Fallout: New Vegas is a sprawling RPG filled with sketchy factions, greasy NPCs, rubbery morality, and tough decisions, all of which ultimately lead the player to one of four possible outcomes that share one thing in common: They’re not great. Which isn’t to say they’re not satisfying, just that there’s no optimal outcome where everybody’s happy and nobody gets hurt. The wasteland is a pretty crappy place, after all, so outcomes tend to be crappy too.
In a recent interview on The Examined Game with Steven Lake, New Vegas designer and director Josh Sawyer revealed his own personal ‘best of a bad lot’ pick for the endgame, and it’s independence all the way.
“It is very hard. I mean, some people would say like, I love Caesar, and great,” Sawyer said. “But it’s kind of hard to hand everything over to an individual like Caesar or Mr. House. It feels dangerous. And then with NCR, you just realize like, man, they got a lot of problems. Like, they have a lot of problems right now. They’re doing things for a lot of very questionable reasons.
“Even if you find people that you feel are very virtuous and and are sacrificing a lot to fight in the Mojave and not because they’re trying to be imperialistic, even though NCR is being very imperialistic, it’s difficult to wrestle with that and come away and say like, yeah, I think NCR is great.”
For Sawyer, then—and most players, apparently—an independent New Vegas is the least worst choice. “I know it’s going to be dysfunctional, I know it’s going to be bureaucratic, I know there’s going to be corruption—but also it hasn’t been tried yet, right? Like we haven’t organized this yet, so let’s give it a try.”
Sawyer said Obsidian tried to portray independence as having its own “drawbacks of dysfunction,” arising from the proliferation of bureaucracy and the corruption that inevitably follows. Even so, I think I have to agree that it’s probably the way to go: If there’s one thing history keeps on trying to teach us, it’s that handing the keys to an unstable autocrat or a fascist military superpower (or, god forbid, both at the same time) never goes well.
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For myself, I wrapped up Fallout: New Vegas with a fifth option that isn’t canon, strictly speaking, but is my head canon: I got so sick of getting jerked around by the competing Mojave factions that when Mr. House asked me to take out the Brotherhood of Steel, I just packed up my stuff and wandered back out into the desert, never to return. Was I a little bored with Fallout: New Vegas at that point, after sinking countless dozens of hours into it? Sure. But turning my back on the grasping travails of the last ragged remnants of humanity and disappearing into swirling sand and crackling radiation, to be remembered only as that guy who did that stuff—that’s real warrior of the wasteland stuff, baby.
Sawyer, in case you hadn’t heard, is reportedly heading up a new Fallout project at Obsidian, which would be nice except that it came amidst the recent major cuts at Xbox, which saw roughly 25% of the studio’s workforce let go and the cancellation of multiple other projects, including a sequel to Avowed.
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