And it certainly also helped that the Mojave Wasteland presented in Fallout: New Vegas was more contemporary, mature and bold. It evoked more Game of Thrones than Road Warrior.

The Mojave Wasteland wasn't really a wasteland. The people around New Vegas have schools, jobs, clean water, food, clinics and a few functioning governments whose conflicts drive the action of the story. New Vegas itself is a vacation spot for wealthy retired folks coming in from out of state, and that doesn't feel post-apocalyptic.

Your character isn't a lone scavenger grasping for survival; he's a gainfully employed courier trying to make a delivery. This desert wasteland is covered in power lines and plumbing pipelines, farms and busy trade routes. The nonsensical fantasy of Fallout 3 was turned into a fully detailed economy for New Vegas, and the productivity of its economy gave actual stakes to the factions vying over it.

Faction play is the star of the show, really. There are an overwhelming number of possibilities for each faction to intersect in and out of each other's storylines in different ways. Faction quests criss-cross into other faction quests, the order in which you take them can affect your possibility of taking others, and the motivations and narrative wrappers surrounding those quests always related to the complexities of the world's economy. The three biggest factions at play all fight with a reasonable and realistic amount of self-interest. You can see where they're coming from. Even Caesar's Legion, who had to have been the villains.

And what great villains they were! Caesar's Legion had an ever-expanding medieval empire that revelled in slavery, torture, sadism and warfare. And what made them truly terrifying is that they weren't moustache-twirlers.