After hours trekking across the wasteland, swatting away bloatflies and squashing hordes of ghouls, the end is in sight. Or at least Hoover Dam is. It’s the intimidating final stageof Fallout New Vegas, and no matter your path until this point, you’ll have to pick a side and fight an explosive battle to irrevocably change the fate of the Mojave.
A fate that is reported, rather than told, through a series of end slides – before you’re taken to a save from before the battle. Ah.
It’s a slightly frustrating ending, particularly when post-game content is so often used in RPGs to display the impact of a player’s decisions. Even in Red Dead Redemption 2 (not an RPG), you can still find special encounters in the epilogue depending on whether you helped certain people in the past. It’s possible to leave a tangible mark on the world, and it shows your decisions went beyond the moment to have long-term repercussions.
This is perhaps why the lack of post-game content Fallout New Vegas – which to me boasts some of the best narrative design in any game – feels like such a missed opportunity. Yet this abrupt ending wasn’t Obsidian’s intention. Post-game content was part of Obsidian’s original plan for Fallout New Vegas, and had to be cut mid-development due to time constraints.