Content of the article: 'Fallout: New California Review & Analysis (with spoilers, of course) WARNING: LONG'

I don't particularly post a lot on Reddit, but after playing this mod, I feel that I had to come to the subreddit just to say what I think. Because this mod was recently updated (April 2020, I think?) I decided to play and eventually decided to write up a review (which is a first for me, so bear with me if it doesn't seem professional, because it's not). I've played through this mod a total of three times, only completing two of them as I restarted my first playthrough just before completing it after experiencing most of it. I'll break this review up into however many sections as most reviews do. This might be long, so thank you in advance if you read it all.

I'll start with the obvious.

– Story –

I'm gonna lump the choices you can make, their subsequent consequences, and dialogue selections in this section as well. This will most likely be the longest section, as I am a story-focused person and if the story is bad for me, then my experience will be incredibly hindered.

As most people who have played the mod will probably agree, the prologue is perfect. In fact, my only gripe with the prologue is that it wasn't just a little longer, but we'll get to pacing in a minute. Just to preface: the prologue is the only thing I like about the story. But more on that soon.

Apr 09, 2020 The Full Version of Fallout New California BETA 200. Check below for patches! This is a.BETA. and you are sure to encounter some minor issues, imbalances, and visual glitches. But they should be extremely minimal. Check the bug tracker and report! California Court Rules in Favor of Kira Kerkorian and Damien Hurley. LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / January 6, 2020 / The Los Angeles Superior Court recently ruled that Kira Kerkorian and Damien. Kira Mann is an adopted tribal resident of Vault 18, working as Kevin Rossman's assistant. She is a possible permanent companion in Fallout: New California and Fallout: New Vegas. 1 Background 2 Gameplay 3 Quests 3.1 Rescue Me Mann 4 References Kira was, like the Star Player, a tribal orphan who was taken into Vault 18 as a child and was raised by the Manns, who were outwardly kind but. Kira Mann will get some extra content added and some minor revisions. She'll also get a content expansion all around so he continually as something new to say. Voice update by the same actor, Caitlyn Singer. Eric and Jamie are being replaced from the ground up with Eric Campbell and Dakota Feron.

The prologue starts off with a very well done opening cutscene before throwing you into Vault 18's last Vault Ball match of the season. In this game, you have a very well scripted sequence of your player character catching the ball before being handed a seemingly simple choice: tackle or dodge. Depending on what choice you make, it can completely change how you experience the prologue. You'll either be a nerd who everyone pities or looks down upon because you got your leg broken for trying to dodge and lost the game, or the star athlete that everyone praises for winning the game.

For all of my playthroughs, I personally went with dodging, placing me in the Path of the Scientist, because that's usually how I play, New Vegas specifically. As such, in the vigor tester, I put high intelligence, luck, and charisma, while keeping my agility at average and bringing my strength and endurance down. A true nerd. I'll touch more on these S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats and skill checks later.

On the Path of the Scientist, you meet Dr. Kevin Rossman who is immediately shown to be a mentor to you, which I adored. Not to mention his voice acting is so top notch, I wondered if they hired someone professional. He asks you to fix a computer, which in turn reveals that the Enclave are planning something involving Vault 18, and this mentor of yours is somewhat involved, but naturally it is left vague.

You also meet Kira Mann, Ben Kurtz, Jamie Campbell, Johnny Matheson, Coach Bragg, Jenn Hail, Eric Campbell, and a few others I can't remember. They all respond to you in accordance to how you did in the Vault Ball game. Because Kira is also a nerd, she responds warmly to you and as a friend, while Johnny Matheson and Coach Bragg completely deflect and belittle you. You can't even talk to them, and you never meet Coach Bragg's sister, Chevy, but more on that soon. You can then do some side quests (if I recall, you have more side quests on the Jock side compared to the Nerd side) and then you go to bed.

Then boom! The Enclave are attacking your vault! Your family that were bunking with you in your room are all dead and you are the only survivor. Now, as the protagonist should, you have to save the vault. After you have done so (by killing Coach Bragg twice, by the way) it turns out the overseer is going to blow up the entire vault because he's gone insane.

At this point, you can go back and collect all the allies you have accumulated so far throughout the prologue. Because I was on the path of the nerd, I couldn't get Johnny Matheson, but I could get two robots, Ben, Eric, Jamie, and Jenn, and eventually Kira once I escaped the vault fully. Jenn, specifically, only talks to you after you save the vault because you're a nerd and she looks down on you, but after saving it, she looks up to you. Once you are about to escape, you encounter Kevin Rossman, and he dies. As a nerd, his death was particularly hard for my character since he was his mentor, but I assume as a jock, there isn't as much of an emotional attachment.

Then you escape the vault, fighting through Enclave, and eventually Raiders once you're outside the vault, and you run to safety as the entire vault blows up. You head over to a nearby house for shelter by the name of Pinehaven, and on the way there, you meet Kira, and then you have your full squad.

This is where the prologue shines for me, personally. I absolutely love companion interaction, and what happens next was awesome.

On my first playthrough, I didn't save anyone except Kira and Ben, so nothing happened. But on my second and third, I rescued everyone I could and had eight people, including me, in my squad. There is animosity between Kira and Jenn, and they instantly start to go at it before Ben ends it. Then I talk to Kira and convince her to join and to play nice with Jenn. Then we head up to Pinehaven and everyone begins to quarrel, as they should. Everything felt real, like we were actually a bunch of teenagers shaken by the fact that our home just blew up, everyone we knew died, and we were the only survivors. Ben tells you that because you are the new de facto leader of the group, it's your job to keep everyone in line. So then you have a choice, let the argument play out, or shoot the ceiling and give a rousing speech. If you let the argument play out, Kira shoots Jenn, and everyone kills Kira, and you're effectively two companions shorter than when you walked in. But if you give a speech, with a speech skill of maximum 45, then everyone will look up to you and you keep all of your companions. It just felt incredibly realistic, and I loved it. Then, afterward, Ben applauds you for saving everyone and tells you to talk to everyone, look around, and scavenge before heading to bed. My favorite line of his was 'I'll keep first watch.' This might be a very simple line, but it really ingrained in your brain the fact that this is SURVIVAL. It felt truly like an experience where they were doing whatever they had to do to survive, and that you guys are truly just a group of dysfunctional teenagers doing whatever you can to see a better tomorrow.

Fallout New California Kira Mann

I was really hoping that the mod would keep going with this… but it doesn't.

As you can see, I love the prologue, and I basically just recapped it because it was just that good that I had to detail everything I experienced. Because it was just. That. Good. But the second you sleep in Pinehaven and the prologue ends… thats when the story turns to the shitter.

I'm not gonna explain the rest of the story because I'd be here forever, but I'm going to try and hit the major beats of what went completely wrong.

The pacing is god awful after. And it feels like some of the choices don't even matter (unless my game was bugged and these lines came across on accident, but I'm going to assume that this was intentional). After sleeping in Pinehaven, you are instantly awoken by Ben because there's Raiders outside calling for you. You don't even have time to process what happened to your vault because now you have to deal with something completely new. So now you can either talk to the raiders or go guns blazing. Talking to them results in your capture, while shooting them gives you the opportunity to escape. Either way, you escape the raiders and then once again, you are plunged once again into a fight between the NCR and the Raiders at the I-15. You help them, and then you are once again attacked by raiders at Union City. It doesn't stop. One moment you're in the safety of Pinehaven, and the next you're apart of the NCR (or the raiders, if you chose that route) fighting this war between the two. And because there's no dialogue option to be reluctant or neutral or whatever, you are stuck with what Fallout 3 did wrong: you are either 'My life for the NCR/Raiders!' or 'I hate all of you and I want nothing to do with this.' There is no in between, which really dampens any role-playing you were planning on doing. Then there's a 'betrayal' that happens halfway through by the NCR? But when you make it back to base, your character has literally no option to confront them about this betrayal. You just go on as usual. Even if you kill the NCR soldier, Less Jameson, that betrayed you (which is an option, by the way) the mod just continues as if you didn't just shoot this guy and kill his squad.

Then there is the companions. Remember how I said I absolutely adore companion interaction and dialogue? Well, it's like this mod was made specifically to blue-ball me. After the prologue, there is NO companion dialogue WHATSOEVER for ANYONE. Every time there is, it's very small tid bits of information, and it only ever comes from Kira and Ben, but mainly Ben. There is no dialogue between the companions, there is no reaction to the events around you (literally Jamie and Eric do not say anything after the prologue. There is zero dialogue for them.). They just become walking turrets shooting your enemies for you.

So I'm gonna skip a lot and just head straight to the 'plot twist' at the end. But just know the quests from the end of the prologue onward are bland, boring, and repetitive.

The plot twist at the end is that you are apparently a super-mutant clone of the Fallout 1 protagonist, the Vault Dweller, which they use to explain how you can heal faster than others, restore broken limbs, shrug off bullets, et cetera, et cetera. Funnily enough, this twist was spoiled to me not by the internet, but by Jenn's dialogue that broke and she flat out spoiled what the twist was before I made it to the moment.

Here's the thing about this twist… it's not good. They were clearly trying to pull a meta 'make you think' moment like what Dead Money did in Fallout: New Vegas. Allow me to explain: Dead Money criticizes the player (not directly, but might as well be) for having heavy reliance on their Pip-boy constantly, specifically the compass that tells you where to go. It makes fun of how your eyes are always glued to that map marker that you become nothing more than a mindless drone following orders with no regard of what they are, and I felt that was genius. It DID make you think.

Bard Of The Wastes

The twist New California did was not good. It tried to explain a feature of gameplay in a redundant and ridiculous way. Does that mean every Fallout protagonist is a super-mutant? Does that mean my COMPANIONS are also super-mutants (besides Kira, cause she actually was one, surprise surprise)? Does that mean EVERY video game character I have ever played that can regen health is a super-mutant? This twist was redundant, and it really only felt like the writer(s) made it just to be edgy and cool. Let's not even mention the fact that it pulls the 'you are the chosen one' card that people are absolutely sick of, not to mention that Fallout never really pulls that card ever in the first place besides Fallout 2, but at least Fallout 2 did it correctly and it didn't feel like you're just a Mary Sue.

Then you have the final final boss battle (yeah, The Master 2.0 telling you you're a clone wasn't the final boss) against Coach Bragg and his sister. As someone who played the nerd route, these guys weren't even slightly compelling villains since you can't even talk to them in the nerd route. In the nerd route, you never even SEE Chevy Bragg. Did I mention that they are also clones of another character? Yeah… not good.

Depending what route you chose, the ending is different. The reason I never finished my first playthrough was because once I saw that the game allied me with Senator DuVille despite me explicitly not allying with him when given the choice, I instantly restarted. Then on my second playthrough, I helped the Shi girl, Kieva, and for some reason that gave me an ending I disliked. Then on my last playthrough, I rushed through only being loyal to General Silverman, which gave me a better ending. Regardless, the ending ends with you eventually becoming Courier Six and being charged with delivering the Platinum Chip, which is nothing special. The endings are pretty neat, specifically the Enclave and Supermutant ones. My two issues with them is one: there is only one ending where your character becomes a courier from reasons that are not 'they were haunted by their past so blah blah blah' and two: they changed the reason Hopeville blows up from 'the courier delivered an unknown package to the NCR that turns out to have been a detonator' to 'whoops they sat on the key and the town blew up.'

Don't even get me started on the unnecessary fourth wall breaking that occurs literally every other dialogue option. It's cheesy, it's redundant, and it doesn't fit all the other humor that Fallout typically does.

Overall, the story was below average, borderline bad. The only thing carrying it is the excellent prologue, but it can only carry so much before the weight of the abysmal story-telling brings it crashing to it's knees. If anyone liked the story, thats good for you, but for me personally, it was not good.

Anyway, that's enough of the story. Moving on.

– Gameplay –

If you have a weak rig, it's probably not a good idea to play this mod. My rig is pretty good, so I didn't have problems, but it's clear that if I had saved in the wrong spot, my game would've crashed endlessly. I run nearly a hundred mods, so maybe with less than 60, the game would've run better.

Besides that, the gameplay is, you know. New Vegas. There's nothing different about it for the most part. The game made the gunfights far larger and they also made the explorable areas far larger, so framerates will probably average at around 35-42 fps. If you can't handle that, then I don't recommend playing. I didn't have a problem with the larger gunfights, specifically because I have the Realistic Weapon Damage mod installed, so my companions did most of the fighting while I just moved up slowly to make progress. The last battle on Fort Daggerpoint was fun because it really felt like a battle. Not like Hoover Dam where canonically, there might have been hundreds of NCR and Legion, but in the actual game, there might have been twelve total.

My issue with the gameplay that I briefly mentioned before is the skill checks. The skill checks almost solely rely on your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats, with speech and science here and there. That was another reason I restarted my first playthrough, because my stats weren't as high as the game wanted them to be. Sure, they made S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats more useful, but they are INCREDIBLY HIGH. I'm talking if you don't have a perception of at least 7, an intelligence of at least 8, and a charisma of at least 7 at the start of the game, you will never be able to do the skill checks. Typically, the endurance and strength skill checks either just piss off the person you're talking to, or they put you in a worse situation then you were in before, or they just do fuck all. Because I'm using Project Nevada, I had to set it so I gain a perk for every level, and my first 17 levels were exclusively for Intensive Training so I could raise my stats to what they wanted.

– World –

I don't have much to say in this final category. New California, like most Fallout games, hits the same problem: the world feels empty. It's basically all desert with essentially three major areas, with only two of them having any quests, and only one of them having actual side quests. You're working across The Pass encountering a raider party every once in a while, but besides that, there is absolutely nothing. I didn't particularly have a problem with this, but neither did I not have a problem. I'm pretty indifferent toward this compared to others.

​

Overall, this mod had potential. The prologue gave it a very strong start, but it gave up literally whole minutes later as if the team behind this lost all of their manpower in seconds and were down to a skeleton crew. My biggest problem with the mod, as said before, is the narrative, and I do hope any mods created down the line by these writers are significantly improved because in my opinion, this narrative became a dumpster fire the moment you wake up from bed in Pinehaven.

If you read the whole thing, thank you. If you at least read some, I also thank you.

Source: reddit.com

Similar Guides

Learn more

• Ranking The dlc from fallout 3 to fallout 4

  Ranking DLC where would you place each DLC from fallout 3 to fallout 4? here’s my list Fallout 3: 4: Mother ship zeta, just felt like a shitty halo level 3: Operation anchorage, just felt like a shitty call of duty level 2: point lookout, Cool new area with with…

• My experience with Fallout

  About a year ago, I played Fallout 4 for the first time. It immediately became my favorite game. The soundtrack, the lore, the locations, and characters gave off a unique vibe that no other game has given me. Since there was a 4 slapped at the end of the title…

• Fallout 76 needs traveling companions

  What’s missing in Fallout 76... I started the series with Fallout 3 and have played every installment but initially avoided Fallout 76. I have never been an online gamer and the early reviews were not kind. With the wastelanders update, however, this seemed like the fallout games I am accustomed…

More about Fallout

Post: 'Fallout: New California Review & Analysis (with spoilers, of course) WARNING: LONG' specifically for the game Fallout. Other useful information about this game:

Fallout New California Kira Mann Romance

Top 10 NEW Games of December 2020

December 2020 is the final big bang month of the year for game releases on PC, PS5, PS4, Series X, Xbox One, and Stadia.

Top 10 Best Video Games of 2020 (So Far)

In times of uncertainty, video games allow us to escape from the stress of the real world. For this list, we’ll be looking at some of the best games released in the first half of 2020.