Monday Mods: Fallout: New Vegas Mod – Brave New World

Fallout: New Vegas was, at the time of release, perhaps the most controversial release in the entire Fallout series. It had passionate fans on one side pointing to its nuanced characters, creative scenarios, and open-ended writing as elements that elevate it above the other recent games in the series, whereas critics would call out elements like the performance problems, wide-ranging selection of bugs, and general sub-par levels of polish being some of its main weaknesses. Fallout ‘76 has perhaps been able to take the crown for most controversial Fallout game, and perhaps the numerous problems with Fallout ‘76 might make the idea of revisiting an earlier game in the series more appealing to some players.

For me, both the ardent fans and the naysayers were somewhat correct about Fallout New Vegas. I think it did represent a dip in terms of how well-produced the game was, and how well it functioned as a piece of interactive entertainment software, but it also had some utterly brilliant moments and characters and felt like a more open-ended take on the formula developed in Fallout 3.

 

I think New Vegas is certainly a game worth revisiting, and this newly released mod gives you all the more reason to revisit it.

Much of the voice acting from New Vegas was pretty solid, but as with many of the Fallout/Elder scrolls games, they did end up reusing a lot of the same voice actors for multiple different characters. This is particularly immersion-breaking when you encounter a random insignificant NPC speaking with the same voice as a character who is crucial to the plot.

Similarly, they ended up reusing a lot of the same character models for a lot of different characters, where you’d see the same face and general appearance for multiple different characters.

It’s tough to point the finger of blame anyone in particular here, certainly, the actors and modelers themselves were not making these decisions, and on the studio management side, they were just doing the best they could with the budget they had. Many of the technical problems did get fixed with post-release patches, but the repeating characters and voices have never been officially addressed.

These are not game-breaking problems, or at least they weren’t for me, but all these years later there is a project seeking to address these shortcomings.

Enter Brave New World, a mod with the goal of addressing the repeated voices and characters, going to the extreme length of working with professional voice-actors to rerecord many lines of dialogue, plus creating brand new character models to replace repeated appearances throughout the game.

After four years of work, Brave New World is ready for prime time and can be downloaded from its page on Nexus Mods.

The creators describe the mod thusly:

“Many of the NPCs in New Vegas were memorable and well-acted; characters such as Legate Lanius, Caesar, Raul Tejada, Craig Boone, Cass, etc. However, due to time constraints, a large number of characters were voiced by the same person or a limited set of actors. As an example, Yuri Lowenthal provided the voice of Ringo, Oliver Swanick, Henry Jamison, Nolan McNamara, Lucius, Lars Taggart, Fitz, Keller, Scribe Ibsen, Knight Lorenzo, Ike, Antony, Otho, Alexus and Sergio, etc. Brave New World looks to improve upon this by adding improved casting and actor variety.

Throughout the project’s development, we have cycled through 30,000 auditions, carefully selecting actors and actresses that best fit the demeanor, personality, and appearance of almost 145 NPCs.

Our team has gone to great lengths to make sure that the project meets
the standards of quality expected for voice acting/voice overs within the gaming industry.

We hope you enjoy our Brave New World.”

The download link and installation instructions are listed here. Although it is worth noting that because of the extensive changes under the hood with Brave New World, your old saves will not be compatible once you’ve installed Brave New World, so you’ll have to start again from a fresh save.

It’s not very common to see projects like this, either as a mod or even as a commercial game release, where shortcuts taken during development can be undone years after the fact. The effort that would go into a project of this scale is rather impressive, and this is a fantastic way to breathe life into a beloved game with some significant compromises made during its creation.