Obsidian knew what it was in for as it was developing Fallout: New Vegas, but that didn’t stop it from sticking with its guns.
Despite how long games take to make these days, Fallout: New Vegas was on the opposite end of the spectrum, taking only 18 months to develop, which was way too quick even then. The end result had plenty of bugs, which is something that Obsidian knew it would have to accept, but also reused assets from Fallout 3 – and in a recent interview with Edge (via GamesRadar), director Josh Sawyer knew that that had to be the case if it was going to ship at all, particularly considering this might be his last chance to helm a Fallout game.
“I knew that people would say ‘Hey, this basically looks like Fallout 3.’ And there were a lot of complaints about bugs,” Sawyer said. “It was very frustrating because we weren’t unaware, but you always have to prioritise things.” That doesn’t mean any of this stopped Obsidian from doing exactly what it set out to, as a big thing the developer wanted to achieve is making the game highly replayable. “All of our work had gone into the intricate and the freedom of the quests and the critical path, and the faction alliances.
“Those are things that, if you just do one playthrough, you are going to be like ‘yeah, whatever, who cares?’ So it did take time for people [to] go ‘oh, wow, actually you can beeline straight to the strip.'” Freedom was particularly important for Sawyer, as he noted that “you don’t even have to do the critical path. You can kill anybody in the game and the game accounts for it. We really heavily focused on freedom to play the game the way you wanted, and I think that’s what stood out over time.”
Since then, Fallout: New Vegas has obviously gone on to become a beloved entry in the series, with plenty hoping that Obsidian would make a new Fallout after being acquired by Microsoft (though I think it’s probably a bit busy making Avowed and The Outer Worlds these days).