The brilliance of New Vegas is how its combination of highly-flexible scripted content, emergent situations, and role-playing opportunities results in a complex, nuanced and very personal story that has the exact right amount of abstraction to come to life inside the player’s head. Only in hindsight, when the difficult decisions start to ramp up and it’s too late to back out, do you realize how deeply you‘ve become invested over time. There are no epic action set-pieces or emotional gut-punches during its first hours - instead the game takes it slow, introducing you to its world and factions carefully and from different viewpoints.

It can feel a bit pedestrian in the beginning. Like many people, I bumped off of New Vegas the first time. But as veteran Fallout narrator Ron Perlman keeps reminding us: War never changes. The days of pure anarchic wasteland survival are over, and humanity is in the process of trying to rebuild itself. New Vegas takes place i n the year 2281, 200 years after a world-wide nuclear war destroyed most of the planet, and is set in the North American Mojave desert surrounding the titular city New Vegas (the name for what’s left of Las Vegas).

You won’t even have to watch an overlong YouTube video essay, I promise.

Let me go one step further and actually try to explain why. Many people will tell you that it’s one of the greatest video games ever made, and that the Bethesda-developed Fallout 3 and 4 suck in comparison. In case you’ve never heard of Fallout: New Vegas - it’s a post-apocalyptic action role-playing game, developed by Obsidian Entertainment and released on October 19th, 2010.

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