Fallout: New Vegas details have landed, Vault dweller, in the off chance that you've already extracted every last clue from last week's teaser trailer. The wait is over. Official Xbox Magazine and PC Gamer are just two print publications whose newest cover stories detail Obsidian's epic, with the latter's hitting mailboxes, and thus the internet this weekend, care of Duck and Cover.
Fallout: New Vegas as we've already come to know is not Fallout 4, but instead a spin-off "semi-sequel," set three years after the events of the Capital Wasteland. Its story is the struggle of three factions: The New Californian Republic, Caesar's Legion, and the local residents. New Vegas will utilize the existing Fallout 3 Gamebryo engine, but with enhancements and tweaks, as is customary when a new team gets their hands on a set of tools. This of course means it's still a first/third-person shooter.
Creative director Chris Avellone says, "We're going to advance the clock three years from the events of Fallout 3, and 40 years since the events of Fallout 2, and take the player far out west to the city of New Vegas. ... It's a very different place to the Capital Wasteland." Vegas was spared the horrific blasts of nuclear war that its predecessor was not, so it remains largely intact and operational, with a sky that's "warm and clear and blue." There's even sparse vegetation such as Mesquite bushes and Joshua trees. Upon catching a fleeting glimpse of the city, the it's said that you can see "it's under construction... you can see the town being rebuilt." Parts of the Stratosphere and The Landmark hotel have become a mish-mash building called the Lucky 38, for example.
More after the jump...
Players will not take on the role of an isolated Vault member, venturing out into the harsh post-apocalyptic world for the first time. Instead you're a courier, tasked with "carrying a parcel across the Mojave desert. You're also a dead man. Left to to rot in a shallow grave, you're rescued by a kindly robot, Victor, and patched up by Doctor Mitchell," who is the good surgeon of Goodsprings -- an outback town home to 232 survivors, and home to the "world's oldest saloon": the Prospector's Saloon.
The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system for character creation/customization returns, as does V.A.T.S. and the ever helpful PDA of the future, the Pip-Boy. New creatures like the mutant gecko and various iterations of the Super Mutant (like a female wearing a '50s wig and horn-rimmed glasses), and weapons including the Varmint rifle, upgraded pistol and grenade machine gun await players in their quest as well. Obsidian have even incorporated a new reputation system, on top of the Karma balancing, that "matters," opening up different options dependant on your actions, ala Mass Effect.
"We use reputation to track the deeds you've done with various communities and organisations. If you do things that help those groups, your negative reputation goes up. If you do bad things to those groups, your negative reputation goes up. You can end up with a reputation of good, bad, or a mix of both," adds lead designer Josh Sawyer. New Vegas also plays host to a system where your selected skills themselves open up new conversation options, an example given is if you invest experience points in explosives, conversation options pertaining to explosives will be available, which can aid your progress in quests. The same applies to bartering, which is used not just for buying items, but also for the negotiation of rewards or bonuses from quest givers.
"In New Vegas, all dialogue options are available to players. Even if you fail a persuade check, we'll show you the option, and there are no bad consequences for failing them. we want players to use skill-boosting chems, magazines or books ... we want them to see that there is content for them, even if they don't have the skills to reach it," Sawyer says. On Obsidian's forums, Sawyer clarified, saying, "This is how it works. Each skill-based dialogue option has two different texts: one for high skill (which will result in success) and one for low skill (which will result in failure). If you do not meet the required threshold, you see the latter. ... I also do want to clarify what is meant by "no penalty for failure". All it means is that you won't wind up in a worse position than you were before selecting it. If a dude bursts in and is intent on killing you, he's still going to want to kill you if you fail the Speech check to talk him out of it."
As for the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, arguably the best way to approach combat in Fallout 3, it's been tweaked to accommodate melee weapons better. "A lot of people asked for more option with melee weapons...so what we've done to address that is every melee weapon has a special melee move. [In the case of] the golf club, it's called 'Fore!'" ... [Another thing] we've added, for cinematic value, is that every weapon now has a knock-back value upon death. Weapons like the shotgun tend to send guys flying."
Companions will also make another appearance in New Vegas, the first confirmed being a ghoul called Raul. Companions are commanded through a context-sensitive menu, and can be equipped with whatever weapons or armor you deem fit at the time. The last tidbit revealed is the addition of a hardcore mode, designed for the most "obsessive" fans, making the game much more about actually surviving. In this enhanced difficulty, healing yourself is not instantaneous, combat is harder, ammo has its own weight, limiting your inventory capacity further, and the player will have take note to drink clean water, lest they risk dehydration and death. Sounds nifty.
Avellone states, "There are a couple of key pillars to any Fallout game. The first is that it's got to look like what the people of the 1950s thought the future would look like. Then you've got to drop a bomb on it." Commenting on Bethesda's first effort, he adds, "The second thing, which Bethesda frickin' nailed, is exploration. You've got to be able to go anywhere, do anything, to anyone."
It absolutely seems like Obsidian -- made up of ex-Interplay/Black Isle members, who created Fallout -- have also nailed their take on the franchise's reboot. It's going to be along wait until fall.
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