4.5/5 ★ – eatpotatochip's review of Fallout: New Vegas.

BioWare and Obsidian are two of my favourite game studios. Both are western RPG developers that have made games that have deeply affected me, and it's fascinating to see the different trajectories these game studios ultimately took. BioWare is more prestigious, successful and influential, but being owned by a giant publisher has clearly affected their recent work to a point that their most recent game, Anthem, was a trend-chasing loot-based shooter with none of the famous world building or characters that BioWare is traditionally known for, and it's the only PC game of theirs that I haven't played, and have no intention of playing. Obsidian, on the other hand, is slightly newer (made by the employees of Black Isle, an old RPG studio and BioWare contemporary that made the original Fallout games and Planescape: Torment, among others, and ultimately closed down), and started out by making sequels to BioWare and Bethesda RPGs before eventually making their own original properties, and they've always been known for two things - being in perpetual financial trouble since their inception, and making incredibly well-written, experimental and ambitious RPGs that they've rarely had the resources to perfect and polish. I had played basically every Obsidian game except for Fallout: New Vegas (their most famous, successful and well-known game), so this month I decided to finally take the plunge and play it properly. A small Fallout primer - the first two games were late 90s isometric RPGs with turn-based combat, and when Bethesda bought the franchise IP and made a new entry around ten years later (with the massively successful Fallout 3), it made a third-person RPG that took the open-world mechanics and feel of their other flagship series, Elder Scrolls, and added a pseudo turn-based slow motion mechanic and gunplay to reference its predecessors. While it was massively critically acclaimed at the time, retrospective reviews are slightly cooler towards it, citing the lacklustre story and writing, as well as the poor shooting mechanics, as proof that they needed some time to iterate and improve on their formula. With Obsidian having a lot of ex-Black Isle members, when Bethesda contracted them to make a spinoff sequel set in a post-apocalyptic version of the Mojave desert, there was a fair amount of experience and prestige brought forward to the project. And while Fallout: New Vegas didn’t immediately get critical acclaim and a bunch of accolades, the passage of time has vindicated its position as one of the best modern western RPGs. It's a extremely long game - with all 4 DLC, the playtime goes up to 50 hours - and I finished it literally yesterday. And yeah, this is definitely one of their absolute bests. Obsidian has a knack for putting competing factions and ideologies in its games and providing opportunities for you to connect and work with them, and the studio’s writers use these groups to deepen the world of their games. For example, Pillars of Eternity 2 had a whole bunch of faction sidequests that gave you a bunch of culturally opposed groups consisting of casteists, capitalists and colonialists; Knights of the Old Republic 2, by contrast, gave you contrasting factions in most of the planets that gave new perspectives on the Light and Dark side of the Force. This game might be their most accomplished in that aspect - there are over a dozen factions and groups to work for, investigate and align yourself with, and it even allows you to carve your own path to independence - just like in another RPG of theirs, the heavily underrated Tyranny. The DLCs for New Vegas are also notable and fun, but they also made me think about how RPG DLCs are pretty strange by design - nearly all of them introduce a huge map and a bunch of places to explore and powerful weapons/armour to find, and they’re usually designed to be played anytime before the main story’s end, which means you have to stop whatever the game’s plot is guiding you towards, disrupting the carefully designed pace of the main campaign to immerse yourself in another expansive (if smaller) mini-campaign with its own quirks and characters to find. They’re usually designed for returning players, but people playing a “Premium Edition” for the first time (which is usually a bundle including the game and all its DLCs) can feel a severe tonal/gameplay whiplash because of this. The only game where I’ve seen such DLC work well is Mass Effect 2, and even that was because the original game was such a varied modular experience by design that the DLCs slotted themselves in perfectly. Either way, though, even with the poor combat mechanics it inherits from Fallout 3, it's a great experience with lots of replay value, and I'll definitely play it again someday.