Fallout: New Vegas

• 1. Welcome To The Mojave

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  Fallout: New Vegas, a 2010 action role-playing game from Obsidian Entertainment, was built on a schedule that journalists called remarkably short for a major release. Publisher Bethesda Softworks allowed the studio 18 months. The game shipped for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and it shipped rough. Yet fans now gather every year in Goodsprings, Nevada, the dusty town where the player's story begins. That celebration has run since 2022. How did a team with a tight deadline and a franchise owned by someone else make a game that people still argue about? What did the developers have to abandon along the way? And what did a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas let them say about greed?

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• 2. Factions And Endings

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  The year is 2281, and 204 years have passed since the Great War, a nuclear exchange between the United States and China. In the Mojave Desert, which the game calls the Mojave Wasteland, three powers compete for control. The New California Republic, known as the NCR, is a democracy trying to restore representative government and keep order. Caesar's Legion is a violent, totalitarian army of tribal slavers, inspired by the Roman legion. Mr. House is a reclusive New Vegas businessman who commands an army of Securitron robots and rules the city as a technocratic dictator.

  The Hoover Dam is the prize. It supplies electricity to the surrounding area, and the NCR took it during an eastward push from California. Both Caesar's Legion and Mr. House want it for their own plans.

  Smaller groups fill the map. The Boomers are a heavily armed, xenophobic tribe based at Nellis Air Force Base. The Powder Gangers are convicts who escaped from an NCR correctional facility. The Great Khans are a tribe of drug dealers. The Brotherhood of Steel is a militant order that wants to secure and hold old-world technology.

  The courier's trouble starts with a delivery. Carrying a data storage device called the Platinum Chip toward New Vegas, the courier is ambushed by mobster and casino owner Benny. Benny takes the chip and shoots the courier in the head. A Securitron named Victor digs the courier out of a shallow grave, and the physician Doc Mitchell nurses the courier back to health. The trail leads to a casino on the New Vegas strip. There the courier can either kill Benny and recover the chip or let him escape.

  Mr. House turns out to be the chip's creator. He survived the nuclear apocalypse inside a life-support chamber. The chip holds a program that can upgrade his Securitron army, and it was first meant to defend Las Vegas during the Great War. The war began before it could be delivered. Benny stole it to overthrow House, with help from a reprogrammed Securitron called Yes Man.

  Four endings follow from the fight over the dam. Back the NCR, and the Republic repels the Legion's attack and annexes the Mojave. Back Caesar's Legion, and the NCR is forced to retreat as the Legion conquers New Vegas and the land around it. Back Mr. House, and his overwhelming Securitron army drives both rivals out, leaving the region to House alone. The fourth path is to usurp House and seize the Securitron network, which creates an independent New Vegas. That last route runs through Yes Man, the reprogrammed Securitron who first helped Benny try the same trick.

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• 3. Playing The Courier

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  On the courier's wrist sits the Pip-Boy 3000, a wearable computer that doubles as the game's menu. Through it the player checks items, character statistics, active quests and the map. It also handles fast travel to places already discovered, and it tunes in makeshift radio broadcasts. The game can be played from a first-person or third-person view. Its open world runs from small settlements and abandoned buildings to large sites such as the city of New Vegas, which was built from the remnants of Las Vegas. IGN's Kristinie Stiemer estimates that finishing every quest takes around 100 hours.

  Combat offers guns, energy-based guns, melee weapons and explosives, and guns accept modifications such as a scope. The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, known as VATS, pauses the game so the player can aim at a specific part of an enemy's body. Each VATS attack spends Action Points. When the points run out, the player must wait a short time before using it again. Some non-player characters can be recruited as companions who travel with the courier and help in fights.

  Seven primary attributes shape every courier: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. Together they are called SPECIAL. Before play begins, the player also chooses the courier's gender, age and race. The attributes feed 13 skills: barter, energy weapons, explosives, guns, lockpick, medicine, melee weapons, repair, science, sneak, speech, survival and unarmed. A high intelligence, for instance, starts the courier stronger in medicine, repair and science. Experience points come from killing enemies or finishing quests, and each level-up lets the player add skill points. At every even-numbered level the player picks a permanent perk. Rapid Reload, for example, speeds up gun reloading by 25 percent.

  A doctor's first conversation shows how talking works. Doc Mitchell explains that he nursed the courier back to health and searched their belongings for identification. The player may answer "Thanks for patching me up, Doc.", "You shouldn't have gone through my stuff." or "What do I do now?" Some replies appear only when a stat is high enough. Asking a shopkeeper for a discount takes 50 points in Barter, and impressing someone can take an Intelligence of 7.

  Those choices feed a reputation system with each faction. Help a faction, and it may hand over new armor or access to a secret base. Act against it, and it may send assassins. Because some factions despise one another, helping one can close off another's quests. Companions react too, and some walk away if a particular faction dislikes the player.

  Hardcore Mode, an optional difficulty setting, turns the wasteland into a survival test. The player must eat, drink and sleep regularly to avoid starvation, dehydration or sleep deprivation. Healing items work gradually, and crippled limbs can only be mended by doctors, a bed the player owns, or special medication. Ammunition has weight, which forces careful packing, and companions can die for good. The mode can be switched on or off at any moment, and finishing the entire game with it enabled earns an achievement.

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• 4. After Van Buren

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  In December 2003, Black Isle Studios' Van Buren was cancelled. It was meant to be the third mainline Fallout game, a real-time game with turn-based combat set across Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Utah. The cause was financial trouble at Black Isle's publisher, Interplay Entertainment.

  Before the cancellation, former Black Isle and Interplay staff had cofounded Obsidian Entertainment. Over the following years the studio made Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Alpha Protocol. It also worked on an Alien role-playing game that was cancelled.

  Bethesda Softworks bought the Fallout intellectual property in 2007 and released Fallout 3 the next year. Critics received it well, and it sold over five million copies in 2008. Bethesda had already started work on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, so it wanted another studio to build a large expansion for Fallout 3. Creative director Todd Howard pushed for a full game instead and suggested Obsidian for the job.

  Obsidian had a history of saying no. In 2007 it turned down Bethesda's offer to make a Star Trek game. It accepted a Fallout spin-off.

  Early planning weighed several ideas. Bethesda wanted the West Coast, where the first two Fallout games take place. Obsidian saw a chance to expand the New California Republic, a faction introduced in Fallout 2. Other proposals included a city modeled on Reno, Nevada, and letting the player choose to be a human, a ghoul or a super mutant. That last idea died over the technical difficulty of dressing ghouls and super mutants in armor.

  Las Vegas and the surrounding Mojave Desert won out. They recalled the 1950s imagery the series was known for, along with the post-apocalyptic look of Mad Max. Obsidian hoped to set the story between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, but Bethesda insisted that each game follow chronological order. Project director Josh Sawyer then reused digital assets from the cancelled Alien game. His rule for the studio's workflow was simple: build on what already existed instead of changing it.

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• 5. Look And Sound

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  Josh Sawyer wanted a story about greed and excess, and Las Vegas history, with its ties to organized crime, supplied the material. One working title was Fallout: Sin City. He drew a line at the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and used it as the cut-off for historical references.

  Fan feedback led Obsidian to build the plot around conflict between factions. Sawyer reasoned that in a desert, factions would care most about water, which made the Hoover Dam a focal point of worldbuilding. In a Game Developers Conference presentation, he said the team wanted to avoid what he called "Jesus/Hitler" moments. In those, groups like the NCR and Caesar's Legion read as plainly good or evil. Player choices were meant to be moral trade-offs instead.

  To capture the desert, Obsidian used data from the United States Geological Survey. Sawyer traveled to Las Vegas and photographed the area for reference, including the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. The team modeled the map on the Las Vegas Beltway. A ring of roads, they felt, would help players find their way.

  Bethesda asked for big structures to serve as landmarks. Fallout 3 had used monuments in Washington, D.C. New Vegas chose kitschy roadside attractions, partly to set it apart. One example is a large dinosaur statue based on the Cabazon Dinosaurs in Cabazon, California. Places lie farther apart than in Fallout 3, which largely centered on the Washington, D.C., area. The palette is warmer, and local plants such as Joshua trees and prickly pear cacti appear. The Strip imitates the 1950s, with large neon signs on every casino and architecture modeled on the Googie movement.

  The underlying play stayed close to Fallout 3, with small adjustments. Iron sights arrived, and movement now strongly affected accuracy, which gave fights more tactical options. Item-crafting and Hardcore Mode were added to evoke desert survival. Sawyer said the mode was meant as an optional jump in difficulty. The team also took ideas from the Fallout 3 modding community, especially mods that made quality-of-life improvements.

  The score came from composer Inon Zur. He received an email listing descriptors for the music: "Southwest in the Future. Open, Spacious, Raw, Lonesome, Cowboy, Rattlesnake, Desert, Wind, Heat, Rust, Steel, Dirt, Grit." Zur drew inspiration from the soundtrack of the film There Will Be Blood. With audio director Scott Lawlor, he wrote music for a string quartet. The score is adaptive, staying quiet and ambient during exploration and growing loud and powerful in combat. In-game radio stations add licensed songs from the 1950s, in genres that include country and bluegrass.

  Celebrity voice actors filled the cast. They included Rene Auberjonois, Felicia Day, Dave Foley, John Doman, Michael Dorn, Kris Kristofferson, Zachary Levi, Wayne Newton, Ron Perlman, Matthew Perry, William Sadler and Danny Trejo. Over 65,000 lines of dialogue were recorded in total. That earned a Guinness World Record for the most lines of dialogue in a single-player role-playing game.

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• 6. Cut Corners

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  Sawyer remembers the pace as demanding but not absurd. His team, he said, worked "somewhere between forty and fifty hours a week." He called it "a really tight schedule" but said nobody reached a point of believing the job was impossible.

  The Gamebryo engine caused the real trouble. Bethesda supplied it because Fallout 3 had used it, but nobody at Obsidian had worked with it. The studio hired a modder who had experience with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Programmers still had to run routine maintenance on the engine. They also struggled to implement the Havok software that console games required.

  Sawyer recalled the day console development kits arrived. The team discovered that the New Vegas Strip was not properly optimized. It had to be cut into sections divided by loading screens, rather than remaining one continuous area.

  The short schedule and the decision to release on consoles forced further cuts. Planned settlements east of the Colorado River never made it in. Three of them would have been controlled by Caesar's Legion and would have revealed more about that faction. Obsidian also wanted players to keep exploring after the story ended, instead of meeting an abrupt stop.

  Little work on that idea had happened by the beta stage. Obsidian chose to put optimization ahead of adding material to an already unstable game. Designer Chris Avellone said the post-story additions would have been small. They would have been extra dialogue options with NPCs and NPCs moved to match the player's chosen ending. Avellone would later lead the downloadable add-ons.

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• 7. Mixed Verdicts

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  Fallout: New Vegas was announced in April 2009, and a first trailer followed in February 2010. In May 2010, a collectors' edition was announced. It held seven poker chips, a replica of the Platinum Chip, a deck of cards with character illustrations, a prequel graphic novel and a making-of documentary. Pre-orders outpaced those of Fallout 3 in North America and the United Kingdom.

  North America received the game on the 19th of October 2010, Australia on the 21st, and Europe on the 22nd. By the 8th of November 2010, it had sold five million copies and earned $300 million. The market-research firm Electronic Entertainment Design and Research later estimated that sales reached 11.6 million copies worldwide by 2015.

  Launch also brought crashes, corrupted saved games and frame rate problems. Fans and journalists complained loudly, and Bethesda released patches months afterward.

  Metacritic produced the most awkward number. Bethesda had offered Obsidian a bonus if any version scored 85 out of 100 or higher. The Windows and Xbox 360 versions earned a weighted average of 84, and the PlayStation 3 version earned 82. Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart said, "It was in the contract, it was what it said." He added, "I wasn't crying over it by any stretch of the imagination." Journalists criticized tying pay to Metacritic, arguing that it lacked the objectivity to measure a game's quality.

  Reviewers consistently praised the writing. Craig Pearson of PC Gamer called the story a significant improvement over Fallout 3. He liked how factions adapt to the player's earlier choices. The British edition of Official Xbox Magazine described the story as "staggering in scope and consistent in quality." Andrew Reiner of Game Informer admired the dialogue but felt that "none of the scripted moments deliver the nuclear bang that Bethesda achieved."

  Side quests drew even warmer words. Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot liked that quests offered several solutions. One lets the player fight robots in an abandoned museum or steal a keycard to avoid a fight. Reiner said the missions and story had nearly unprecedented depth, giving players thousands of reasons to replay. IGN's review credited the map with leading players to new side quests and unique places.

  Because the gameplay barely changed, some reviewers treated the game as a large add-on to Fallout 3. IGN's review said it felt like "a giant, awesome expansion." Pearson wrote, "Two years to stay exactly where you were." Francesca Reyes of the American Official Xbox Magazine struggled to recommend it to anyone who had not enjoyed Fallout 3. Faction reputation and Hardcore Mode, by contrast, were welcomed as extra layers of complexity.

  Companions split opinion. Christopher Monfette of G4 felt they built a stronger emotional bond than any moment in the main quest. Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer thought they were more trouble than they were worth, because they ignored his commands.

  Glitches drew the sharpest complaints. Mike Nelson of 1Up.com said they were among the most frustrating he had ever seen, and that he would have scored the game higher without them. A reviewer for Edge wrote, "Creatively, New Vegas gets almost everything right. Mechanically and technically, it's a tragedy." Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb predicted he would remember the lockups and breakage before the world itself. Even so, he said players who tolerated the flaws of Fallout 3 and Oblivion would eventually have a good time.

  Awards followed anyway. The game won the 2011 Golden Joystick Award for Role-Playing Game of the Year and IGN's 2010 award for Most Bang for Your Buck. At the 14th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards it was nominated for Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year. Mass Effect 2 took that prize.

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• 8. Long Shadow

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  Cass Marshall of Polygon wrote, "Fallout: New Vegas has endured in the cultural zeitgeist in a way that few other games have." Opinion shifted upward over the years, and some critics now call it the best game in the series. Part of the change came from patches that cleaned up glitches. Kat Bailey of VG247 observed that once talk of technical flaws faded, players came to value the game for what it is.

  Six downloadable add-ons extended the story, four of them with new areas to explore. Dead Money is survival horror. The courier is captured and forced into a heist on the Sierra Madre Casino, which is hidden by a cloud of deadly toxic vapor. Avellone felt a horror level would seem odd in the base game but suited an add-on. Honest Hearts is set in Zion National Park amid a conflict between several tribes. Old World Blues brings B movie humor and a group of mad scientists.

  Lonesome Road sends the player after Ulysses, another courier, who rejected the job of delivering the Platinum Chip to Mr. House. Two add-ons had no story. Courier's Stash offered items first released as pre-order bonuses, and Gun Runners' Arsenal added weapons, modifications and new types of ammunition.

  The modding community kept working too. Dominic Tarason of PC Gamer wrote, "Years of dedicated community efforts have culminated in New Vegas being a better game than ever." Tale of Two Wastelands fully combines Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Fallout: New California is a prequel that expands the courier's backstory. Fallout: The Frontier, an expansion-sized mod, added a new worldspace with new items, quests and characters. It drew media attention for its size and its controversial material. A guide called Viva New Vegas won wide praise for its quality-of-life improvements for new and returning players.

  Fans can be pointed about how they compare the game with its successors. Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku wrote that "you can't talk about Fallout 4 without having someone start talking about how good New Vegas is." She said she had been emailed petitions about Obsidian and future Fallout games many times. Fans commonly fault Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 for uninteresting storylines, downgraded role-playing mechanics and limited options for player expression. Ian Dransfield of Retro Gamer described New Vegas as a balance between Bethesda's 3D approach and the traditional role-playing focus of Black Isle and Interplay. Emma Kent of Eurogamer praised how carefully even the smallest story was crafted, and said the larger power struggle mirrors current real-world conflicts.

  Other developers have borrowed from it. Ben Fisher of Rebellion Developments said New Vegas was a reference point for Atomfall, a 2025 game set in an alternate history after the Windscale fire. Rebellion built the plot around one central location, as New Vegas does with its city. Fisher called the older game "a reference point for the idea of a densely concentrated RPG adventure experience." Raphaël Colantonio, cofounder of WolfEye Studios, said the plot was an important inspiration for the studio's unnamed upcoming game. He said, "We did like the free-form exploration of New Vegas." He also liked that "the story keeps going no matter what."

  The Fallout television series pulled the game back into argument. The episode "The Trap" seemed to contradict the plot of New Vegas. Some fans concluded that Bethesda wanted to retcon the game because of a perceived disdain for its reception. Todd Howard clarified the matter, and PC Gamer quoted him saying, "New Vegas is a very, very important game to us."

  The second season of the series prominently features the New Vegas setting. It takes place 15 years after the events of the game. Flashbacks show Cooper Howard's character with Mr. House before the Great War. Jim Vejvoda of IGN noted that the trailer referenced Caesar's Legion and the Hoover Dam. Co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet later said the show would not confirm which of the game's endings is canon.

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