The thing that makes Fallout New Vegas endlessly replayable is being able to choose who to side with out of its various factions. You want to work for the NCR? You want to help the Followers of the Apocalypse? You want to collect scalps for Caesar? That’s on you.
Looking back at Fallout 3 for Game Informer’s oral history, designer Emil Pagliarulo pointed out that in Bethesda’s first Fallout, “There are no factions. You can’t join the factions, right? You join the Brotherhood of Steel, but that’s the main quest. I remember at one point, our lead animator at the time, Hugh Riley, he made a comment in a meeting that said, ‘We have the opposite of feature creep. We have feature seep,’ meaning that we were cutting things. We were really smart about cutting things, because we knew that we couldn’t do it.”
You meet the Boomers as part of the main storyline, but whether you hang around and help them with their giant ant problem and array of busted solar panels is up to you. Same goes for the Kings and the Great Khans and the Three Families and everyone else. Every town has its own measure of your reputation. By the end of the game, the Mojave is a map of people who are thriving or rotting—all because of you.
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