Confessions of a New Vegas hater

We can all change our minds, right? We're all entitled to being wrong, recognizing our mistake, and then correcting that, aren't we? Having the ability to reposition ourselves and our opinions after new information has come to light is, for one thing, a badge of honor in the scientific community. I don't necessarily have that excuse when it comes to Fallout: New Vegas. In the nearly 10 years since it launched, the game hasn't changed. I have. You can watch some of my gameplay above. I mean, it certainly sounds like I'm having a good time.

My reasons ("reasons") for disliking New Vegas ever since it launched are manifold and questionable. Some had to do with persistent bugs that, unmodded, exist to this day. My current playthrough basically crashes to desktop once every hour to two hours without explanation or apology. I've run across NPCs, both friendly and hostile, frozen in place in the desert, either staring unblinkingly across the sand, or flying into the sky—Skyrim style—after taking my lead pipe across their forehead. Those are all fair criticisms.

The less-fair criticisms come from my playstyle not coalescing with the gameplay. You see, when it comes to the Bartle taxonomy of player types, I'm an Explorer. Almost 100 percent. That's as opposed to Killers, Achievers, and Socializers. I don't remember what my "Bartle Quotient" was. It's been some years. All I remember is that when it comes to Acting vs. Interacting, and Players vs. World, I spiked hard on World and Interacting side of things. That's what firmly put me into the Explorer archetype.

Well, of all the things New Vegas does well, it doesn't give an explorer much to chew on. At least not in an Elder Scrolls sense. Exploration is worthless in New Vegas compared to a Morrowind, or Oblivion, or Skyrim. And by saying, "Exploration is worthless," I mean that it's not rewarded. You won't stumble across much of anything that's not in the script. And there's no room for emergent gameplay unless you count Caesar's Legion elite assassins coming after you as "emergent." Which it's not. That's just something you get to deal with forever, as soon as you make Caesar mad enough—which I manage to do rather quickly in-game.

You can already see how I'm comparing two unalike quantities here. Bethesda is the parent company of The Elder Scrolls. And Bethesda is also the parent company of Fallout. But Fallout: New Vegas, specifically, was made by Obsidian Entertainment, makers of highly regarded games like Neverwinter Nights 2, Pillars of Eternity, and most recently, The Outer Worlds. The Outer Worlds just won a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing, for crying out loud. It's obvious Obsidian knows how to write its way out of anything.

It can write its way out of relentless game-crashing bugs, write its way out of little to no payoff for those of us with wanderlust, and it certainly writes its way out of emergent gameplay. You can't hardly out-write Obsidian, which means there's nothing left for a player like me—a player that craves subtext and environmental storytelling in video games more than the kind of writing that nets you a Nebula Award.

But then something changed. No, this isn't where I earned that scientific badge of honor by examining new info and changing my stance with New Vegas. It's more of like when a politician changes their mind but is labeled a "flip-flopper." New Vegas is still bug-ridden. It's script is still king and has nothing subtle to convey that the writers aren't already telling you. And there's no reason to go 10 feet off to the left or right of the highway when you're moving from point A to point B, because the most you're going to explore and find is a prickly pear and a handful of cigarettes. Hey, maybe there's subtext to be found in that, but if so, it's too subtextual for me.

So, like I said, the game hasn't changed: I have. Right now, for this potentially very narrow window of time, I've shifted somewhere up or down, left or right, on the Bartle taxonomy of players. I'm normally an Explorer, but this time I'm not chasing waterfalls. I'm not an Achiever, but this time I learned how to play Caravan, an in-game game of cards, and snagged 30 wins against NPCs across multiple townships; only 1.5 percent of players on Steam have that one. I'm no Killer, but I'm running around with Boone and ED-E to make it so we wipe any opposition off the map within seconds of encountering them. And I'm no Socializer, but chatting incessantly about New Vegas with our own John Yan has propelled me to think about, write down, and expound on the changes I've experienced between 10 years ago and today.

I may still be an Explorer, but muffling that need gave me the ability to walk just a little bit towards those other three sections of my Bartle Quotient. I'm less upset at the maze-like floor plans of every single indoor structure; REPCONN hallways are as samey as they are labyrinthine. I'm less annoyed that I walked around the entirety of McCarran Airport and was rewarded with nothing but boxy construction and slightly varying mounds of dirt. And I'm less disappointed that Black Mountain looks nothing like Black Mountain and more like a dark pile of rocks stacked in a ziggurat shape.