Ever since the Fallout franchise was taken over by Bethesda Softworks, there’s been something of a mixed reaction to how the games have changed. Instead of the older style of Fallout and Fallout 2, which were fairly similar to the Diablo franchise in terms of gameplay, Bethesda’s additions to the Fallout franchise play more like their Elder Scrolls series. Some people, especially those that never played the pre-Bethesda Fallout games, welcomed the change, since The Elder Scrolls is widely accepted as excellent games, to the point where people are still buying copies of Skyrim now. But at the same time, there does seem to be something lacking from the newer Fallout games, as while the gameplay of Fallout 4 is almost identical to Skyrim, most people agree that the writing of Fallout 4 is nowhere near The Elder Scrolls’ quality.
Ever since Bethesda Softworks took over the franchise, there have been four Fallout games added to the series: Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Fallout: New Vegas, the last of which was made by Obsidian Entertainment wearing a Bethesda mask. What I’ve always found odd is that, while people seem to describe most of these games as having mediocre to outright bad storytelling, the one game that everyone seems to agree is good in every way is Fallout: New Vegas. What I find particularly interesting about this is that New Vegas is easily the most politically charged of the Fallout franchise.
The basic overall conflict of New Vegas deals with the fact that Las Vegas was never a military target to be hit by nuclear weapons during the war. This means that, while radiation still wiped out a lot of people, and mutations still roam the land, many of the buildings and facilities are still around and can be put back into working condition again, including the Hoover Dam.
Three different armies are now pooling their resources together to annex the city and take the dam for themselves. A fourth faction (kind of) emerges if the player decides to overthrow one of the others and push for Vegas to be an independent city. These four factions each represent their own political viewpoints, and I think the secret to New Vegas’s success lies in the way it handles each of these factions.
The New California Republic, usually referred to as the NCR, represent a democratic nation that offers to add Las Vegas to their nation, presumably with the rights that that would include, and in my first playthrough I assumed they would be the “good guys.” Turns out, the political machine of the NCR is large and unwieldly. I can only remember a single instance of genuine corruption displayed by the NCR in the entire game by a guy smuggling their military weapons and selling them on the side, and yet, even when everyone else in their entire faction is working for what they think is the good of their nation, they are bogged down by things like communication issues between the front lines and their president back in California, scientists who have genuinely good intentions but see people as statistics and assume they know best, and a military that steamrolls over the local tribes of Vegas and can start violent fights with the locals in the city, or flat out slaughters tribes like the Great Khans.
And you can’t entirely fault the NCR for the latter, because the Great Khans as a culture are nearly irredeemable, what with the raiding other tribes, or the fact that when a minor faction of doctors taught them how to make medical supplies, they immediately use this knowledge to make drugs and sells them to chem fiends. Even the AI Yes Man who is programmed to be unfailingly polite can’t come up with anything positive to say about them. And yet, the fact that the Khans completely deserved what happened to them doesn’t let the NCR off the hook; there are still consequences for driving a vicious and violent tribe off of their land, even if they were harassing their neighbors, even when all of said neighbors cheered to see the Khans removed, the best option they had still results in the remainder of the Great Khans want to join their enemies in the fight for the dam, the soldiers who participated in the Battle of Bitter Springs are often remorseful and shell-shocked, and the NCR still gets labeled genocidal for what was arguably the best choice they had at the time.
The bottom line is that the NCR has good intentions, is less corrupt than the American government today, and they still fail. The game doesn’t present them as a caricature of democracy, or show them failing because of some nihilistic message about humans being awful. Even when everyone is doing their best, things still fall apart.
On the opposite side, we have the Legion, which is a militaristic faction following a dictator where no one really has rights, all women are enslaved, and the men are drafted into an ever-growing military that rejects technology. You would think that they’d exclusively be the “bad guys,” but again, the story shows the pros and cons for their side.
For all the problems with the Legion, the one thing everyone who lives under their rule agrees upon is that the Legion brings order. In a chaotic wasteland full of lawless raiders (who probably do even worse to women than the Legion), radioactive mutants that like to eat or mutate humans, robots that have gone amok, and even just wild animals, anyone who can bring law and order looks really friendly. And the territory of New Vegas, outside of the city itself, is overrun with all sorts of nasties that the NCR don’t seem to be able to stop. The Legion drafts little boys into its army and puts them through hellish training as early as ten years old, and they have the manpower to keep these problems under control. The NCR is an apparently free country that doesn’t appear to be implementing a draft at the moment, and their spread too thin to deal with the problems of the wasteland. Even though they’re a fascist dictatorship, you can completely understand why people would side with the Legion, and not just for that one mission where you get to kill the NCR president.
The third faction involves Mr. House, a robotics tycoon who has kept himself alive for two hundred years through advanced medical technology, is former citizen of Las Vegas, and currently dwells in a towering casino called “the Lucky 38” (a literal ivory tower, if you will) and he offers a third option as an alternative to the other two armies: with an army of his own made of durable robots armed with rocket launchers, grenades, gatling lasers and submachineguns, he will repel the two armies and secure New Vegas as his own city, which he will own.
This third option might be called state-capitalism. Mr. House will own everything, he will allow everyone else to live under him like serfs/tenants, and will use the shear power of his economic and military might to reshape the city into whatever he wants. He even has plans to seek out and colonize new worlds not tainted by radiation, and it’s easy to see this as an appealing option. The downside is that Mr. House is one of those geniuses who has absolutely no respect for the average person, or for human life in general, openly refers to himself as an autocrat, and is so detached from any real human emotions (apart from smugness, and even that might just be the result of his voice recordings and the picture displayed on his computer screen), and he does not really care about any of the people he’s planning to rule.
His lack of emotions might be his best-selling point, as he’s clearly disconnected from most of the pettiness we might associate with dictators in real life, and he has no physical body anymore that could engage in sexual exploitation of his female underlings (a major problem with kings going all the way back to ancient Sumeria), but at the same time, can you really trust the future of New Vegas and its people in the hands of someone who just doesn’t care about human beings? Someone who barely sees people as anything other than a commodity?
The final option is to overthrow Mr. House and install a subservient AI named Yes Man, which allows you to take control of House’s robots and repel the two invading armies. That means you can run New Vegas however you want, and avoid the problems of the other three choices, right? Except, some of the minor factions of the wasteland aren’t going to listen to you, no matter what you do. For example, you can get the Great Khans to avoid working with the Legion, but they do not seem to ever change their ways, and leave the Mojave Wasteland forever. The Brotherhood of Steel, a minor faction obsessed with preventing outsiders from having any access to military technology, will not sit idly by while New Vegas is patrolled by robots, and will permanently be at was with the player in the Yes Man ending, no matter how much good reputation the player built with the Brotherhood throughout the events of the game (there is no good ending for the Brotherhood of Steel unless you side with the NCR and smooth over negotiations between the two). The robots also have a limited operation range, meaning that they can only be controlled fairly well when relatively close to New Vegas, and thus cannot be used to protect settlements like Goodsprings or Primm (starter towns that are a long way from the main city), while the chem fiends that plague parts of New Vegas are still running around, now without the NCR soldiers to keep them down. Choosing this option avoids all of the issues of siding with the democracy of the NCR, the dictatorship of the Legion, or the state-capitalism of Mr. House, but it comes with new problems of its own.
What I think makes New Vegas so good, so much that it still holds up today, is the fact that the political angles are all shown in such a way that none of the ideas they represent are deliberately insulted, or berated. There are no strawmen, none of the people representing the ideas are shown to be wrong for purely arbitrary reasons, and each side is allowed to make its case. Unlike much of what passes for political commentary today, New Vegas feels like it wasn’t trying to insult half of its audience in the most ham-fisted way possible, but was simply using politics to tell an interesting story, and at the same time, make an excellent video game.
I have heard people complain before that they want fewer politics in media, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I think people enjoy having media that gives them a break from politics now and then, but I think what people really want is to see different political views, where the author isn’t just trying to make a one-sided argument. And one of the things that fiction like fantasy and sci-fi is very good at is showing us complex issues from multiple angles. Fallout: New Vegas takes this element and runs with it, showing us that whichever faction you or the NPCs (or other people playing their own game), there are good reasons for and against it, and no one is siding with a faction purely because they’re an evil caricature or an idiot, but because they have different values, shaped by their own backstories and politics.
Because politics, politics never changes.
