Let it never be said I can't admit where I was wrong.

Earlier this year I played Obsidian's Pentiment, which I adored. Fabulous little game with choices that really mattered and a genuine reverence and love for history.

I've tangled with Obsidian's games a few times to varying degress of success. Their South Park games are a good laugh, the Outer Worlds is weird and awkward and well, New Vegas.

I've played an awful lot of Fallout 3 and 4. Bethesda's games have a certain je ne sais quois that really makes them a delight, despite not being particularly good in... well, any respect. Fallout, especially, has a real magic in it; between the fantastic tech assets (the Pip-Boy, of course, but all the vault mechanisms, the terminals... they all feel so suited to the setting), the sublime score and radio that set the mood and some very moody storytelling in each location, it's easy to get lost in it.

Despite that, mind, I'd never managed to get into New Vegas, although not for lack of trying. Every year or so, I'd go 'maybe this time it'll take' and then, without fail, I'd bail around Primm. There was a fair amount of stuff that didn't gel with me in it, most notably the fact that early doors it's a damn hard game if you don't have Guns as a tag skill. I knew, of course, that a lot of the quests can be solved non-violently, so I'd usually put all three tag skills in non-violent skills too.

Not this time, though. This time I finished a playthrough, and smashed through the DLC, too. I tagged Guns, Science and Speech, which was a massive help. A massive help, really - tagging GUns makes the early game less brutal, and I still had plenty of points in skill check stats for early-game speech challenges.

Which, honestly, made the game an awful lot more fun. Suddenly I wasn't doing chip damage on every single enemy and counting down the bullets till I was punching them. It made that initial journey to Primm and beyond a lot less gruelling.

Anyway, turns out everyone who wasn't me was extremely right about this game. It's delightful. The shooting is still the same as in Fallout 3, which is to say, it's kind of rubbish, but everything around it rules. Being able to level Speech to 100 and talk down everyone in the game, even the Legion's Turbo Nazi? THRILLING. Meeting a guy at a solar farm and using your high science skill to correctly deduce he has no idea what he's doing? Phenomenal.

The sheer possibility landscape in the game kind of beggars belief, to the extent that you kind of wonder how they even fit it all in. And especially how they managed to put it all together in just 18 months. How are there three different major factions you can side with on the strip, each with full-featured and intertwined storylines? How is there an ADDITIONAL 'no thanks' questline that lets you take Vegas independent? How come every place you go to in the Mojave has at least two or three quests attached to it, even if it's a single-purpose location like a Vault?

It's the kind of elegant design you simply don't see, really. Bethesda certainly don't do it. Baldurs Gate 3 kind of came close, at least in terms of density of quests, although it definitely doesn't have the same quality in its choices. Even Obsidian don't seem to have matched it, although granted I've not played Avowed much or ever touched Pillars of Eternity. Maybe they've cracked that nut again in those.

Anyway, yeah. Good game! The DLC is pretty mediocre, although I really loved Old World Blues. That one specifically is buoyed by the Think Tank being so weird and fun and tragic? Maybe that's just me having 'old world blues,' myself, though - I do think the best writing in all of the Fallout games is when it's confronting the pre-war world and contrasting it with the current wasteland.

But yeah. All this to say: if you were waiting for a sign to finally play New Vegas, this is it. It's ruddy bloody brilliant.