Tried some new things, some worked
That's exactly how this game feels.
Fallout 3 took a hit, almost-old-school series and brought it into a modern, 3d, multiplatform world. It was not as good of a game as some of its predecessors in overall quality, not in length or depth of customization, and it certainly wasn't a 100/100 as I saw on a lot of websites. However it did succeed in accomplishing what it was meant to do: take a turn-based third person RPG, and make it into a First Person Shooter RPG.
Fallout: New Vegas built heavily on that success and formula, in fact I would say a large part of the engine, models, etc. were directly ported from Fallout 3, and attempted a few new things. A few.
Unfortunately, one of the first things you have to talk about when discussing the transition from the previous game to this one is the technical issues. You have to discuss it first because it's one of the first things you run into. And unfortunately it's a double whammy of both game stalling (Sometimes ruining) bugs, and poor hardware optimization. They were able to patch most of these out quickly, but if you look at this game's scores on any given site, you'll forever read about their shoddy release, which is always a shame and perhaps an embarrassment when it comes to such a large release as this.
Once we dig our way out of that, though, we find ourselves mostly immersed in a pretty solid game.
If you've played Fallout 3 then you pretty much know the score, and if you haven't, just think of any FPS you've ever played, and add an inventory and some stats/skills.
From Fallout 3 to this game, the main differences are:
-A respectably larger collection of weapons and items.
-Crafting
-Factions
The item selection is MUCH better than Fallout 3, which quite honestly was pretty pitiful. However, it doesn't take all THAT long to track down a gun that will take you most of the way through the game. Regardless, the gun play is pretty good, though it does lack a little bit of the edge in mechanics that you would feel in a straight up shooter, and for your own good you'll find yourself using VATS in any semblance of a serious situation. That aside, guns are pretty relevant, and damage is fair both ways, coming and going. Armor selection is also much better, with quite a few cool selections for you to customize your character with. Unfortunately the developers have once again decided to cop-out and combine all armor into two pieces: head gear, and everything else. So that you never can separate boots, gloves, pants, or chest pieces from each other, and have to accept whole packages as they come. I find that strange, given the fact that this is the same developer that brought us fairly good gear customization in Oblivion. There is also a very sufficient collection of rare "named" weapons and armor to be found.
The added crafting system is much improved over the ramshackle half-mechanic included in Fallout 3. In FO:NV we have a great system to help offset ammo usage, and you can create a respectably large variety and selection of useful items, though guns and armor is still not included in that list for some reason. Repairing items is also much easier, as it can be done away from benches now, and if you value self-repairing enough to invest in it, you can even use "like" pieces of gear (such as any pistol to repair a pistol), instead of having to track down exact copies just to do repairs. Among all this, the ammo crafting is by far the most useful, unless, that is, you're playing as a melee/unarmed build.
The factions are probably the most disappointing in the list of new items. The length of the list is only slightly wanting, but your involvement in them, and the ways in which you react with them, is borderline terrible. Like many other games, you can never actually be IN a faction, you only have standing in relation to it. And even more awful, you can't wear their gear around them without pissing them off, no matter how much they like you. How can they ask you to choose sides, and dedicate your time and energy to helping a cause, and then not let you become an official part of that cause? Ridiculous. Unfortunately, this poorly thought out mechanic is also combined with some of the more intensely painful bugs, such as getting permanently labeled a part of a faction by donning their gear, then fast traveling.
One thing that went downhill from Fallout 3 was the balance of weapons. I felt in Fallout 3 that the weapon choices, albeit it painfully limited, were pretty well balanced against one another in terms of ability to deal damage. In Fallout: New Vegas, they added a couple items to the list, and you're left with a list of choices that looks something like this:
-Firearms
-Explosives
-Energy Weapons
-Melee
-Unarmed
-Throwing Weapons
This is REALLY where my list of things describing what they thought would be cool, then failed to implement properly comes in.
First of all, there are basically two choices of weapons that can take you throw the game relatively painlessly: Firearms, and Unarmed. Take note, however, that unarmed also includes any fist weapon, not just fists.
Next, they totally scrambled the traditional stats-> skills ties with these, such as disassociating the firearms skill with the perception stat, which has been standard since the first Fallout.
What's strange is that there are quite a few Melee and Energy Weapons whose stats look great, but just seem to lack stopping power. And that's really strange considering the fact that, in the past Fallout games, energy weapons have historically been better than their gunpowder firearms counterparts, and harder to obtain as a result. Not the case here. I have played through this game several times, and the absolute most damage weapons in the game are the weapons that benefit from the "Cowboy" perk, such as revolvers and repeater rifles, and the weapons you can obtain from the higher tier Rangers are the best in the game. Same thing goes for the fist weapons, which are almost instantly lethal to anything in the game.
Explosives and Thrown Weapons are useless for other reasons. Explosives are also a little underpowered, but more than that, other than grenades, you don't find any grenade-launcher or other projectile based explosives weapons until you're halfway through the game. Thrown is even worse off, as it doesn't even have a skill attached to it!
Speaking of a lack of skills, skills seem to have even less of an effect on actions than they did in the transition to FPS in Fallout 3. Nowadays, they seem to be mere skill checks against dialogue actions, or a determining factor in what lock you can pick, what gun you can wear, etc.
The game has also been tragically stuck with the level scaling we've had to endure since Oblivion, but they seemed to have at least sort of learned their lesson, as it isn't as drastic. However, we're still stuck with a collection of enemies that ranges from weak compared to you, to moderate, to kill you almost instantly no matter what you're wearing. In this game, the devastatingly powerful enemies aren't even the final bosses of the major factions, but the strange creatures in the wasteland, namey Cazadores (oddly enough, these are simpler higher tier mutant mosquitoes.... ), and Golden Geckos. Not only are Cazadores the size of a golfball and capable of one or two shotting you in Power Armor, they also take several shots from godly weapons to down. Stranger and stranger... A lack of testing perhaps?
The storyline, I thought, was actually a major improvement over the last game in the series. The game doesn't try to take itself too seriously like the last one, and there are some pretty funny moments. One of the main antagonists, Benny, is actually pretty funny if you bother to listen to his dialogue.
There are also many more ways to end the game, and as an added level of intelligence on the programmers' part, any sidequests you do affect the ending, depending on how you completed them. In fact the sidequests are way more plentiful and infinitely more interesting than in Fallout 3. The sidequests will actually keep you engaged for much longer than the main storyline.
The companion system is much updated, with a lot to choose from, and a variety of different bonuses. With so many, however, it's disappointing that you are only allowed to use one at a time, while the other four or five sit back at your hotel room, twiddling their thumbs.
Finally, the graphics are virtually unchanged from Fallout 3, which is strange considering the fact that this game, at least upon release, had much more trouble running well than Fallout 3.
In conclusion: It's a great game. It's not the best game ever made, and that's mostly because of a lack of thought and polishing in several key areas, namely gun balance and factions. It has a lot of re-playability, as, besides from trying different builds, there are four different major endings, and and almost infinite number of ways to handle the different side quests. If you played Fallout 3 and haven't given this a try yet, I would definitely recommend picking it up, as it is an improvement over its predecessor in almost every way. Enjoy.