I’m sitting here watching the final credits for Fallout: New Vegas and my save game is sitting at nearly 50 hours.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in New Vegas and I look forward to any DLC that Bethesda releases.While I don’t have anywhere near all the achievements and I don’t plan to get them.  With RPGs like this I don’t really like to go back and replay just to complete the story line in another way.  For Fallout New Vegas I would have to do that 3 more times, plus spend a lot of time grinding, to get all the achievements.  As much as I love getting every achievement in the games I play I’m ok with not having them all for RPGs. Going back into a game world like New Vegas’ just doesn’t sit right with me.  It would be like watching a movie and the going back later and changing the last act.

Anyway, I had a blast playing Fallout New Vegas.  I think anyone who enjoyed Fallout 3 will like New Vegas.  Sure, the graphics are a little dated at this point since both games use the same engine, but for me that did not take away from my game play.  There were however quite a few other things I found frustrating while playing New Vegas.  None of these things are so bad that I ever thought about not finishing the game but if they were fixed Fallout New Vegas could easily be my game of the year.  As it is now that will not happen.

The main things that bother me are related to the pace of the game.  Because Fallout New Vegas has such a large game world it makes for slow game play at times. Yes, once you discover a location you can fast travel to it and that does help somewhat.  Even with the fast traveling the pace is slowed because the load times are quite long each time.  The load times apply not just to fast traveling but to going through any door to a new building or area.  I even have the game installed to the hard drive to help speed things up but the load times are rough.  To the point that if I forgot something in a building I regularly just decided not to go back in for it so I would not have to deal with the loading again.  Before you have enough locations discovered you’ll spend a lot of time walking through the wasteland.  In these times I was really wanting an option to sprint.  Sure I can put my gun away and move a little faster but it is still quite slow.  It was so bad at one point I stopped playing to go search online to make sure I did not miss a way to sprint.

The other thing that was really frustrating is that minor side quests do not show up in the quests list.  Instead you get a note about them that tells you what someone asked you to do.   The main quests it tracks what the next steps are including optional ones.  For minor side quests there is none of that.  Most of them I just skipped doing because it was too much of a hassle to try and remember. For the few that seemed fun I kept a notepad handy to write notes to myself on so I would not forget to do them.  I should not have to be doing that for a video game.

I know a lot of folks have run into major glitches in Fallout New Vegas, but I thankfully did not.  I had a few minor ones, but none so bad if totally broke the game for me.  In one tunnel I found I would fall through the floor each time I passed a mound in roughly the middle. Fortunately it would just jump me to the other end off the tunnel when that happened.  Another time one of my companions got lost. I never did figure out where he went.  I even went back and checked the last place I was but he was not there.  Luckily after a while the game told me he returned to the Lucky 38 Casino.  While he was lost it would not let me replace him because I already had 2 companions with me.  At least that did not last too long.

So, while not perfect Fallout: New Vegas is a great game.  If they had just spent some more time with testing out the little things and speeding the game up it could have been even better.