I just now completed Fallout: New Vegas, nearly a month after purchasing and downloading it.

Initially, the independent ending wasn’t my stated intention; I just wanted to play through and complete the game at least once. So I was playing along with Mister House up until the fifth quest.

Kill an entire bunker of Brotherhood of Steel types? Uh… right. I sided with Yes Man instead.

It wasn’t until that point that I realised what was making me uneasy in my headlong plunge towards completion. It’s the fact that there’s no clearly defined “good” or “bad” endings - technically speaking. There’s three basic paths, but unlike, say, Morrowind or Oblivion, they have more impact than whether you join House Hlaalu or the Fighter’s Guild - they literally close off alternatives.

Despite this, the more I read online about the endgame, the more it begins to feel like Morrowind: inevitably, you find yourself pulled back to Hoover Dam/Red Mountain, then to the final boss fight with Legate Lanius/Dagoth Ur. The main difference is that you have to choose a Great House to join, instead of being able to remain a freelancer. (Which, I suppose, makes sense in a way; I can’t imagine some rogue element wandering through and picking off one of the most feared warriors in the Mojave.)

The fact that completing the game makes me uneasy about how it’s done can only mean one thing. Obsidian’s writing team did one heck of a job.

(This post was originally posted 31 Jan 2011, but Tumblr’s back-dating doesn’t seem to work.)

I just now completed Fallout: New Vegas, nearly a month after purchasing and downloading it.

Initially, the independent ending wasn’t my stated intention; I just wanted to play through and complete the game at least once. So I was playing along with Mister House up until the fifth quest.

Kill an entire bunker of Brotherhood of Steel types? Uh… right. I sided with Yes Man instead.

It wasn’t until that point that I realised what was making me uneasy in my headlong plunge towards completion. It’s the fact that there’s no clearly defined “good” or “bad” endings - technically speaking. There’s three basic paths, but unlike, say, Morrowind or Oblivion, they have more impact than whether you join House Hlaalu or the Fighter’s Guild - they literally close off alternatives.

Despite this, the more I read online about the endgame, the more it begins to feel like Morrowind: inevitably, you find yourself pulled back to Hoover Dam/Red Mountain, then to the final boss fight with Legate Lanius/Dagoth Ur. The main difference is that you have to choose a Great House to join, instead of being able to remain a freelancer. (Which, I suppose, makes sense in a way; I can’t imagine some rogue element wandering through and picking off one of the most feared warriors in the Mojave.)

The fact that completing the game makes me uneasy about how it’s done can only mean one thing. Obsidian’s writing team did one heck of a job.

• Practising scratch DJ techniques
• Actually damn DJing
• Working out how best to mash up Afro Celt Sound System and The Grid
• Writing Magic, as Opposed to Magic (my Harry Potter / TES4 crossover fanfic)
• Writing Magic is Escape Velocity (my Fallout New Vegas / My Little Pony crossover)
• Writing The Chronicles of Ra'jirra: The Wasteland Affair (another damn crossover, this time Fallout 3 / TES4)
• Scripting an SL hunt system and actually getting all the new features to bloody work
• Engaging in fripperty-pish such as Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Glorkian Warrior, and staring vacantly at Facebook and/or Tumblr
• Failing to ignore the nagging feeling that I should be doing something useful