The creators of the Fallout TV show have confirmed Season 2 avoids making any New Vegas ending canon by taking what they call "the fog of war approach."
Fans of the Fallout video games had wondered how Season 2 might reflect the endings of Obsidian’s much-loved Fallout New Vegas, given the show is canon and is set 15 years after the game.
A quick reminder of where we’re at in the Fallout timeline: the Fallout TV show is set in 2296, nine years after the events of Fallout 4 and 15 years after the events of Fallout: New Vegas. We’ve already seen a debate about which Fallout 4 ending should be considered canon, if any. Based on already released trailers, we know Mr. House is in Season 2, so does that suggest a canon ending is being used?
Depending on the choices the player, aka The Courier, makes throughout the course of the game, New Vegas can end with victory for the player during the Battle of Hoover Dam, which drives out all factions including Mr. House himself, a victory for Mr. House in which he remains in control of New Vegas and takes over Hoover Dam, a victory for Caesar's Legion, or a victory for the New California Republic.
There are variations within these endings, but given Mr. House is in Season 2 in a post-war setting, and is alive (sort of) when the main characters turn up at New Vegas, it seems he survived the events of New Vegas the video game.
But does Season 2 make a decision on who won Fallout New Vegas? It does not, executive producer, creator, and showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet and executive producer Jonathan Nolan told IGN in an interview.
Nolan said Geneva Robertson-Dworet and co-showrunner Graham Wagner took “the fog of war approach,” which he called "an absolutely brilliant way to make a bit of an end run around that whole question."
“This was a really early decision that Graham and Jonah, and I made together,” Robertson-Dworet added, “was that we wanted to try, as much as possible in our show, to honor all gamers' experiences and all the choices they might make as they play the game. So we always wanted to avoid trying to make one canonical ending the ending that led to the events of the show.”
In Season 2, all the various factions at play think they won the events of the New Vegas video game. “We had the delicious idea that at the end of a conflict, 15 years down the line, every faction might think they won, which I think has a bit of a poetic quality to it,” Nolan said.
“It's like, the story of history depends on who you ask,” Robertson-Dworet added. “That was the idea.”
There is one fan-favorite minor faction in New Vegas who very much did not win: the Kings. In the video game, the Kings are a street gang made up of people who discovered an Elvis impersonation school and decided to live their lives according to the King’s ideals. But in Fallout Season 2, we see they have become ghouls.
“It hasn't worked out very well for the Kings, at least some of them,” Nolan teased, confirming the Elvis ghouls we see in the show are indeed the Kings characters from the game.
Nolan continued: “One of the fun ideas is that, with all the factions, whether it's the Legion, or the NCR, or the Kings, is that in any version of the ending, there'd be some rebuilding to be done, right? Whoever won, whoever lost, all these factions would be in rebuilding mode, and the sort of sanctity of Vegas, this place that House very carefully protected, has been, for reasons we'll come to understand in the season, has been removed or violated, which means that the folks who were in the game, safe and sound, have had some hard times.”
Still, there is much about Season 2’s New Vegas that fans of the video game will find familiar. Robertson-Dworet described the Strip, for example, as “a very sacred kind of location.”
“You really feel like you're almost going into the heart of the game when you reach the Strip. And so it was really unbelievable to see what our production designer, Howard Cummings, pulled off. We took over an abandoned shopping mall and built there, and the scale of it was just phenomenal. So that was really exciting to see come to life. Freeside was also unbelievable, also because it's shot on the same street that Westworld was shot on and Deadwood. So just seeing that transformed at a place that's had so much TV history, for me, as a fan, as well as now making a show there, was really, really exciting.”
Fallout Season 2 kicks off December 17.
Image credit: Lorenzo Sisti/Prime.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
