Amazon’s Fallout TV show ended with the awesome reveal of a devastated New Vegas at the end of Season 1, a location which was brilliantly explored through Season 2. However, it turns out that the original pitch for Amazon’s TV adaptation of the beloved RPG franchise was set to begin in the iconic city.
Alongside discussing Bethesda’s plans on avoiding generative AI and revealing new details about The Elder Scrolls 6, studio head Todd Howard explained that the original idea for the TV story was set entirely within New Vegas, but Howard told the producers to hold off on exploring such a vital location to the game’s canon.
“The writers really wanted to go to New Vegas [for Season 2],” Howard said. “They actually wanted to go there in the early, early pitches of Season 1, and I said ‘I would save that. That can be, that’s such an iconic thing for Fallout, it’s better to, let’s establish the base and then we can go to New Vegas’”.
Howard explained that, after the juggernaut success of Season 1, the crew came back for Season 2 “with a lot of confidence”. With this said, it still required a lot of work to bring New Vegas to life without necessarily de-canonising every choice players could make within Obsidian’s beloved RPG.
“I thought they did a really good job in taking it there because it’s tricky,” he said. “You have an iconic area, a beloved game, particularly storylines that end different ways and really strong characters. And there’s like a million ways to f**k that up. So it can be a bit of a minefield, right? And I thought they did a great job, we spent a lot of time saying like, ‘let’s not refute anything that happened in the games, but let’s see if there’s some areas that the writers really want to push forward”.
Howard explained that New Vegas particularly has a lot of beloved characters, but the show particularly focuses on the icon that is Robert House. Even with that character, the show never determined which ending of Fallout New Vegas the player, aka The Courier picked, but there’s enough leeway to let that character return in a multitude of ways.
Fallout Season 3 starts filming “this summer”, Howard confirmed, although an exact date has yet to be locked in. Prior reports have claimed that the next season will take players to locations unexplored in the Fallout games, although it seems that some New Vegas scenes will still be present at least for the show’s opening episodes.
While there is no brand-new Fallout game to tie in with the next season of Amazon’s Fallout TV show, it does seem that players will at least be able to return to Washington D.C. with a release of Fallout 3 Remastered. Still unconfirmed by Bethesda, the very-leaked remaster will reportedly be designed to hit a similar level of quality as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered which launched last year.
