New Vegas, as you could probably surmise, takes place in Nevada 200 years after a slew of nuclear detonations that have ravaged the United States. Thanks to Mr. House, a rich and driven entrepreneur, the Las Vegas strip still stands as a beacon in an otherwise desolate world. Despite this, the U.S has been irreversibly destroyed, and now a new way of life has surfaced in the Mojave, forcing those who wish to survive, to adapt and overcome the new challenges.
Upon starting the game, it is revealed that your character has been shot in the head and left to die in the small town of Goodsprings. Shortly after, you are pulled out of the grave by a robot and brought to the town doctor, Doc Mitchell. Somehow, he managed to patch you up. He introduces himself and gives you a psychological evaluation before letting you wander off into the desert. It's a miracle that he still has his medical license. Before you leave, he mentions stopping by the saloon to meet a woman named Sunny Smiles. She can show you the lay of the land and how to survive long enough to find your killer and get revenge. You take your first steps outside and are greeted by the view of a quaint town with a general store, saloon, and not much else.
This is where my love for Fallout: New Vegas truly bloomed. If you recall, Doc Mitchell mentioned heading to see a woman in the saloon. In any other videogame, your next objective would be to head inside and talk to the woman, giving you no option to do anything else, like a train on tracks. But New Vegas is different. From the moment you step outside into the wastes, you are given complete freedom. You could go talk to Sunny and have her teach you the ropes, but if you wander off to a little gas station just on the outskirts of town, you'll find a man hiding inside. He informs you that he has a crippling debt with a gang called the Powder Gangers and that he cannot pay. He fears for his life and asks you to gather the townspeople for help, rather than deal with it himself. You can either help him get rid of the powder gangers, thus removing the menace from the town and earning you respect. Or, you could help the powder gangers take over the town for supplies, money, and infamy. This decision is what made me fall in love with the world of New Vegas.
Interactions like these are common in Fallout, and they are entirely missable if you do not know where to look. This means the player who explores carefully and thoroughly is rewarded. Your reward? The ability to change the Mojave for better or worse.
This is a common feature of RPGs or role-playing games that has been missing from many games recently. Often, developers do not have the time or patience to add these kinds of choices to their games. As a result, they lose a lot of replayability because you know how the game will end if you've beaten it once. However, New Vegas takes the idea of choice to the extreme. Most quests have multiple resolutions and even an option to fail outright, giving you hundreds of combinations to complete a mission. This culminates in an end-of-game slideshow, showing you all the choices you made (or did not) to make the Mojave a better (or worse) place. This slideshow tells you the fate of the characters and civilizations you encountered during your playthrough. There are a total of 27 slides for each special character or location, with each slide having a multitude of variations depending on how you resolved their quests. With a little bit of digging and some math, we can find out exactly how many unique versions of this slideshow can play. Reddit user NessaMagick, provided a spreadsheet of the values all added together and the total might surprise you.
That's right. There are more than a QUADRILLION possible endings for Fallout: New Vegas. If you played every single day for 10 years you still wouldn't see every ending, and that's not including the four DLC packs.
I have never played another game quite like Fallout: New Vegas in my life. Its robust freedom, rich story, colorful characters, and profound philosophy solidify its place as my number one video game of all time. In the future, I expect more games will inch their way to the top of my list, but none will ever overthrow Fallout: New Vegas.
