'Fallout: New California' Mod Review

 Mods... mods have really changed a whole bunch!

Just the other week I found myself barraged by countless Fallout videos on Youtube, some jokes, some lore and other secret snippets of rare dialogues which even I'd never seen before. And thus it became evident, as ordained by that the great algorithm in the sky, that I was going to be playing through New Vegas again for the four millionth time. But this time I wanted to try something a little different, because you-know: Four million playthroughs. I wanted to experience something I'd never had the chance to before in New Vegas, see something new, live a new Fallout story! And so I took to the internet, sparked by vague half-stuck, half-dissolved memories, and searched up 'Fallout: Project Brazil'. (Which should give you some idea of how far back my knowledge goes with this mod.) What I found instead was 'Fallout: New California' and after an embarrassing amount of head scratching and frustrated re-searching, I actually looked at the screenshots for New California and went 'Oh, I recognise that.' I realised that this was mod that I had been looking for and it had finally released under it's new, full, title. And so I embarked on a brand new adventure.

As I hinted, I remember hearing about this mod from way back; one of the consequences of being such a diehard AlChestBreach fan from those halcyon days. Before I had a PC that could run Bethesda games, I instead gawked at the incredible mods that were being put together by fans, for free, on the regular. New Vegas felt like it got more modded quest content then any other game I'd ever seen; and to this day I sort of stand by that. New Vegas has a frankly stupid amount of quest mods. But it was the ludicrously ambitious mods that promised to add a whole new campaign which really captured the old imagination. You had your 'Fallout Frontier', your 'For the Enclave' and what was then known as 'Project Brazil'. Brazil seemed to go that step further than the others, offering an entirely alternative game, like a full conversion mod, wherein you'd experience a vault full of fully voiced characters, quirky quests and two distinct questline paths. Even back in that beta stage wherein only an unfinished version of the prologue was playable; I was blown away.

My memory might fail me, but back then we had a Vault littered with cool custom made items, quality voice acting, and a smattering of side quests that went some small way to fleshing out the various characters that New California would adopt. Having watched a couple playthroughs, I roughly knew how it all played out and thus when I actually had the hardware capable of playing the thing, I hesitated on actually playing the thing: wanting to experience the whole mod proper once it was good and finished. And so it slipped from my mind, like these things do, until the year of our lord 2022 when I suddenly said: "Why not?" I'd already played another huge quest mod tacked onto a game I already love and documented the experience for this blog, (I'm talking about my review KOTOR's 'Brotherhood of Shadow: Solomon's Revenge') so why not cover this one too? I discovered the name had been updated, pointedly avoided any screenshots or infomation pertaining to what I might experience and... spent the next day trying to get a working build of Fallout New Vegas mods to run ontop of it. (It was CASM's autosave feature which was causing all my crashing- can you believe that?) So how do you think I got on?

First thoughts? If you'll forgive a brief play-by-play, I think my head transcript reads a little like this. "Ahh, it's the custom cutscene I remember- So cool. Woah, is this intro a completely custom animation? How impressive that the team co- wait... okay, this is several tiers above my highest expectations." That latter thought would be my virgin reaction to seeing the heart of Vault 18, the Vault of choice for New California. It looked... honestly incredible. For someone who had seen countless quality mods that reuse vanilla assets dressed up with high poly custom textures or clever layouts to play into the fantasy of a brand new, wild, adventure, and even those that managed to squeeze out whole complex towns and cities for their mods to take play in; I was expecting an experience much along along those lines. A high quality, well designed little world space which felt new but also comforting and familiar. Not that I knock that sensation, for that pretty much sums up New Vegas in it's entirety! It was a game cobbled together in a year from the remains of Fallout 3, that game's DNA is just slathered all over 'Fallout: New Vegas'. But 'New California' raises the bar.

A custom vault, hewn under a dome of rock and snaking out from a central hub of activity and technology. Enclosed but wide and intimating, the sight captured the look of how I always imagined the underground America of 'The Amtrak Wars' to be like. And of course it was all unlike anything I'd seen from Fallout before. When I imagined playing through New Vegas with new eyes, my wildest dream couldn't have conjured an experience which so acutely sparked those 'brand new butterflys' that I felt when first loading up the vanilla New Vegas on my battered 360 just after school in the couple of hours I had before it got dark. New California whipped me straight back to 2010; that's the sort of power these Devs were juggling with; and I was speechless. All this from just seeing what the Vault looked like, mind you- I hadn't even taken the time to playthrough the thing yet.

'Fallout: New California' proposes a potentially stand-alone Fallout narrative wrapped into your New Vegas install that has its own complete self-contained story, starting from the confines of Vault 18 and reaching out into the eye of a storm that threatens to influence the Californian wasteland for the next decade, at least. And I say 'potentially' stand-alone, because you can, in-fact, carry your character over from the end of New California right into New Vegas proper. (The transition is as smooth as a block of butter left out on the counter for a mid-summer tan. Almost. I have a small gripe about it, but I'll touch on that at the end.) And it starts in the prologue, life in the previously unexplored Vault 18 wherein the player is caught mid-play in a game of Vaultball- about to make a decision that will shape the course of their life.

If there's one significant design distinction that the New California team clearly leaned towards; it was turning the dialogue role-play knob up to eleven. From the start of the game you're deciding whether or not you are a Nerd who gets barrelled over in a sports-match they were ill-advised to pursue in the first place, or a star quarterback Jock who thrives in the arena of physical fitness. And from there you can enjoy a smattering of small quests and incidental actions that will rub off on your impressionable young adult Vault Dweller with permanent stat perks. It was really cool to actively shape the stats of my character in gameplay outside of the typical stat spread of Fallout games. Even if I do think the sheer amount of perk stat buffs you can get has the chance to make you pretty darn overpowered before you've even left the prologue. (To be fair, this is a pretty tough DLC-sized mod; you'll need the help!)

Dialogue is full to the brim of fun character-building choices, many of which are interestingly enough based on the character's S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats rather than their skill-point spread, distinguishing this approach to dialogue role playing from pretty much every other FNV mod ever made, and FNV proper. It makes for a much more 'core character' dialogue check when you pass a dialogue pointcheck that you didn't just hit because you waited for a level-up so you could dump skill points over the threshold. Core stats are more immutable, and thus recognising their integral value actually made me a lot more willing to accept it when I simply didn't have what it takes, rather than hover over that 'reload' button like the timeline's most irresponsible Gallifreyan. That being said, I do like being able to grow into the right person for the job, which isn't always a possibility with the way this mod handles these checks most of the time, but I love the distinction from how base New Vegas would have handled this design element. It makes the experience stand out just that more.

The prologue offers an immersive and slow paced introduction into the world of Vault 18, meeting the colourful inhabitants, going on a few side quests, and mostly just adjusting to one of the two lives you picked between at the beginning. The curious will find a lot of explorative value tucked away in this location, proving that it's not just sprawling for the sake of being big. (Although making the nerd hobble around it on a broken leg certainly wasn't very kind, Cali Devs. You could have saved me that humiliation!) The central terminal in the middle of the Vault holds logs and logs of data, all of which are professionally written, telling the decently comprehensive story of the Vault. I was completely invested in reading all of them, simply for the love of a well-written lore snippet, and even then some of the finer details slipped past me. (for the life of me I couldn't figure out who the exiles that left the Vault generations ago were and when they left.) But the use of scouting reports mixed in with personal logs and the odd not-so-subtle 'main quest hook', all did a great job contextualising the world you are about to enter without feeling like a text-book worth of homework. Despite the fact it is, quite literally, a huge lore dump. Presentation can evidently sell anything, even an exposition library.

Atop of totally unique locations are high quality unique character models for the people who will serve as your loyal army of companions for the remainder of the mod. They all look visually interesting, some perhaps a little too so. (I spent the entire mod wondering what was up with Jamie's arm before finding out that her model was actually a whole new skin for a different character that the team never got around to implementing.) A couple of my favourites were Alpha- the Enclave-looking robot who is just a laser-cannon of death, and B-6-RK, a robot dog which frankly puts Fallout vanilla's Rex to shame. His entire robot-wirework frame bleeds effort in it's every bark and bite, and to think about the amount of work that went into creating him alone- phew, I have to put some serious respect on the dedication of this team!

Events transpire to force you out into the wasteland for the second half of the mod and this is where the mod struggles with itself a bit, as the linear nature of the narrative wants to keep ahold of you for as long as possible despite the fact there's a wide open world out there you really want to explore. The targeted introduction to this snippet of California is more than a little bit railroady, and the mod frets to let you off the tracks for more than a brief second whilst it prepares the set-up of the wider world. But once it does let you go, it sort of just pushes you off the embankment without so much as wishing you luck, into the the wilds of 4 different questlines crossing various factions all vying for control of this small chunk of land. And it's more than a little overwhelming.

I really was quite jarred when the training wheels fell off and I realised that I was the one guiding the narrative of who I spoke to and where I was working, because it is no way a smooth transition from what the game was doing beforehand. Up until a specific moment you're hanging out with your carefully curated cloister of companions, constantly conferring about what to do and where your options lie, and the next everyone loses all agency except for you and it becomes clear your guiding a posse of puppets across the wasteland. Yes, unfortunately despite their great designs and colourful personalities; the second half of New California possess pretty much nothing for the companion cast to do. No personal quests, no real main quest integration, (unless you slip down the Survivalist questline, I guess) and just the very rare interjection into world events that was so occasional I would jump everytime a strange voice from behind me would comment on the startling revelations we had just been subjected to.

New California's questlines are rather combat heavy, as one might expect from a mod made by excitable Fallout fans, but it does offset nicely against the dialogue heavy introduction, I suppose. Still, there were points when even the real life me was starting to feel symptoms of that Battle Fatigue which is bought up at one point in the plot. These large battle set pieces are incredibly functional in New Vegas' aged engine, and directed in such a clever way, with great positioning  and sound design, to make them feel massive and totally engulfing. You'll feel like you're in the middle of a war torn highway as mortar shells burst over your head and warring streaks of laser glitter back and forth in the night. I didn't know New Vegas could be this chaotic. Or that I would grow so weary to it so fast.

When every other mission or so is a prolonged assault against literal armies, you find yourself cherishing some of the quieter moments, which you can still find from the few side quests scattered here and there. Also, I really did start to feel the pinch in resources throughout this mod, wherein by the end I was fretting over whether or not to use Stimpaks or endure slow Healing Powder HP regen due to having less than 5 stims on me. I've never been that low in a Fallout game outside of 76 before. Either I got really unlucky with mob drops or there's a seriously lack of healing items spread out across this chunk of wasteland. And considering I literally never found a single stim on any corpse; I'm thinking my problem might be the latter. 

The actual landmass that New California takes place in is not quite as impressive as the Vault, nor as interesting and rewarding to go and explore, which makes sense given the size of it. I think the choice of colour palate, a drained sandy beige, helped speed along a feeling of weariness whenever it came to exploring, as well as the design of the worldspace itself which relied on a lot of artificial rock valleys, small enough to prevent straight travel but not large enough to impress with their scale. I get the idea, you break up the sightlines and make the paths a bit windy and you obfuscate the shape of the land and make the travel time feel bigger and more epic. But when there's relatively few places of consequence to dot the land in-between major hubs of content, a lot of that feels like dead space. I didn't feel bad about abusing fast travel after an hour in.

New Vegas suffers from this a bit too, with both games being set in the desert, but what Obsidian did to get around this was guide the players on a curated path across the mainroad leading into Vegas, and treated them to small self-contained questlines every step along the way to keep them invested. California could have done with a more scenic route packed with their content across their worldspace; but what we got instead isn't horrible by comparison, it just gets tiring a lot quicker than I think the team would have wanted. However, whilst I might begrudge the journey and how stale they get, I have to admit that the destinations slapped. The NCR Union City was specifically based on the Fallout 1 & 2 town designs, with that white plaster desert-shack look which resembles something out of Star Wars. It looks spot-on to the original Fallout world design, only bought to life in the 3D space. And then there's the gaping quarry which the various Raider factions operate in. A bit too big to be navigated effectively, but certainly effective for that initial 'wow'. And some of the incidental locations you do stumble upon just beg to be explored. How can you not at least raise an eyebrow at the curious sight of that wrecked Sand Crawler to the south?

Nearer to the end of the mod the player starts being introduced to more grand and cool locations, capping off with a finale area that is easily the most impressive custom interior I've seen in a New Vegas mod. Although bear in mind that my only point of contention to taking that spot is literally Vault 18 from this same mod. (This team were in an absolute league of their own when it came to creating assets!) Without going into spoilers it's hard for me to elaborate on exactly what it was about those final few rooms that was so absolutely cool, but to speak in broad terms that those in the know can pick up on; I loved the call-back to early Fallout and think this project easily put that earlier iteration on a run for it's money. For the spectacle of sight-seeing alone, this mod deserves your download!

For the later half of California, the narrative take a free-form stance wherein you chase a handful of questlines down to decide where your chips will ultimately fall, similar in spirit to the layout of New Vegas. How the wider narrative itself is actually deployed to the player, however, it quite distinct, and in many ways bears a resemblance to the brute-force expositional methods of early isometric Fallout; wherein the driving force of the narrative is the player choice, with no central character pointing them here or there. In fact, I somehow managed to do the exact same thing I did in Fallout 1 here again, where I was only introduced to the identity of this story's big bad through my character's own dialogue. I didn't know who the main antagonist was, but my character magically did through means I know not. A blunder which, anecdotally, makes this feel like one of the truest Fallout 1 successor stories I've ever played. (And there are other reasons for that feeling as well, obvious to those who have played it.)

Some of the plot threads seemed to slip away from general cohesion, and the very concept of The Survivalists feels like somewhat of a 'space filling empire' in some regards; but the quality of the worldbuilding alleviates just enough of my apprehension to the use of certain factions here that I can accept what has been constructed here, if not exactly love it. And of course, there's the actual use of Project Brazil in the narrative which I found to be disappointing, purely due to my own self-built expectations based on my sudden realisation for what that title even meant. It wasn't until I was playing the game and heard the song 'Brazil' as used in Terry Gilliam's fantastic dystopian film of the same name.  I said "Ah ha! So that's the inspiration? The team are being driven by one of most bizarre and interesting dystopian films of all time? This story is going to be incredible!" Only to be let-down by the relatively conventional Fallout 1 style plot, with a few weird twists and turns here and there and a couple pervy plot points snuck in for good measure. (Can never hate a pervy plot point or two) None of which is to say that the narrative was awful. I actually think it was okay-to-good, and actually would love to play through it again in the future because of how enjoyable it all was.

But I can't pretend as though there isn't at least one huge narrative plot point which is sure to be controversial. The kind of narrative contrivance that you could only find in a fan-fiction setting and which, admittedly, I had a little trouble swallowing. I am not exaggerating when I say that this reveal, which I cannot in good conscious spoil, felt like a budget Kojima-reveal without the intricate set-up that wins you over despite yourself. This moment is really going to be a case-by-case instance, where for some out there it's going to break their experience altogether and for others, like myself, they'll find a way to swallow it and respect the idea of going there, at the very least. Although I don't think anyone will conclude that this reveal enriched the narrative at all, it more left a wavy question mark over the whole campaign.

Lore is, however, a fickly thing; and I can absolutely get over a mod playing fast and loose with things much more than I can an official Bethesda stamped product. (Fallout 4 and 76 have caused many a pulled hair with their glaring lore inconsistences.) Besides, New California itself literally told me to screw the canon and live dangerously, and I'm inclined to agree. If it makes things more fun, even if it's a bit twisted narratively, then I just say: go for it, son! To think that I used to bawk at the way Tale of Two Wastelands warped the story by making 'Fallout: New Vegas' a direct sequel to 3 (New Vegas starts three years later, afterall.) But this mod happily steamrolls right over that with the enough gusto I can't help but applaud. I bet this upset a bunch of lore purists out there, but if we were that married to sticking to the events of the games no matter what, then we wouldn't be playing around with mods in the first place, now would we?

Once the mod is done, and assuming you've reached one of the several endings which allow for it, (two don't) the story of the mod is transitioned directly into 'Fallout: New Vegas' proper through a slideshow that neatly covers 18 years of events and, to the credit of the writers, directly ties in one of the lingering plot-threads of New California into the canonical prequel narrative established by The Lonesome Road DLC for New Vegas. An extremely bold move to shoot for, but gracefully done. I was quite impressed. The team even included some rudimentary links of content from New California showing up in the Mojave, for those who just aren't ready to say goodbye to the cast. (Although I do wonder about how these designers interpret the ravages of time. 18 years later and everyone except Kira and Jenn has white hair? They're in their late thirties- how many pale white-haired forty year olds do you know?) Aside from all that, the story just drops you out into New Vegas proper with the levels and experience to totally roll over everything up to Vegas without breaking a sweat; kickstarting the quest to rule the Mojave wastes. Although now we have the baggage of an entire totally fleshed-out backstory to colour our view of the world.

Coming out of 'Fallout: New California' as it is now, in it's final state, I have to say that this is one of my favourite mod experiences I've had. Sure it comes with the trappings of amateur design direction, with an over abundance and reliance on prolonged action spectacle, but the execution of intent made up for the otherwise one-note direction. The visual design of certain interiors, public hubs and unique characters were incredible, easily matching or trumping anything that Bethesda or Obsidian had produced for the base game. Companions were a bit of a disappointment, more in that the team didn't have the time, I presume, to give them meaningful questlines and choice-dependent endings like one can expect from vanilla companions. And the overall story was ambitious, perhaps even a bit too much so, but I always prefer something which takes risks that doesn't always pay off, rather than stick to the boring road and accomplish nothing.

I don't do grades for mod reviews, given that they're usually a passion project of one individual and so it would feel more like I'm grading them; but for this special project I feel it's worthy of some special treatment. Given my experience and compunction to want to play this again, marred by small shortcomings here and there, I would be inclined to offer a B+ Grade in my ever arbitrary rating system, when comparing it with Fallout game experiences I've had. Yes, I'm comparing it with the actual published games, and I'd say it lands a decently high mark anyway. Personally, I'm going to consider this mod a must-play through on my future runs, just for the fantastic scope and diversity of choices presented here, and the richness of the talents on display. These sorts of projects are truly inspiring to me, for a project that took the time, fostered the talent and came out largely functional and playing great. I hope every individual who lent their talents here goes on to keep creating, Project Brazil proves that a lot of them have the all-important eye for it.