Fallout New Vegas is supposed to be the cover story for a few console and PC magazines next week, apparently some people have received their copies already and have posted some info. Bethesda:
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It looks very similar to Fallout 3 and uses some new art and some old art
There's a new hardcore mode that addresses many things that were added in mods, as well as a normal mode
Hardcore mode includes :
--- You need to drink water to survive
--- Ammo has weight
--- Healing isn't instant
The storyline involves NCR vs. Slavers (Ceasars Legion) vs. New Vegas residents
You aren't from a vault, but you get a Pipboy from someone who is, as well as a Vault Suit
There are special moves for melee weapons in VATS, for example there's a groin shot available for a golf club weapon called "Fore"
The Hoover Dam is supplying the electricity
There's a quest to rescue a Ghoul from some Super Mutants who can then become a companion
Nightkin and Geckos are back
Ceasars Legion are the slavers and one of the 3 main factions
There's a topless bar in a casino in a town called Primm
There's a Super Mutant base called Black Mountain
The NCR base is McCarran Airport
There's a town called Fremont
Ceasers Legion are based on the Strip
There is a map in the magazine showing locations in the game including Area 51 and the Hoover Dam
The NCR armor is similar to brown combat armor
Your skill levels have a greater effect on the choices you have in conversations.
There's a reputation system as well as karma
There's a grenade launching machine gun
There are both intelligent and dumb Super Mutants, and Nightkin are elite.
Hit the headline to check out the rest of the goods.
- First-person action RPG with the same engine as Fallout 3 (sorry, Van Buren fans).
- Set in the Mojave wastelands. Vegas didn't get many nukes. More intact buildings, as well as desert vegetation. Vegas itself is mostly intact.
- You don't play a Vault Dweller (or descendant of one) but a courier, left for dead and saved by a friendly robot.
- The overarching story is a struggle between the locals, Caesar's Legion (a faction of slavers from the east) and the New Californian Republic. Vegas itself is mostly intact.
- Both karma and reputation are tracked. If I'm reading it right there's separate reputations for each of the settlements, as in 1 and 2.
- All dialogue options are shown to all players, regardless of whether you have the stats to succeed or not, though there's no punishment for failure.
- Bartering is not just lower prices but negotiating for better rewards.
- VATS returns, and melee weapons have special moves in it. The golf club has "Fore!", which is a shot to the golf balls (so to speak) that knocks the opponent down. Weapons also now have knock-back upon death, with shotguns sending mans flying.
- Super Mutants return, but in two varieties - the smarter ones from Fallout 1, and the idiot ones from Fallout 2. On at least one occasion you can convince them to fight amongst themselves.
- New weapons include what appears to be an M4 and a grenade machinegun.
- Followers can be managed through a context-sensitive menu, with orders like "follow", "stay" or "attack".
- Hardcore Mode! In this mode, Stimpacks heal over time (as opposed to instantly), combat is tougher, ammo has weight and you can suffer dehydration, so keep some water on you!
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You're a courier, wounded and left for dead in a shallow grave. A friendly robot, Victor, digs you out, and his doctor owner Mitchell patches you up. You take a "vigour test", which is some sort of electric parlour game. This decides who you are and sets up SPECIAL. You can also take some Rorschach tests, but the mag says this is for fun. The Doc then gives you a Pipboy as he was once a Vault dweller.
"Hoover Dam", and "Helios" (a solar plant, confirmed by the mag to have been built by Poseidon) are fought into and then you can direct the power to wherever you choose. In the case of Helios you can also keep the plant for your self use the energy to call down a powerful laser, or even try to distribute to all equally, however there is a risk of overloading the reactors.
There is a "reputation system", in which all three factions (NCR, Ceasar's Legion and the locals) will either see you as good or bad toward them individually.
There is a screenshot of three Capital Wasteland mutants running toward the player, who is wielding what *looks* to be a heavy incinerator, but has a TV screen and no flamer fuel tanks. He's also wearing NCR combat armour, which is in gold/mustard colours.
There are two separate screens of supermutants that look to be more local, grey skin, and the two are wearing very different clothes. One is Tabitha, who is hearing a blonde wig and love heart glasses. The mag implies she's "not all there".
One that quest, you rescue Raul, a ghoul who Tabitha kept alive to fix her favourite robot. He appears to be a follower, as the mag says you can give him items, and also commands, such as "stay, follow or attack", and also tell him to switch to melee, in which case he'll mutter "sure, I'll put away my rather effective gun, and switch to this piece of um, metal tubing here".
From what I read, the "all dialog" thing seems to imply there will be failures for skill checks as well as speech checks, though, as the mag states, there is no penalty for failing a skill check. In fact, the mag gives an example: A woman who the player tried a Sneak skill attempt on in conversation failed when convincing her an ambush would help the town be rid of a gang of raiders. She simply says ""Good luck with your, uh, ambush"
Interesting return to the west coast, I wonder where it sits in the Fallout time line and what references they'll make to the 1st two games, as Vegas isn't that far from where the initial action took place.
A mostly functional city would be fun, hopefully its more npcs than "random town of 3-10 people and the dwellings that would support them" like in Fallout 3. The Pitt was the closest the east coast got to a city in the last game, that wasn't overrun with mutants or rubble.
I was hoping to read about new features, but it seems like this will be largely the same game with more stuff and a new story. I'm still excited but more innovation would have been welcome.
It might be really cool if they let you establish your own turf and have your base develop in very different ways based on your actions. The game could culminate as a turf war with you being simply the hoodlum that wins out or the paragon of justice bringing order to a post-apocalyptic world.
J.E. Sawyer, one of the Obsidian developers, clarified the "no skill check penalty":
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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.
I just hope that in the endgame I don't need to fire 3 magazines from my most powerful weapon into the face of almost every enemy I meet to kill them.
In fact, ditch that whole goddamned scaled difficulty thing and go back to letting me be too strong or too weak for an encounter if I go to the wrong place.
I'm looking forward to the Vegas titty bars and I imagine gambling for caps will play a big role, this is Vegas after all.
Same engine and reusing 'some' artwork is a big disappointment for me....had hoped we'd be seeing a brand new engine and fully new artwork. Does this mean we'll be seeing the same level of graphics....or will it be improved (hoping!)?
Hardcore mode sound great. Hopefully there will be a lot of the features from Fallout 3's Wanderers edition mod.
I wish there would be vehicles of some sort or at the very least a pull cart (like in the Road) for your character to haul his gathered goodies around.
Same engine, same problems? I hope not. Last time I played VATS wouldn't work half the time and sometimes it'd crash the game. Not to mention the memory leak.
I would also like to see them finally fix the horrible animations that every game using a bethesda game engine since morrowind has suffered. Nothing like a character playing a walk forward animation while they move at a 45 degree angle. Although, to be fair, games only started solving that... 10 years ago now?
Just an FYI, all the games you'd be talking about are on the same core engine. Might explain a few things, right?
I'm convinced they don't have anyone on their staff that has ever watched a real human being run any distance.
It has little to do with the engine. Even a crappy graphics engine for the PS2 is capable of decent animations. They have never bothered to make the animations look realistic at all.
And for a AAA game, that's really unacceptable. As much as I enjoyed Fallout 3, in this day and age, there's no excuse for the basic run animation to look so poor.
It's the Gamebryo engine which has been used in a lot of games, so I think any bad animations are Bethesda's fault. Hopefully Obsidian doesn't take the easy way out and reuse them. There's even a fallout 3 mod that gives the game better animations so they really have no excuse. http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=7670
