The Fallout show may have to address New Vegas’s branching endings

Now that we know Fallout season 2 is happening, we’ve really got to talk about how the show is going to address the ending of New Vegas. Like so many other RPGs, the Fallout games let players chart their own course to multiple different endings. In Fallout 3 you’re given the choice to provide clean water for the entire Capital Wasteland, or you can poison everything even more than it already was. Your choices near the end of New Vegas are even more impactful.

Which side are you on? 

Three main factions are vying for control over the Mojave Wasteland. There’s the New California Republic, which wants to secure more territory and use the Hoover Dam to provide power to the rest of its cities back in California. Caesar’s Legion wants to take over the area because… Well, because that’s what legions are supposed to do. Finally, there’s Mr. House, the quasi-immortal, mega-rich overseer of the Vegas Strip that wants to create a new post-war world order. 

As a player, you get to choose who you’re going to throw your lot in with, and you eventually decide the fate of the Mojave. You could side with any of those factions, or you could partner up with a robot named Yes Man to secure independence, of a sort, for the people of the Mojave. Whatever decision you make, the consequences are far reaching, not just for the Mojave but also for each faction in the fight.

We’ve gotten some hints

The Fallout show takes place 15 years after the events of New Vegas, and the brief peek of the Vegas Strip it gave us might have already ruled out some of the game’s endings. We see that none of the Strip’s lights are on, and the walls surrounding it appear to be crumbling. The animation that plays behind the finale’s credits pans through a Strip that’s marked by empty streets, decaying infrastructure, and a crashed NCR Vertibird. 

That Vertibird is very telling. If the NCR was fighting in the streets of Vegas, then it stands to reason that they weren’t completely destroyed by the Legion. We don’t see signs of the Legion in or around the Strip, so maybe the high Charisma ending where you talk Legate Lanius out of the war altogether is going to be canon. In all seriousness, every New Vegas ending implies that things will get much worse in the Mojave before they get better. The Legion plans to enslave and kill most of the Mojave’s citizens before trying to push further west. The NCR wants full control of the region, so if they win the second battle of Hoover Dam, they’ll probably overstep their bounds and end up fighting with Mr. House’s robots. If House wins, the people of the Mojave will be under the wheels of roving Securitrons that follow his orders. And though a Yes Man ending claims to support an independent Vegas, the line between “independent” and “under the Courier’s control” is thin.

Decisions, decisions

It might seem like the Fallout show needs to pick a canon ending to explain the state of the Mojave in 2296, but I actually think the series could sidestep the issue. 15 years is a long time in the Wasteland, and since all the New Vegas endings lead to more conflict, the show could dump us into an embattled Mojave where no one really remembers why the fighting started. 

If the show does make a firm choice about the canon, I imagine that the NCR or Yes Man endings will be the top contenders. If the Legion won, there’s no way it would have resisted pushing into California by 2296, especially considering that the NCR’s capital city got nuked out of existence. If House came out on top, then you’d expect the Strip to be in better shape, maintained by highly advanced Securitrons.

An NCR or Yes Man victory in the Mojave both pretty easily set up a Vegas that’s still just divided enough to make for good TV, but we’ve probably got a couple of years to speculate and theorize before anyone gives us an answer.