Fallout: New Vegas is an action RPG developed by Obsidian Entertainment set in a post-nuclear Mojave Desert. As the Courier — left for dead and dumped in a shallow grave — players navigate a three-way war between the New California Republic, Caesar's Legion, and the mysterious Mr. House for control of New Vegas and the Hoover Dam.
Fallout: New Vegas is an action role-playing game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks, released in October 2010. Using the engine and framework of Fallout 3 while dramatically reworking its approach to storytelling and faction design, it follows the Courier — a package runner shot in the head and left for dead in the Mojave Wasteland — who must recover, find their attacker, and navigate the political upheaval threatening to reshape the post-nuclear American Southwest.
Where Fallout 3 told a relatively linear moral story, New Vegas is built around genuine political complexity. The New California Republic is a sprawling democratic federation stretched too thin, its soldiers exhausted and its politicians corrupt. Caesar's Legion is a brutal slaveholder empire that offers order through absolute subjugation. Mr. House is an enigmatic pre-war industrialist who has kept New Vegas running through sheer technological will. A fourth option — backing neither power and securing independence for the Mojave — is available to players willing to build the alliances themselves.
Each faction has multiple questlines, and decisions within them ripple across the world. Towns, settlements, and characters have histories that the player can learn through skill checks in Speech, Medicine, Science, and Survival. The game actively rewards preparation and knowledge, treating the Courier as an agent with leverage rather than a protagonist with a fixed destiny.
The Mojave Wasteland is drier and more open than the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3, its landmarks — Nipton, Novac, Boulder City, the Strip itself — each with a self-contained story that reflects the larger conflict. The writing, led by John Gonzalez with contributions from veterans including Chris Avellone, is among the most sophisticated in the series: morally serious, darkly funny, and willing to let the player be genuinely wrong without flagging it as such.
New Vegas launched in a notoriously buggy state and received solid but unspectacular reviews — mid-80s across platforms. Its reputation has grown substantially in the years since, and it is now widely regarded as the creative peak of the modern Fallout series and a landmark in RPG design for its commitment to player agency and faction-driven storytelling.