Breakdown (Spoilers Ahead)
- Fallout New Vegas’ 6 endings are non-canon to the series
- Fallout Season 2 will explore what actually happened to the Mojave
- The Fall of Shady Sands and the NCR is yet to be fully explained
Amazon’s Fallout TV show is now a beloved video game adaptation, but the show’s first few days of release saw fans decry the series for its take on Fallout New Vegas canon.
Upon release, fans claimed that the destruction of Shady Sands destroyed the canon story of Fallout New Vegas. It didn’t, and Bethesda head Todd Howard has since confirmed that New Vegas is, obviously, still canon.
However, while events within New Vegas are definitively canon, it seems that none of the game’s 6 endings are.
Explained in an interview with GQ, Fallout showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet have revealed that there is no definitive canon ending to New Vegas that they’re running with for the series.
“All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play [Fallout: New Vegas],” Wagner said.
“Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place [of] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred.”
With the main events of New Vegas still being canon, it’s worth assuming that a mix of endings will be used to continue the franchise’s story.
The canon endings of Fallout games have often changed. While Fallout 1 and 2 both had definitive chosen finales, Fallout 3’s canon ending takes place after the optional DLC Broken Steel. Furthermore, Fallout Tactics and Fallout: New Vegas have never had their canon endings disclosed.
What’s important is that the central conflict of Fallout: New Vegas still definitely occurred, and The Courier was involved. However, we’ll have to wait until Fallout Season to find out what really happened to New Vegas City and the NCR.
With the Fallout 5 release date still many years away, Amazon’s Fallout TV series is likely the only canon story we’ll be seeing for a while. Meanwhile, gamers are returning in droves to old games, even Fallout 76, and even we’ve been diving into a Fallout 4 mod pack that turns the game into a Halo horror game.