brace for maximum NV succ:
when yall shit talk new vegas because “it takes place in a desert” or “i don’t see how the main plot’s interesting” it’s like sayin Watchmen sucks because it’s about superheroes and you don’t see how dr manhattan is interesting and also you only read two chapters
it stands head-and-shoulders above everything else in its genre AND medium
you don’t have to personally like it, but when you start arguing that it’s just outright bad you’re just gonna look fuckin foolish, because nobody who understands what this game is would argue that its content and structure have no merit, especially when compared to other titles in its genre
the vocal “hatedom” for nv mostly consists of people who wrote it off for some personal hang-up unrelated to the actual quality of its content, or because they really fundamentally don’t “get” what the game is. a five-minute conversation with almost anyone who prefers Fallout 3 will reveal that they cannot explain why people like New Vegas, because they don’t understand anything about the game.
when criticizing this game, people might broadly say “i don’t like the story” (because they experienced 1% of it), but nobody challenges the weight of moments like Arcade’s suicide, Robert House’s reveal and breakdown, talking Ulysses down from genocide, realizing the literal weight of your greed under the Sierra Madre, rallying the scattered peoples of the wasteland to your side at Hoover Dam, assassinating Caesar during surgery, or helping Borous remember his childhood dog and watching him realize what he’s done, because these are all wholly effective examples of interactive storytelling that make YOU, the player, feel involved, and important, and clever, and disturbed, and compelled, in a way Bethesda’s post-Morrowind “RPGs” rarely even attempt, much less successfully execute. NV critics are generally completely unaware of all this content (and these are just a handful of examples out of DOZENS) because New Vegas is not a theme park that beats you over the head with the subtleties of its world like Bethesda’s flagship games.
NV’s most rewarding moments are long-term payoffs for making all the right (or wrong) choices, rather than mandatory setpieces that every single player is assaulted with every time they play through the game. Bethesda games shove your face into every twist, plot point, scripted battle, and interesting NPC, because they’re terrified you’ll miss what little worldbuilding they’ve done. NV cuts you lose in the world with the only sure goals of confronting Benny, deciding what to do with the platinum chip, and ending up at hoover dam, EVERYTHING else is optional, missable content that you must seek out and piece together. NV is designed like Morrowind, built around the idea that knowledge, stories, and worldbuilding are their own rewards, and aimed at an audience who actually want to learn about the world they’re exploring. Modern Bethesda fans don’t grasp this and expect to ride through the story like a monorail, and are confused when their simple beeline towards the next main quest objective doesn’t blow the story open. A lot of players quit after confronting Benny, convinced the game is almost “over” because they’ve resolved their initial motivation, ignorant of the dense, living WORLD they’ve just blindly walked past, and unwilling to consider that there could be an underlying central plot bigger than what they’re told in the first few minutes of the game (because every bethesda title bar Morrowind more-or-less tells you what your endgame motivation is before you’ve left the tutorial).
Rather than use the story as a background atmosphere to prop up gameplay, New Vegas uses its engine as a means to simulate stories on a robust, breathing level. Where FO3/4 are static narratives plopped onto a map with some sidequests, NV is basically a simulation of what it would be like to live in Fallout’s world for a year or two, with a “main quest” that simply amounts to the sum of all the decisions you make along the way, many of your actions having far-reaching implications in a way that simply isn’t seen in Bethesda titles.
like… fuck, if I was operating under the assumption that NV was “fallout 3 in a desert” i’d write it off too
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