Fallout: New Vegas: The Imagination of RPGs

Few games seem to have garnered the cult reputation that Fallout: New Vegas has. While initially seen as a meaningful but inferior sequel to the contentious Fallout 3, over the years the game has become many a fan’s favorite. This can be attributed to a great many things; the politics that play into the conflict, the huge variety of characters and quests, the higher insistence on keeping the world consistent, the memorable characters and their struggles. But perhaps the biggest reason for its acclaim is its return to the series’ roots of role-playing. This game above all else shows the power that role-playing games have that very few other media can provide.

First and foremost, the Fallout series from the beginning has always been about creating a character to interact with this strange, post-apocalyptic world. The player is given a variety of options to build their character, from their looks to the attributes they excel or fail at through the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. System, to their skills. These choices will affect how the player can interact with the world and its inhabitants. As an example, if the player character has low intelligence, then their dialogue with NPCs will become drastically different, or if they have low strength, they cannot properly use certain weapons and take damage worse. While some of this (notably the altered dialogue) was absent in the third entry, New Vegas brought it back, albeit on a lesser scale. The character at certain points can speak dialogue that is slurred and slow, making the character “dumb”; they will take words such as “power plants” literally and state simplistic boasts.

Beyond that, however, the player is also able to make choices based on how their character would act. The player character be morally good, evil, or neutral. Choices that affect these come in different forms, such as killing good or evil characters, stealing, doing deeds for no pay, extortion, eating dead bodies, and more. Interestingly, while this karma plays a huge role in the game, it is not as prevalent as Fallout 3 was. Much more focus was given on the newly implemented reputation system. The reputation system tracks your standing with the various factions of the game, depending on if you helped them or hurt their goals. The first example comes in the town you start off in, Goodsprings. A caravanner is caught in the middle of a standoff after getting in trouble with the local criminal gang the Powder Gangers. The town, meanwhile, has decided to protect him and refuses to give him up. The player character can step in and choose either side. Helping the town will net you perks and a good standing with them but will make every Powder Ganger turn against you, making your trip to the next town Primm harder. Conversely you can kill the caravanner and many of the town’s residents. This gives you good standing with the Gangers but will negatively affect your karma and become shunned by the town’s remaining residents, as well as turn it into essentially a ghost town. This also requires you to betray the residents who helped you up on your feet, incentivizing the player to reconsider betraying the town unless they want their character to be an evil backstabber.

This applies to the rest of the game as well. All the major factions vying for Hoover Dam represent a core ideology bred by the new world. The New California Republic desires to bring back the democratic values of the Old America. Their main rival, Caesar’s Legion, sees the destruction of the world as an example of democracy’s flaws, and views the NCR as weak and selfish people without morals. Instead turning to utter totalitarianism and the rejection of modern technology as the answer. Caught in the middle of it all is the leader of New Vegas, Mr. Robert House, who instead sees Vegas as a beacon to make money and advance humanity out of the dark ages, playing both sides of the conflict. Finally, the player can act independently and take over New Vegas themselves, representing a rejection of the authority into a more anarchist rule. The player can side with who represents who they agree with the most or find the most benefit in siding with. The minor factions also represent this choice, where the character can feel pity for their state and help them or find themselves disgusted and destroy them. These choices do not even have to be how the player feels, but instead how they think the character feels.

Now, a counterargument might be made against both this game providing a good role-playing experience, and video games in general being unique in that regard. While the game still provides many quality avenues to build your character, many of the questlines essentially boil down to fetch quests, with little in the way of role-playing. Most of these questlines are begun by members of the NCR, with only a few quests for the Legion and other factions. While this makes sense for the world as the NCR is the most powerful faction, this makes it harder for characters against the NCR to shine. Another factor is the aforementioned “dumb” dialogue. The original isometric games only had a select number of voiced characters, meaning that most of the dialogue was text-based. This allows costs to be lower than fully voiced games, letting the developers come up with more dialogue options such as low intelligence, throughout the whole game. New Vegas, however, is a fully voiced game, causing costs to become higher, and in tandem with the limited development time of about 1 ½ years, meant this low intelligence option only applied to certain areas.

On a more general critique, video-based RPGs allow for less imaginative play than their low-technology counterparts. Before advanced 3D or even 2D graphics, the best way to create characters were Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons. The lack or limited visual aid opened new ways for players to imagine their character. They were not limited to the graphical capabilities to design their character’s looks or the writers to make their dialogue; the player was only limited by their imagination. In addition, they were also able to imagine or even create the world and quests how they fit, only increasing the possibility for imagination.

While this is certainly true, that does not mean Fallout: New Vegas has less worth than these CYOA books and tabletop games. Indeed, this game simply provides a similar yet different experience to them. The 3D graphics arguably allow the player to also immerse themselves in the world better than literary descriptions. The more limited way to affect the world also allows the player to discover things for themselves, while still allowed to build their character with the tools provided by the developers.

All these RPG elements that I brought up would have been difficult if not outright impossible to manage within the confines of old media. Movies, TV shows and most novels are completely linear tales where the viewer has zero input on how the story progresses, completely at the mercy of the creators. With the advent of interactive gaming, especially 3D games, this technology become ripe for role-playing games to immerse the player in the world. The older isometric Fallout games were able to visualize the world that the player explored in a memorable way. With the series turning to a 3D, first-person/third-person environment, this provided the player a way to further engross themselves into the story as their character, considering every single choice they make. Games like Fallout: New Vegas shows the potential in the interactivity of new media to engage the viewer and leave a lasting impact on them.