Video Game General

Of course, Fallout 3 had already acted as an incredible anecdote generator not long before New Vegas launched, so Obsidian had the terrifying task of taking that template, harnessing the carnage of a simulated world, and layering on new systems, all in 18 months. “At the time, it was daunting,” Sawyer admits. “For a long time we didn’t really know the technology very well. Because we weren’t going to a new renderer or anything, it was basically like ‘Well, this is Fallout 3, but not as good’ – that was my fear, that people were going to say it was Fallout 3, but nothing was better about it. The whole team put a lot of effort into thinking through how the factions behave, how they interact, and how the world looks, the reasons for why things are laid out the way that they are. I think, when the game launched, people just didn’t notice a lot of that stuff.

“That was a little frustrating at first, because if you’re just playing the game for five to ten hours you’re just like ‘Oh, it’s like Fallout 3, whatever’. One of the things that does make me happy is, over the years, people are starting to notice a lot of the details that the world builders put in, the writers put in, the quest designers put in, creating reactivity. It’s stuff you might not even notice in a single playthrough, but on multiple playthroughs – and there are people who have over 1,000 hours on Steam – they start to see, like, wow, there really is a tonne of stuff you can do in this world that is meaningful in a reactive sense.”

The team had a monumental workload in that short development time. They had to get to grips with new development tools, write 65,000 lines of branching dialogue, design quests, create characters, improve the mechanics – for example, adding an aim-down-sights mode for guns, creating a faction system, disguises, and more – and even build the world.