New Vegas Features That Made Role Playing Feel More Natural Than Most RPGs

Fallout: New Vegas has pushed the boundaries in world-building and role-playing in a series that already has both in abundance. What stood out to me the first time I played Fallout: New Vegas was my experience as an RPG fan, and how the systems that come with all RPGs are so gracefully implemented.

RPG mechanics are present in every level of this game, but it is so well implemented that role playing happens without thinking too much about it. Playing any new RPG can involve a learning curve, but Fallout: New Vegas simply makes role-playing a breeze, all with the charm the franchise is known for. Here are some ways Fallout: New Vegas makes role-playing more intuitive.

10

Your Skills Have Broad Applications

A Game With Letters

Skills inform your gameplay, but Fallout: New Vegas follows in the tradition of some of the best RPGs by making skills appear in conversation. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 also do this in terms of class, but Fallout: New Vegas feels more intuitive as it follows naturally from building your character, rather than a single class decision.

Your character build can change Fallout: New Vegas in some unexpected ways. For example, making a character with a low Intelligence gives you many paths to follow with special dialogue and action options, many of which are very funny and create a unique gaming experience with at least average Intelligence.

9

Behavior Is Followed Differently

Your Behavior Is Reflected On Others

Morale meters used to be a common way to show when your character is lying on the scale. This behavior tracking method is largely abandoned by today’s RPGs, but Fallout: New Vegas was released when the behavior meter was at its peak. Instead of a behavior tracker, we use a Faction Reputation system.

Faction Reputation is a dynamic system that responds to your choices, and determines how the faction feels about you. This is the difference between walking into, say, a Legion camp and being accepted versus being shot on sight. All factions fall somewhere on the moral scale, but this system makes your character’s actions and behavior more integrated into the game world with tangible results.

8

Clothing

Hide and Enter

One wish that stands out to me from Skyrim is Diplomatic Immunity because I played an Altmer as my first Dragonborn, and I got very far in Thalmor disguise at the Embassy. I was happy to find that Fallout: New Vegas took this further. Every team has a uniform, and you can go a long way by wearing that uniform, even if that team hates you.

Aside from adding unpredictable espionage to Fallout, stealth is a staple of RPGs. Being able to take off a lone scout’s uniform and put it on to go through a tricky situation where you might win uses natural storytelling and is a simple example of cause-and-effect, but it works very well.

7

The Courier is a blank slate

Create Anyone You Want

Fallout: New Vegas’ player character, the Courier, is smart because he has an obscure backstory. Having a player character that is very close to the plot, like in Baldur’s Gate 3 or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, is a fun hook, but it takes away one of the joys of playing RPGs, which is creating your own backstory for your character.

Courier is a blank slide, and you can fill in whatever you want. There are also reasons to not give them anything at all due to headshots, which gives you the freedom to send them in any direction you want.

6

Symptoms Promote Character Deficiency

Flash Impact Character and Gameplay

We all love a badass, but the best characters are made up of a combination of good qualities and flaws. Usually, when leveling your character, the goal is to improve them for all reasons. Fallout: New Vegas takes a different approach in that some of these features are wrong.

Deliberately giving your characters flaws may seem ineffective, but it makes gameplay and role-playing more engaging and fun. I gave my Courier the four-eye trait, resulting in a -1 Perception hit if he wasn’t wearing glasses. I finally got him a pair, which gives him a new look to go with bestie Arcade, and a new +1 Perception bonus.

5

Search Results Come Later

Keeping Past Actions in the Present

Sending the Bright cult back in time for the rockets was a happy ending to a very long quest line, and I had no way of knowing the consequences of my actions would catch up with me in the endgame slides. Thankfully, the results were positive this time, and resulted in Novac, my favorite place to stay, being saved for my actions before I even got to the Vegas Strip.

Getting instant rewards or compensation when you complete a quest is common, but the consequences of your actions in Fallout: New Vegas are sometimes apparent hours later. By roleplaying, that means thinking about the consequences of your actions, and considering what kind of world you want to leave behind.

4

No One Is Safe

There are no Important NPCs with a few unique items

Photo by Bethesda

Most RPGs have at least a few immortal NPCs who are so important to the story that everything breaks when they die. Fallout: New Vegas approaches this differently; the only important NPCs are the kids, Yes Man, and friends. Everyone is free game, including team leaders.

Fallout: New Vegas accounts for a large amount of chaos caused by this, giving you unparalleled freedom. I decided I had seen enough of Caesar’s Army and found their philosophy disgusting, so one day I killed him on sight. It makes the theory and other quests inaccessible, but all of that can be processed in other game systems.

3

Fallout: New Vegas Meets You

Make Smart Decisions

Speaking of tough decisions like killing team heads, Fallout: New Vegas does a lot of work to accommodate those decisions. Usually, the person you kill is replaced in the tier, but some quests will be permanently locked.

Some decisions, like destroying the securtron army, make the final battle difficult, and your allies will react to your decision. Depending on who they are and what they believe, they may leave you, attack you, or be forced to accept your decision and work to deal with it. This gives you the freedom to not only experiment, but create almost any type of character imaginable.

2

Use Any Weapon

Out with Class Limits

Rather than being limited to a class, you can literally use any weapon or solid object as a weapon. Hammers, tire irons, baseball bats, small guns, and power weapons are some of the things you can use as a weapon.

While it’s nice to be able to use whatever you want, this system also removes any barriers to roleplaying. I like to come up with reasons why my Courier is a better sniper, or why they use energy weapons in particular, or their tendency to melee even against tougher enemies where keeping distance would help. This is a very underrated part of roleplaying, but it works so well that you don’t even have to justify why you’re limited to one or two weapon types.

1

Survival Mode

Assembled and Ready to Go

One of the most popular additions to Skyrim is Survival Mode, a popular play style for a reason, and it’s in vanilla Fallout: New Vegas with Hardcore mode. Rather than being an enemy, the challenge here lies in the truth. Hunger, lack of sleep, thirst, ammo weight, and the permanent death of a friend give the game a lot of depth and force you to think carefully about your possessions and your route through the Mojave Wasteland.

It also provides a perfect canvas for role-playing. Hardcore mode requires adjusting your actions by design, and it forces a different perspective on how to play Fallout: New Vegas.

Released

October 19, 2010

The ESRB

Mature IM: Blood and Gore, Strong Violence, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Drug Use

Engine

Gamebryo