Extraordinary Depth through choice and character building make New Vegas one of the best RPG's in years
Fallout: New Vegas, while at a glance almost identical to its predecessor, retains the looting and exploration while offering the player a huge amount of choice that will drastically alter your path through the game. The choices in New Vegas aren't black and white like in Mass Effect, but rather shades of grey – the group that seems like the good guys at first might turn out to have ulterior motives later on. A lot of this choice and depth comes from the main plot line, where you can choose to help a number of different groups or people that will drastically impact the way the game plays out. It isn't just a few lines of dialogue that will change with your choices, but the actual missions you complete and the people you work for will vary from playthrough to playthrough as you opt to side with different characters and factions.
The faction system also contributes to this depth, since in order to do a lot of missions you need to be favoured by a certain faction. In order to receive the favour of a faction, you must do work for them. However, when you work for one faction, you are often going to make yourself an enemy of another faction. So now, when you are deep underground in an abandoned vault looking for the leader of a bandit group, you aren't just doing it for experience points and loot; now you are doing it in order to raise your status with the faction that gave you the mission. Maybe, however, you don't want to kill the bandit, maybe you want to make a deal with him that will end up being more profitable for both of you. Almost every mission involves a twist of some kind, and often a mission that starts of relatively simple will branch out in incredible ways with the consequences of your choices rippling across the wasteland.
While levelling up and stat-building is fairly similar in New Vegas as it was in Fallout 3, the attributes you put points into will have much greater impacts. Some missions will allow you to avoid a lot of work if one of your skills is high enough. You might be able to talk your way out of a tough fight if your speech skill is high enough, or you might be able to jury-rig a broken machine instead of searching for the missing parts if your repair skill is high enough. This adds a lot more meaning to the choices you make in building your character. Do you want to specialize in a certain kind of combat? Or build a character who is able to talk his or her way out of combat. Apparently someone managed to play through the entire game without killing a single person or animal, and I believe it, such is the amount of choice that New Vegas offers. (tip: try and get your luck skill as high as possible for easy money in the casinos)
So while New Vegas maintains those aspects that made its predecessor great, it revamps the Role-Playing elements across the board and improves on them dramatically. New Vegas now works as a great loot-heavy adventure game like its predecessor, but it also works as a deep and highly repayable RPG, the likes of which we have not seen for some time. Coupled with high quality voice acting and writing, great ambient and licensed music, memorable characters and smooth performance, these Role Playing elements turn what is already a great game into one of the best of the year. It's just a shame that the combat outside of VATS isn't better, and that there are still a number of small yet irritating bugs.