Fallout: New Vegas

"From where you're kneeling it must seem like an 18-carat run of bad luck. Truth is... the game was rigged from the start."

If you've had the distinct misfortune of talking to a fallout fan, you might be aware of the widely held belief that Fallout: New Vegas is the best of the series. When an opinion on ANYTHING in a fandom is so widely held I can't help but get skeptical about whether that opinion deserves to be so popular. This is definitely one of those cases where the hype is warranted. New Vegas nails so many things other entires in the series fail to hit all at once: good writing, pacing, side quests, characters, puzzles, I could go on and on. This entry manages simply to do well in all these categories.

Some important context that explains why it's so different from the others is that it was developed by a completely different studio than Bethseda Game Studios who made the other 3D entries. Obsidian Studios where the ones who developed New Vegas. I'm no game dev studio historian but I do know that these fuckers cooked immensely. It pretty much looked exactly like the previous Fallout 3 but through a lot of immediate differences from a usual fallout intro, it set itself apart. Instead of starting in a vault or otherwise living inside a vault, you begin as a simple courier assigned to take a suspicious package which leads to him getting shot in the head and left in a ditch. You start this game as you wake up after being saved by a robot living in a local town. I feel like this intro is way better than the usual because this immerses you as a character already living in this unique and charming retrofuturist, post-apocalyptic world. The world itself has always been the real charm of fallout games, and this one's is the best example. The Mojave Wasteland is filled with the weirdest, silliest, odd fucks you've ever stumbled across and some will undoubtedly stick with you after you turn off the game.