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

GamesRPGFalloutFallout: New VegasA single character shows why Fallout: New Vegas is a classicWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Bethesda)

Chief Hanlon sits in his usual spot at Camp Golf.

ReinstallThis article appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 399 in August 2024, as part of our Reinstall series. Every month we load up a beloved classic—and find out whether it holds up to our modern gaming sensibilities.

Reinstall

This article appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 399 in August 2024, as part of our Reinstall series. Every month we load up a beloved classic—and find out whether it holds up to our modern gaming sensibilities.

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.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

The Courier stands surrounded by the lights of New Vegas.

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.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

A rear shot of Chief Hanlon looking out over Lake Las Vegas.

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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 likeColonel MooreorLieutenant Monroeask the player to commit or sign off on.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

The Bitter Springs refugee camp.

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.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

The Boulder City memorial.

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.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

An NCR trooper turning to ash after being hit by a laser blast.

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 actualsocietyrather 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.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

The heavily guarded front gate of New Vegas.

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.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Caesar turns to ash after being hit by laser fire.

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 Bethesdanot 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.

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Hanlon’s razor#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Patriot games#

The nuclear question#

Black sheep#

Hanlon’s razor

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

Patriot games

The nuclear question

Black sheep