Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas begins with the player's character taking a bullet to the head, surviving it, and heading across the Mojave desert after the man who pulled the trigger. Within a few hours, this simple revenge story turns into a political thriller about who will control the Hoover Dam and, with it, the entire region. The New California Republic, Caesar's slaver Legion, a mysterious casino owner, and small factions across the map all have their own interests, and the player can befriend or antagonize any of them. A reputation system tracks behavior separately for each group and each settlement, so decisions carry weight even dozens of hours later. The finale can be played out in four fundamentally different ways, and none of them is written as the correct one.

Gameplay is built on a combination of first-person action and the tactical V.A.T.S. system, which lets you stop time and allocate action points to individual body parts of an enemy. Compared to the previous entry, it added weapon modifications, elaborate cooking and ammo crafting, and a so-called Hardcore mode, where you have to eat, drink, and sleep and where healing isn't instant. On Xbox 360 the game ran on the same technology as Fallout 3 and carried its flaws as well: frame-rate drops in more densely populated areas, occasional crashes, and quest-script bugs. Visually it bet on a parched yellow-brown palette, beautifully complemented by a radio playing swing and country from the mid-20th century, which feels almost oppressive against the ruins.

Reviews at launch praised the writing and structure while also flagging the technical state. It's precisely the quality of New Vegas's writing that over time made it the title cited as the benchmark for what a consistent RPG world with real consequences of choice should look like. The influence can be seen across a whole range of later games that borrowed the faction system and the idea that the player doesn't have to be a hero. Today it mainly stands as proof that written content ages more slowly than technology. The graphics are dated, the dialogue and dilemmas are not, and four expansions add dozens more hours of content on top.