What will another Obsidian Fallout game even look like all these years on? Here's my attempt to read the radioactive tea leaves

Home on the wastes

I know. The right answer to the question in the headline is simple: whatever the developers working on it decide they want it to look like. Even though I’ve told myself that multiple times since last night’s report that the New Vegas studio have been redirected to the wasteland amid the horrible circumstances of Microsoft’s latest layoffs, I still think it’s something that’s worth any fan of Obsidian’s work pondering for themselves.

In the past, it’d have been a question I - a passionate New Vegas lover, and someone who’s generally had a pretty good time with the other RPGs Obsidian have put out over the past 15 years - would have been able to answer with ease. I knew exactly what I thought I’d want from any return the studio made to Fallout. By and large, more of what I loved most in New Vegas.

It seemed a no-brainer to keep things set on America’s west coast, affording Obsidian the chance to continue deftly weaving elements of Interplay’s classic entries with fresh factions and ideas. There’d be minimal potential for any problematic extra wrinkles to be thrown into Bethesda’s next mainline entry, assuming they plan to stick to their established east coast fiefdom. The choices of setting on offer out west would allow things to remain tonally distinct from the numbered entries’ mostly urban wandering, usually through grey and brown cities steeped in colonial history, even if wherever Obsidian picked didn’t come with such cowboy-centric vibes as Nevada.

If it was being made immediately after New Vegas, or as a timely spin-off to 2015’s Fallout 4, the obvious choice would be to expand and deepen the roleplaying and faction mechanics that made Obsidian’s original Mojave adventure sing. Improved tech would allow the building of a more dynamic and deep wasteland to roam, while the fighting would just need minor tweaks, on a similar scale to those New Vegas made to Fallout 3’s iron-sightless gunplay. The story would have to face the conundrum of how to handle any consequences of New Vegas’ impactful endings, but given it seemed unlikely to be set in exactly the same patch of Nevada, that felt like a crossable bridge.

That was the blueprint that seemed, to my teenage mind at the very least, a useful starting point, which Obsidian could and likely would take off in whichever unique and unexpected directions they desired. Nothing is ever that simple, but in the decade and change since New Vegas came out, this alleged followup is walking into a vastly more complicated situation.

While MMO spinoff Fallout 76 has recovered from a rocky launch, chugging away and introducing plenty of new developments in the Fallout universe, the series otherwise stagnated while Bethesda toiled away on Starfield. Then, the Fallout TV show happened. It’s undeniably been a huge positive for folks who’ve been clamouring for more Fallout, even if myself and likely every other pre-show player can point to certain things we wish it’d done differently.

It’s also neatly slotted in as the provider of fresh west coast Fallout adventures, even offering its own interpretation of a New Vegas after the events of Obsidian’s game. You can - and god knows people have - debate exactly how much impact on series canon the show should have, but Bethesda have been steadfast in insisting everything it depicts will be taken into account for future games. That big malleable space, at least in terms of events around the time of recent Fallout entries, in which Obsidian spread their worldbuilding wings last time isn’t so empty any more.

So, to my mind it’d make more sense than ever for Obsidian to venture somewhere else within North America. This might well have happened regardless of the show. Even if New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has insisted he’s unbothered by the impact the show’s had on the overall story surrounding New Vegas’ factions and characters, as well as events within the wider story of Fallout, he’s never sounded like he’d be keen to poke around old haunts long enough for that to be a big issue with any new game he’d helm.

“With any project I think it has to do with, 'What are we doing, what are the boundaries that we're working within, what am I allowed to do and not allowed to do?',” the developer said of potentially leading another Fallout game during a Q&A video on his YouTube channel back in 2024. “I think that with any IP, especially one I've worked with before, the question is what do I want to do this time that I wasn't able to do last time? And if those constraints are just really constraining then it's not very appealing, because who wants to work on something where the one thing they want to explore is not possible to explore?” He added that when it comes to Fallout as a series, he reckons there are “still a ton of stories that can be told in there and questions that can be asked about society”.

Assuming he’s approaching this new Fallout game at Obsidian with a similar mindset, it seems the likeliest plan involves going as far away from simply repeating elements of New Vegas as Microsoft’s bigwigs will allow him to. Perhaps a trip up north towards Canada or south towards Mexico to explore a wasteland not as heavily steeped in nuclear age Americana, or a Fallout game that defies the standard formula in some other way. RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 have taken over as the standard bearers in the years since New Vegas and Fallout 4. Both have pulled in scores of RPG heads and non-RPG heads alike, while Cyberpunk followed the stellar Witcher 3 by pushing technical boundaries to create a stunningly dense and detailed metropolis.

Looking to Obsidian’s own RPGs, Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 could inspire ways to mix up Fallout. Ditching the one big open-world structure might be sacrilege, but the way these two games split their open worlds into separate regional chunks does allow for a more distinct, vibrant contrast in biomes, in contrast to New Vegas’ largely beige and brown desert. Tonally, both are also less serious and stuffy than New Vegas tends to be, though Obsidian should be careful with this; as I bagged on The Outer Worlds 2 for when I reviewed it last year, this approach can blunt the games’ capacities for straight-faced storytelling and building palpable tension into their tales of bubbling war.

On the other hand, it’s a lot closer to the tone Bethesda and Amazon have imposed on Fallout for the past decade, with funky Vault Boy skits being far more common than lengthy philosophical speeches about bears and bulls. That’s not to say New Vegas, a game which famously allows you to shag a robo-prostitute named Fisto, didn’t know how or when to have a laugh. Still, it feels as though the comedy meter’s been cranked a few notches higher in Bethesda-adjacent RPG land over the years. Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2’s insistence on providing you with a world-ending threat to face down as you explore a world of people wearing different hats is also quite in the Bethesda-style RPG mould, come to think of it, compared to New Vegas’ pragmatic focus on the faction conflict as the be all and end all.

Digging slightly deeper, both games have their protagonists head a party, rather than only being accompanied by a single follower and optional dog. Since this approach is very much in vogue right now largely thanks to Larian, there seems a good chance it’s the way any future Fallouts go and perhaps try to double down on. The Outer Worlds’ flaw system would be easy to Fallout-ize, since it’s essentially a more advanced and reactive version of New Vegas’ traits. Tracing a bit further back to another Sawyer-helmed game, if this new Fallout game can capture any of Pentiment’s ability to paint palpably detailed and deeply emotional portraits of communities, that’d be brilliant. However, the medieval mystery solver is a far tighter and leaner package than RPGs with the scale expectations of Fallout (or even The Outer Worlds) would likely allow. It’s the plucky little monk among towering knights, and thus arguably isn’t the best blueprint for an armoured hero to pin Obsidian’s future on.

I’m well aware that what I’ve ended up with here is a long list of things this new Fallout game might well try to avoid, if Sawyer’s allowed to stick to his guns about taking the series to new and intriguing places. That’s why it’s all worth considering, though. Putting Obsidian back on Fallout might seem the obvious and boring choice, both on paper and in Microsoft’s spreadsheets. Once you properly consider it, though, even disregarding the terrible circumstances of the layoffs, the studio will have anything but an easy or simple road ahead if they’re to capture lightning in a bottle again.