Amazon’s Fallout TV series has made waves since it dropped last week, mostly due to the quality of the work. Fallout’s one of the best video game adaptations we’ve gotten and one that enhances the series greatly. It also is situated at the very end of the known timeline of the games, serving as a sort of sequel to the series while Bethesda works on Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI. However, there’s a contingent of fans who were less than pleased with the implications of some of the events in Fallout, specifically what they perceived as the retconning of the beloved Fallout: New Vegas.
Now, people involved with the show have already come forward to refute the belief that it erases New Vegas, and Todd Howard, who’s largely led development on the Fallout series since Fallout 3 in 2008, is the latest to clear things up once and for all.
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Spoilers for the timeline of Fallout and events of the show follow.
In a conversation with IGN, Howard stated, “There might be a little bit of confusion in some places. But everything that happened in the previous games, including New Vegas, happened. We’re very careful about that.” There, are you all happy now?
Read More: If You’re Worried About The Fallout TV Series Messing With Canon, You’re Missing The Point
Fans have gotten bent out of shape over the fate of Shady Sands, one of Fallout’s most famous settings. Shady Sands plays a prominent role in the first game, and is gestured to throughout the series—most directly in New Vegas—but is ultimately revealed to have been leveled by Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) in the Fallout series’ season one finale. Fans were worried that this particular moment erased New Vegas from the canon since last they heard, Shady Sands was still intact at the end of the game. This seemed to contradict a timeline in the show that posits that the “Fall of Shady Sands” occurred in 2277, a handful of years before the events of New Vegas, leading many to wonder if it was snuffed from the timeline for the show.
As Howard puts it, the team is threading the needle a little tightly here, “but the bombs fall just after the events of New Vegas,” meaning that Shady Sands gets nuked in the early 2280s, not beforehand. The “Fall of Shady Sands” in 2277 is in reference to something entirely different that leads into the eventual destruction of the first capital of New Vegas. Fallout hasn’t elaborated on what that is exactly, but likely will when it returns for its second season, especially given how the finale appears to feature Mr. House—a prominent villain from New Vegas—and ends on a shot of the New Vegas skyline.
Elsewhere, Howard mentions that he became emotional when Fallout’s showrunners came to him with the idea of blowing up Shady Sands, but ultimately settled once it was revealed to be “a pretty impactful story moment that a lot of things anchor on.” Considering how many threads that plot point has left unresolved, and how rattled fans were upon learning of Shady Sands’ decimation, it definitely feels like it was the right call for the show to make. Now to see if Fallout can offer some satisfying answers about Shady Sands’ fate when it picks back up on this storyline next season.
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