To come full circle, here's another way this game reminds me of Oblivion: it tries to wow you with first impressions and then just basically entice you on. Both games are like hot cheerleaders who you follow a year as they tease you on. And finally you sleep with them (both). And maybe this realization hits outright, maybe it takes a few years, but at some point you'll suddenly go: “hey, hang on, they were crap in the sack!” Capital Wasteland: Revelation works like that: it tries to wow you, sometimes in rather farcical ways (a mini-nuke catapult? Really?), and then it tries to take you by the nose and have you explore as you try to find the next awesome spot. But the thing is: most spots are really boring, a lot of quests are uninteresting and none of the NPCs come even close to being memorable...except for Moira Brown: I have never felt so passionate about killing any NPC as I did her, sometimes I had no choice but to exit dialog and shoot her in the face because she's just that annoying.

Here is the real shocker: even though this game does not excel at much except creating annoying NPCs, it is still a good game. Because sometimes, even when the cheerleader is crap in the sack, it's still fun to chase after her. But more importantly, for years now RPG designers have focused purely on pretty graphics and fun combat, and while Capital Wasteland: Revelation also does that, it is a rare return to values of quest design we know of from Black Isle Studios and Troika, an approach that says quests have to be interesting, have to have multiple solutions and your choices really do matter. The latter point is probably the weakest one for CW:R and there are plenty of bad quests to turn you away, but this is still a remarkable accomplishment that I did not expect after Oblivion.​