At the outset of the game, your character is shot and left in a shallow grave in the desert, lifted of the package you were entrusted with delivering. A robot digs you out and takes you to a local caregiver, Doc Mitchell, who nurses you back to health.

"Unlike the previous Fallouts, where you start in a vault and you are a vault dweller, this one starts with a curveball," says Pete Hines of Bethesda Softworks.
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Events in the game happen a few years after Fallout 3. No characters from that game appear, Hines says, "but you will eventually hear a little bit about the events" of that game. New Vegas is "a self-contained story. You don't have to have played the previous games to have any clue what's going on here."

"It is a massive game world that will take you hundreds of hours to explore every nook and cranny."