We knew Prime Video’s Fallout TV present would go to New Vegas as quickly as Season 1 ended, however it wasn’t till the first trailer was launched that we realized the enduring setting can be on the heart of your entire second season, which premieres on December 17. On prime of that, Fallout: New Vegas has simply turned 15, so now appeared like the proper time to look again on one of many most interesting sci-fi RPGs ever made.
With that reward being stated, Fallout: New Vegas was hardly a universally praised slam dunk again in 2010. Whereas many critics and gamers already celebrated Obsidian Leisure’s renewed give attention to the deeper RPG points of the sport and the stronger writing throughout the board versus Bethesda’s (massively profitable) first try with Fallout 3, the hectic 18-month development course of was evident.
Big cuts were made, and the game arrived in less-than-ideal shape. A mix of patches, mods, excellent official expansions, and time eventually elevated it to today’s widely accepted opinion – that it’s the best Fallout has ever been.
But what made it so enduring? Why won’t veterans stop recommending it over the rest? How can Fallout Season 2 expand on the iconic setting? Let’s shuffle up, deal, and see what the cards hold for the future of New Vegas.
“The game was rigged from the start”
Set in the year 2281, New Vegas was the first mainline Fallout game to introduce a non-vault-dweller main character: the Courier, who is just a person trying to survive out there in the Wasteland. When you’ve played through the entire game at least once, that seemingly small decision feels like the first of many bold swings and a pushback against unspoken conventions.
At first, New Vegas is a simple revenge story. The Courier is part of a larger plot and considered expendable, but doesn’t find that out until much later. This naive setup gives the player a perfect excuse to push forward and get to New Vegas (the actual city that survived the nukes). That’s just one step of the journey, though.
By the time you learn about what the game really is about, chances are its systems, mechanics, and colorful cast of characters will have grabbed you. Whereas some open-world games just lay all their cards on the table from the get-go and others choose to be all mysterious, Josh Sawyer and his crew gave us simply sufficient of a story hook to maintain the intrigue up whereas we realized concerning the world and the factions. Whereas the common Fallout 3 participant would fortunately delay the seek for their misplaced household in favor of these tantalising aspect quests, monitoring down the person who tried to homicide you is an goal with an nearly primal psychological factor.
That is to not say your story stays small. The Courier has a huge effect on the world and the best way the principle narrative performs out by the point they attain the tip part. Whereas some RPGs provide the phantasm of selection — the place your character simply reacts to occasions and makes a number of key selections — New Vegas retains issues muddy till the very finish as an alternative, even permitting the participant to recreation the system if the playing cards they’re dealt aren’t attractive sufficient; apt given the on line casino theming.
A complex ideological war
Though the irradiated and mutant-filled Mojave Desert may not be as rewarding to just explore as the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 or later Bethesda-crafted maps, it’s hard to deny that it houses the most interesting factions the series has had. Three big groups (and a surprise fourth) to follow or fight against might not seem like a lot, but how the New California Republic (NCR), Caesar’s Legion, and Robert House’s automated forces are portrayed and used in-game makes a huge difference.
The NCR represents a return to North American ‘normalcy’ and old-fashioned democracy… which also involves expansionism and imperialism to “pacify” the Wasteland. Caesar’s Legion is a straight-up totalitarian dictatorship of LARPers playing Romans. Last but not least, Robert House (aka Mr. House) is the enigmatic ruler of New Vegas; he’s kept a fragile peace and formed a city-state that ‘works’ when everything doesn’t. All raise fair points (okay, maybe not the guys obsessed with the Roman Empire), but, more importantly, present the player with weighty paths forward as that region of the former United States tries to rebuild.
New Vegas goes beyond the good/bad dichotomy and allows players to play more complicated figures based on choices built around political and ideological expressions. Even Caesar’s Legion isn’t presented as an ontological evil, but a sad, logical endpoint of completely unchecked authoritarianism, which loops back to the past, a dark reflection of the NCR’s worst impulses and the cautionary tale for modern empires that feels especially prescient in today’s political environment.
As for Mr. House, his promise of eternal ‘stability’ comes at a price, and at his core, he’s just another rich man past his prime using the fear of the unknown and outsiders as a weapon to protect a capitalism-defined status quo two centuries past its prime.
They’re all ugly allies on paper, but with even more nefarious forces at work, you may have to choose the lesser evil to give the Mojave Wasteland and New Vegas enough time to heal.
What’s next for New Vegas?
We won’t have to wait long to find out what happened in New Vegas canonically, as the Fallout TV show begins in 2296 and Season 1 revealed the NCR took a huge blow. The Season 2 previews have additionally proven members of Caesar’s Legion and several other well-known areas, all with out revealing who’s ruling over the New Vegas Strip. Maybe extra essential would be the exploration of the situation’s previous and Robert House’s initial motivations. No matter Jonathan Nolan and the present’s writing crew have performed, it is secure to say hardcore followers could have so much to say come December.
On the video video games entrance, there’s nonetheless some semblance of hope {that a} New Vegas remaster (or even a follow-up) could happen in some unspecified time in the future, particularly now that Bethesda and Obsidian are below the identical Microsoft-owned roof and the franchise has blown up in recognition due to Amazon’s extremely profitable sequence.
For now, New Vegas holds up excellently as an open-world action-RPG filled with sci-fi components – particularly should you go into the DLC – that places its roleplaying and storytelling points above every little thing else.
Fallout: New Vegas is presently out there for buy on PC (Steam, GOG, Epic Video games Retailer) and Xbox consoles through backwards compatibility. The bottom recreation is included with Recreation Go Premium and Final subscriptions.
