You are a courier in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, betrayed and left for dead in a backwater town in the Mojave Desert, and where you go -or who you befriend or antagonize along the way- is entirely up to you. You may have encountered similarly framed —but frustratingly unsatisfying— open-world RPG games from Bethesda (Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim), but Obsidian’s “Fallout: New Vegas” offers a wasteland that is not only wide, but deep and rich. Your choices & character actually mean something in the world you’re diving into. You are not out to make every single person like you, or to fetch 10 grumpkin teeth and return them to Uncle Mawkspook. You can’t be the president of everything. There isn’t a nice tidy solution to everything you encounter - maybe that chem-pushing idiot you just vaporised was important to somebody. Maybe turning this other hothead in for his manslaughter would take a suburb of people with him. If you’re looking for a bunch of ‘put the round peg in the round hole’ type kindergarten coddling, this is not the game for you. What this refusal to offer obvious victories leads to is a more living, breathing world where you’re no longer navigating just the radioactive wasteland, but the values and societies that have sprung up in it, and all of their conflicts and grievances. This is as ambitious as all hell and even 8 years later I’m astounded they pulled it off. The superb writing (and the way that each story thread you choose tug on leads to dozens of others) means that you will discover these different communities organically in a way that is totally unique to you. Companies trying to immerse people with VR should take note of kind of environmental richness we see in New Vegas, which actually responds like a dimensional world, instead of reacting like endless mediocre games that serve up goddamned connect-the-dots busywork. New Vegas is a triumph of gaming as an art form; it expanded the boundaries of what the medium can do. 10/10
