Friday, July 5, 2013

Next Pacifist Gaming Challenge- New Vegas



I’m really getting into this pacifist gaming idea, and am looking for the next challenge.  Fallout: New Vegas seems to the next one on the list.  Just ordered it from Amazon.


Fallout is a long running, post-apocalyptic series that has a bizarre publication history.  It started close to 20 years ago as a remake of a game called Wasteland, produced by a company called Interplay.  The studio in Interplay that built the game, Black Isle, was eventually dissolved, and the developers split up and eventually formed a new company called Obsidian.  Obsidian found a niche in making intellectually superior sequels to games other companies put out, and occasionally generating their own intellectual property (like Alpha Protocol).  Fallout: New Vegas is an odd merging of these two.  Technically it is a sequel to Fallout 3, by Bethesda Games Studio, which acquired the license to Fallout.  However, all of the original producers and writers of Fallout 1 & 2 now work Obsidian, and they simply picked up their notes from their own cancelled Fallout 3 and merged them to Bethesda’s game engine.


Okay, enough gamer politics.  The cool thing is that one the best game developers/writers, Chris Avellone, worked on the game.  Avellone’s list of projects is a roll call of all of the cool, quirky role playing games of the last few decades; games like Fallout 1 & 2, Alpha Protocol, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Plansescape: Torment.  Avellone also writes game that let you look for alternatives to violence.  Take for example this screenshot of a pacifist run through New Vegas.


(More of that story in Gandhi is Not Dead, Seen in New Vegas)
So my next game is chosen, and my stack of shooters languish on a dusty shelf.  Stay tuned.

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