Fallout: New Vegas is arguably one of the best received open-world RPGs of the last decade and has left many fans hoping that Obsidian may be able to develop another game in the series in the future. Earlier this year, Microsoft began the process of acquiring Bethesda, and since Microsoft already owns Obsidian, it could allow for another collaboration between the developers.
However, a sequel to Fallout: New Vegas–whether it’s a direct sequel or a spiritual successor set elsewhere in the wasteland–will need to avoid the original’s biggest problem. New Vegas may be a great game, but when comparing some features to those originally planned by Obsidian, the contrast is stark.
Early concepts for the New Vegas strip showed it being far larger than the one realized in-game. Concepts are rarely able to be fully realized in-game, but even the Fallout E3 press demo showed a larger version of New Vegas. Still, there are still areas that players can access in-game using console commands that were originally planned to expand the Strip but were eventually left empty due to time constraints.
New Vegas, supposedly one of few surviving booming cities in the post-war United States, is reduced to a couple of thinly populated streets in-game. Even the city’s supposedly packed slum, Freeside, is far from densely populated, and New Vegas comes across as more of a fort built around Mr. House and the Lucky 38 Casino than an actual city.
Fallout is better positioned to get away with small cities than a series like The Elder Scrolls. At the very least, the small size of Fallout’s cities and their small populations can be partially justified by how few people and places survived the Great War of 2077. Nonetheless, the original concepts for the New Vegas Strip suggest that the game could have had a very different feel.
As it stands, Fallout: New Vegas is ironically one of the Fallout games which spends the least time in a city despite being named after one. The city of New Vegas doesn’t sprawl out over the Mojave Wasteland like the ruins of Boston of Washington DC in Fallout 4 and 3 respectively. New Vegas focuses more on the wasteland itself than the ruins of civilizations left behind. Not only was New Vegas able to escape nuclear annihilation thanks to Mr. House, but much of the Mojave remains relatively unscathed by the fallout for the simple reason that it was already a desert to begin with.
The early concepts present a version of New Vegas which is more balanced between its wasteland cowboy aesthetic and the film noir aesthetics of the city thanks to the urban area taking up a larger part of the game. If New Vegas had been given more development time, it’s possible it would have struck a rural-urban balance rarely seen in the Fallout games, which tend to take place in the sprawl of a single city.
It’s possible, on the one hand, that Obsidian might be given the opportunity to develop a direct sequel to Fallout: New Vegas. In that case, the developer could create a version of the city of New Vegas closer to its original plans, but this seems unlikely. For a start, building a new New Vegas would risk making the original game feel far less immersive, with it being constantly clear that the world presented in the original Fallout: New Vegas is vastly smaller than it is in the lore, something open-world games often go to great lengths to obscure.
Even if there never is a New Vegas 2, however, there are some big takeaways that can be learned by fans as well as both Obsidian and Bethesda as the studios develop rival open-world RPGs. If nothing else fans can take comfort in the fact that while there are no upcoming announced Fallout games, it’s better to wait longer than it is to have a product rushed. This has been made blatantly apparent this month, with fans of series like GTA increasingly happy to wait longer for GTA 6 to avoid a bug-filled launch like Cyberpunk 2077’s.
For Bethesda, Fallout: New Vegas shows that there are more places to explore in the Fallout universe than ruined cities. Some of the Mojave Wasteland’s most isolated areas are great for getting the true cowboy experience, and while Bethesda’s single-player Fallout games have found success with primarily urban settings, there could be more of a balance to be struck.
For Obsidian, the inability of Fallout: New Vegas to really realize its titular city leaves a future opportunity wide open – there still hasn’t been a Bethesda-produced Fallout game to show a fully restored, thriving wasteland city. Indeed, the Fallout series has always erred on the side of making its cities look like the bombs just dropped despite the games often taking place multiple centuries after the Great War.
If Obsidian isn’t able to make another Fallout game, these lessons could still be applied to another Obsidian IP like a sequel to The Outer Worlds. Perhaps cities like The Outer Worlds’ Byzantium could be expanded from the sliver seen in the first game, for example. Whatever the future of Obsidian and Bethesda is, many Fallout fans will still be left wistful imagining what could have been if the New Vegas Strip had been given more time and resources in an already iconic game.
Fallout: New Vegas 2 isn’t confirmed to be in development.
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