Fallout New Vegas 2. Yes, really.

 Be still my beating heart

So I know fairly well that I have sort of a precedent here; I've lost my heart and mind over the prospect of a sequel to seminal role playing masterpiece 'Fallout New Vegas' once before, during the great Obsidian buyout by Microsoft. Of course, this coincided nicely with the Bethesda consolidation to make sure that both Fallout and Obsidian, the creators of that original, were finally under the same roof so that if they ever wanted to, the option to go back to the franchise who's world they rocked was fully open to them. And after Fallout 4, a game which forgot it was an RPG, and Fallout 76, a loosely strung-together block of scripts that forgot it was a game; we really needed a return to Devs who just knew what they were doing the whole time, you know? People who had history creating the Fallout franchise, understood the areas to focus on which made this franchise special, and were brave enough to push the world into new areas and reignite the fandom. And now it looks like that might be a reality.

Now of course, I'm a total hopeless romantic for stuff like this, so if I'm given the sliver of a whiff of more Fallout, you can bet I'm going to fall over myself being ready to believe it. A guy in a Freddy Fazbear fur-suit behind the local Pizza Hut at 4 in the morning telling me that Fallout New Vegas 2 was right around the corner would be enough to make me pump my hands in the air screaming "Yeah baby! This is what I've been waiting for- this is what it's all about!" But this isn't just idle speculation, allegedly. What we've got today is an honest to goodness, apparent, source who, potentially, has a track record for reliability, I'm told. (I'm trying to cover my bases, but god I want to believe this with all my heart so bad!) Word is that stupidly early talks are being had right now to make a sequel to New Vegas, and if that is even remotely true than let this explosion of tacit excitement be undeniable affirmation that we fans all want this! Let Microsoft hear that this needs to happen, sooner rather than later!

Famously, Fallout New Vegas was a game made in about 18 months using the tools left over from the development of Fallout 3. That original game was a powerhouse in it's own right with many at the time rightly considering it a masterpiece pinnacle of RPG action adventure gaming. That title lasted about as long as it took for us to have a tangible example of what the best in this field could look like, when New Vegas was released in October 2010. I personally remember being very dubious about a new Fallout game, having grown to love and thus be extremely protective of Fallout 3. I felt like this was an attempt to replace that game, to overwrite it's place in history. And... I guess it kinda was. New Vegas reminded us what it looked like to traverse a post war 'society', not just a collection of stragglers. (so more Fallout 2 than Fallout 1.) It gave us a more complex narrative with branching paths, greater customisation, supremely evolved characters and powerful enough tools to mod the game to heaven and back again. (Fallout New Vegas still gets new mods to this day; that's a sign of a game with staying power in the community.)

But then, of course, the base release of Fallout New Vegas fell just short of the requirements for the staff over at Obsidian to get their bonus from Bethesda. There was a deal in place that the reviews for the game need to hit a certain average point threshold to make Obsidian eligible for their bonus, and it was threshold they proved to be just shy of. Now, of course, there was a specific deal made in good faith and Obsidian staff have reiterated again and again how there are no hard feelings over that, not lingering and not even at the time; but for the memes it is funny to go back and say "Damn, if only Bethesda had given Obsidian their bonus; we'd have a whole series of Vegas-style Fallout games by now..." In truth, Bethesda probably just wanted stricter control of one of their flagship franchises and Obsidian were too busy to entreat Bethesda sincerely for another project. Which is fair, what with Obsidian working hard to summon necromantic eldritch energies to resurrect the Classic Role Playing Game genre back from the dead and thrust it into the mainstream. (For which they've done beautifully, by the way. Pillars is a hit and Tyranny is one of my new favourite games ever.)

Fallout New Vegas 2, which is all we can call this game at such an early stage of negotiations, actually has a world of expectation waiting for it should the project go ahead; because the very idea of this sub-entry to the Fallout series has unwittingly adopted a sort-of unblemished messianic reverence in the community that is sure to be daunting to approach. People think of New Vegas as the antidote to all of Fallout 3's shortcomings, when the truth is that is was just a vast improvement upon everything that previous game was. Ask reviewers from the time and they'll attest that New Vegas was so buggy they needed to call the local exterminators after each play session, and to be honest I think a bit of confirmation bias might have played into that. I mean the game had it's issue with bugs, sure, and it fell apart when you started modding unless you bent over backwards to support the engine with fixes and capability patches, but the base game wasn't that bad. Unless you played on Playstation. Oh god, the game was crash-ridden on Playstation.

For now all we can expect, and rub our hands excitedly about, is a new story set on the West Coast of America and perhaps loosely following the expansionism of the NCR. But the great thing about Obsidian is that wherever they go next, what new factions or conflicts they bring to light, will probably be so fresh we can't even take an educated guess right now. I hope they'll be another conflict with many different sides that the player can pursue like there was in Vegas, but I'd like there to be a bit more nuance tied into these characters so that it's not quite so easy to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad ones. Sure the NCR had their bad slivers and the Legion had it's slight advantages; but I don't think anyone could seriously scratch their heads and wonder who's the cleaner-cut of the two. I want the sort of complexity that has you flip-flopping until the very last moment, like the conflict between the various struggling factions in 'Pillars 2: Deadfire'.

I would also adore a take on DLC even reminiscent of what Obsidian did with New Vegas; because that was an exciting bread-crumb trail of teases and pay-offs better than what any poxxy live service has done in the time since. From the moment we finished Dead Money, the post-game credits screen was teasing fans about some world-shattering battle which would occur in the last DLC which hadn't even been announced yet. And the two next DLC's had references and teases about some shadowy figure called Ulysses that was hunting our Courier for reasons that we didn't know. That's three whole DLC's worth of build-up to a confrontation that inspired data-miners, speculation videos, excitable whispers, and everything of the like all up until the release of the 'Lonesome Road' DLC. It was exceptional. I need something like that once more, just to remind me what it's like to be excited again.

Fallout New Vegas 2 could very really be a reality at some point in the future, and I have dreamt about this so much over the past decade that it seems almost surreal to admit it all could come alive. I've had so many ideas and plots, idealisations and suppositions, that it's almost a shame that this substance-less dream phantom of a title will someday take shape, because the ethereal wisp seemed so pure. But would I rather have the dream or the reality? And with that choice there's very little conflict- I'd take the real thing any day of the week- warts and all. So now that I've got myself, and hopefully you, all worked up; prepare to wait another three or so years until we actually hear if the thing got greenlit! (God this industry moves so slow sometimes.)