Fallout IX: Nuclear Cash Cows Go MMOoooooo!

[RagingKrikkit]

So, I need to decompress, and I guess that here is as good a place as any.

Seven years ago, I first had the Fallout recommended to me, actually on this board of all places. Two years later, on the recommendation of multiple men I met in basic training, I picked up both Fallout 3 and New Vegas for Xbox, and immediately developed a preference for the latter. I don't know if it was writing quality, the touch of Western flair, the lack of a green filter or simply the presence of working ironsights, but while I hardly made it out of Megaton before abandoning 3, New Vegas kept me enraptured all the way to Freeside, before the influx of disposable income that comes with having room and board covered by the taxpayers led me to acquire a decent computer. This in turn led to a new game on said computer, taking me into the second act proper before the loss of my autosave file cost me a particularly egregious amount of time since my previous manual save.

This more or less killed my investment into New Vegas for the next several years, only returning to it last year as I first tried my hand at modding. Or perhaps I should say killed my investment in playing it. Those years spent not playing New Vegas were spent relentlessly spoiling myself on it. Quests, companions, endings, the whole nine yards. Except for one thing.

For some reason, there was one corner of New Vegas that I refused to be spoiled on, a corner that got me to click away from anything as quickly as I could. I wasn't always fast enough, but I was largely content that I had done a decent job of remaining ignorant. Earlier this year, I finally returned to New Vegas and made it stick. I roamed the wastes, I sent ghouls to space, I raised a bomber from the depths, I shot a man in the head with his own gun because irony demanded it, I took copious amounts of drugs and killed a ghost bear that was on fire with a knife, I lead a two-man assault on the most fortified position in the Mojave, I had my brain ripped out, but yesterday, I finally learned the last secret of New Vegas, the one I had spent so long avoiding, so that I might see it myself. The secret that got me to unsubscribe from Oxhorn a full year before it became cool to do so.

Yesterday, I walked that Lonesome Road, and after realizing that trying to summarize the entire experience would take hours, I guess I should just summarize the two major things I took away from it. Firstly, that it was truly grueling. A mix of very hard difficulty, hardcore mode and my particular flavor of combat mods that doesn't massively decrease time to kill, but does severely nerf healing items turned the Divide into every bit the brutal hellscape I had heard it to be.

Secondly, and, more importantly, my trip down that road did something that years of debate, argument, jingoism and general memery had failed to do: it got me to change sides. I've long discounted the Yes Man option, the sheer amount of "well, my Courier" inherent to the path making it largely incompatible with the other three when trying to make any objective comparison of which ending is best. But there, in the ruins of what once was, I found something new. A new symbol, and the shadow of a nation. Neither Bear nor Bull, not damned by the all-consuming drive to expand. When, at long last, I finally set foot upon the great Dam, it shall not be as conqueror, but as liberator, driving away the failing flags and replacing them with something new, perhaps better, and maybe, just maybe, something that can be called home.

Spoiler

Show