Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout New Vegas was not as beloved on launch as many would have you believe. On release, New Vegas was a technical disaster with game-breaking bugs and other issues that were considerably more present than Bethesda’s Fallout 3, and online discourse took over for a few years.

Now, Fallout New Vegas is held up at the golden child of the modern Fallout games, and for good reason. New Vegas is fantastically written and the most RPG-feeling entry of the bunch, but Obsidian felt the cold chill of an upset fanbase for years after the game originally released.

“I think Bethesda deserves enormous credit for taking this isometric game and turning it into a first-person, immersive, open-world experience.”

New Vegas lead writer John Gonzales

Speaking to Game Informer, lead designer and project director Josh Sawyer said: “It’s interesting, because New Vegas was not particularly well-received when it launched. It was quite buggy and both players and critics commented on how much we had reused from Fallout 3. It took about five years for the community to come around on the game and maybe a few years more for us to start considering that players actually liked the design choices we had made.”

New Vegas originally began as a DLC expansion for Fallout 3, which Todd Howard felt would be “best if it’s a standalone”, with the Bethesda Game Studios head claiming: “I didn’t think that would do it justice for what they had in mind [if it was an expansion]. And I think they did an amazing job.”

Sawyer explains that “over the years, I think players have come to appreciate that we really tried to mazimise how much freedom they had to play the game”. While Fallout 3 could feel quite railroad in how it introduced players to the virtual wasteland for the first time, New Vegas was very open about its openness. Players already knew how this series functioned, so you could be almost immediately let off the tracks, and the players who stuck with it immediately fell in love.

John Gonzalez, the creative design lead and lead writer of Fallout New Vegas, explains that the game was only possible because of the foundations build for Fallout 3. After all, Obsidian’s game was created in just 18 months, re-using many assets, re-tooling features, and climbing on the shoulders of Fallout 3 to reach even higher than its predecessor.

“I played a lot of Fallout 3 and I think Bethesda deserves enormous credit for taking this isometric game and turning it into a first-person, immersive, open-world experience, and doing all the work of translating that,” Gonzales said. “I think that there have been other Fallout games that have had a different focus. I think that what you have in New Vegas is a very Obsidian-focused experience. It’s all about allowing the player to have tremendous amounts of narrative impact, narrative control. And so, I think that for someone, if that’s your jam, then you’re going to think that New Vegas is the best of the bunch.”

Fallout New Vegas is a beautiful RPG, and served as the basis for a lot of the much-loved Fallout Season 2 on Amazon Prime. It’s always been loved, but now it isbeloved, and it’s deservedly held as the gold standard for Fallout, a standard that will hopefully be reached whenever Bethesda eventually released Fallout 5.

For now, the only Fallout content we’ll be seeing is years of additional updates for Fallout 76, as well as a remaster of Fallout 3.