This post will discuss the end game events in Fallout New Vegas. If you have not finished this game yet, and you plan to do so at a later date, please proceed with caution. Major spoilers below!

Today we are going to talk about Fallout New Vegas. You may ask yourself, why would I talk about New Vegas. After all that game came out like a century ago. Well, I seem to be determined to scare away all but my most loyal readers seeing how last week I reviewed a foreign novel that has no English translation. Now I’m going to talk about last year’s game. And not just an old game, but a game that I already spent several posts discussing back when it was still new.

What cam over me? Well, I recently revisited New Vegas after abandoning it for several months and finally got to play through the end game content. And you know what? It was good. It was so entertaining I decided that I need at least one more New Vegas post to give the game some praise. There are a lot of games out there these days that say they offer players interesting choices, but few actually do. Most offer you artificial binary decisions: you can be a saint or a murderous psychopath. Sometimes however, a game comes along and gives you a true conundrum. A choice so difficult you actually can’t make up your mind for hours. One of such games was Dragon Age Origins, and I wrote at length about the entire experience. I am pleased to report that I experienced something very similar while playing Fallout: New Vegas. While it was not as emotional and powerful as the Dragon Age decision, it was still quite difficult decision.

Interestingly what made my New Vegas play through so interesting was not the writing itself, but rather emergent game play. Being a sandbox setting the game allows you to pursue multiple quest arcs at the same time. It is the sequence in which I did some of the side quests, my choice of a companion heavily influenced this experience.

But let me start from beginning. The big deciding end-game moment in New Vegas is the battle for the Hoover Dam. Through your actions you can influence the outcome of this battle and the future of the Mojave Wasteland. You have an option to side with one of the three factions involved in this conflict: NCR (New California Republic), The Legion or the elusive Mr. House who controls the Vegas Strip using an army of robotic soldiers.

The Legion is pretty much portrayed as bad guys. They are slavers, they treat women as property, they crucify and torture people and have almost no redeeming qualities. There is little incentive siding with them unless you really like their Roman themed duds, or want to play a total jerk ass.

NCR are almost total opposite. They are a fledgling democratic government and generally come off as good guys. They can be a bit bureaucratic and heavy handed though. Their expansionism rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and their armies have been known for uprooting and driving away native tribes to make living space for NCR citizens.

Mr. House is a bit of an enigma. He is a 200 something year old living corpse in a casket, hooked up to a sophisticated computer system that gives him full control of the New Vegas Strip and an army of robotic servants. He is a bit of a technological genius and a visionary with dreams of restoring the Mojave to it’s pre-war glory. And you don’t have to take his word for it. All you need to do is to visit the strip. It is a place unlike any other in the wasteland. At night, you can see it from just about any place in the game – New Vegas is a neon-bright beacon of wealth and prosperity. The living conditions in Mr. House’s domain are far above and beyond anything that NCR or Legion could offer. He provides security, luxury, modernity and unobstructed free commerce – things that are hard to come by in the harsh post nuclear wastelands.

Of course Mr. House is a dictator – a benevolent one, but a dictator nevertheless. Choosing to help him over the NCR is choosing a totalitarian empire over a democracy. Still, House has proven to be fair, and stable leader over the past two centuries and he has at least one or two more centuries in him. While he can be an ass from time to time, his goals and vision are something exceptional. No one else in the Mojave has the knowledge, the foresight and the ambition that could match his. I was skeptical to help him at first, but then he got me. He promised not only to resurrect pre-war technology, but to improve upon it. He bought me with vision of Mojave becoming a technocratic utopia – it’s products and technological wonders flooding the rest of the world, inciting a restorative frenzy to rebuild and reclaim the humanity’s lost technological edge. And then he promised me the stars. Mr. House wouldn’t stop at restoring the planet to it’s pre-war glory. He would succeed where his contemporaries have failed and launch a space program to explore and colonize the solar system. If I was lucky and with the medical advancements he would introduce, I could live to see at least significant part of that plan to unfold. That struck a cord with me. How could I not work for this guy? I immediately signed up for Mr. House fan club and started doing his quest.

In the process I inadvertently picked up Veronica as my companion. Why Veronica? Because she is voiced by Felicia Day (aka the redhead from The Guild). Do I need to explain further?

Veronica is a member of Brotherhood of Steel – an isolationist elite group of power armor wearing knowledge seekers and advanced tech hoarders. You may remember them as The Good Guys™ from Fallout 3, but this faction is a bit different. They are xenophobic and self-centered group. They seek out, study, restore and preserve pre-war technology but they keep it to themselves. It’s not that they don’t want to help the people of the Mojave. It’s just that they thing that they are better served by not having dangerous pre-war toys they could hurt themselves with. The Brotherhood believes that their mission is to prevent more catastrophic end-of-the-world events by controlling peoples access to advanced technology. Sharing their secrets with outsiders is strictly forbidden by the laws of their society. Which sort of makes sense.

Thanks to Veronica however I was able to somehow get in their good graces, and become one of the very few outsiders allowed free access to their base of operations. There I met some interesting NPC’s and discovered that while their values might be tad misguided they are still upstanding people who genuinely believe their cause is just and noble. Doing Veronica’s personal quest chain revealed more detail. While Brotherhood seems powerful because of their pre-war arsenal, their numbers were dwindling. Since one has to be born into the order the Mojave chapter was lacking fresh blood, and slowly dying out. Without opening up to the outside world, and taking in recruits and/or mates from local tribes they would surely perish in the next few decades.

Being an awesome guy that I am, I did a whole bunch of fetch quests for these people to gain their trust, then influenced their Elder to lift strict lock-down rules and allow people in and out of their bunker more easily. Then I brokered a peace agreement between the Brotherhood and the NCR, allying them both against the Legion. I made Veronica happy, I possibly turned around the Brotherhood around from the self-destructive path, and I made them cease fighting with NCR stabilizing the region a bit. In fact, these people liked me so much, they offered me a honorary membership in the order – a very rare, almost unheard-of honor. In short, me and the people of the Brotherhood became total “BFF’s”.

So me and Veronica went back to the strip, all happy, holding hands and all. I hit up the Lucky 38 casino to see what the big boss was up to and turn in his last quest. It turned out he had another assignment for me: exterminate the Brotherhood of Steel.

Fuck! Shit just got real.

You see, Mr. House views the Brotherhood as an imminent threat. They are technology freaks, and New Vegas strip just bristles with pre-war tech. The Brotherhood’s entire philosophy and value system revolves around keeping “dangerous” tech out of the hands of the unwashed masses. There is no way they would allow Mr. House to execute his vision of restoring the Mojave to it’s former glory. That sort of thing would go directly against what they believe in. So major conflict of interest was unavoidable. In fact, I just made things worse by propping up the faction that my boss genuinely feared.

Can you see the problem here? Mr. House just asked me to genocide the very people I just became friends with, and who just made me a honorary member. He told me to go wipe out an entire base full of named NPC’s for whom I did various quests, and who had interesting exchanges with Veronica while we were visiting them. What’s worse, he did not even want to hear about a possible diplomatic solution. With a Speech skill of 100 I was sure that I could speech-check the Elder into forming some sort of alliance, but that was not even on the table. Mr. House would accept nothing but a total annihilation of the Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood.

But could I stoop so low? Could I actually go through with it and kill these well meaning noble people that never did me any harm? Could I commit this unspeakable crime in the name of progress? Could I justify it as choosing a lesser evil to further a greater good? And hell, could I do this to Felicia Day? Could I just go and slaughter her people after having her follow me for most of the game?

Of course there was an alternative. I could side with NCR and give control of the Mojave Wasteland to a lumbering bureaucracy thousands of miles away and hope for the best. Or I could take out Mr. House and take his place trying to execute at least parts of his grand plan by myself. Both options however required me to give up on the dream Mr. House infected me with. I would have to de-throne this great man, and have lesser minds control Vegas.

What would you do? Would you kill your best friend’s family and friends in cold blood in the name of progress? Or would you give up on a dream, and ruin humanity’s best chance at returning to pre-war glory because of sentiments and moral doubts. It was a very difficult choice – at least for me. I’m a liberal technocrat, futurist and science nut – I really wanted to side with Mr. House. I really believe that people of the Mojave would benefit the best if he was in charge. But I just could not go through with the cold blooded ethnic cleansing he ordered. It was too big of a price to pay.

In the end I chose the independent route, took out Mr. House, gained control of his army and drove both Legion and the NCR from the Mojave Wasteland. But the dream died with the ancient genius. The independent state I created was relatively stable, but the promised technological utopia never came. I merely maintained peace and stability, but the people were no better under my rule than they were before. As predicted the Brotherhood became a thorn in my side, slowly growing in strength and plotting to take me down and dismantle Mr. House’s robotic army. Did I choose wisely? Was this really the best option?

This is an example of pretty decent writing, well designed sandbox and multiple valid endings culminating in a very profound moral dilemma. Note how this dilemma was born out of emergent game play choices and my personal beliefs rather than from some sliding scale morality meter. This is how you design good sandbox games ladies and gentlemen. You let the player tell his own story. In this aspect the end-game of New Vegas was by far superior to the binary non-choice I was given in Fallout 3. I had my own, very personal, deeply moving story arc emerge purely out of random sequence in which I did side quests and my companion preference. The interesting thing is that your experience with the same game content might have been completely different.

What ending did you choose on your first play through?

For example, Fallout 3 had a persistent bug that would constantly crash my game to desktop when entering VATS. It didn’t happen all the time, but often enough to be incredibly frustrating. There was also some water reflection bug that would crash the game if I looked at a puddle of water under the right angle. New Vegas does not have either of these, which made me a very happy camper.

The very old physics bug is still there though – the one that has been around since Oblivion. You can test it yourself: walk up to a table or a shelf with bunch of items on it and take one of them. More often than not, everything else that was on the same surface, will inexplicably float up about half an inch into the air, and stay there. If you nudge any of the floating items with the Z button or bump them with something else they will drop down to the surface, but otherwise they will just stay in mid air forever. It is not a big issue tough, and I suspect the cause is burred somewhere really deep in the physics engine guts, because Bethesda now has 3 games and a few expansions and DLC’s that are all affected by it.

People keep telling me about some crazy save game destroying bug that affects the game, but I have not seen that one yet. I bought the game through Steam and I have seen it update it at least once so far, so I’m thinking that maybe the issue got fixed already. Or maybe I’m just lucky.

By far this was my most favorite of all bugs I have encountered:

Deputy Beagle stuck in the ceiling (click to enlarge)

Yeah, that’s Deputy Beagle from Primm with his head stuck in the ceiling. I have no clue what happened here, but that’s how I found him when I rescued him from the Powder Gangers and he ran off. He eventually got himself unstuck somehow, after I reprogrammed the Protectron to become the new Sheriff, because I saw him walking the streets of Primm on my subsequent visits. But his “head in the ceiling” episode really made me laugh.

This is not really a bug but an interesting implausibility:

Solid Tumbleweeds

Yes, I am crouching on top of a tumbleweed. I guess this is a limitation of the game engine – there is probably no way of making semi-solid, semi-destructible objects that would simulate how a real tumbleweed would react to my attempts to jump onto it. At least not without making some more or less complex changes to the engine itself. Still, I found it kinda funny.

Another fairly hilarious bug shows up during some death animations that causes the body to deform in weird ways. I saw my character’s neck elongate, and limbs grow and shrink in size for no reason. Unfortunately I never had FRAPS on to record it when it happened so I have nothing to show for it.

Other than that though, the game has been pretty good to me. It only crashed few times on me. First time was when I launched it for the first time, and was creating my first character. As soon as the doc in Good Springs gave me the face designer gizmo the game freaked out and died. On a subsequent try it ran fine, and then crashed again when got camera control and started spinning it around to see how my newly designed face looks from different angles. Then it crashed a few times when I left the game on for a long time and the screen-saver kicked in, or when I tried alt-tabbing from the game to do some other stuff.

At one point, I also had an NPC turn hostile at me for no reason. It was the Ghoul trapped in the basement of the rocket facility. We had our little chat, I agreed to find his friend and as soon as the conversation was over he started shooting at me. Reloading game helped though.

Other than that, the game has been good to me. Have you experienced any funny bugs? How about game breaking ones? Share in the comments. Please avoid spoilers though – I still haven’t finished the game.

1. Mikoto’s Beauty Pack

   There are actually several face/hair/eye improving mods out there. I picked this one more or less at random. I’m not sure if it is the best one, but it works. It has a decent set of new hair styles and lets you create characters with eye color that actually stands out and is not the usual pale gray shade.

   Fun fact: my current FNV character has the same hairstyle as one of my Morrowind characters. I think the Bethesda modders who make all this wonderful content recycle a lot of ideas and designs – which is not a bad thing actually.

2. MT UI

   You know how modern video games are no longer allowed to have reasonably sized fonts in menus, because that would not work for console-tards and their TV’s? MT UI basically re-scales the fonts used for your pip boy menus, and dialog trees so that you can actually see more than 3 items per screen. Very, very useful.

3. Free Play after main quest

   I installed this so that if the game ending sneaks up on me, I can still go back and finish up the side quests or hunt for achievements. I mean, yeah – I could potentially just reload earlier save and then put off completing the game, but that’s kinda silly. I mean, when you are in the last act of the game, and you are about to reach the final climactic encounter, you don’t want to put everything on hold just so that you can find that stupid snow globe that is missing from your collection.

4. Level Cap at 100

   In Fallout 3 I smashed against the level cap about halfway through the game. In fact, I didn’t even start the main mission at that point, which seemed arbitrary to me. So I installed a similar mod back then. By the time I finished the game, I was able to one-shot pretty much anything out there but surprisingly this didn’t really ruin the game for me. I just felt like a bad-ass. So I decided to use one of these for New Vegas as well.

5. Further Third Person Camera

   This is an interesting mod which increases your field of vision in third person mode by allowing you to zoom out more. It is very useful when you are trying to run away from strong melee opponents like radscorpions with your low level character.

6. Faster Running

   Games built on Bethesda engines always have this problem. Your default speed is jut to slow for comfort. This speeds you up a bit, making exploration less of a chore.

7. Performance Fix

   A lot of people swear by this mod so I decided to include it even though it never did anything but crash the game for me. I tried all the different dll’s they offered and every single one would simply crash the game to desktop before even getting to the main menu. Still, check it out – it may improve your performance unless you have a GeForce GTX 285 like me.

If you have favorite, must have New Vegas mods, please post them in the comments. I’m always on the lookout for cool things like that.

I used mods to get the hair to look like that.

As of writing this post, I have been playing the game for about 3-4 hours, and have not left the starting town yet but I can already tell you that Obsidian addressed the most egregious criticism of Fallout 3. New Vegas actually does feel like it is set few hundred years after the war. People actually do take time to clean up their houses from the rubble (well at least in some areas). Pre-war food is still disturbingly ubiquitous but Obsidian does go out of its way to show that the citizens of their game world do supplement their diets with contemporary foodstuffs. For one, there are more things to eat out there in the world than the canonical squirrel on a stick. I even encountered an NPC that lampshaded the food situation expressing a disbelief at the fact some people actually eat the 200 year old relics. Best of all, one of the very first things you see when you start the game is a guy tending a garden outside of his house. It all adds up.

I was pleasantly surprised that most food and water in the starting area was not radioactive the way it was in F3. Yes, the radiation in F3 was a game mechanic but also a logical inconsistency. I always wondered how inhabitants of Capital Wasteland managed survive more than few years with all their food and water being contaminated. Did they just pop Rad-Away all the time? NV setting is much more logical: people tend to settle in areas with little or no radiation, make and grow their own free food, and tap into clean water sources. Radioactive areas are usually abandoned places inhabited by mutants, and full of artifacts of the bygone era. This works very well for me.

Reputation System

The game still uses a silly karma system, but at the same time Obsidian implemented a reputation system. Doing quests for certain factions will put you in their good graces, but at the same time you may get on somes shit list for aiding their enemy. Allegedly your reputation score is more important than your karma score which sounds encouraging. There was just nothing worse than a F3 punishing you for stuff like stealing stuff from abandoned house while no one was around to see it. This still happens in NV but hopefully the reputation system will be able to offset it.

Another element of the game I really like is the hard core mode. Obsidian basically implemented that old food/drink/sleep mod from Fallout 3 as an optional core game mechanic. You can enable it when you create your character, and disable it at any time from the option screen. But while it is on, you need to keep your character well fed, well rested and hydrated. Failing to do so will result in temporary lowering of your stats, and eventually in death. The 3 counters work exactly the same way as the RAD counter does: they start at 0 and slowly creep upwards. The thirst counter is the quickest to rise, but also the easiest to reduce: all you need to do is to stop by a sink, toilet, or a puddle and take a gulp every once in a while. Sleep counter is the slowest one, and you can actually pull several in-game all-nighters without running it to high. I sort of wish that these counters were somehow incorporated into the HUD though. I man, your character should instinctively know how hungry, thirsty or sleepy he is. But I’m not complaining. It is a nice addition and I enabled it without even hesitating for a second.

The food counter in hardcore mode.

Character creation however still sucks. I’m sort of disappointed that Obsidian did not spend more time on creating good looking PC faces. A lot of their NPC’s are actually fairly well designed. They are as good as you can make them with Bethesda engine I guess. But the default preset faces are beyond ugly. Whats worse is that the face generation takes place on a poorly lit computer terminal screen. The game allows you to re-color your face, and change the light/shadow dynamic up to your liking, but it fails to tell you that once you that your face is actually never going to look the way you designed it. The dynamic light in the game world plays havoc with the color balance on the facial features, and 80% of the time any adjustments in the “tone” section of the character designer will result with your face looking like a clown the second you step outside. But I guess that’s where the community comes in. You can fix the face problem by installing one of the many face/hair/eye mods that are already available out there.

Lighting makes a huge difference in character creation.

All in all, it seems an improvement over Fallout 3 and I think I will enjoy playing it. Is it buggy? Oh, you better believe it is. But then again, I knew it was going to be this way. I mean, New Vegas is a project made by Obsidian using a Bethesda game engine. If there are two companies out there that positively excel at releasing buggy, unpolished games it is these two. But I will leave my bug complaints for another post.