Every year, since 2022, I’ve done a playthrough of Fallout New Vegas, usually around November when, predictably, with the arrival of the merciless cold, my life takes a sharp nosedive only for it to rise back up like a cursed Pheonix. I always found New Vegas a comfort game; linear enough to feel “guided” through a decent experience, but open when it’s time for exploration. It’s a hub-based approach that Obsidian would use in their subsequent isometric RPGs like Tyranny and the Pillars of Eternity games.
This year, after loading my mandatory 50+ modlist and getting to Novac, I felt the sudden pull towards anything other than New Vegas, and I realized, to my shock, that I wasn’t keen on repeating the gameplay cycle, with the same character I’ve been playing since the first time Benny told me about the eighteen-karat run of bad luck. I made my last delivery, it seemed. But I’m not like the Khans, uninstalling a video game I had on my PC for the last three years without looking it in the eye. Dig?
I hate historical revisionism in video games. When New Vegas came out in 2010 it was an unplayable mess. After Obsidian patched the game and launched some of the best DLCs in the business, the game remained an unplayable mess for modders to whip into something functional. Today, there’s no corner of the Internet where I can look without hearing how New Vegas is the best game ever made, about how Bethesda should abandon every project in favor of a sequel, and how every other title pales in comparison to the colossus of bugs set in the Mojave desert that makes me wish for a nuclear winter.
But that’s not where we start. We start at Fallout 3, Bethesda’s early attempt at modernizing the Fallout franchise, taking the world the first two games were set in, and giving it a less cynical, less misogynistic, more gameplay-oriented treatment. The confrontation between Fallout 3 and New Vegas is one of the most infamous showdowns in the history of gaming.
The showdowns happens mostly in the minds of fans, and on YouTube, where old fans lament the acquisition of a borked, flaccid franchise by a studio that could, actually, create video games at the time they purchased it. When Fallout 3 came out it was dubbed “Oblivion with guns” because Bethesda’s approach to open world design remained static, like Ubisoft’s. But you don’t hear that Watch Dogs is just Assassin’s Creed with phones. No, the problem was the influx of new fans who demanded the games were playable.
New Vegas got caught in the cross-fire, and was used a sort of battering ram against Bethesda. All of a sudden, it was Bethesda’s fault for the disastrous launch of New Vegas, and not Obsidian’s for biting off more than they could chew, even if they had access Gamebryo, and to support from a bigger, and more successful studio.
Despite of this, Obsidian went on to become a success story themselves, amassing a good reputation as a AA developer and delivering good video games like Pillars of Eternity and Pentiment. Josh Sawyer maintains an active YouTube channel where he discusses game design and history, and he even contributed to the modding community with one of the largest New Vegas mods. Obsidian aren’t to blame for revisionism, rather, it’s revisionism that happens in a vacuum, created by people with short memories, and later used for marketing purposes.
Cyberpunk 2077 saw a surprisingly similar trajectory. After an atrocious launch, preceded by an aggressive marketing campaign held by the studio who made the Geralt games, revisionists kind of forgot, and told us that Cybperunk 2077 is the best open-world game in existence. The problem should be obvious: you launch a broken game that people buy at full price, and you later use that money to fund the patch that should have never been a problem. This is why I don’t have a problem with Betehsda not ruining their games with official patches. I want my modding community to ruin my games with unofficial patches!
Revisionism plays into my mixed feelings because I can’t just read a commentary from someone who complains about the bullshit in New Vegas that not even modders can fix without having a bot gush about the Mojave. We all know that the Mojave is empty and yellow, but it’s also dumb; its over-reliance of invisible walls and high-level enemies makes the first fifteen hours of a campaign look the same no matter the color of my bullets. I’ve already bitched about this in my Fallout 4 rant, but this restrictive approach to map design hampers replayability.
The lack of meaningful faction content fucks with replayability, too, and it’s the result of Obsidian not planning their game correctly. The end result is that a player who doesn’t spend their time doing quests for the NCR has fuck-all to fill a playthrough with.
Mr. House’s quests are weirdly intertwined with the Legion’s, so, at some point after coming to Vegas, House will send us to Caesar, and Caesar is like “yeah, just get your army of Big Chungus off my property, hope we’ll never hear from you again! Till the Hoover Dam, so long! Hasta la vista! We’ll forget all about you massacring my peons for the last forty hours.” It’s jarring, and funny, and I can’t believe that Caesar will talk to me about his poor understanding of fucking Hegel, of all things.
The army of Big Chungus is the, dare I say, whole point of the New Vegas conflict. The Courier was supposed to deliver one of the chips needed to activate the army, but was T-boned by Ben Ten, who stole the chip, and meant to use his modded Chungus (codename: Yes-Man) to take over Vegas. Ben Ten didn’t take over anything; I assume it’s because Yes-Man kept insisting he had to visit all other bullshit factions in the Mojave.
Okay, I just have to rant about the Boomers for a second. Out of all the stupid factions in the Fallout franchise, and believe me, there are a boatload of those, the Boomers take the absolute cake. A bunch of inbred bastards who try to revitalize a plane put their claws on several rocket launchers and use it to keep outsiders at bay. You bet I emptied by revolver into them, there’s no way I’m ever going to replay that quest where I have to help a dude hook up with who I can only assume it’s his distant cousin. That, and I hate the Brotherhood of Steel.
Now that I finished my rants, let’s talk about the actual problems. New Vegas is extremely bugged, and playing the game on PC without following the overly drawn out Viva New Vegas guide is an exercise in getting your time wasted. Quests break because you’ve done something you weren’t supposed to, in an open-world game about choices. The gunplay is paper-thin; Obsidian’s attempt at making it so that you can play some of the game without VATS fell flat. Rebinding weapons sucks. The game is unplayable without fast travel. The random crashes are incessant. The Strip is garbage.
And there’s the forced level-up screen, which is just… a forced modal that pops up the second I exit combat. Character customization is bare-bones because a few skills, like Repair and Speech, are universally useful, to the point where playing a 20+ hours-long campaign without the Jury Rigging perk and 100 Speech is artificially making the game more difficult. That’s because:
These balancing issues mean all characters are the same character, and that there’s no reason to play a New Vegas campaign without trying to see all available content. In the early game, upkeep isn’t a problem because you wear rags, but in the Lonesome Road DLC, or in Old World Blues, you’ll get chewed on by repair costs. I start to think Dead Money takes away all your equipment specifically because of repair costs. Can you imagine having to scrounge thousands of Sierra Madre chips to keep your rifle from going limp like in a Tom & Jerry cartoon?
I already mentioned how, at some point, Caesar will forget your “crimes” against the Legion, wiping your faction karma gauge minutes before an NCR quest sends you to wipe out one of their outposts. Karma, and reputation mechanics in general, are laughable.
The problem is that you can’t design a reputation system that doesn’t let a backdoor for the player to “repair” it. In Red Dead Redemption 2, you hurl “howdy” at fifteen thousands NPCs to refill your karma after butchering a dozen innocents. In Pathologic 2, you burst through infected houses to save children, and trade your junk at a loss with copy-and-pasted townsfolk. In New Vegas, karma does nothing but show an ugly, pixelated icon in the upper corner of your screen for lockpicking someone else’s panty drawers. But if I dare to cross a certain karma treshold with a faction, the game will interrupt be with another modal.
And who knows, maybe some of the cutboard cutout companions will decide to leave me! Oh, no! Cass, come back! Don’t go! I need you to clear a few dungeons for me!
I dislike all companions in New Vegas, with no exception. Veronica is insufferable, Boone is flat-out an asshole, Cass has no personality, Gannon is cutting room floor, and Raul is difficult to reach, and just Jury Rigging with legs. When people mention companions in New Vegas, they usually talk about their quests, which are interesting, but not a reflection of how it feels to play next to the companions.
What makes New Vegas stand out in the volcanic lake of other Bethesda titles is the depth and quality of the side content, which shouldn’t be a surprise since some of the Obsidian team worked on Planescape Torment.
There’s a guy you stumble upon if you follow the quest markers to the Strip. He’s hold up in a facility called HELIOS One the NCR took over after fighting against the Brotherhood of Steel. The guy– whose nome de guerre is Fantastic– will explain to you how to get the power plant running, and during the player’s inquiry on how Fantastic even managed to get the “technician” job working at a power plant, he’ll say:
“They asked me if I had a degree in theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics.”
The first (and hundredth) time I heard this I fell of my chair, clutched my stomach, and rolled on the ground until my skin peeled off like in a solar. From laughter, of course. It’s ecstatic, and dialogue like this is present all throughout New Vegas because, well… Fallout has a problem with humor. Fallout cannot exist without making you laugh, or without trying to. See, post-apocalypse isn’t a world, it’s a stand-up comedy show because that’s the DNA that Fallout 1 & 2 sprayed all over the rest of the franchise.
And it’s everywhere. There’s the BDSM sex robot you can hire for prostitution, which doesn’t make you a pimp, because you get no further compensation after delivering it to the new employer. There’s the robot you can re-program to become the sheriff of a settlement in the beginning of the game, who’ll turn into a proto-Caesar in-between telling you about the Vicky & Vance museum. There’s the White Glove Society chef who’ll utter the incredible: "I fucking invented edible food.” There are the Elvis impersonators. The mutant schizo-granny. There’s a group of quasi-religious ghouls locked up in an old Borhterhood of Steel base that got attacked by Nightkin, whose leader speaks with a deer skull, who’ll give you the key to a basement where a guy says he joined the ghoul group because of their fine-looking ghoulettes and… And another guy thinks he’s a ghoul. I mean, I can already hear “Gary” a dozen times, but I don’t see how New Vegas, or Fallout 4 is any different.
I think the humor is a college-tier indulgence written by people who can write humorous scenes, but shouldn’t. The problem is the tonal inconsistency between the guy who fucking invented edible food and the world of Fallout.
My favorite quest in New Vegas happens in Camp Forlorn Hope, where you help the medic patch up the unfortunates sent in the meat grinder against the Legion. The quest rewards the player’s strategic hoarding of junk and vividly exposes you to the realities of fighting as an NPC. The player can survive the onslaught of the Legion, but Gary can’t. Gary lost a leg, and you need to amputate it so that the president won’t send Tom Hanks and his team to find Gary’s only surviving brother on the other side of the Mojave.
Another quest I adore is Boone’s companion quest. Yes, Boone’s a piece of work, but he is that way because he had to no-scope his wife after she was sold to Legion slavers by a disgruntled shop owner in Novac. The logistics of that backstory are stupid (how, precisely, did the “sale” happen?), but Boone’s story unfolds with you uncovering the Bitter Springs massacre, which was an NCR botched job that resulted in the death of too many innocents. The quest raises an important point about the value of soldiering in a lawless world, and helps Boone with processing the guilt of having been a part of that massacre.
A super NCR sniper was raped by an insane raider nicknamed Cook-Cook. If the player kills Cook-Cook, they can talk Corporal Betsy into going to therapy. The catch is that Betsy’s trauma manifested into aggressive sexual advances made towards other women, and if the player is a female Courier, they’ll get a spoonful of that as well.
This is, by all means, excellent writing, and not because it’s tragic, but because it reflects the post apocalyptic world in its most haunting glory: a lawless wasteland, still wrecked by sins committed against humanity two centuries prior. Switching from this to the guy who fucking invented edible food feels interesting in the moment, but the whiplash caused by the switch diminishes by suspension of disbelief because I know he wasn’t written to reflect anything about the world, but because it was a ROFL-tier joke.
The humor thing, as I’ve alluded to before, isn’t exclusive to New Vegas, but it gets in the way of what New Vegas tries to say. And to get to the bottom of what New Vegas tries to say, we’ll have to look at the DLCs.
Caesar doused in oil his right-hand man,– the one-man army Joshua Graham– burnt him alive, then threw him off a mountain. Graham fell, but escaped death, and “found himself” in leading a tribe of Wasteland survivors. When we meet him, he’s loading several dozens of automatic pistols while reciting Bible-inspired prose.
Graham isn’t a tragic character. He’s a man with backbone who doesn’t cover up his scars because they are unsavory to look at, but because he needs the bandages to manage the daily pain. The tribe he’s leading is attacked by the “bad” tribe who’s trying to link up with the Legion and murder Graham in the process, and your job is to get out of Zion by helping the local tribes with their war problems.
If you choose to go with Graham’s path (which you will) and fight back against the invaders, you have the opportunity to talk Graham down from enacting holy vengeance. Because this is Fallout, you can do it through a hefty Speech check, but the point is to teach Graham, the Legate-turned-war-preacher, that the desire for vengeance he buried down beneath his scarred tissue is not worth quenching. Is Graham wrong for desiring to enact violence against the people who wronged him? Does Graham deserve to be taught a lesson and lead others to safety after the atrocities he committed in Caesar’s name? What redemption arc should a war criminal get? Honest Hearts is skimpy on these questions, but you shouldn’t walk away with “violence bad”, but rather with an impressionistic painting of a Wasteland moment in which someone who got what he deserved lets go of giving others what they deserve. Yes, some people deserve vengeance, and you can say the spirit of the law is designed around disincentivizing normal people from enacting vengeance against those who wronged them. But there’s no law in the Wasteland, other than the law of the automatic pistol.
“In the years before the Great War, Big Mountain had been the home to the brightest minds of the 21st century. Scientists of vision were drawn to the facility to tackle the greatest technological challenges of the era. They sought to create a new world, fueled by technology, for the benefit of all mankind. [...] And the great stone in the middle of the Big Empty lay untouched, filled with countless technological wonders… Wonders that, in the end, had been answers to the wrong question.”
What is the right question? It certainly isn’t "How to blow up the enemy?", but the scientist brains trapped in appliances wouldn’t know. For years, the brains experimented with the available technology to create things only a multitool like the Courier could use, mostly to bring hell on earth in the Mojave. Another mind, Mobius, has been playing whack-a-mole with the Think Tank’s memories because the bastards should never leave the Big MT, less the Wasteland is turned into an even worse patch of radioactive dirt.
Here’s where you’ll see the footprints left behind by Elijah and Ulysses, who have more thematic weight, but the important thing of note is that the Think Tank’s scrambled brains are an ongoing war machine with the goal of enhancing the military capabilities of whomever. They are dangerous, pre-War guns that, in the hands of someone like Elijah or a pro-Legion Courier, could rip apart whatever shreds of humanity were left after the Big Boom.
The problem with the War as an out-of-story element is that it ultimately doesn’t matter in the world of Fallout. It’s impossible to bring about the comforts of the old world because of radioctivity-induced decay, the monsters it unleashed, and the tribal mindset inherent in the survivors who don’t hold on to any law other than the law of the automatic pistol. That’s why the NCR needs to be portrayed as a somewhat incompetent, heavily armed force; if it didn’t try to be a stately army, not a single entity would take it seriously. Humanity can’t evolve, it can only go backwards, to try and start anew, but what is it support to restart? If you imitate the old world, you’ll go back to where you came from. Back to the Big Boom.
Let me say: I love Dead Money in a way I love nothing else about the Fallout franchise because it’s the only thing that’s untouched by the abhorrent, trashy, meaningless humor that detracts from the point. Elijah is one of the best villains I’ve seen in gaming; an old failure, thirsty for old world weapons to stomp the NCR with, who stumbled upon the way towards the Sierra Madre Casino, the “grandest” casino the West. On the day of the Big Boom, the Sierra Madre was supposed to open for business and flaunt its unhinged security system that not only keeps outsiders at bay, but everyone inside a prisoner.
Elijah set up a system of dragging adventurers into the Sierra Madre so they could break into the casino’s bowels under the threat of explosive collars. Playing through Dead Money is the closest a first-person Bethesda title has ever gotten to a survival horror. Everything will kill you, and navigating the poisonous cloud, with immortal ghosts on your track, and the beeping collar going nuts each time a radio is nearby is clunky, terrible, and tedious. But that’s why Elijah did what he did; he couldn’t risk letting go of his chance of breaking the Sierra Madre and untangle its secrets.
Elijah is insane, but so are the people whose help you need to carry on. Dog/ God is a schizophrenic Nightkin whose paranoia and antisocial tendencies can only be placated with intelligent choice of dialogue options. Christine, who survived Veronica’s mixed signals before Dead Money, is hunting down Elijah for revenge, and in her quest, ended up with a lobotomy at Big MT. Domino, a ghoul from before the War who mixed up the Sierra Madre’s owner in a scheme with a thot, will never trust you unless you pick all the dialogue options that wouldn’t make him feel inferior. The cast is stellar; these are terrible people you’re probably working with at the office as I type this, each driven by their selfish motivations towards the heart of the casino.
The end is, like the rest of the DLC and humanity’s fate after the bombs fell, tragic, because you have to leave the Sierra Madre vault empty-handed, otherwise you’re softlocked and need to reload. It’s a lesson, but not the one you think. It’s not about letting go of the past; if anything, Graham should’ve taught you you cannot let go of it because the scars will be there to remind you of the things that brought you were you are. You will never let go of the past, just as the Wasteland will never grow into another Old World because the scars of the earth are there to claw the humanity’s insides like a Xenomorph baby. What you need to let go of is the goals that brought you where you’re at.
Ulysses can’t let go, because he’s seen the backwards people he encountered bastardize and use the past as decoration. He’s seen how meaning is stripped from rituals and iconography in a revisionistic manner that mirrors a lot of our attitudes towards history: we don’t understand history, but only play-pretend we do, and give ourselves pats on the back for pretending well enough. I don’t think the point of Ulysses is that “understanding” history is a good way of coping with the tragedy of a world that will never evolve, but that history itself is an insidious enemy that warps perception into ideology. He masks his ideology of contempt towards the NCR with wordy tirades, but… not quite well enough. His humanity slips through, and at the very end, the Speech check convinces him to leave the nukes alone. To disable the nuclear launches, the player sacrifices the new incarnation of the E-DE companion after trekking the best level in New Vegas: the Divide, a place where nothing grows, nothing worth mentioning anyway, where inhabitants are caught in a vicious cycle of play-acting war.
It’s good. And I love how much it stays in direct opposition to Fallout 4, which is a game about rebuilding the Commonwealth into something that resembles comfort. The misery inherent in Lonesome Road is marvelous; fighting in claustrophobic tunnels the half-burned walking remnants of a place you destroyed carries a sense of melancholia that you’ll never have the pleasure to experience. No one reading this article will ever trek the ruins of their home after nuking it.
But… the misery is the point. Fallout is a miserable universe because the world after the Big Boom is inconceivable. Everything humanity has worked for is turned to a palace of ash in the aftermath of nuclear warfare. You may find warmth, love, and even meaning, but to splash the picture with bullshit jokes was always low and it’s the reason I can’t take Fallout seriously. My favorite rendition of a Fallout world isn’t even a Bethesda game, but the free DOOM total conversions Ashes 2063 and Ashes Afterglow, because the game doesn’t try to pretend the world isn’t proper fucked. It’s you and your motorbike in a desolate land, ruined by debris, and by the hopes of a better world you’d better let go of.
There are places where humor is intertwined well with the narrative themes. The vault where people sacrificed one of theirs each time a fucking laptop demanded it, with posters begging voters to elect as overseer anyone else but the candidate who put up the poster is a masterclass in storytelling. Of course it was a joke. The vaults are always jokes, but this time, it hurts in a way you’re probably not accustomed to. You think to yourself “if I was there, I’d never”, but you’re not the hero you imagine yourself to be. Not in the Wasteland.
Fallout doesn’t need jokes, and it doesn’t need heroes; it needs more stories like the half of New Vegas that people think they remember, but don’t, because if they did, they’d realize how little they understood from Dead Money and Lonesome Road. It’s a shame that you need to play the DLCs to get to the bottom of the Mojave conflict because you’re likely to have progressed well into the Battle for the Hoover Dam before you reach the Divide or the Sierra Madre. And I simply don’t have it in me to spend the required fifty hours and put up with the shambles of that combat system anymore. In a sense, I think I let go of my dreams of finding meaning in video games. So at least I got the message.