Hello there, new Fallout fan. You’re looking well. I hear you just finished the excellent Amazon Prime Fallout series and fancied seeing what else this universe has to offer? Excellent choice. Welcome to the party!
Odds are most of you newcomers finished up Fallout and decided to head to the last game in the series, 2015’s Fallout 4. I suppose you could have gone for Fallout 76, but if you’re after a proper single-player Fallout adventure then Fallout 4 likely appears the most alluring of the bunch, especially with the recent release of the shiny-new gen update and a whole stack of mod support on consoles as well as PC.
Maybe you’ve just started Fallout 4 and emerged from the vault to an open world filled with possibility. Maybe you’re already deep into the game and loving it. Whatever the case, I need you to hold your horses and do one thing for me before you go any further. Believe me when I say this is in aid of getting the very best Fallout experience.
Are you ready? This is a complicated and lengthy procedure, so I hope you’re paying attention.
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- Step 1: Uninstall Fallout 4.
- Step 2: Go get Fallout: New Vegas instead.
I should probably make it clear at this point that I am joking, but only kind of. If you’re having fun with Fallout 4 that’s brilliant and I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from you. But if you feel Fallout 4 isn’t quite giving you what the Amazon Prime series gave you, I can confidently say you need to make the switch to New Vegas.
Some caveats: Yes, Fallout: New Vegas is an older game. It’s a little rougher around the edges than Fallout 4, and maybe even more broken if that’s possible. It also has something Fallout 4 doesn’t: a well-written story and the feeling that you’re playing a proper RPG where your choices really matter.
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Fallout 4 is a great game. I have a lot of time for it. But I would argue it’s largely unfocused, and frequently buckles under the weight of its own scope. There’s too much to do, not enough of it interesting or varied enough to make you want to keep pushing through the radioactive rubble. It also places a much larger focus on action and shooting, which is lovely if that’s what you’re after, but not ideal if you want a game where you don’t have to gun your way through every situation.
Fallout: New Vegas is a much smaller game, and all the more focused for it. Developed by RPG aficionados Obsidian, it’s a game that puts a much greater emphasis on the role-playing elements of the series. The shooting is clunky, yes, because shooting everything in sight is rarely the only possible solution, though you can totally do that if you want to.
New Vegas invites you to really explore, speak to people, form your own opinions, and use what you’ve learned about the world to navigate increasingly complex and morally grey situations. Who gets access to electricity, who takes charge of an army of killer robots, who distributes food and water, these are all choices you’ll make in any given playthrough.
It’s also up to you how much you engage with the main story. You can, if you really want to, march straight up to the New Vegas strip and enact bloody vengeance. It’d be a challenge, and you’d miss out on a lot of great quests, but it’d be your choice.
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If you play Fallout: New Vegas on an Xbox Series console you can enjoy an increased resolution and improved framerate. If you’re on PC you can ram it full of mods to fix bugs and overhaul dated textures. There are ways to make it look and feel less dated, if you really need to fiddle with it. But at its core, Fallout: New Vegas is the ultimate distillation of everything that makes Fallout great, and it’s not a game newcomers can afford to miss.