A single character shows why Fallout: New Vegas is a classic

Well, it happened to me. By my count, approximately 97% of the human race fell deep into a Fallout hole after Amazon dropped all eight episodes of its TV series this April, and you bet your bottom bottle cap I was one of them. It took me a while to settle on the one I was gonna pour my time into, though. I flirted with the first game, endured the Temple of Trials in FO2, and even tried to remember what the hell I was doing in my last Fallout 4 save before I finally accepted the truth: I was going to have to install the requisite 60+ mods to coax New Vegas into playability on modern hardware.

And, you guessed it, New Vegas is still an incredible game. Incredible enough that I'm finding new things to appreciate about it after nearly 600 hours and a double-digit number of playthroughs. This time through? A relatively minor side character, and the possibility that—if you truly love something—you have to let someone beat the snot out of it from time to time.

Hanlon's razor 

Fallout: New Vegas' best character is Chief Hanlon. Not Mr House, not Caesar, and certainly not anyone else who emerges from the formless mass of NCR bureaucracy to hand you your quest objectives. It's a man you might never meet at all on an average playthrough, and he's everything that still makes Obsidian's Fallout stand out from every 3D game in the series before or since.

Hanlon's a lion in winter; a hero from times gone by. Three years before the game starts, he was the immovable object that the unstoppable force of Caesar's Legion ran into at the first Battle of Hoover Dam: Baiting the warlord's army into its first major defeat with cunning, tactical ingenuity, and enough C4 to level an entire town.

But by the time of the game, you can find him dozily watching the sun come up over Lake Las Vegas from the NCR outpost at Camp Golf. Weary, sombre, old. He'd be long-retired if his country didn't think it might need him to help hand Caesar a second defeat, and he's feeling his age.

In outlook, he's a kind of militarised Anthony Bourdain. He's a beleaguered liberal type, believing firmly in his republic and the principles on which it was founded, but in despair over the direction it's taken under a buzz-cut cabal of imperialist politicians headed up by President Aaron Kimball. 

Hanlon knows from bitter experience that no one loves armed missionaries: The people of the Mojave hold the NCR's encroachment (and their own consequential displacement) in justified contempt, and during the time of the game the nation itself gets little out of the occupation but a meat grinder into which it feeds a steady stream of treasure and conscripts. It continues regardless, either to spread "the great western light of California"—in the words of Prez Kimball—or because the prize for eventually taming the land is the abundant energy generated by Hoover Dam. That energy could sustain the NCR's post-apocalyptic bourgeois idyll, its swollen military-industrial complex, and its continued drive east.

Hanlon's old enough to remember the same sententious drivel Kimball spits coming from the mouths of better leaders, and it didn't mean much then either. So far, what the NCR has brought the Mojave are massacres and population transfers (though, to be fair, rivals like Mr House and the Legion brought much the same) and that's not including the war crimes that figures like Colonel Moore or Lieutenant Monroe ask the player to commit or sign off on. 

Has it brought good things too? Certainly. Infrastructure, governmental institutions, defence against the Legion. But it's hard for Hanlon and many Mojave residents to see all that past the piled corpses.

All Hanlon sees is the young and stupid dying for the old and greedy, with no end in sight to the forever-war with Caesar's Legion. He's one of the most respected and courageous figures in the NCR establishment, but he's scared and helpless watching the levers of power bend in the hands of men obsessed with personal glory and a lust for Manifest Destiny-like eastward expansion. 

So Hanlon does the only thing he can think of to beat them: He betrays his country. He begins working towards the NCR's defeat. Drawing on his rank and authority, he begins spreading lies and disinformation to demoralise the troops, make the NCR's campaign look doomed, and spur a political turn toward withdrawal from Vegas back to California.

Patriot games 

There are plenty of real-world parallels to the NCR's campaign in the Mojave—Vietnam, World War 1, even something like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—but one is more obvious than the rest. New Vegas came out in 2010. The United States, still high on its post-Cold War unipolar moment, was testing the capacity of its military, the support of its citizens, and the patience of its allies in conflicts and occupations that had dragged on for nearly a decade at that point. It was borderline uncontroversial even in the western world to be sick of the whole thing.

In 2024, none of that is relevant anymore. Ha, just kidding. Boy, the look on your face. No, actually, the question of the value of humility—of being able to walk back mistakes and accept the occasional defeat—to an empire overstretching itself to the point of complete internal collapse are more relevant than ever. That's fairly disquieting, of course, but it's also one more entry on a long list of testaments to New Vegas' narrative vision.

It also makes the question it asks, via Hanlon, a real pertinent brain-twister: Can you wish for your own country's defeat, patriotically?

In some ways, Hanlon's desires are a mirror for Caesar himself. Where Caesar wants his clash with the NCR to reforge the Legion into an actual society rather than a marauding band of warlike slavers, Hanlon wants a defeat at the Legion's hands to chasten his country's establishment and turn it away from the path of imperialist conquest and unchecked expansion. Hanlon getting what he wants means Caesar gets what he wants too.

Hanlon never deliberately gets NCR troops killed, mind you, but he and Caesar share a goal if not a motivation. You might think Hanlon has a point, but you wouldn't support Caesar, would you? Would you?

The nuclear question 

It's knotty in a way that Obsidian excels at and Bethesda—despite its attempt at a murkier central conflict in Fallout 4—does not. Even if you're not a gung-ho pro-NCR type, can you stomach the consequences of its defeat? Even if Hanlon isn't purposefully getting troops killed, his plan still results in deaths on his own side.

What are the ethics of jamming a spanner in the works of a conflict between a deeply imperfect democracy and a gang of unequivocally evil slaveholders (if you keep reading modern-day US parallels into the game then the implications here get a bit, uh, dicey, but I never said the game was perfect)?

If you ask me, which you are since you're reading this, he's right. A bloodsucking, imperial NCR would be a slow, spreading cancer in the Mojave where Caesar's Legion would be a swift car crash. Preferable, maybe, but not desirable. 

If Fallout's civilisations ever want to chart a course out of the quagmire that saw the last guys end up trading nuclear blows, they need to stop falling into the same jingoistic, exceptionalist traps. Hanlon manages to raise all of these thorny, ugly questions over the course of a single conversation in a secluded balcony deck chair, which is probably why he's the chief.

Of course, New Vegas lets you finagle a way out of this. You can give the NCR a well-earned black eye without handing Vegas over to Caesar by siding with Mr House or going independent, as is the privilege of a superpowered player character. But the questions are still raised, elegantly and subtly.

And if you're still a die-hard NCR supporter? You can actually get him back on board with California's civilising mission by popping a bullet in Caesar's dome, persuading him that the Legion can really be beaten. Call that a comment on the shallowness of liberal anti-imperialism: That it was only ever the loss of NCR life—and not the faction's ruthless behaviour in the Mojave—that bothered the old man.

Black sheep 

Hanlon just couldn't exist in a Bethesda-helmed Fallout. That's not to beat a dead horse: We're all bored of people grousing about Bethesda not getting it, man, but he's emblematic of all the reasons why so many people—high on Fallout vibes after the Amazon show—returned to a game from 14 years ago rather than your Fallout 76es or 4s, even at the cost of spending an hour or two installing mod after mod after mod. He's a more interesting man in a more interesting Wasteland, where Todd's tales of absconded dads and pilfered sons feel daft and perfunctory.

It's just another thing that makes Fallout: New Vegas a strange black sheep in the post-Fallout 3 series catalogue, and one that I'd like to see preserved better. I wish more people got a chance to chat with Chief Hanlon, and with another Obsidian Fallout seeming like an incredibly unlikely prospect, it'd be preferable if people could just download and play the studio's last one with a minimum of faff.

Whether that's a remaster or just flicking on the "Steam Workshop" button so I can automatically download all the mods I need to make the game work, I don't know. I just know that after 600 hours in New Vegas, I'd be happy to hang out for 600 more.