After a long wait, Prime Video has begun giving us loads of information about Fallout season 2. We now know that it's set to release in December, will bring back all the main characters from the first season... and will take place in a location that's sure to give game players anxiety.
First-look images for Fallout season 2 have confirmed that the series will take place, at least partially, in the fictional city of New Vegas. As the name suggests, this is the post-apocalypse version of Las Vegas, and it's the setting of the 2010 installment in the video game franchise Fallout: New Vegas.
This well-respected game — some consider it the best of the franchise though others strongly disagree — has many terrifying areas. If you left the starting area in the wrong direction you'd be mobbed by vicious mutated bugs, and other areas were filled with deadly creatures and dangerous humans. But a certain Fallout season 2 first-look image features a little hint of my least favorite area, and even seeing an identifying logo 15 years later gets my blood rising.
This image is the one you can see at the top of this article, of a pre-war Cooper Howard (played by Walton Goggins) in a car in the Vegas strip. Reflected on his window is the logo for a casino that appears in-game as the headquarters of one of the faction owners, called Lucky 38. This owner, Mr. House, is expected to be a character in Fallout season 2 based on a tease at the end of the first season.
Lucky 38 is the tallest casino in New Vegas, visible on the horizon through much of the game world, and it's usually the first of the many casinos you visit on the busy Strip area of the game. But to me, apparently, it's become representative of some of the game's biggest issues.
Wrong kind of bugs
Fallout games have often been accused of being buggy, or having technical problems which mean things don't work right (not the kind of bugs that, as I mentioned before, jump you at the beginning of the game). But in my experience, Fallout: New Vegas has been, by far, the worst of a bad bunch, I remember playing it on my old PlayStation 3 and having it crash every 15 minutes, sometimes out of the blue and sometimes after a few minutes of my PS3 making noises like a wood chipper.
The entire game was lousy with this kind of issues but no area was as bad as the Strip. This part of the game had loads of NPCs or Non-Player Characters, which made it much more taxing on the system, and that's to say nothing of the various atmosphere effects, flashing lights and sound cues. I found it almost impossible to explore without my game crashing or becoming so slow that I couldn't play.
I remember getting worried every time that I needed to cross this area in-game, knowing the gamble that it'd involve: will I be able to venture through it in one go, or will my game crash multiple times on the trip, bringing me back to my last save point and losing me progress?
It got so bad that every time the Lucky 38 logo came into view, I'd be quick-saving my game incessantly so that I wouldn't lose progress upon a crash.
Many years on since the last time I played Fallout: New Vegas (I'm one of those Fallout super-fans who doesn't rate it) I thought I'd forgotten all about the Strip's big issues, but seeing the Lucky 38 logo in those Fallout promo images triggered my heart rate to instinctively jump up! And I'm certainly not the only person to have this association, given how many people complained about the game's problems at launch (and for the decade-and-a-half since).
Thankfully TV shows can't lag and glitch like a video game can and so watching Fallout season 2 won't be as painful an experience as trying to play the game was back then (by all accounts, it plays a lot better now, especially on modern games hardware). Perhaps the show will be a therapeutic experience which stops me attributing this casino logo to game crashes and lost progress.
That's a good thing too because it seems that lots of Fallout season 2 takes place around New Vegas, based on what the creators have said and promotional materials. Another first-look picture, shown above, seems to show characters inside one of the casinos.
Fallout season 2 lands in December 2025 (no exact date just yet, but I'm hoping for New Year's Day simply because posters in the video game advertise a Lucky 38 New Year's Eve party in 2025 so it'd be a nice fit). So we've got a few months to wait until we see just how New Vegas-y the sophomore season is.
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