Fallout 2 Season 2 Trailer 2 Reaction
The House wins, wastelanders. The House always wins!
This December, Fallout, Amazon Prime’s live-action addition to the universe of the popular video game series, returns for its second season. As Lucy teams up with The Ghoul to hunt down her murderous father, the series will take us east to a place that one group of fans are giddy to see: New Vegas. Introduced in the spin-off game of the same name, Fallout: New Vegas has a special place in the hearts of a lot of fans. Yet with how the multiple potential endings that the game had for players, we don’t know what was canon and what wasn’t. But the newest trailer for Season Two just gave us a major piece of the puzzle, as we can clearly see The Ghoul speaking to none other than Mr. House. Unless that’s a flashback, this all but canonizes the ‘House Wins’ ending.
I already discussed who Mr. House was in my review of the first trailer, and I’ve discussed a little of New Vegas in my history of the NCR. But now that we know he’s going to appear in the present day, it’s the perfect time to recap the events of New Vegas. Because unless Bethesda decides none of that game was canon, what happens could play a big role in the upcoming season.
The Players of New Vegas
To better understand what happens in Fallout: New Vegas, we first need to understand the balance of power at the start of the game. Thanks to Mr House’s defenses, the Mojave Desert was spared the worst of the Great War. Most importantly, it ensured that the Hoover Dam was saved from destruction, making it, and New Vegas, valuable real estate. As a result, the NCR and Caesar’s Legion both want control of the Mojave and its infrastructure, while House wants to establish New Vegas as an independent nation. The three are unable to shift power in their favor, though, until House finds something he’s been looking for for two centuries: the Platinum Chip.
The truth was that House’s robot army had been operating on older software because his computers couldn’t handle the newer version. He had commissioned a Platinum Chip capable of processing all the immense data without crashing as well as unlocking the full power of his robots. Unfortunately, the Great War began hours before it could be delivered, and House had to make do ever since. When the Chip was finally found, he immediately hired couriers to bring it to him, only for one of his men to ambush the one carrying it, shooting and leaving them for dead. That Courier is who we play in Fallout: New Vegas, and once we recover, that is when the story begins in earnest.
Mr House, I Presume?
Having cheated death in the Wastelands, players must journey across the Mojave to find the one who took the Chip and get it back. In the process, the Courier becomes involved in the conflict for control of the Mojave, and players can become affiliated with the NCR and the Legion. Eventually, though, we find the man who shot us and retrieve the Platinum Chip, and this is where the game starts to diverge into multiple potential endings as tensions hit their boiling point.
With the NCR and Legion gearing up for a rematch over Hoover Dam, the Courier can decide who will come out on top in one of four endings. We can choose to aid the NCR or the Legion while getting rid of Mr. House, allowing them to annex the Mojave. We can give House the Chip, become their right hand, and drive both sides out altogether. Or we could double-cross everyone and take control of the Mojave for ourselves. For the longest time, fans have not known what the canon outcome was, but between the show’s first season and this new trailer, multiple branches seem to have been cut off. The fact that we see Mr. House in 2296, and that New Vegas seems largely intact, must mean that the House ending was the canonical ending to Fallout: New Vegas. That, or Bethesda chose to ignore everything that happened in that game except for the basic premise, in which case, that stinks.
Regardless of how the new season might set the story of Fallout: New Vegas in stone, though, that doesn’t change the fact that what’s happening could make a lot of fans happy. Fallout: New Vegas is considered one of the best games in the entire franchise, and it’s got a dedicated community of fans to this very day. Since 2022, fans have gathered every year at the real-life starting point of Goodsprings, Nevada to celebrate it, showing how important it is to fans. The game itself can be played on current-gen consoles and Steam, so if you haven’t played it yet, then now is the perfect time to get started, because the show seems set on leaning all in on New Vegas, and it’s likely that this trailer will make it more popular than ever. I know I am considering playing it for the first time myself!
