14 DAY TRIAL // Fallout: New Vegas is one of the big launches of this year, veteran role playing game oriented studio Obsidian, which includes some of the people who created the first two games in the franchise, using the technology Bethesda built for Fallout 3 and moving the action quite a bit to the West, to the strangely unaffected casinos and sprawling urban spaces of Las Vegas, the City of Sin. The game is set to arrive on the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the PC at some point during the fall.
And a fresh preview in GameStar magazine offers some new pieces of information, some of them a little spoiler laden, on what the Fallout man can expect to discover in the videogame. The main Vault destination players will be able to visit is numbered 21 and lies deep beneath the Strip in Vegas, Caesar's Legion being the faction that actually dominates the city and the elements of its infrastructure that have not been affected by the nuclear war.
The New California Republic also has a presence in the area but they are less than properly equipped for the ongoing conflict with Caesar's Legion and cut off from the Hoover Dam, which has been taken from the Brotherhood of Steel, and from the original Californian government.
Orbital weapons, which seemed to be on the cards for Fallout 3 but were never given to the player to control, are implemented in Fallout: New Vegas in the form of Archimedes 2, an orbital laser battery that can be used once a day on unsuspecting enemies.
The way the combat system works has also been streamlined a bit, with only one weapon skill being offered for all projectile weapons and big hitters like the rocket launcher and the Fat Man nuclear weapon now being governed by the Explosive skill.