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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