New Vegas Was the Best Fallout, and Obsidian Knows It

Fallout: New Vegas was the best entry in the series—I’ll defend that. The third game was good, meaningfully better than the fourth, but New Vegas had something the others didn’t: a specific, weird personality. The writing was sharper, the factions were more interesting, and the Mojave Wasteland rewarded you for actually looking at it. So when Fallout 4 arrived with its voiced protagonist and its scripted dialogue choices that all said the same thing in slightly different tones, I felt the loss like a cash withdrawal I hadn’t authorized.

The people who made New Vegas—Obsidian Entertainment—never got the Fallout license back after that. Bethesda kept it. But Obsidian has now announced The Outer Worlds, which is, by every indication, New Vegas in space. You wake up at the far end of the galaxy in a place called the Halcyon colony, and everything about the setup—the factions, the moral ambiguity, the promise that decisions actually propagate through the story—reads like the DNA of the game I’ve been waiting for since 2010. That particular promise has been made and broken by enough studios that I’ve started treating it as aspirational rather than contractual. But Obsidian’s track record is better than most.

Their resume includes Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and South Park: The Stick of Truth, all of which delivered something close to what was promised. Shooting and talking your way through strange towns, deserts, and alien terrain while the story actually responds to your choices—if any studio can make that work again, it’s probably them. The Outer Worlds is coming to Windows, PS4, and Xbox One. I’ll be watching it closely.