Lately, I have spent a lot of time playing New Vegas.
Wait, not quite right; what I’ve spent the most time doing is caring about New Vegas. What do I mean by that? Well, what the hell do you think the point of this post is?!
*breathes deeply*
Anyway, I tend to get stuck on games; playing them as much as I possibly can until I’m done with them. In general, that means either until the game is finished or, in case of Bethesda Games, I grow bored with them. Point is, I have a very easy time engaging in games. But New Vegas doesn’t just engage me, it makes me care. It makes me care about the decisions I make, about the characters I meet, about the enemies I mow down.
I’ve tried to deconstruct exactly why that is. The method I’ve employed for that is to make a comparison to other games.
In Skyrim, for instance, I can massacre the stormcloaks if I side with the empire or vice versa, but I don’t care. Those soldiers are little more than groups of pixels to be demolished. And that goes for really any enemy; bandits, beasts, even dragons. Perhaps it has to do with said interchangeability; if you side with either faction, you’ll be butchering the others in the same forts, in the exact same way. One side doesn’t have distinct locales or methods.
Meanwhile, in New Vegas, the fiends, for instance, are situated in a vault, and have a very identifiable aesthetic. They’ve got vulgar texts scribbled on walls, mutilated bodies lying around, all the lovely stuff. You know what kind of people you are dealing with just by looking at their camps. Caesar’s Legion tend to have large camps with lots of tents, while the NCR have barracks and bunk beds. As opposed to everyone and their dog, their dog’s uncle, and their dog’s uncle’s bollocks, live in the same early middle-age houses.
For my next trick, say a character from Skyrim whose history and fate you really care about.
None? Thought so.
Now, let’s do the same for New Vegas. The list is pretty darn long. For a start, you’ve got all the companion characters. The are superbly characterized, not just in terms of personality, but in terms of their life experiences. Cass came to be sitting at the bar at the NCR’s Mojave Outpost drinking herself half-blind after her caravan was burned to a crisp by unknown assailants. If you can convince her to come with you, you’ll end up trying to find out who was responsible, and bring them to justice. Along the way, you might pick up bits and pieces of her past, such as the story behind her full name.
Note that I’m very much including the player character in this. They are part of the world. All we know is that they are a courier who was shot in the head. Who knows what adventures they were up to in the past. Sure, the whole vault-dweller fish-out-of-water thingy was fun. The first time. Maybe even the second. But it’s gotten really stale. What was the history of this character? Oh, they just had a boring life in a vault. The end. The vault dwellers are a known quantity, and they don’t belong in the world they are kicked into. That makes immersion hard.
As an example of this point, I’d like to use the Elder Scrolls games. Again. There, you always wake up a prisoner of some fashion. It’s always the same deal in every game. But you are a part of the world. You had a life in Tamriel before you were imprisoned, a life the player is free to imagine. You could imagine you having a past that will come and haunt you one day, as actually happens in one of the DLCs to New Vegas.
Another thing that might contribute is the fact that New Vegas is rather…uncompromising. The moment I’m thinking of is when an officer is worried about the mental wellbeing of one of his rangers, because while in captivity with a group of raiders, she was raped. And you’re not in charge of fixing her, just finding a way to convince her to seek treatment. It might be hypocritical to be shocked by this when it’s a game where you kill a ridiculous number of people, but the fact of the matter is that war is run-of-the-mill in gaming. It’s what we’re expecting. The psychological consequences of someone being raped isn’t.
Of course, I won’t pretend like it’s not pertinent that it is a setting that appeals much more to me than the Viking stuff that makes up Skyrim. I feel that the developers did a stellar job with integrating the setting of the old west with that of the post-apocalyptic world. Contrary to Fallout 3, the world in New Vegas is one where the people aren’t just walking around in rubble, they are trying to rebuild civilization, and have reached that to a degree. Heck, they’ve gotten so far that they’ve got trouble with currencies. The NCR have their own dollar bills, but they’re worth very little as people don’t have confidence in it. The Legion denarius, however, are worth much more because they are gold coins that are backed up by an actual valuable good.
All in all, it’s an impressive game, especially given what they had to work with; the least stable engine in the history of gaming, and character models that look like stroke victims.
Now if only they could not remake it.
