15 Years Ago, An Unlikely Spinoff Became One Of The Best RPGs Ever Made

Copyright Inverse

The spinoff of a popular first-person RPG series gets handed off to a new studio that’s never made a first-person game before. Envisioned as an expansion, it grows into a full game, though its developer has only 18 months to finish it. It launches with a host of bugs that make it frustrating if not unplayable for large parts of its audience. That might sound like a nightmare, but instead, it ended up as a nearly universally beloved entry in the series, frequently cited as one of the best RPGs of all time. That’s the story of Fallout: New Vegas in brief. Despite the strange circumstances of its development and the buggy way it came into the world, New Vegas was praised immediately after its release on October 19, 2010, and it’s only grown into more of a classic in the years since. And just in time for its 15th anniversary, it’s also available for free with Amazon Prime this month, in case you’ve somehow slept on it all this time. In many ways, playing New Vegas feels a lot like playing its predecessor, Fallout 3. One common critique of the game at launch was just how similar the two are, with only minimal gameplay changes being implemented between them. But while the core of New Vegas’ combat and exploration is nearly identical to that of Fallout 3, it’s a huge step up in how it presents its world and story — which are the strongest aspects of the game by far. New Vegas starts you off in about the worst position you could be in. Ambushed while running a delivery job, you begin the game by being shot in the head and left buried in a shallow grave in the desert. Fortunately, you’re soon discovered by a security robot and taken to a doctor who saves your life, setting you on a course of vengeance against the person who left you for dead. From that relatively simple revenge story, New Vegas blossoms into a struggle for the fate of the post-apocalyptic world you find yourself in. Following the move to Washington, D.C., in Fallout 3, New Vegas returns the series to the West Coast — specifically, Las Vegas, Nevada. Taking place shortly after the mostly unconnected previous game, New Vegas centers on a struggle for control of the Hoover Dam. Three factions are fighting for the dam, each with a very different vision of how they’d like to reshape the Mojave Wasteland, but none are straightforward in their means or motives, and there’s no purely “good” way of ending the conflict. That’s a large part of what makes New Vegas successful. While you could easily decide that the quasi-democratic New California Republic is a much better choice than the slavers of Caesar’s Legion, every faction is morally compromised, and deciding which drawbacks you’re willing to live with or try to mitigate makes your choices feel far more meaningful than if the game were a simple black-and-white struggle. While the fight for the Hoover Dam is the backbone of New Vegas’ story, it really succeeds on the margins. The game is stuffed with entirely side quests and characters you’re never forced to interact with, and the moments that truly make it a classic are mostly found here in these totally optional corners of the world. More than just interesting moments, the stories that unfold outside of main quests are where you learn what life in the Mojave Wasteland is truly like, cementing it as one of the most fascinating RPG settings ever. All that from a game that seems to have grown out of circumstances you couldn’t replicate if you tried. In the early 2000s, Fallout creator Black Isle Studios was at work on Van Buren, a project that was set to become the third Fallout game, when a group of employees left to found Obsidian Entertainment. At the end of 2003, Van Buren was cancelled, and Obsidian honed its skills on classics like Knights of the Old Republic. In the meantime, the rights to Fallout were purchased by Bethesda, which went on to create Fallout 3, bringing a first-person perspective to the series for the first time. Given Obsidian’s connection to Fallout and the clear ability of the team to tell a great RPG story, Bethesda contracted the studio to create a Fallout 3 spinoff while Bethesda itself was at work on Skyrim. Obsidian took the project and ran with it, leaning on its story-telling chops while reusing as much as possible from Fallout 3’s gameplay to reduce unnecessary work. The results speak for themselves. A decade and a half after its release, Fallout: New Vegas is one of the best games in the series, with a dedicated community that’s still making mods for the game to this day. Those mods, along with official patches from Obsidian, have also cleaned up the bugs that plagued its original release, making New Vegas an even better game now than the already-great version of it available at launch. No list of the best RPGs ever would be complete without New Vegas, and its 15th anniversary is a great time to see why if you haven’t already experienced it.