Why Do You Play Fallout NV?

[KKrueger]

I'm returning from a lengthy discussion with a friend.

 

We're both novelists and our main area of discourse tends to revolve around our professions. Today, however, it took a different turn: I mentioned I was back to being hooked on Fallout NV and couldn't wait to hit my daily target of 1,000 words so I could return to the game.

 

Not being a gamer, at all, he wanted to know the attraction.

 

I was flumoxed at first. Why do I enjoy the game so much? I gave him a rather lame answer - "You know what I'm like: I like to be different characters." - but on reflection, I think there's more to it than that.

 

Unless you believe in the after-life or reincarnation - and I won't even begin to suggest we start such a topic - we only get one life to live. Playing Fallout NV allows me to live many lives.

 

Why do you play?

Edited January 10, 2014 by KKrueger

[888mikem888]

My answer will probably not be impressive, but I feel one good reason why I, and a lot of people play games like Fallout is because we get to escape from the world we live in and for a while pretend we live in a different universe doing amazing things. For example, in real life I clean hotel rooms for a living, not very exciting. In Fallout, I'm an adventurer taking on dozens of bandits at a time and saving lives from evil. It's an escape from the crap we all get in real life. When you immerse yourself into a fantasy world, for a while you forget all of your troubles.

 

Any way, that's my two cents, because that's exactly what it's worth.

[charwo]

The simple, petulant answer is that I want to tell stories and writing them down is horrifically painful to me. Someday when I have money, I'll have someone to dictate to. Simpler still is there's no comparable RPG game. I want to love Mass Effect but in my opinion it's a total failure as a story because it is a cosmic horror story, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Whenever I can get to the space opera parts, it's gold. Still others are fantasy and I've really learned to hate fantasy and anything that smacks of fantasy.

 

The more complected one is actually how dissatisfied I have become with the series, beginning with two. Yes, I'm kinda that kind of fan. I love me some retro-kitch, as long as it's realistically justified. But they never tried. I have a reason, but it's not the cannon one. But whereas in Fallout everything is plausibly justified by real extrapolations of science (ghouls a one time phenomena from mutated FEV and not radiation), Fallout 2 goes into SCIENCE!, which is magic hiding in scientific jargon. And I hate fantasy because I f*#@ing hate magic; it makes writers lazy.

 

What I play for is that when I bound with a character, who is never me nor an avatar of me, they start talking. They start saying things that totally make more since than the vaunted Word of God. I gave up on fiction a long time ago: for me the purpose of story, besides the basic didactic utility of exploring nature, is to bond with a character and see them to the end. And I can make characters I feel are worthy to follow, then it's my job to make sure they get where they're going. Although the caveat is there's a lot of gameplay/storyline segregation, especially in terms of timeline.

 

Order of play in the latest round is:

Courier (Theresa)blows up the Divide, gets Shot in he Head to Recover to Save Primm to Honest Hearts to explore the non-quest locations to Dead Money to Lucky Old Sun to Talent Pool

 

The actual order of events is:

Lucky Old Sun (2176) Courier blows up Divide (2177), Courier helps restore Hoover Dam generators (2178), Talent Pool (2179), Honest Hearts (2180), Courier gets shot (2181), Vault Dweller saves Primm while friend recovers in Goodsprings, Courier hops on motorcycle and zips through Primm pass, and gets sucked into Dead Money on the way to Novac.

 

The actual vanilla storyline and all the mods I put on become a floating timeline. My job is to make sure my character(s) are prepared, successful and have justifiable reasons for doing things other than player boredom. The badass non-stop violence of the Couriers wake is justified being several different people, some companions, some OC, including my original Vault Dweller which I justify by compressing the post war timeline from 204 years to 104, and don't lose anything except that the founder of Arroyo was from Vault 13, but not the Vault Dweller. Because a hero would never abandon real bastions of civilization to make a group of Vault-noobs the better part of a thousand miles to the ass end of Oregon only to have them degenerate into tribals.

 

My Vault Dweller, Merriweather is actually a fascinating character to arc after the first game: saves the Hub singlehandedly, gets to psycho in the process, shoots Albert Cole (the 'cannonical' Vault Dweller) in the knee to try and convince his followers to go back to Vault 13, gets clean, joins the followers, watches the Vault-noobs come back and they all get into Vault 13 after the Oveerseer was disposed. Then marriage, family, normalcy until the Enclave shows up, then spends all of Fallout 2 being a powerless whelp, gets recused by Cole's tribal bastard son, then traveling the land with Sargent Rock and his crew on a mission of redemption and raider killing, and having her marriage collapse into just short of divorce because Merriweather's homicidal glee and violent American patriotism reminds her husband a bit too much of the Enclave. And because I've modded NCR to be flying American flags, it makes sense that's she's trying to reconcile the Followers and NCR as long as her modified-to-the-hilt body still allows her to play hero of the wastes. She's also in Nevada to kill Caesar: when he was a little boy, she taught Edward Sallow a bit to well of her own Fascist admiration of Rome. Her criticisms apparently were ignored. Edward was her student, and now uses her teachings to stand against America. Death follows...

 

...Like I said, frustrated writer. But not a frustrated story teller. So I use Vegas as a frame to put a story together which sometimes matches the vanilla take, and most of the time it doesn't. Also it gives me an excuse to learn about all kinds of things such as reactionary idealism, the ethnic Romaoi in Western Europe following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the real science of nuclear war (hint: both nuclear winter and appreciable radiation after 14 days is total crap), why the Fallout universe had to have invented the transistor concurrently with our own despite all idiotic assertions to the contrary, and to look more closely at American Civil Religion, which the pre-war Fallout world seems to have lacked entirely, despite all the jingoism.

[KKrueger]

Such fantastic replies. Thank you!

 

888mikem888: I'd say your reply is worth a lot more than 2 cents. I gave it some thought, and I think I have the same reasons for playing. The both of us are engaged in fairly thankless professions (these days everyone thinks they can write, so the profession is taken less seriously then ever), and escaping this, as well as the myriad problems in our lives, is a reason I completely overlooked. Nice one.

 

charwo: You're committing a crime, you know? Turn that gift of storytelling into novels; otherwise, you run the risk of being carted away by the Literary Police! I found your reply thoroughly fascinating; especially this: "I use Vegas as a frame to put a story together which sometimes matches the vanilla take." This, again, is something I overlooked, and yet I do precisely the same thing. I really have to take my hat off to the Nexus modders here: selflessly, they give us such freedom to extend the game and shape our personal journeys. Anyway - utterly fab reply!

[TrickyVein]

Because it's better than Fallout 3. And if I want to return to the capital wasteland then I can just play with Tale of Two Wastelands.

[JimboUK]

Good writing, interesting characters, choices with consequences, freedom, it's what an RPG should be.

[yzerman19]

I play FNV because it brings me fun by working to improve my character's stats over time.

[zetenrisiel]

Honestly, it's pretty much just to shoot stuff. The points about immersing yourself in an environment and using a game as a storyboard are true here as well, I have notebooks full of adventures that were thought up by me and played out in a game universe.

 

I tend to favor fantasy settings but FNV was on sale and looked like a modern age version of Oblivion, so I bought it. I'm not a huge fan of the Fallout lore and universe( what do you mean the game ENDS!?) But it is nice as a sanbox futuristic shooter.

 

Lately I've been using it to flesh out a sci fi character who has been thrown into a primitive world. The settings are different but it's close enough.

[fetchfox]

Setting, immersion, roleplaying. I just love the universe, and with mods and hardcore mode it's a perfect platform to immerse yourself in a character and playstyle.

Edited February 7, 2014 by fetchfox

[Slydessertfox]

I just love the whole concept of the Fallout universe. I mean, a post apocalyptic RPG with 1950's culture and some dark humor on the side, just sounds fantastic to me.