Music] all right so before moving on to the next feature there's a couple more strip families to take a look at the first of the two would be the omertas who head up the Kimora casino after cleaning them out of their caps at blackjack I decided to chat up this lady over here you see I'm extremely interested in gaining additional experience and the speech options provided do a really great job at gaining me additional experience so I have to make sure that tucking her into bed doesn't also give some kind of additional hidden bonus experience and anyways she opens up to me after she's done opening up to me and tells me that a man named Cochino has been doing horrible things to her in the bedroom in addition to breaking America's rules constantly she thinks that he's disappeared her lover Carlitos who promised her escape from her life here at Gomorrah I know it sounds weird but this is actually probably some of the finer female voice acting I've heard in these games which isn't exactly what I expected from this quest line the great Johanna and now I don't even know why I'm telling you this unfortunately the quest itself isn't that great your entire objective is to go find Carlitos who is a two-minute walk away quote-unquote hiding in a hotel I do admit the idea of repurposing a vault into a hotel is kind of neat but the quest substance consists of talking to this guy walking back to Gomorrah following Johanna talking to her walking back to the vault talking to Carlitos walking over to free side talking to these guys walking back to the Gomorrah talking to Joanna walking back to the front lobby and waiting walking out to free side and accidentally shooting a disguised hooker in the back of the head when she runs out in front of your bullet and vets technical stuff aside this whole thing is kind of stupid because apparently the omertas are supposedly actively hunting down Carlitos and presumably Johanna when she makes a break for it and the big scheme here is to hide in freeside which is a brisk ten-second saunter from the casino great plan dudes when all is said the high speech check saves the day and Johanna lets you know that the omertas are planning a big move against mr. house so my next string of tasks has me figuring out what this Cochino guy knows which is that the upper management in the omertas are amassing specialists and firepower to do something or another this involves a fella who smuggles a lot of guns into the casino and a guy who's been hired as an explosive specialist I casually suggest to the first guy that he should go plant some thermite in the weapons cache and so he goes and does that and gets gunned down after apparently I could have found some evidence of blackmail that got him to cooperate willingly but whoops I guess the second guy appears to be very friendly kind of a casual observer who has no vices which is admittedly weird for the place that he's in after you crack into his safe you find a holotape that depicts him raping and murdering women in visceral ways so I tell him to get out again I feel like I might have flip-flopped the treatment of these to do this quest completely wrong at the end here the two bosses sit me down to execute me basically and I tell one of them that the other one had me do this stuff so they start blasting each other Cochino starts blasting them everyone's blasting I remember I'm still in the couch so anyways I start blasting oh yeah I think Gomorrah might be out of management options here maybe I get to run the casino now these two quests kind of even out to be alright the first one was pretty shitty but I enjoyed the second one thoroughly plus there's a lot of angles to go in at which is cool so the last of these casinos belongs to the white glove society and what the [ __ ] all right this is definitely my favorite casino of all of them it's just so different the masks the fact that they can see through my hidden weapons the classical music the place is just weird and I like it except that my safe got corrupted while I was gambling which is great I don't know if it's intentional these guys at the ultra luxe are probably the most like a real-life casino that I've had to deal with the other two casinos were cake walks but good lord the amount of times that I've been kicked in the nuts by this dishonored mask-wearing dealer is insane I eventually made out like a bandit but God it took a while minor complaint here but for Vegas of all places as a setting you would think there'd be a bigger abundance of games to play it's really just roulette and blackjack I was kind of expecting poker maybe craps slots you know not a huge deal but still so the weirdness with these guys is well warranted as it turns out a lot of them are part of a secret society of cannibals and they're in a bit of a bind as their guys have basically taken the son of a super wealthy and powerful Brahmin rancher named heck that's a good name they really wanted another guy who escaped in his hiding up north surrounded by traps and if I want to cooperate I need to retrieve the first pick and bring hex son back to him this place is a [ __ ] creepy starting in the dining area this eerie Bell music starts chiming in faintly in the background when you make it to the kitchen area there are two men torching Brahman hides for some reason and then when you walk further in it's this long tiled hallway dotted with faintly glowing red lights and lots of doors leading to God knows what I love it the issue is that when I go to bust N Out as commanded by the head honcho of the white glove society I get attacked so I lock the out of the room and all was fine the only two objectives I had at this point was getting Ted back to his daddy and going to see what was up with the investigator upstairs if I go up there I get attacked and I have no guns and if I go outside the quest fails and so I decided to look it up and apparently this quest is potentially the buggiest one in the game according to the wiki so that's cool so when I played through this I never even got the opportunity to retrieve the so-called main dish from his shack up north I just gave Ted back to heck and got paid and the quest is completed weird I have nothing to say to someone so lowly and ill-mannered so we're done with the strip but we've got two more minor factions left before we can move on with the main story but first a few implants implants take the place of bobbleheads in this game which makes a lot more sense from a technical perspective basically at 4000 caps a pop you can enhance every one of your special attributes provided that you have enough endurance to handle them endurance is important in this game probably more important than most others you don't necessarily need to max it out or anything like that but investing a few extra points into it is probably wise in addition to the special boosts you can also boost your damage threshold and receive a regeneration perk for twenty thousand caps total now all that gambling I did is starting to look a lot less silly hell I didn't even have enough to buy all of the implants but I did get most of them I'll be back for luck but I don't think charisma is gonna be on my to-do list unless I have spare change the next faction is called the Boomers I know kind of a different inflection on it 10 years later huh well it would have been a lot cooler if it was a bunch of old men but surprisingly enough it's just a bunch of people who like to make [ __ ] go boom this is told to you by a dude at the outskirts of their territory who makes a wager with you if you can make it to the gates alive he gave me instructions on how to dodge the incoming artillery but I can't read so I just went around on the train tracks when I arrived at the front shit-for-brains here decides that he's going to intimidate me with a launcher aim two feet from the gate I don't know what he thinks is gonna happen when he tries to shoot that at me but it would probably be pretty funny anyways these guys this whole thing is that they're secluded on purpose to keep everyone else out of the base but the head honcho has it in mind that if they don't let a little bit of the outside in it'll eventually just roll over them so now my mission is five fold in helping these guys out and showing them that you should always trust outsiders no matter what my first task is listening to this kid oh go on and on about the boomers history basically they were part of a vault system vault 34 to be exact if you know anything about fallout which I assume most of you do you'll know that many of these vaults were all separate experiments on the human race run by volt tech while the details aren't expanded on it did stick out to me that every single person had a gun of some sort it seems simple but you have to wonder how a vault would turn out if everyone had a lethal weapon on them apparently it didn't turn out too badly as these guys struck out on their own found the airbase and removed the radiation from it slowly then they hauled howitzers over and have been trying to fix up an old b-29 bomber since then to restore the bomber to fly the open skies and honored safety running high explosive ordnance upon ignorant savages to say this self-sufficient economy of explosive wielding nut jobs are obsessed is a bit of an understatement the whole reason that they moved here was because they were upset with a 43 to 1 kdr it's later revealed that the NCR tried shutting off the water from lake mead to their base and promptly restored it when they started getting hit with precision bombing strikes courtesy of the boomers shortly after so these guys are pretty feared and respected which is kind of cool anyways this lower part of the quest really just winds up with me getting rewarded for repeatedly jerking off the boomers and I probably should have phrased that a different way considering the little boy that I'm talking to so next I have to clear out some ants that have moved in and made a nest near the solar arrays and they've been eating gunpowder so they explode with heat fortunately I've just been using guns so no issue there then this guy here has been watching an actual grey alien at the crimson caravan company through his binoculars he wants me to go talk to her and see if she's interested in and as it turns out she totally is have you spoken with McClafferty yet that's great I can't believe you went through all this trouble for me thank you so after clearing up a few other loose ends you meet the happy couple back at the air base where they introduce themselves and Janet asks if she can stay here for a while do you think it'll be okay if I hang around here for a little while so we can get to know each other better of course it would I'll have you set up with some quarters with some of the other women with some of the other women with some of the other women so I'm really about done here you only have to do tasks for the boomers until they like you and they idolized me at this point upon returning to Pearl she commends you and asks you for your assistance with one final task to get a b-29 bomber up from the floor of the lake so I tell her okay and take off it's not a hard task but it is pretty cool when you return you're greeted as a hero and the Boomers pledge themselves to your cause letting you know that they'll be bringing in a bomber to crush your enemies when the time comes to fight at the Hoover Dam so that leaves us with our final minor faction for this video a very little known fact that goes by the name of the Brotherhood of Steel the role of the Brotherhood in this game is an interesting one or should I say their lack of a role when I first played New Vegas way back when I was kind of excited to see what they were up to out here having just come off their pivotal role in fallout 3 I was surprised and disappointed when I learned of how little their place was here in New Vegas because they're kind of just scraping by it's interesting because realistically speaking the Brotherhood's role in three was probably much bigger than it should have been considering their West Coast origins sure a small brigade of them could make sense but they had presence like they've been in DC for an insane amount of time so seeing the opposite side of the coin play out for them so close to the west coast is an interesting take so where does that leave the Brotherhood now well they're holed up in a bunker manning a very small fenced off area when you approach their base its [ __ ] central and that they seize all of your gear fit you with an explosive collar until you remove an NCR soldier who set up camp in another bunker close by doing so is an easy speech check tasks and returning to McNamara has you answering him as to how you got this guy to leave which is ridiculous because he tells you immediately after that he has a mic attached to your collar and that he knows exactly how you got him to go I guess he just wanted to see if you would lie yeah these guys are ridiculously paranoid which is probably pretty expected due to how used to being in control they are so McNamara here decides to send you out to retrieve the hollow tapes of brotherhood patrols that have been gone too long and in the case of them being alive escort them back safely this is where paladin harden comes in the guy thinks that McNamara has been doing a shitty job and lacks the leadership required to make this chapter of the Brotherhood thrive so he asks me to help him elevate himself to usurp McNamara's reign so I tell him yeah sure mostly because he asked I'm not too fickle about who I help yet well this involves a bunch of side tasks on top of my side tasks talking to other leadership getting their opinions figuring out where they stand I wind up playing a mini game where I I salute a by rest' it's been jumping between servers and gain as much info as I can from the head scribe and senior paladin Ramos then I head off to find those missing patrols harden finds the fact that they have holotapes interesting seeing as those that receive them are usually on special missions not regular patrols like mcnamara claim that they are the entire base is on lockdown due to McNamara's decisions and no one is allowed in or out unless cleared by him so there is something that's happening here that needs some solving well as it turns out this goofy bastard has sent all of these guys to their deaths so the first ones were sent to some quote-unquote friendly mutants the second ones were sent to the repconn offices where they got presumably gunned down by all of the robot security and the third ones were sent to the Boomers which is particularly funny because the mission briefing told them that there was no way that they had any sort of firepower which could threaten a full suit of power armor whoops so yeah I think I'm on the side of harden for this case to oust McNamara you have to do a bit of research and find a technicality within the chain of command which allows Hardin to exploit it and take over unfortunately there really isn't some big showdown or confrontation it's kind of just like alright give me a few days and then the screen fades out to black and there's Hardin sitting there it's kind of lame still I didn't mind the rest of these quests and when all is said and done you can actually join the Brotherhood yourself if you complete one last mission take out an entire group of pre-war gun sellers up in freeside this [ __ ] is pretty tough because these guys pump out an insane amount of damage so it took me a few tries but eventually I was able to take them out and got to loot the store as a reward yeah I still really haven't put any points into energy weapons which kind of sucks because that's what these guys peddle but whatever I make it back and get named a paladin of the Brotherhood which comes with a set of power armor the armor is an absolutely horrendous condition and it gives me negative agility which sucks a lot but actually also got access to a safe house up north which has a lot better gear than this so I really can't complain too much plus it has a few benches for me to create and convert ammo and create other jury-rigged [ __ ] the Brotherhood's role in this game is very tiny compared to every other entry really but I think that's ok with me I wish you the best outside brother alright let's finish this thing we're off to the NCR so the first thing that these guys have you doing is going to the boomers and gaining their support check next I have to kill pacer the King's secondhand man preferably without framing the NCR I could have also used my favor from earlier to accomplish a peace between the NCR and the kings but I decided to take those caps instead so I decided to spike pacer supply of drugs damn check then it's off to do some real work by a visiting Colonel Moore at Hoover Dam well kind of she asks me to take care of the Great Khans and the omertas which I've already done you'd think they would have given her another voice line if this were the case something along the lines of god damn you a brave [ __ ] I'm glad you're on our side here's a gift card for t.j.maxx you know standard [ __ ] for getting things done ahead of time but she still treats you like you just came back from the quest and rattles off another one instead well the next one is disabling mr. house which kind of regretting that upgrade I gave him earlier apparently it's not really a big deal though because I could just bust through his secret area with no science check or key which I thought was really odd house is this ancient decrepit human being preserved in a Dragonball Z namekian recovery tube and he tells you that he would rather die instead of simply being left to live with no control I can't say that I blame him though I do wonder if the sterilized option was the more humane way to go about all this this [ __ ] fossil can take a beating so with the human jerky out of the way I think I may have stumbled upon my first real criticism of this game's story all of these stories no matter who you choose intertwine in some way or another it's something that I complimented earlier so for example if I chose yes man he'd want me to visit the Brotherhood in the boomers just as the other factions would it's all a pretty elegant way of choosing your side while still experiencing the core of what the game has to offer along with the twist that each faction presents yes man is the true middle ground here because fighting for yourself could actually benefit these other factions as well for example what if I said to Caesar or the NCR leaders hey I brought houses systems under my control and I'm willing to use them to help your cause in whichever way that I can it kind of seems like a great way to double dip between the wild card and other faction missions but when I install yes-man houses mainframe I immediately fail all other NCR quests or presumably Caesars if I was working with him up until this point I just don't see how they're mutually exclusive things yes I could see how these factions would be threatened by me having all of this power but why would they turn down all of the potential that I have out right just because I control the strip now I imagine that they would be very interested if house suddenly said hey how about you uh send over some of your soldiers onto the strip and I help you out in your fight I don't know it's just the first minor thing that struck me about the story so far after returning with my report I get another slap to the face as my now trusted allies at the Brotherhood of Steel must be destroyed apparently there is no peaceful way to resolve this which really [ __ ] sucks I guess there would have been if McNamara was still around but I kind of saw to it that he wasn't so basically I have to pick three keys off of three different people and use those keys to generate a self-destruct terminal password and then hightail it out of there ironically if I had five more science I would have just been able to hack in but oh well I do feel bad about destroying something which I worked so hard for but honestly the Brotherhood are a bunch of insecure [ __ ] in this game I guess they kind of are in every other game though they just have way less power in this one and it makes them seem pathetic to be so overzealous and continue to stockpile technology while wiping out those who have stuff that they don't while they themselves are a pretty miniscule force out here in the mojave oh and slight side note here I do realize that Veronica's side quests are tied to the Brotherhood and I do intend to do them alongside other notable side quests in another video all right so the last phase of this never-ending quest is protecting the president of the NCR as he makes a speech the Ranger who you report to tells you that there may be something suspicious going on so I should keep an eye out for clues and whatnot doing a little searching has me stumbling upon a patch of blood in the supply closet and an engineer who tells me her friend is missing which tells me to look around for someone in a jumpsuit well there's only one guy who's wearing a jumpsuit so I look in his pockets and there's a detonator inside then I happen to notice that someone left there human body on the ground outside of a sniper tower I really hate when this happens to me so I let the guy up top know that he might have dropped something and he starts firing BB pellets at me for some reason so I give him a tutorial on sniper rifles and sniper rifle accessories and he thanks me for the information after this I decided that there might be more to this detonator thing and it turns out that it leads to something known as a bomb it was kind of weighing bear force one down so I decided to rip it out gently the president finishes his speech and I report back to the colonel who says you protected your point you did I know the judge no wall watch to show you this is the point of no return as the game lets you know before you commit to this route the battle of hoover dam takes place from the dam itself all the way to Caesars camp on the other side it's constant battle with few pauses and I wound up missing the part where I could flush the légion invaders through the dams turbines because it was right at the start and I didn't know which arrow to follow but I made it through these guys anyways with the help of a metric [ __ ] ton of stimpaks when I finally make it to the camp leggett la Gnaeus stands tall and powerful ready to best you in combat i instead up to talk my way out of this like always which much like the master in Fallout 1 is actually a really cool way to defeat a final boss you can either Bluff him with a lie or talk strategy with him I opted for the latter which encompasses the idea that while they might win here they'll also lose a war of attrition would be both their boon and their bane as the using their full might would cause them to lose everything that they fought for in the east while conquering the West the leggett recognizes this and tells you that they will retreat for now before he runs off and locks himself in his tent this tent has fancier canvas than Bethesda promise that's fallout 76 community and that's it for this game as far as a lot of the main stuff goes you make your way back to the front of the camp and the general unnecessarily explodes the front gates that make a cool guy entrance he thanks you for your work and you get to see how the end game panned out which for me was mostly good stuff with some not-so-good stuff mixed in I particularly found it interesting that the followers were forced out of the mojave and wound up with the great khans and while who established a very prosperous and grand empire in a state that no one has ever cared about or ever will care about good for them so here are my final thoughts about the game speech in this game is more important than I've ever seen in any other installment and if I hadn't immediately pumped it to a tee I imagine most of my quest would have gone a lot differently this is perfect for someone like me who's always trying to play the charismatic charming guy in video games which makes it ironic that charisma as a stat is god-awful and should be dropped to one immediately when starting the game but I guess it is what it is the amount of dialogue options in this game if you have the right stats is almost insurmountable and I like that even having a high luck stat with some of these things meant the difference between a fight breaking out and things going smoothly looking back on this script I really haven't complained about the game very much and there really is a good reason for it the game is great but if I had to pick out the biggest glaring issue its how rushed it was and that's by no means obsidians faults I touched on this earlier but on release a lot of issues came packed with the game bugs glitchy areas crashing and a lot of that hasn't been fixed even today except by modders and no matter how good a game is I really don't think that that should ever be the case no one should have to jump through hoops to play a game properly on any platform as much as I enjoyed myself I don't think I've ever quick saved as much as I have in this game I don't know but what I will say is that obsidian did a fantastic job making almost every single quest memorable it really is quality over quantity and I can't help but emphatically compliment them for the job that they managed to pull off for the amount of time that they were given I can 100% see why this game has as big of a following as it does even today so was Fallout New Vegas as good as I remember no it was much better I had a blast with almost everything and it pains me to think that we probably won't see another iteration like this with the way that Bethesda has been handling the franchise I hope that'll change one day you never know but until that day comes I'll be using New Vegas as a benchmark for what a good RPG should be thanks for watching I'm not gonna lie the idea of this video initially intimidated these [ __ ] out of me but I'm very glad that I did it and I'm looking forward to covering the DLC and notable side quests probably not all in one video but we'll see and if you guys want drop a few suggestions as to what you think some of the essential side quests are and I'll try to squeeze them in also I know that a lot of you don't really like advertisements maybe some specific types of advertisements and there isn't one for this video but they really do help me out when I can get them many suggested that I open a patreon and after mulling it over I decided I'd try it out just please don't feel obligated to donate I'm never going to twist your arm on this anyways I've got a twitch where I fit in streams when I've got time I got a Twitter where I talk about stuff and I have a discord where people chill out and shoot the [ __ ] in the mean time and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 2,504,656

Keywords: Fallout, New Vegas, Evaluation, Discussion, Review, As good as I remember, Vegas, Casino, The strip, Boomers, Brotherhood of Steel, Omertas, The Tops, Gammorah, Chairmen, Benny, Mister House, Lucky 38, The Omertas, Freeside, The Kings, Followers of the Apocalypse, Great Khans, The House, Victor, Yes Man, Wild Card, NCR, New California Republic, Caesar's Legion, Legate, Bethesda, Obsidian, Liam O'Brien, Mojave, Courier, Powder Gangers, Crimson Caravan Company, Analysis

Id: Ko21W3cPNlI

Length: 55min 3sec (3303 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SynUK]

The writing in it is great. I loved the way the sidekicks' backstories would become revealed over time the more you used them. I remember Veronica's backstory (the Brotherhood scribe) being particularly powerful.

Plus it has that theoretical physicist line that everybody loves.

[u/SlaminSammons]

I’m replaying through it right now. It’s as good as I remember, but man I’m having way more crashes than I used to have. I always had crashes, but I’ve been getting them like every 10 minutes. Finally got it stable or so last night.

[u/bluesky_anon]

I replayed it with Lonesome Road last year, waiting for The Outer Worlds. It is still that good, with a few graphics mods.

When The Outer Worlds came, I liked it quite a lot, but it felt like a step down from what F:NV achieved in interconnectedness, world-building, RPG systems, atmosphere, dialogue and story.

[u/TacoFacePeople]

I still think it's a lot better than Fallout 4 (or 76), and better-written than 3 or 4 as well. It shipped with a lot of bugs, but at it's present iteration... it's stable in my experience.

I think it holds up well compared to similar (open-world RPG) games of this past generation. Part of that may be the releases we've seen from those two big Bethesda franchises. The prior generation (PS3/360) had Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and New Vegas (with the latter being farmed out). The current gen (PS4/Xbone) had Fallout 4 and 76, and only one of those is really the same kind of game.

Outer Worlds presents something similar, though shorter and with less meat/exploration/story packed into the world.

[u/SpaceNun99]

The map is pretty cool, but suffers from being last gen a lot even with max mods. I remember the coolest mod was the one that made 100s of old songs in public domain the radio.

I remember liking this game but toward the end it got a bit stupid, and the map is poorly done in the mountain areas. It's almost hilarious how it just changes scenery so fast. It shows how far we have come when you compare this to red dead or origins. After playing F3 and this game back to back I was about done with the series honestly. But I do have fond memories of using max mods on PC and playing with my PS3 controller

[u/rapter200]

Fallout: New Vegas is good

[u/Vinny_Cerrato]

I get why people love NV and prefer it over FO3, but I could never get into it like like the other Bethesda style open world sandbox RPGs. In those types of games, the world and setting are HUGE factors for me, and the generic post-apocalyptic desert NV took place in was indistinguishable from the hundreds of other games, movies, television shows, etc. that take place in generic post-apocalyptic deserts. FO3 was certainly not without its faults, but the Capital Wasteland was, and still is, an incredibly interesting setting/environment.

[u/ACardAttack]

I like it, but always found when I hit the strip to just lose interest in the story and the quest. None of the sides really interested me and the DLC was a big miss for me (never played lonesome road). I found FO3 to be more fun to explore and be in. The Strip felt so weird and limiting.

[u/Arcade_Gann0n]

I say this as someone that loves New Vegas, the game is horribly overrated, at least in the sense that it's "so much better" than 3 & 4. Sure, the writing's a bit sharper (then again, I never saw how the writing of the other games was so "terrible", so that's not a huge draw for me) and the gameplay's a fine evolution, but a lot of the side quests were dull (Bye Bye Love is the worst of the 3D games by virtue of having over 20 loading screens for a standard "back & forth" affair), many locations were utterly useless as anything but padding, half the DLCs are tedious slogs, and it's so unstable that I end up freezing way more often than I do in 3 & 4 (but hey, why use patches to polish it when the developers can go out of their way to nerf the number of Stimpaks you find in first aid kits instead).

Again, I do love the game for being more Fallout, but I don't get why people put it on a pedastal to shit on 3 & 4.