Instead of The Courier, Van Buren would have featured an escaped prisoner who later uncovers the plot of a mad scientist named Presper. It would have included many of the aspects that ultimately defined Fallout: New Vegas, such as the setting, but the combat would have been a hybrid of turn-based and real-time elements.

Just a few years earlier, he had departed amidst the slow collapse of Black Isle Studios, leaving Sawyer and a skeleton crew to take on the impossible task of finishing Fallout 3.īlack Isle's Fallout 3, called 'Van Buren,' was very different from the version that ultimately came out of Bethesda. Urquhart never quite dared to dream that he would get to work on another Fallout. So what's different now? Maybe it's best to start from the beginning. Instead of fading into history, New Vegas became a classic. Somewhere along the line, things changed. Instead, it's a game where the play clock is measured in time spent plodding through loading screens and not actually doing much. By bringing little else new to the experience and with it being as buggy as ever, New Vegas could have been adequate as a smaller-sized expansion disc. New Vegas is a proclaimed non-sequel, and it shows.

It's stranger still to read passages like this one from 2010: It's hard to believe now that the game that enjoys so much acclaim once missed its Metacritic score by one point, depriving Obsidian of their hard-earned bonus payments. What do fans want even more than Fallout 5? Fallout: New Vegas 2, obviously. A 2016 Kotaku article featured the headline, ' Fans' Intense Love for Fallout: New Vegas Must Be Weird for People at Bethesda.' In the wake of Fallout 4, which has become something of a whipping boy for the Fallout community, New Vegas' legacy is stronger than ever.Ĭheck Fallout: New Vegas' Steam page, and you'll find that it enjoys near universal acclaim, with player after player calling it the best game ever.

'I was like, 'What? How does this kid, one, know about New Vegas, two, know about my mod, and three: that's the burning question that he wants to ask'?'īut that's the kind of cultural cachet that Fallout: New Vegas has these days. Given an opportunity to ask the judges a question, the competition's winner-a 7th grader who couldn't been older than six when New Vegas was first released-asked Sawyer: 'Hey, are you going to update your mod anymore?'

If you want to know how relevant Fallout: New Vegas still is today, consider what happened when Obsidian founder Feargus Urquhart and director Josh Sawyer went to a local middle school for a game design competition.

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