Summary
WithFallouton the brain thanks to the Amazon Prime TV show, I decided to start a fresh run of New Vegas for the first time in almost a decade. Instead of going for something modern or givingFallout 76a second chance, Obsidian’s masterful spin-off felt like a much nicer way to familiarise myself with the beauty of post-apocalyptic wastelands.
First launching in 2010,New Vegasbuilt upon everything that made Fallout 3 great and then some. Conjured up by a development team consisting of members who worked on Fallout and Fallout 2, it understood this universe and how to expand upon it more than any other studio. It’s why we look back upon it so fondly, and why, almost 15 years later, we are still playing it.
Now, I need to come clean - I didn’t actually start a new playthrough, but one I’d begun on the Xbox Series X a couple of years ago and never finished. The game dropped me into the middle of the wasteland with a Level 12 character and Boone by my side, but it was clear from one look at the map that I still had so much of this game left to see. So I walked in an undiscovered direction and didn’t look back.
Melancholy Is Fallout’s Greatest Strength
Several hours later, I checked my phone and realised I’d spent an entire evening wandering the Mojave Desert, diving into abandoned shacks and power stations to scrounge up loot and to kill whatever radioactive creatures were brave enough to show themselves. I’d hardly done any quests, except for some small NCR favours in a local camp, which made me feel a little dirty. These soldiers are just trying to survive, but the last thing I wanted to be is some filthy military type. So I trounced off once again, eager to spread righteousness across the wastes. I also began to embrace the melancholic vibes that came along with it all.
Fallout is a lonely franchise. Not because we haven’t had a new mainline entry for the better part of a decade, but because it puts the player in the middle of a world that has been robbed of its humanity by nuclear devastation. What was left behind wasn’t nearly enough for those who survived to rebuild, so we did what we could with the shattered remnants instead.
I also thinkFallout 3 and New Vegas would be perfect for Nintendo Switch. Imagine blasting feral ghouls just before bed. Pure bliss.
The luscious forests and natural world we take for granted in the modern day have been replaced by an endless stretch of barren desert. Ground no longer allows anything to grow, so all we have are the burnt husks of dead trees and crops that struggle to flourish even centuries after the bombs fell. It’s a sad world to exist in, but one that Fallout still draws humour from in its subversive writing and excellent characters. I love this part of the games, but what I have always loved most is how desperate and alone they make you feel, even as you do the most simple of things.
New Vegas is significantly more upbeat than Fallout 3, but it is still so easy to lose yourself in its open world as you spend hours discovering new locations that have nothing to do with its main story. I stepped into countless derelict buildings that each told their own story. Random objects found throughout abandoned homes indicate that someone used to live here, until they were either killed or left it behind for greyer pastures. I picked up a few leftover supplies before checking the nearby terminal, digging into diary entries that helped me piece together exactly what might have happened here.
Sometimes you aren’t even afforded this context, and you’re asked to use only the world that stands before you to piece together your own stories. To create characters or circumstances that once mattered, but much like you, they saw this place as a broken home and moved on.
There could be smaller garages and workplaces or entire industrial facilities too, and often you’ll only ever stumble across fellow scavengers or roaches picking at the rotting flesh of what’s left. Sporting archaic graphics and gameplay mechanics, this only adds to the emptiness of it all so many years later. A primitive rendition of the apocalypse where less is so much more. It reminds me of a single moment in Fallout 3 that will forever stick with me.
You can activate Ham Radios in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but the majority of them give out nothing but static. But sometimes, it can pick up a stray signal you can lock onto with a trusty PipBoy, helping to point you in a certain direction or hear the fleeting voice of someone who is long dead. But this particular distress signal sounded especially desperate. So I did my best to follow it, bounding across hills and taking out super mutants until I stumbled on what appeared to be an old sewer grate. The signal was stronger now, so I stepped inside hoping to find someone I could help.
What awaited me was a quartet of skeletons, huddled together for warmth next to empty containers and a radio that was putting out the signal I’d spent the past hour chasing. They’d been dead for decades, yet part of me still wanted them to be alive. It was naive of me, so I switched off the radio, walked away, and basked in the loneliness of it all yet again.
You have to tune out the tragedy of it all after a while, and find the beauty of small towns and settlements filled with people who are also doing everything they can to survive. The biggest triumph from these games comes from how they can make you feel heart wrenchingly alone, where your only companion is your own melancholy until you stumble across a radscorpion ready to eat you for lunch. It allows your mind to wander, to make up events that compliment the lore that Fallout feeds us. That alone is a feeling that has forever stuck with me.
Fallout 3
WHERE TO PLAY
Fallout 3 takes place in a ruined area around Washington D.C. two hundred years after the Great War. In a game met with critical acclaim, you must traverse this wasteland looking for your father, while solving the mystery of his disappearance.
