Let me tell you a tale of the wasteland. The Courier was wandering, as she is wont to do, and stumbled upon Vault 34. She made her way through a cave full of geckos and the irradiated hallways of the vault full of feral ghouls, all the while uncovering bits and pieces of the story of what happened to the vault dwellers. Too many people, too many guns, a struggle for power, and a broken reactor. A tragic story but stories like that come a dime a dozen in the wasteland. Eventually, the Courier made it to the bottom of the vault and found a suspicious terminal that allowed her to do one of two things: reroute the vault's controls or close the reactor vents. No one had told her to do anything about either of them and she wasn't sure what doing either would actually do. So she pushed a button and left to continue her adventures elsewhere.

This was what a large chunk of my experience with New Vegas was like: stumbling backwards into an area or a quest, getting a fraction of context on what is supposed to be going on, and then being asked to make a Grey Moral Choice™ to decide the fate of some strangers. I looked up what was up with Vault 34 and it turns out you can either let some people who are trapped in the vault out or close the vents so the nearby NCR Sharecroppers would have less radiation coming out of the vault and messing up their crops. It maybe would've been an interesting choice if the game had ever indicated that to me or found some way to communicate that to me. But instead I just tripped on into the last objective in the quest and pressed a random button. This quest was basically incoherent and it happened with enough other quests that I encountered that entire swathes of the game felt incoherent.

What I want to say is that the writing was strong enough and that individual stories worked well enough that I didn't need it to all fit together nicely and be presented in a way that was comprehensible but honestly I'm not sure I can really say that. I visited nearly every location and did every quest I could find but so much of the writing is relatively bland. The game is so chock full of uninteresting characters and stale stories that I found it hard to maintain interest beyond the most basic level of "I guess I should be paying attention so I have some idea of the larger plot." Maybe time is a factor and ten years of other games and other stories make this game feel a bit more stale now but I can't imagine that would effect every bit of writing across the entire game, right?

I'd like to end this with at least one positive note, though. I think this game does a much better job at connecting back to the roots of Fallout 1 and 2 than 3 does. This is mostly due to New Vegas's proximity but just the simple act of having people be like "oh, yeah, I grew up in Shady Sands" or whatever makes the franchise feel much more like a singular whole whereas F3 is just like "I dunno, this ghoul you might know wandered across the entire country and turned into a tree or whatever".

Oh, and the game only crashed to desktop twice and corrupted saves four times which is much lower than I was expected considering how monumentally broken and barely functional the engine is! So, good job on that one, New Vegas.