Ok, I wanted to post something on this game, and looked for ages for a thread to do it in.
I think "Fallout: New Vegas" may be one of my favorite games ever. It's like they took all of my criticisms of "Fallout 3" (STOP ATTACKING ME WITH RADSCORPIONS FOR NO REASON, I JUST WANT TO SEE WHAT INTERESTING STUFF YOUR WORLD HAS GODDAMMIT!) and improved everything that was wrong about it.
- Vastly reduced random encounters, instead replacing them with "scripted" ones where the tough enemies are in hard-to-reach areas with bigger and better loot as a reward; you can avoid those areas at the start of the game when you're a feeble, underpowered novice, and seek them out when you've levelled up and want a decent challenge.
- It's entirely possible to play as a character with almost no levelling of combat skills at the start and not suffer a huge disadvantage. I know, I've done it - poured all my points into stealth, speech, lockpick and survival. And it works.
- Much better story. (Yeah, I know "New Vegas" gets stick for the fact that its character doesn't have an "identity" at the start. But seriously, is that really worse than the horrible vault opening of "Fallout 3"? Yeah, starting with the character's birth was plain awesome, but the vault escape was incredibly badly managed. The overseer could die and you'd get blamed, no matter whether you had anything to do with it or not, for example.) It just feels as though you have more control over what happens.
- The landscape is genuinely varied, more so than "Fallout 3", although I think Washington DC is better portrayed than Las Vegas. Now you have desert mixed with greenery, even snowy hilltops.
- The different "factions" work incredibly well. Why doesn't every role-playing game have this? Seriously? This is how the character encounters in "Fallout 3" SHOULD have worked. I love that you can play two games, and in one game you are friends with a particular faction, in the other you're mortal enemies with them.
- The skills are better balanced from "Fallout 3". Barter, speech, energy weapons and explosives are no longer useless; guns and stealth have been toned down. I love the new "survival" skill.
- The soundtrack incorporates elements of the previous "Fallout" games, but this has always been a weak point in the series. Now, in Fallout: New Vegas, for the first time EVER, it's not.
The sheer variety of the experience reminds me of the first time I played the original "System Shock". Yeah, it's that good. Definitely the best game I've played over the last three or four years.
But the main thing is the random encounters, the soundtrack, and the factions.
All sandbox role-playing games should learn by example of just how good these aspects of Fallout: New Vegas are. It just goes to show that you don't have to stand for being attacked by a f--king RAT every sixty seconds like clockwork because the game deems that you haven't had a "random encounter" for too long.