Summary
Recently, I went onTheGamer Podcastto talk about whatFalloutgame you should play first when you’re done with the TV show now that you’re basking in that radioactive fever. My choice wasNew Vegas, but it brought up an interesting problem that Senior Editor Eric Switzer and Lead Features Editor Jade King were quick to point out—where do you go from there?
Fallout 3is good, but the story pales in comparison, and 4 is downhill in every single way bar the shooting. Starting at the peak and jumping off is hardly ideal, so I suggested going full throttle and playing the original two games instead, exploring more of the West Coast. But there’s an obvious—and more palatable—choice that completely slipped my mind,The Outer Worlds.
Also developed by Obsidian, this RPG is like if you took the New Vegas cast and hurled them into space on a makeshift rocket. Thankfully, they fared better than the ghouls.
Instead of surviving a bullet to the head in post-apocalyptic America, you’re a colonist awoken from cryostasis in the Halcyon system to find it on the brink of collapse, helping a disgruntled scientist piece it all back together. You travel from planet to planet on a ship called the Unreliable with a rag-tag party consisting of a vicar, mechanic, and rich girl trying her damndest to come across as working class.
It perfectly encapsulates New Vegas’ tone, andtakes the anti-capitalist messaging of Fallout to its limits. In the very first town, you find workers paying reparations for a colleague who committed suicide because it was ‘damage to company property’, as well as plague victims who are cured depending on how valuable they are to the bottom line.
The Outer Worlds itself plays exactly like a Bethesda game. So, going from New Vegas to its spiritual successor is an incredibly easy leap. It even has a VATS-like system with the slow-motion bullet-time ability, highlighting enemy weaknesses so that you can blind, cripple, and stagger them.
Sure, you don’t have power armour, ghouls, super mutants, deathclaws, and all the other iconic Fallout imagery, but The Outer Worlds is in its infancy and still goes toe-to-toe with the best games in the series. And those are just images. Fallout is as much about tone and sharp wit as it is the icons, and what The Outer Worlds lacks in icons, it more than makes up for its writing.
The problem with starting at New Vegas is that it has such a rich personality. you’re able to shoot the NCR war memorial and tell the soldier in mourning beside it that his dead brother was a coward, or you can tellMr. House—the head honcho of the Strip itself—that he’s “chip outta luck”. Dialogue isn’t just a tool to mine for exposition in Obsidian games, it’s a way to make the player as personable as everyone around them.
Nothing sums that up better than when talking to the bureaucrats of Monarchy; “If I have to eat one more weird science project passed off as food in this sprat-fu**ed colony, I am going to stab someone.”
Even Fallout 4, which had a voiced protagonist, struggled to capture that feeling. So much of the dialogue felt arbitrary, boxed into the same four choices every time as Nate and Nora rattled on like blank robots. The Outer Worlds is truly faithful to New Vegas in that it makesyoufeel as much a part of this world as everyone else.
I completely agree with Eric and Jade; going from New Vegas to any other Fallout is going to be a challenge. The factions aren’t nearly as fleshed out or as interesting and the characters behind them pale in comparison—nobody talks about John Henry Eden in the same way they do Mr. House or Caesar, and for good reason.
The Outer Worlds is the perfect next step, sticking with what made New Vegas special, only withgoodshooting this time. The best part is that we might have a sequel as soon as next year, whereas with Fallout 5, we could be waiting for over a decade. So, boot it up, watch the fever spread like the famine plaguing Halcyon, and before you know it, you’ll be on the Spacer’s Choice hype train as much as the Fallout one.
Fallout
Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.
