Elder Scrolls V Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas, both legendary video game titles, but which one gets a high score?
Eric Jedd
Equinox Staff
Bethesda is a video game development company that has made a serious name for itself.
The company has two famous game series in particular that have created a loyal following throughout the years.
Even though these games are from the same developers, they are worlds apart.
Starting with the Elder Scrolls series this collection of games started in 1994 with the first installment, The Elder Scrolls: Arena.
It was the first of many fantasy-based role playing games (RPG).
The series continued to grow and the company has since completed the fifth game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Skyrim is the ultimate single player fantasy game. The game itself is a living, breathing community and expansive wonderland filled with medieval weaponry, spells and magic, and most importantly, dragons to slay.
With more than 300 hours of gameplay and a rich thriving environment, it can keep anyone from going to sleep early.
The second series successfully produced by Bethesda is the Fallout games.
Black Isle Studios released the first two Fallout games, but the impact Bethesda had on producing Fallout 3 was accepted worldwide.
Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and featured a post-apocalyptic open world that also has RPG elements.
The latest game in the series also published by Bethesda is Fallout: New Vegas.
This game revisits the futuristic wasteland with a new location.
It is different for its unique first and third-person shooter elements, as well as its rich faction system and amazing depth of morality choices.
Compare and Contrast:
Skyrim is a game set in a fantasy world of magic and dragons.
A person’s character is developed by usage of skills and magic.
The shear amount of quests you can do is staggering, which gives a player practically endless opportunities to use these skills.
Fallout: New Vegas is set in a bleak future riddled with nuclear exposure and the deadly mistakes of man, where advancing a character takes experience from killing enemies and completing missions.
The games have two different styles of progression. For a character to level up in Skyrim, the player needs to use the skill constantly.
The more the skill is used, the more it levels up.
For a character to level up in Fallout: New Vegas, the player needs to kill things and do missions.
Each level gained in both games earns the player a perk that will help the character by granting bigger percentages of damage or possibly having a mysterious stranger come and help during fights.
Between these systems Fallout: New Vegas has easier progression than Skyrim because a player just has to kill things to level up.
However, Skyrim’s level up system is better because it is more rewarding.
It forces the player to get used to the thing they are using in order to make it better.
In terms of the overall theme of both games, Skyrim is all about laying waste to mythical beasts, improving your skills, and taking long treks into the wilderness to explore and discover.
Fallout: New Vegas is about going out into a radiated world and making the best of it by gaining trust, and killing radiated mutants and bandits that roam the wasteland alongside you.
These two games share this common attribute: Exploration.
If you play either game you know the worlds are all about this. They both work on a grand scale of scenery and openness that can only be explained by looking at the game screen.
You can explore each mountain in Skyrim and every sand dune in Fallout: New Vegas. This is where both games match in quality. Skyrim and New Vegas both have amazing attention to detail, and some of the most expansive maps of any video games.
One of the most annoying aspects of either game is the amount of glitches and bugs the player will have to endure. Each game has a fairly large amount of bugs that can hinder gameplay and cause the game to crash, forcing a system restart.
The glitches in Skyrim have ranged from giants sending the player miles into the air, to the hilarious backwards-flying dragon. With recent updates and patches the game is in a durable state, but there is the occasional bug.
The glitches in Fallout: New Vegas are of a more sinister nature. When the game first came out it brought with it an abundant amount of bugs. From the simple random floating characters, to the seriously annoying pitfalls into the environment below, this game was a chore to play. Though the most recent updates fixed the serious glitches, bugs are still not hard to find.
With fewer glitches than New Vegas, Skyrim wins this category.
Gameplay is fairly different mainly because Skyrim deals with melee combat, and Fallout: New Vegas deals with gunplay.
Skyrim has an array of amazing weaponry: swords, battle axes, maces, war-hammers, everything along the lines of close range. The only long range weapons in Skyrim are bows and arrows, magic spells, and special skills. True “combat” for this game is mostly hand to hand.
Fallout: New Vegas is all about guns, guns, and more guns. A player can have the common pistol, machine gun, and shotgun. Or, they can have the outrageous Sci-Fi laser rifle, Tesla Cannon, and Fat-Man mini-nuke launcher. The game does have a varied list of melee weapons as well, but the player is heavily influenced to take up arms.
Both games have similar controls; however, Skyrim makes better use of them. It’s much more satisfying when the player can block an attack with a shield, and then hit an enemy with a mace.
In New Vegas, you pretty much shoot people either manually or with the V.A.T.S. ability that pauses the game and lets the player select target areas on their enemies. It’s fun, but can get stale after a while.
Skyrim gets the jump on New Vegas in the gameplay category.
In the end the games speak for themselves. Both games are good and deserve a player’s time and attention. Each game has an amazing world to explore, but with its superior level progression, gameplay, and lack of glitches, Skyrim stands tall over Fallout: New Vegas.
Eric Jedd can be contacted at ejedd@ksc.mailcruiser.com