MOD SPOTLIGHT
Keep NewVegas weird.
The great thing about playing a deep and rich RPG like Fallout: New Vegas is that the choices you make can ensure each playthrough will be a little bit different. But despite playing the game a number of times since its release in 2010, I’ve never had a playthrough turn out quite so different as when I installed the NV Randomizer mod.
The mod, as you can probably guess from the name and a quick glance at the images on these pages, randomizes the hell out of Fallout: New Vegas. Which is why within just a couple hours of beginning my game I was already armed with a hammer capable of one-shotting most enemies, a talking coyote had asked me to submit to a credit check, and I’d met an NCR military policeman whose head was a just skull in a fishbowl.
I’d also come across Mr House within an hour of starting the game. The real Mr House. Not the computer screen version, the withered old man on life support version. And not at the Lucky 38 casino as you might expect. I just found him out in the desert. That’s pretty damn random!
HOUSE CALL
Let’s back up. With the mod installed, I awoke in Doc Mitchell’s house in Goodsprings, a place I’ve been many times before, though I’d never seen Doc dressed like he was preparing for a fetish party. He was bare chested, with leather strapped raider pants and a power armor helmet covering his head. I’m not trying to kinkshame him, it was just a departure from his typical getup. He walked me through the basics, and then revealed my randomized stats and handed me some randomized starting gear, which included riot armor and a unique and massive two-handed hammer called ‘Oh, Baby!’. It is, essentially, a super sledge, only it hits harder than the standard version. It’s one of the deadliest melee weapons in Fallout: New Vegas, in fact, and I began the game with it.
I left doc’s house and came across Victor, the securitron robot who dug me out of a shallow grave. Only
Victor wasn’t as much a robot as he was a bighorner, those weird mutated bulls. He still acted like Victor, and we had a quick chat, but it was hard not to feel a bit weird to be talking to an enormous mutated cow.
Those weren’t the only randomized bits. As far as the actual bighorners that are usually grazing the town, they’d been replaced by a radroach, a nightstalker, and a spore carrier, which are disturbing-looking fungal green humanoids. They still acted like bighorners, though, as they didn’t bite me or irradiate me.
I MET AN NCR MILITARY POLICEMAN WHOSE HEAD WAS A JUST SKULL IN A FISHBOWL
BONE TO PICK
You know Trudy, the bartender at the Prospector Saloon? Don’t worry, she wasn’t a mutant cow or a fungus monster, she was still Trudy! Though one of her arms had been, at some point, completely skeletonized from the elbow down. She seemed OK with it, though. Sunny Smiles, good old tutorial Sunny, was also still mostly Sunny, though her dog Cheyenne had been replaced by a molerat. And a few minutes later, Sunny was replaced by a pile of ash, because I accidentally shot her with a holorifle while aiming at a lakelurk king, which had replaced the geckos we were hunting.
See, it’s not just clothing and models that have been randomized, it’s monster spawns as well. Which means even in a starting zone, you might run into a powerful monster your low-level character is not equipped to fight. Unless the mod has already equipped you to fight it by giving you a friggin’ hololaser right out of the gate. Which it did. Anyway, Sunny died, but so did the lakelurk king and the ghost trapper the mod had replaced the other gecko with.
As I sifted through the corpses and Sunny’s ash pile for loot, it grew dark, nearly pitch black. I checked the clock, and it was just about noon, which is an odd time for the sun to be blotted out by an inky blackness, that made it hard to even see the unearned hololaser in my hands. That’s because the mod randomizes the weather and sky and atmosphere as well. You can go from a bright, clear day, to a radioactive green sky, to a blood-red sunset, to a completely monochromatic filter in the space of a few minutes. It definitely keeps things interesting.
Speaking of interesting, my level one character finally ran into some problems even my ridiculously overpowered starting kit couldn’t handle, when I tried running from Goodsprings to Primm. Along the road, I spotted something in the distance moving very quickly, which turned out to be a deathclaw mother battling a giant zion mantis. The mantis, despite its giant designation, was quickly killed, and then the deathclaw, running at a speed which I’d estimate to be about 90 km per hour, obliterated me with one swipe before I could even register it had turned in my direction. Hmm. I think it’s not just the monster spawns that have been randomized, but the monster’s attributes, because I’ve
WITH THE NV RANDOMIZER MOD, THE VEGAS STRIP IS… WELL, IT’S SOMETHING ELSE
never seen a deathclaw that fast. It looked like I was watching a game of Fallout: New Vegas on fast-forward.
After a few more deaths from other extremely deadly monsters along the route, I finally arrive in Primm to behold still more randomization, like Ruby Nash holding a flaming sword, Powder Gangers dressed like old timey gangsters, and plenty of other amusing nonsense. And after I’d left Primm with a new sheriff in charge, I found myself in the desert being attacked by a brahmin, a giant rat, and a ghost harvester, which is an odd trio to be hanging out together. Odder still was finding Mr House nearby, his life support systems just plunked out there in the middle of the desert. I couldn’t interact with him, unfortunately, though he did sort of move his head to look around a little. Until I killed him, at which point he stopped doing that.
Having found Mr House in the middle of nowhere, I became curious as to what might be in Vegas to replace Mr House, so I decided to skip ahead a bit. I used a cheat code to add the entire world’s locations to my nearly empty Pip-Boy map and fast-traveled to the Vegas strip.
BOWLED OVER
With the NV Randomizer mod, the Vegas strip is… something else. Robot security guards have been replaced with just about anything you can think of, which is why a talking coyote told me I’d need to submit to a credit check. Citizens of Vegas, who were already ridiculous, are even more so now, with a variety of masks, oversized policeman’s hats, and in the case of the NCR cop, a skull in a fishbowl in place of a normal head. Another lakelurk welcomed me to the casino, an enormous yao guai crouched near the elevator, and Mr House, as it turned out, had been replaced by an enormous, towering robot that waved its massive metal arms and claws around while it spoke. I guess Mr House being a robot isn’t too off the mark, really.
Naturally, I had to go check out Caesar’s Legion, so I paid a visit to Nipton, where I found one Legionary wearing soccer pyjamas and a mountie hat, accompanied by mechanical scorpions and glistening pink centaurs instead of mongrels. It was clear Caesar had done away with the dress code when I went to his camp, where I saw Legion slaves walking around in full power armor and a Praetorian Guard wearing a sweater vest, slacks, and a baseball cap at least three sizes too big. Dale Barton, the trader, was now a woman wearing an elegant gown with a meat cleaver strapped to her hip, though that wasn’t as weird as the fact that I could also see through her.
Vulpes Inculta was half-nude, wearing a motorcycle helmet, and while his face was male, his body was clearly female. Caesar, somewhat anticlimactically, was simply dressed in dirty rags and rusty helmet.
As for Benny, the guy I was supposed to be tracking down? No more checkered blazer for Benny. Instead it was bright red pyjamas and a fireman’s hat and gasmask. Not quite the slick style he has in the vanilla game, but I’ve got to hand it to him. It’s still quite a look.