With inXile, Obsidian, and Bethesda under the same umbrella, Fallout New Vegas 2 reportedly in early talks 

Over a decade after its release, Fallout New Vegas remains one of the most exemplary golden chalices of the role-playing game genre.

In its release year, Fallout New Vegas received a uniformly high critical appraise, tail-ending its sales figures with two BAFTA nominations and a Golden Joystick GOTY award in the same year. The plaudits received were not due to the game’s technical side but because of its value despite it. Baked in Bethesda’s quickly aging Gamebryo, the game suffered from the same issues as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with woody facial animation and janky combat.

That its technical drawbacks still cannot hold back its other areas is a testament to what Obsidian could achieve in a narrow development window of eighteen months. This can be partially attributed to the fact that the Obsidian team included the original auteurs of the first two Fallout games, a la Black Isle studio and Interplay Entertainment Corp.

Overburned by Skyrim's development cycle, it was a happy coincidence that Bethesda commissioned Obsidian to recapture the original Fallout RPG charm in the new fully-3D Fallout era. As it turns out, it is a happy coincidence that might repeat itself in the months to come.

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Fallout New Vegas 2: Turning back to its roots might become the franchise's saving grace

Five years after Fallout New Vegas, Bethesda took its second swing at re-contextualizing Fallout in the modern shooter scene. It managed to find this goal in a sense, as Todd Howard had proverbially pulled out the big guns. Bethesda reportedly brought in id Software, the people behind Doom, to polish its gunplay.

Interestingly, Fallout 4 managed to become the inversion of New Vegas’ highs and lows. Its hyper-streamlined design philosophy, while it did finally consummate the twin identities of a feature-complete shooter and a turn-based VATS system, did so at the behest of the narrative.

The writing in Fallout 4, while it may hold itself up to Bethesda’s standards, could not trump the eighteen-month masterwork of a crunching Obsidian team.

Naturally, community projects like a New Vegas remake on Fallout 4's engine try to bring together the best of both worlds. Doubtless, the franchise’s gradually dimming reputation and fallout with its fanbase, along with the several Fallout 76 debacles, have only fuelled rumors of a Fallout New Vegas sequel even further.

Roughly a year earlier, Tyler McVicker had provided further fuel to this merry bandwagon of rumors, stipulating that Bethesda may already be in talks about Fallout New Vegas 2.

This was two months before Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda vis-a-vis Zenimax. Currently, Microsoft owns Bethesda, Obsidian, as well as inXile Entertainment. inXile has already proven its mettle and eagerness at re-invigorating Interplay Entertainment classics with spiritual successors like Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera.

While Bethesda was crunching their Fallout multiplayer formula with Fallout 76, Obsidian has tried its own twist on the quasi-Fallout intellectual property, The Outer Worlds. Currently, Obsidian is working on its own Elder Scrolls spin with Avowed as well as Outer Worlds 2. However, the fact that all three major players of the entire Fallout franchise’s lifespan are currently under the same umbrella is telling.

As popular leaker Jeff Grubb portended recently in Grubbnsax:

“This is very early, but people have begun to have talks and say these words in sentences, and these words are ‘Obsidian’ and ‘Fallout New Vegas 2’.” (reported by VGC)

Rest assured, fans of the series should expect some interesting times ahead.