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16 years since its release, Fallout: New Vegas is widely considered an RPG masterpiece, but when looked at from within the context of Bethesda’s notoriously tight 18-month development turnaround demand, it’s even more of a monumental achievement. According to director Josh Sawyer, there was even more they wanted to do with the game but had to cut due for time.
In a new video called ‘Setting Goals’ shared to Sawyer’s official YouTube channel, the Obsidian veteran explains how his hopes and goals for Fallout: New Vegas were defined by how little time the studio had been given to work on it. It’s no secret that Fallout: New Vegas was built largely using existing Bethesda assets from Fallout 3, but that wasn’t only because it needed to fit seamlessly alongside the other games in the franchise – it was also just the most efficient way to do things.
“For Fallout: New Vegas … my goal was – well, we were constrained by the 18 months from the beginning,” says Sawyer. “So, I said, ‘let’s modestly restructure some of the systemic things that Bethesda did. 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.’ Because there was very little else that we could do in that window of time.”
Of course, it wasn’t immediately clear back in 2010 that Fallout: New Vegas was about to become one of the most beloved games in the series, as the game was a technical disaster at launch. That said, Sawyer makes it clear that he was confident from the very beginning despite the time constraints he faced.
“I believed in that team,” he says. “We had fantastic designers and writers, and I believed that they could make really great quests and content. So, I just said, ‘Look, we can’t set our sights on anything crazier than this. So, let’s just make the best quest content and story content that we can.’
“And that was the goal. And get it done within 18 months, which meant that a lot of other ideas about things that we could do had to just fall by the wayside. So the 18 months wasn’t a goal, 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.”