Choices. Life is full of them. Some of them are mundane, like what to have for breakfast or what show to watch on Netflix, while others are of greater consequence, like who you choose to marry, or whether or not you upvote that cat p🙈icture on Reddit.
You should always upvote that cဣat pic, by the way.
Meanwhile, games try and capture that lifelike feeling by offeri🎀ng the player similar choices. Do you use a sword or a dagger? An assault rifle, or a pistol? Do you save the princess or leave her in the dungeon to explore the wider world without royalty dragging you down?
Fallout: New Vegas was a classic in the franchise that offered players an unparaꦛlleled amount of choices. Almost every quest you embarked on had a choice at one point or another, if nothing else than what order you kill those Legio🍃nnaires in. For most Fallout fans, New Vegas represented the pinnacle of choice-𝐆based, story-driven campaigning, where everything you did felt like it mattered.
And yet, most of your choices weren’t actual decisions at all. They were the illusion of choice.𝐆
How many times did you rescue the enslaved wastelander, only to find them dead of a 🌳radscorpion a few paces away? What actual good was it꧒ in choosing to be benevolent if your benefactor up and gets themselves killed after 30 seconds?
Fallout: New Vegas is full of choices that on the surface seem profound, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find none of them ever really mattered. Here’s a smattering of those choices to make you feel like🐻 a leaf in the wind.
20 Your Finger On The Switch
There are a lot൩ of seemingly monumental choices that New Vegas provides you🔯 that should have far-reaching consequences for the Mojave, but ultimately turn out to be 💛underwhelming.
Take the quest “That Lucky Old Sun”. In this quest you’re tasked with bringing online a massive solar generator that’s controlled by the NCR. Once you’ve got it fully repaired you have a choice: you can divert the power to New Vegas and Camp McCarran, as requested by the NCR, or you can send it to the Fremont and Westside as req⛄uested by the Followers of the Apocalypse, or you can just give it out everywhere like a commie. Either direction you go, it doesn’t seem to change any particular location. New Vegas is the same by the time you arriv♋e, and both Fremont and Westside are as drab as ever.
19 To Benefit The Many, Or Save The Few
It wouldn’t be an RPG if you weren’t ever given the tried, tested, and true moral quandary: do you sacrifice a few for the benefit of all, or make everyone suffer just so a few more can live? “Hard Luck Blues” eventually slaps you with that choic🐼e right near the end when you’ve finally made it past hordes of vicious ghouls and find yourself in Vault 34’s reactor.
Just as you’re about to close to rector vent to stop poisoning the nearby farms, a message pops up on your computer terminal saying there’s a group of trapped refugees. Opening the door woulওd for them to escape would irradiate the fields, but closing the vents would cut off their air supply, killing them.
Here’s the thing: the sharec♉ropper fields are still there if you choose to save the refugees, and killing them doesn’t do much other than removing a few NPCs from Aerotech Office Park. You might as well let your heart guide you s🎃ince the net effect is virtually nothing at all.
18 Helping The Not-So-Great Khans
The Great Khans are a bit of a do-nothing g𝓰roup in New Vegas. Ostensibly they’re there act like🧔 the Mongol Hordes of the old world, but in practice, they just seem to be selling drugs and living in yurts.
New Vegas gives you the choice of whether or not to help the Khans actually become great again. If you do then they will help you in the final battle at Hoover Dam, lending their forces to fight against either the NCR or the Legion depending on which 🀅faction you side with.
The thing is, the Khans are so weak that you might as well not have bothered. They’re armed with tiny peashooters that do virtually nothing but scrape the paint off the armor of either faction, and their unarmored members die in sওeconds. Some help they turn out to be.
17 That’s A Wrap, Caesar
I very rarely sided with Caesar’s Legion. Something about the whole assaulting an🧜d pillaging thing just never really sat well with me. But if yo⛎u can stomach the omnipresent stench of blood and despair, then eventually Caesar himself will deign to speak to you - albeit at spearpoint.
You see, Caesar has a problem: he’s got cancer. He needs an operation to remove a tumor from his brain or he’ll be dead in days. It’s up to you to figure out how to do brain surgery in the desert using some old-world tech⛎nology. You can cho꧂ose to save the biggest psychopath in the desert, or you can kill him and make it look like an accident.
Either way, it doesn’t really matter. If he dies, Lucius just takes over the whole pillaging party. If he lives, it’s just more of the same. It’s almost like this powerful and charismatic leader matters less than the m🐬urder party. Who knew?
16 ...Or I Could Just Kill You
There’s a lot of quests in New Vegas that fall under these lines: you can gဣo through the rigamarole of repairing this, fi🔯xing that, talking to this person, or, I could just kill you.
Case in point, the quest “Crazy, Crazy, Crazy”. If you manage to get past the horde of Super Mutants littering Black Mountain, you’re confronted with the problem of Tabitha, their crazy Nightkin leader. You now have a choice: you can fix her robot, Rhonda, you can rescue Raul, the ghoul mechanic, or you can just frickin’ kill her. No matter which path you choose, the reward and outcome are all the same. The only difference is a brief blurb at t𒉰he end of the game saying how Tabitha and Rhonda had lots of great adventures in the desert if she lives. Which is a big if.
15 This Is The Opposite Of Intelligence Gathering
This is probably my favorite quest in the game for how friggin’ poin⛎tless it is. In “Eye for an Eye”, an NCR Sargeant tasks you with sneaking into Cottonwood Cove, planting a bug to listen in on Legion radio communications, and stealing some Legion troop documents. If you decide to get caught and you’re not hostile with the Legion, their commander can give you some fake reports and send you back to the NCR, which completes the quest just as easily as having done the quest for real.
It gets better: once the bugs are planted, the same Sargent asks you go back and just murder everyone. Normally a radio bug only works if there’s someone still speaking into the radio, but apparently, the NCR don’t even care! Yo🧸u go to a✨ll that trouble of infiltrating their camp only to negate everything by killing everyone. True tactical genius.
14 A Rose By Any Other Name
Let’s talk about a choice you’re given right at the beginning of the game that is perhaps the most pointless one you’re ever presented with. I’m talkin’ about character creation. S꧑pecifically the looks departme💦nt. You can make yourself look a gorgeous supermodel wandering the wastes, or an ugly Quasimodo hobbling from camp to camp, but either way, it makes no difference to how the game plays.
And it should. You have a charisma stat which actually determines dialog options. Being super pretty or hideous should really change the way the world interacts with you. I mean, if I walked into a store with a 🅘face like that th𝔉en I’d probably find buying a pack of gum to be a pretty tiresome affair.
13 White Legs, Black Hearts
The worst choices in New Vegas are the one꧑s where you think you’veཧ made a profound moral decision, only to have that choice revoked a few seconds later. That’s what happens in “Crush The White Legs”, one of the final quests in the Honest Hearts DLC.
The White Legs are the main antagonist group working for the Legion. They’ve come to Zion to kill everyone and take over the canyon. At the very end,✤ you’re confronted with their tribal leader, Salt-Upon-Wounds, who challenges you to a duel. Once you defeat him (something that’s not hard to do, given the presence of VATS), then you can choose to let him live or kill him.
But it doesn’t matter what you choose since he dies either way. Let him live and the end credits show that he meets his end, along with the rest of the White Legs, not soon after leaving 𓄧Zion.
12 I Thought The Apocaly⛄pse Would Be More Apocalyptic
Lonesome Road is a fitting end to th🐓e saga of the Courier, and New Vegas more generally. You finally meet your hitherto unknown rival, Ulysses, kill him, and then deඣcide what to do with his recently unearth nuclear arsenal. The sins of the Old World are indeed hard🐬 to bury.
You have a choice of three: send that nuke to NCR territory, send it to Legion territory, or if you’ve managed to rescue Ed-E, cancel the launch. Doing nothing is easily the most boring option, but choosing to nuke either side is almost equally as disappointing. One would think that a nuclear explosion would wipe out large swaths of either NCR or Legion settlements, but in the end, all that appears is a small crater with 𝓡some unique gear. It doesn’t even matter which side you nuke since the stats on both are identical.
Surprisingly, while your reputati🦩on does drop for nuking ei🦂ther side, they won’t attack you even if your reputation drops into the negatives.
11 All Bullets The Same
One of the things everybody loves about New Vegas is just h♛ow much of an expanded arsenal the game has when compared to Fallout 3. There are a ton of guns, weapons, and modifications to make every character feel unique not just in skills and perks, but als🌺o in style.
And while the gun you choose certainly matters, one could argue that if you decided to play the game differently, choosing your weapon based solely on ammunition, the choice becomes rather pointless. Nearly every ammo type in the game, from the 5.56mm to the venerable .357 Magnum, remain💦s viable to get you to the end-game.
How do I figure? Let’s take th🐻e .357 as an example. You begin the came shooting a lowly Cowboy Repeater, but eventually gain access to the K9000 Cyberdog Gun in Old World Blues, a gun more 🗹tha♍n capable of shredding a Deathclaw with ease.