Is New Vegas a Western?

CT Phipps

Carbon Dated and Proud
I was curious about your interpretation of the story that way.

It has Western motifs but is it actually a Western-Western?

What's your opinion?

And what is the most Western way to play it?
 
Yeah, it has a lot of elements of a Western.
Protagonist is robbed and left for dead, miraculously survives and tries to find his would-be-assassin, meets different factions trying to control an otherwise lawless region, and potentially double-crosses a whole lot of them.
Classic Western storyline from movies like Hang Em High, the Dollar Trilogy and so on.
The Western elements, as said above, have always been present in Fallout, starting with Shady Sands and its adobe-like architecture and problems with bandits, Junktown with its rivaling "rulers" (Killian specifically enforcing "frontier justice" in his ending slide), Boneyard with its gangs and a group of armed people basically enslaving a group of people...
Fallout is basically a post-apocalyptic Sci Fi Western in many ways.
The only way NV could have been more Western is if it had more ponchos.
 
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Now that I think on it heavy western elements and a wild west feel is a big part of fallouts identity that just outright isn't present in fallout 3 or 4.

It is why they base their games on the east coast in which those elements are much less prevalent. When you think west you think desert.
 
It's kinda hard to have a Western in the East, i
Not really. All a western is is a set of concepts, cliches and character types. Logan is a western. Breaking bad is a western. No country for old men is a western. Hell fuckin tremors for is a western. It's a highly flexible genre that is only loosely defined outside of the 50s.
 
Not really. All a western is is a set of concepts, cliches and character types. Logan is a western. Breaking bad is a western. No country for old men is a western. Hell fuckin tremors for is a western. It's a highly flexible genre that is only loosely defined outside of the 50s.
He is joking.
 
He is joking.
You'd think emphasizing the "west" and ending the sentence with "innit" would be obvious enough, but hey, confirmed retard gonna confirm.
While Westerns are named after the (Wild) West, the concepts can be applied to any time or region. Although I guess I wouldn't call them purely "Western" then, since "Western" means a particular time and region (with some leeway for all the subgenres such as Spaghetti Western, Revisionist Western and so on).
I guess Breaking Bad and Logan would be called Neo Western, for example, and New Vegas would be more like a (post-apocalyptic) Science Fiction Western. There's a Western subgenre for everyone!

(Is there Trap Porn Western for Graves? Probably!)
 
New Vegas is a western in setting, but I find the original Fallout to be closer to a Western in genre.
 
I can certainly see it as a Western. Fallout 1 and 2 borrow particular popular elements from the Western genre in different ways which I think differentiates the products and why we may determine them all as Westerns but very differently. You even have fantasy-western elements in 2, which were popular even in films like High Plains Drifter with the protagonist having visions and premonitions of the future. I think New Vegas is very partial to the Western Aesthetic more than the storytelling, but elements are still there for sure.
 
I was curious about your interpretation of the story that way.

It has Western motifs but is it actually a Western-Western?

What's your opinion?

And what is the most Western way to play it?
Wild west wasteland is what true Fallout should be :P
'cept one thing, horseback riding is missing :P
 
Doesn't exist in the game. The most Western way to play it would probably be you and Benny in a quick draw and story ends there.
Somebody mod that in there.

You can get pretty close to that by basically saying "time to die" to Benny when he's still on the casino floor at the Tops. It then becomes a game of blowing Benny's brains out before he clears leather and the AI on his goons kicks in.
 
It could had been more of a western, rather, it could had applied those tropes more, that's for sure.

We have mines but they're all dungeons. A sulfur mine or two, maybe a old gold mine. A quest line about a boom might had been nice rather than that odd Powder Ganger spinoff who is apparently important enough to get an ending slide despite not fighting at the battle?

More town-related stuff like dealing with corrupt sheriffs and lawmen and mayors. We have one ornery deputy, a shitty motel owner, and that's about it. West and North Vegas are bastions of anarchy, apparently, with little to no problems up top.

Caravan hits, various runs, even more courier work would had all been welcome and fleshed out the game a bit and added a nice layer of 'western', along with little details in avatar customization via clothes and armor.
 
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