My gaming equivalent to The Force Awakens. My hype leading up to the release of this game was honestly a little over the top, and when it actually released, that excitement shot me well past the point of any measured critical thought. This game was a masterpiece, 10/10, anyone who said otherwise was just a nitpicking, biased contrarian. Of course, with time I gradually started to notice the cracks, and by the time Fallout 76 came out, I realized there was probably a lot that I was okay with that I probably shouldn’t have been.
Levelling and perks are streamlined right down. Fun and creative builds are still possible, but role playing is limited by a constrictive story where your choices are practically inconsequential, not to mention the writing itself just being nowhere close to the level of New Vegas’. It’s full of bugs, A.I. issues, broken questlines, and it crashes semi-frequently. Plus, I’ve always been bothered by the number of dead ends in this game. Stories, characters, questlines that feel like they still have ground to tread but just don’t, like why don’t the Minutemen ever try to take back Quincy after you build them back up? Why does the stuff with Danse just end after that one quest, why doesn’t he develop, why can’t you recruit him to any of the other factions? I’ve been looking up a lot of the cut and unfinished content for this game recently, and I’m convinced that if this game was given another year or even just a few more months of development time it would’ve been a completely different game.
There’s a lot wrong with the game, but that’s not to say it didn’t do a lot of good too. The world is colourful and atmospheric, with lots of landmarks to check out, with that moody soundtrack as the cherry on top. The companion characters are imo best in the series, I swear they funnelled all of their writing talent into the character of Nick Valentine. Gunplay and VATS are vastly improved, VATS isn’t quite the crutch it was in the older games. Customization is great across the board, weapons, outfits, power armor. The thing that probably ate up the most of my time though was the settlement building. I loved building and fortifying strongholds, repairing the Castle, building towns at Starlight Drive-in and Spectacle Island, I remember I was watching The Walking Dead at the time, so I used the rug glitch to build a junk wall around Sanctuary, modelled it after Alexandria in the show. I got really into roleplaying them as this “take what we can get” type militia, so for every assault rifle or laser I handed out, I’d give someone else a hunting rifle or lever action, for every combat armor, a leather strap and so on.
In short, I like it still, it has a ton of content and does things that keep me coming back to it now and again, but it’s flaws are pretty hard to ignore and as an adult I have to say that New Vegas is definitely still better.
Levelling and perks are streamlined right down. Fun and creative builds are still possible, but role playing is limited by a constrictive story where your choices are practically inconsequential, not to mention the writing itself just being nowhere close to the level of New Vegas’. It’s full of bugs, A.I. issues, broken questlines, and it crashes semi-frequently. Plus, I’ve always been bothered by the number of dead ends in this game. Stories, characters, questlines that feel like they still have ground to tread but just don’t, like why don’t the Minutemen ever try to take back Quincy after you build them back up? Why does the stuff with Danse just end after that one quest, why doesn’t he develop, why can’t you recruit him to any of the other factions? I’ve been looking up a lot of the cut and unfinished content for this game recently, and I’m convinced that if this game was given another year or even just a few more months of development time it would’ve been a completely different game.
There’s a lot wrong with the game, but that’s not to say it didn’t do a lot of good too. The world is colourful and atmospheric, with lots of landmarks to check out, with that moody soundtrack as the cherry on top. The companion characters are imo best in the series, I swear they funnelled all of their writing talent into the character of Nick Valentine. Gunplay and VATS are vastly improved, VATS isn’t quite the crutch it was in the older games. Customization is great across the board, weapons, outfits, power armor. The thing that probably ate up the most of my time though was the settlement building. I loved building and fortifying strongholds, repairing the Castle, building towns at Starlight Drive-in and Spectacle Island, I remember I was watching The Walking Dead at the time, so I used the rug glitch to build a junk wall around Sanctuary, modelled it after Alexandria in the show. I got really into roleplaying them as this “take what we can get” type militia, so for every assault rifle or laser I handed out, I’d give someone else a hunting rifle or lever action, for every combat armor, a leather strap and so on.
In short, I like it still, it has a ton of content and does things that keep me coming back to it now and again, but it’s flaws are pretty hard to ignore and as an adult I have to say that New Vegas is definitely still better.