Obsidian’s Fallout New Vegas is often heralded as the best game in the series. While the game heavily recycles assets and systems from Bethesda’s Fallout 3, its tight writing and brilliant world makes it one of the best RPGs ever made.
While Bethesda spent around four years developing Fallout 3, Obsidian were on a strict deadline to deliver New Vegas in just 18 months. In a new episode of his YouTube series, project director Josh Sawyer explained that the strict deadline is the reason why the RPG focused so much on its writing, the very thing fans praise the game for to this day.
Speaking in a new video titled Setting Goals, Sawyer explained that the team was obviously “constrained by the 18 months” deadline. This meant that the team couldn’t perform major gameplay overhauls to the core Fallout 3 experience. Instead, minor tweaks would be made, and the focus would go into writing and crafting great quests within the tools Bethesda provided.
“I said: ‘Let’s modestly restructure some of the systemic things that Bethesda did.’” the designer recalled. “Try to do as much as we can to emulate their style of open world exploration, and let’s try to just tell the best stories we can with the best quest reactivity that we know how to do.” This is what New Vegas does best. While the game doesn’t feel like a huge technical jump over its predecessor, its quests are deeper and more memorable.
Sawyer explains that there “was very little else that we could do in that window of time”. However, that intense focus on what the team could give players became the game’s biggest boon. “I believed in that team,” Sawyer adds. “We had fantastic designers and writers, and I believed that they could make really great quests and content”.
For Sawyer, the limit was clear, saying “we can’t set out sights on anything crazier than this”. Instead, the team was pushed to “just make the best quest content and story content that we can”, and with an 18-month deadline, they did it. “The 18 months wasn’t a goal,” Sawyer said. “It was a constraint, but we had to work within it, and so that’s why it became so focused. And I think the team did a fantastic job.”
To this day, Fallout New Vegas is heralded as the pinnacle of the series, especially for the modern entries. While the game did suffer from major technical issues on launch, former developers have admitted that those were not the fault of Bethesda’s engine.
“I can understand there would be an inclination to blame Gamebryo,” game designer Chris Avellone said recently, “which I don’t think is the world’s most fantastic engine. But I can’t argue with the fact that it lets you make an open world environment, and the scripting for it is, you know, it’s there.”
Avellone explained that they “could have been more economical with our building” had they opted to work closer with Bethesda. Nevertheless, despite its technical issues, New Vegas is still one of the best games in the RPG genre to this day.
While not officially confirmed by Bethesda or Xbox, a remaster of Fallout New Vegas is reportedly in the works. Allegedly coming after Fallout 3 Remastered, the upcoming redux will put the 2010 RPG in Unreal Engine 5 with shiny new visuals and some gameplay tweaks.
