As some who know me, may know I’m a huge fan of Fallout: New Vegas. I love this game. I regularly watched the trailer on Steam, just imagining how it would be to play it until I actually played it and realised how good it was. Soon I started modding the game. Adding fun little things to it, learning best practices (at a time where Viva New Vegas didn’t exist yet) and all that stuff.
Fallout: The Frontier
At some point, Fallout: The Frontier came out. I have to say, up until the release, I never noticed anything about it. When it released I noticed it, due to YouTube and etc, and then I played it.
Now I found the enjoyment highly depend on what you play. There are 3 main campaigns, one for the each NCR and Legion (the two major factions from the base game) and one for the Brotherhood of Steel (a minor faction).
The NCR Campaign
The NCR campaign is the one you almost immediately get shoved into, and at least one mission is required to start the Legion campaign. Its the longest with 5 acts, which gets more insane with each act. Its also the most visually impressive and the least with role playing decisions, something Fallout New Vegas did the best in the Fallout franchise and even compared to other RPGs.
I like to compare it to a Call of Duty-campaign. There is not a lot of decisions to make, but you get shoved in new areas with some new gimmicks and that’s it.
The Brotherhood of Steel Campaign
Once you leave the NCR campaign alone and start wandering the quite beautiful worldspace, you may run across someone telling you about them or heck just find the HQ. Once surviving a long monologue explaining who they are, which I’m sure is supposed to be a joke, you get send to fetch something and you are in.
The Brotherhood of Steel is not really a fan of the NCR or the Legion. Especially the leader of the Brotherhood of Steel chapter holds grudge against the NCR after a combat encounter with them, which they lost. Now to the interesting part: You can repeatedly talk to the leader and show them that the NCR is not so bad, which may result in a ending where the NCR and the Brotherhood of Steel work together to fight against the Legion.
The Legion Campaign
For this I must, I never played this campaign, but I have watched an extensive playthrough of it by the fantastic mikeburnfire.
From what I’ve seen, this campaign is more about manipulation of the different factions, to get to your points. But always with the choice to just murder everything in your ways or find different solutions. This is probably the most RPGic of the bunch. The only requirement is, you need a good standing with the base game Legion before starting “Fallout: The Frontier”.
The public perception
The release was a textbook disaster. Many technically errors and then people found hints of pedophile wordings in dialogue lines. Among all that, is the fact, that the NCR campaign is the very first one you start with. So many people just started playing that, not trying to branch off.
What do people expect, when they boot up a mod of the most beloved RPG of the last decade? Probably not a Call of Duty/Battlefield campaign. So the first thing they see, is how this game has been dumbed down to a shooting gallery. And most people stopped right there.
Obviously YouTube being YouTube, people started making videos like: “look how bad this mod is” or “the largest Fallout New Vegas mod is a DISAPPOINTMENT” (artist rendition). Often just mentioning how bad the NCR campaign is.
Now I usually don’t mind those videos so much, I watched one or two and then just don’t watch them. But it got so bad, that the videos from mikeburnfire about this mod, regularly got comments how “unsavable bad” this mod is. (there you have my motivation for this post lol)
It may has something to do, with how I played, but I don’t see it at all… Yes, the NCR campaign is very bad. But once you leave it and start wandering the new areas, you may find new things and some cool side quests. I can’t stop and think, if those comments claiming how bad the mod is just only played the NCR campaign and marked the complete mod as bad. Which I find very bad thinking, because its literally larger than that. It has a huge worldspace, two more campaigns which are leagues better than the NCR campaign. One other thought, is those people leaving the comments, just repeat what those YouTube Videos said, which could open a way larger conversation about YouTube or social media placing opinions in our heads.
Honestly, I don’t know where to go with this post. I’m just so annoyed seeing those comments, so I wanted to vent those thoughts out. I just can’t understand, how people can be so vocal about a free mod, that people worked 8 years for to release it. Luckily there seems to be a v2 in the works, which a overhaul for the NCR campaign and to smaller areas. Lets see how well that will go. Lets hope for the best.