While I never really grew tired of the Capital Wasteland, I’ll be the first to admit I wouldn’t have objected to a spontaneous shift in aesthetic. That prayer was answered in the first five seconds of playing New Vegas, a game that seemed geared more toward refinement rather than revolution. Modeling 50’s era Vegas, the latest Fallout (and first from Obsidian…sort of) hit me with a fresh blast of neon right out of the gate. A dreamy Vegas night evening soon gave way to the seedy interior of a casino, where I was granted the option of playing Blackjack or Roulette. Those seemed to work well enough, but I was sort of there to play Fallout, not parlor games.
Thankfully there was much more to the demo, as I was then transported to a different section of the game that focused more on combat. Currently allied with the New California Republic, I was tasked with infiltrating a stronghold of Caesar’s Legion and executing their leader. I was also presented with the option of a companion, Boone, who arrived with far more options this time around. Use of the command wheel, which offered moderate degrees of control over Boone’s behavior, was put to the task. We were supposed to be doing a sniper/rifle assault, but he failed to object when I suggest he go completely melee. It didn’t make any sense, but my very ability to actually do that was what mattered.
Anyway, the rest of the scenario played out in a manner not unlike Fallout 3. Though I had a load of new weapons, I chose to employ the sniper rifle via the V.A.T.S. system and blow away foes from afar. I went it and instantly slaughtered the boss inside of a tent, and it was supposed to be the end of the demo. Instead I restarted from the beginning and chose to take a much more improvisational approach to the demo. I executed Boone right away, armed myself with some badass melee claws, and went to town on Caesar’s Legion. It was also at that time that I discovered each melee weapon had a special ability that, while placing style over substance, did well to break the monotony often associated with melee combat.
One thing I didn’t see much of was NPC interaction. If combat was the heart of Fallout 3, the freedom of expression in character interaction was the soul. Angel or devil, every choice you seemed to make always played out in an exciting and occasionally unpredictable manner. Other than the guarantee that I could easily be aligned with Caeser’s Legion instead of the NCR, that was largely absent in the E3 demo.
I also chose to broach a topic familiar to many of those who played through Fallout 3; crashes, bugs, and single digit frame rates. The rep from Bethesda acknowledged that problem and then boasted that Obsidian was optimizing the base code from Fallout 3, as well as adding their own little tweaks and improvements in the process (he wasn’t willing to elaborate, but getting in and out of V.A.T.S. seemed smoother).
While my brief (less than 15 minutes) time with canned New Vegas demo certainly couldn’t be considered indicative of the final package, it sure seemed a whole lot like Fallout 3. The weapon tweaks were cosmetic and the only substantial improvement arrived with deeper companion AI control, and the dated character animation doesn’t seem to be getting much of attention but, despite those observances, I couldn’t really complain. I loved Fallout 3, and if New Vegas is going to offer tweaked mechanics under the context of an entirely different story, sign me up, please.
