Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas was built by Obsidian Entertainment on Fallout 3's technology, but tells a completely different story, and many players still consider it the peak of the modern series. The hero is a courier who is shot and left in a shallow grave at the start of the game, and the quest for revenge quickly turns into the question of who will rule Mojave: the militaristic New California Republic, the slave-holding Caesar's Legion, the mysterious Mr. House of the New Vegas casinos, or none of them. The world is more compact than the Capital Wasteland, but far more densely packed with factions whose interests constantly intersect.

A reputation system tracks your standing with each group and with individual towns separately, so decisions have traceable consequences, and the ending splits into several fundamentally different outcomes. The hardcore mode returns, requiring you to eat, drink, and sleep, with healing no longer instantaneous. Weapon modding was added, along with cooking and ammo crafting at a workbench, and much richer skill checks in dialogue, letting entire sections of the game be resolved through talk instead of gunfire. Combat uses the familiar V.A.T.S., but manual aimed shooting is noticeably more usable than in the predecessor, and weapons have better feedback. New Vegas also received a series of story expansions that bring the courier's fate to a much more personal close.

The PlayStation 3 version was notorious after launch for technical problems, from frame-rate drops to quest bugs, and some of these persisted even after patches. Even so, the atmosphere wins out: the parched desert, western motifs, radio jingles full of country and swing, and Inon Zur's music together create a space unlike anything else. Critics received the game very well, even though its technical state dragged down scores at the time, and over the years New Vegas became the benchmark for writing a reactive RPG with real choices. Today it's most comfortable to play on PC with patches, but even the console version offers dozens of hours of a beautifully written world.