#oneaday, Day 283: The Brown Wasteland

I love the Fallout series a lot more than I think. Any time I’ve spent a protracted amount of time away from them, the only thing I remember about them is the colour brown. Brown brown brown everywhere. Depressing brownness. Wasteland. Dead things. Brown. Dirt. Dust. Oh the dust.

But then I go and play one—in this case, latest entry Fallout: New Vegas—and I remember that life in the wastelands of post-apocalyptic America isn’t just brownness and dead things. Amidst all the death, destruction, doom, depression and other words beginning with D, there’s a lot to discover. There’s life—only some of which is out to kill you—and there’s humour. And there’s an interesting narrative with some deep lore, too.

New Vegas is one of those games that draws you in without realising it and before you know it, several hours have passed. There’s something about the world, the characters in it and the situations you find yourself in that just keep you wanting to explore, just to see what’s around the next corner, over the next ridge.

And the thing I like most about New Vegas, like Fallout 3 and Oblivion before it, is that if you see something off in the distance and think “I wonder what that is?” then you can just walk your way over there and investigate for yourself. And the world is set up in such a way to encourage you to do this.

New Vegas, as it happens, is a huge improvement over Fallout 3. It’s difficult to pin down exactly why this is. Is it the new survival sim “Hardcore Mode”, where you have to keep your character fed, hydrated and rested as well as free of radiation and life-threatening injuries? Is it the interesting plot, which teases you with clues dangling on hooks just out of reach and then proceeds to distract you with OH LOOK ROBOTS AND GHOULS AND WON’T YOU HELP US, STRANGER?

Perhaps it’s the new Companion system, where you can explore the wasteland as a party of up to three—your character, another human and a robot or animal. This certainly makes an enormous difference—for starters, travelling with a trained sniper means that enemies are often taken out long before they get anywhere near me. This is good, because my character sucks at gunplay. Then each companion has a plotline to follow and their own interesting little quirks. The robot I’m travelling with at present, for example, doesn’t speak but blasts out recorded military marches whenever it enters combat. This is inexplicably hilarious.

Or perhaps it’s just the chance to get back into another meaty RPG where you’re not shunted down a linear path to an inevitable conclusion. The Fallout series has always been about exploration and thinking “what would I do if I was in this situation?” Morals sometimes go out of the window in the wasteland, and there’s plenty of interesting choices to make throughout the course of the game’s quests.

The game’s much-publicised bugginess hasn’t reared its head very much since I’ve been playing. I’ve had two freezes, but these weren’t a real problem because 1) I’d been playing so long it was probably time to stop and 2) the auto-save system (at least on the 360) meant that I hadn’t lost any progress. I’m sure there are other bugs out there to be discovered, but frankly, nothing has spoiled my enjoyment of the game so far.

So if you’re the slightest bit interested in seeing how you would take on the perils of survival in the wasteland, Fallout: New Vegas comes highly recommended.