With the major European gaming conference Gamescom kicking off in Cologne last night, the opening night show was full of pleasant surprises and announcements – although most of them were for games, as you'd expect. Prime Video managed to steal quite a big share of the limelight, though, by unveiling a proper trailer for the next season of Fallout.
We now know the show will premiere on Prime Video on 17 December, just before the holidays, which means there'll be quite a battle for attention between it and the final (movie-length) episodes of Stranger Things, which are also due around that time. This teaser, though, confirms that Fallout is aiming higher for its next run, with a first proper look at New Vegas, which was teased at the very end of the first season.
Lucy (Ella Purnell) will continue her new odyssey, chasing down her father's trail as it leads her to the reborn capital of gambling and sin – although she'll find a version of the strip that's more than a little familiar to anyone who played New Vegas in game form years ago. Pincipally, it'll be ruled over by the slightly sinister Mr House, who's got his fingers in more pies than you might assume at first.
Walton Goggins’ Cooper Howard, also known as the Ghoul, will also play just as large a role this time out – if not a bigger one. He's going to be at Lucy's side as a reluctant companion and potential guardian, full of violence and threat. We'll also clearly get more flashbacks to the time before the bombs fell, and his work with Vault-Tec. That might give us some more clues as to his deeper motivations, too.
Meanwhile, there are quick glimpses of some major developments for fans of the games. For one thing, the teaser ends with a quick look at the show's first Deathclaw, one of the most powerful monstrous enemies in the series – with an appropriately fearful response from Lucy and the Ghoul.
Beyond that, though, we also see how things are going at the Brotherhood of Steel, and get the tiniest of moments with Caesar's Legion, a faction in the Mojave that we hopefully will get to see more of. This fascistic take on how people could organise themselves in the post-apocalypse could be really relevant in today's politics, and houses some great characters in the games.
So, it's all looking pretty excellent at this stage, and there's likely more to look forward to. Amazon's only calling this a teaser, after all, despite it seeming like a full trailer – so we'll probably get more of a showcase of the story of the season at some point in the next couple of months.
