Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout New Vegas is now heralded as the greatest modern Fallout game, and that’s for good reason. However, even now, the 2011 RPG is hampered by its technical shortcomings, many of which have been blamed on the state of Bethesda’s game engine.
Created before the release of Skyrim’s Creation Engine, New Vegas was built on a form of Gamebryo, which did have its own limitations. However, in a recent interview with TKs Mantis, Fallout 2 designer and New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone explains that the issues of the latter had little to do with the engine itself.
“I can understand there would be an inclination to blame Gamebryo,” the iconic game designer said, “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, especially in 2011, having all the tools to make an open world game with the reactivity of Fallout or Elder Scrolls game is “to be commended”, even if the tools themselves do have their own set of weaknesses.
“It worked,” the designer said. “It was able to make a game which, you know, I hate to say it like that’s the most fantastic thing in the world, but it actually got it over the finish line, even if the car was, you know, sputtering smoke and like gears were falling off”.
“There was a reason why Washington DC was built the way it was that we completely ignored.”
Fallout New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone
The designer explained that while the Fallout New Vegas team “could blame Gamebryo” for the shortcomings of the game, the biggest blockade of fixing the game’s biggest technical issues was due to the team not reaching out to the level designers at Bethesda to help them.
“After speaking to some of the level designers who worked on Fallout 3 and, I think, Fallout 4, who were very familiar with the Gamebryo engine, they ran me through all the errors that we made in building the Mojave in New Vegas,” he said. “And some of them I was aware of, like Vegas, Vegas was a nightmare, and that’s a whole other topic, but they pointed out to me that there were so many ways we could have saved space. We could have been more economical with our building because they knew all the tricks.”
Avellone explained that the team at Bethesda “would have loved to have helped”, even if they were busy with Fallout 4 at the time. “The fact that we didn’t have access to that or push for access to that, I think, you know, was on us. So, like, we could have just build out those spaces better, and Vegas was a great example of where we completely dropped the ball in terms of optimisation. Not once, not twice, but like three times it had to be rebuilt, scaled down, rebuild, scaled down. ‘Oh, let’s throw up some more billboards. Let’s try and cloak this problem.’”
The designer revealed that the segmentation of Fallout New Vegas was never a limitation of Gamebryo really as Bethesda had already proven that the engine was more capable both in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3.
“All that stuff was already shown to us in examples of how Washington DC was built,” he said. “There was a reason why Washington DC was built the way it was that we completely ignored. Sure, it hurts the overall feel, but it worked, versus trying to push the limits and breaking several times because we wasted – I don’t want to say wasted – but we had a lot of failed attempts to make Vegas run properly and there were things we could have done…”
Nevertheless, there were still issues under-the-hood with Gamebryo at the time that Bethesda has since fixed. Avellone explained that Bethesda warned the team there were “all sorts of messes under the hood”, but the “fundamental flaw” was that achieving 30 frames-per-second was not easy.
“I was in a meeting with Bethesda where, a few days before, I had done an interview about the Gamebryo engine, and someone had asked me: ‘Hey, is New Vegas going to run at 30 frames-per-second?’ In my mind, it’s inexcusable that a game would not run at 30fps, so I said: ‘Yes, it will’. And, to my surprise, I’m in this Bethesda meeting, this tech director starts lecturing me about, ‘You shouldn’t have said that’”.
Now, Bethesda is creating The Elder Scrolls 6 on an upgraded Creation Engine 3, another new version of the studio’s open world RPG engine. An upgraded version of the engine used for Starfield, the next Elder Scrolls title should be even more technically competent.
As for the future of Fallout, Bethesda is reportedly on very early pre-production of the next mainline game in the series. Additionally, the studio is planning for years of additional updates for the multiplayer spin-off Fallout 76, and remasters of both Fallout 3 and New Vegas are allegedly in the works. With more seasons of the Amazon TV series also planned, there’s a lot coming for Fallout fans, but Fallout 5 is still a long way away.
