If I had a nickel for each time a Bethesda-owned RPG sent me bouncing around a handful of close-knit settlements before sending me to the other side of the map, I'd have two nickels. Skyrim's journey to Riften and Fallout: New Vegas' hike from Nipton to its titular city remain, to my mind, significant parts of how these two games were able to gain such an enduring hold on the genre. Now, playing Dragon's Dogma 2 more than a decade later, I'm finding the same expeditionary design philosophy that made me fall in love with those fleeting moments written throughout the whole game.
New Vegas was the first Fallout game I ever played, and I squeezed everything I could into that first playthrough. No inch of the Mojave went unscoured, no DLC went unplayed. The obvious follow-up, of course, was Fallout 3 - a game in which I ended up with less than a fifth of the playtime of its Obsidian-made successor. But that meager 18 hours belies my fondness for Fallout 3, moments of which stick just as clear in my mind as those from New Vegas; the flight from Vault 101; Tranquility Lane; laying traps for Super Mutants in the bowels of the museums. So why did I spend so much more time in the Mojave than in the Capitol?
