‘It took about 5 years’ for people to start liking Fallout: New Vegas, says Josh Sawyer, and even longer for Obsidian to see that ‘players actually liked the design choices we had made’

Sometimes, a game needs time to age before we come to appreciate it—as is the case, Josh Sawyer, studio design director at Obsidian, claims of Fallout: New Vegas. Considered a cult classic, and potentially the best “modern” Fallout game (I put “modern” in air quotes there because it did come out 16 years ago. Sorry), New Vegas captured the last shreds of that oldschool RPG magic before Bethesda went ahead and made Fallout 4.

In a recent mega-interview with Game Informer, however, Sawyer maintains that New Vegas was nowhere near a beloved classic back when it first came out: “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.”

That’s a bold claim, Mr. Sawyer, let’s see how it holds up—back in 2010, Craig Pearson gave it a solid 84 in his Fallout: New Vegas review. Hah! We liked it before it was cool! But just to be sure, let’s look at the actual text, shall we? I’m sure Pearson didn’t complain about how much Obsidian reused… Oh. “New areas, characters and factions, but the same clunky inventory and character models. Two years to stay exactly where you were.”

Egg on our face, then. Fair enough, Mr. Sawyer. Sorry, Mr. Sawyer.

In fairness, in pure numerical terms, an 84 is “A great game with exceptional moments or features; touches of brilliance. We love it” per our own reviews policy, but his assertions on the specifics hold water.

Sawyer continues: “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.” Those being the really quite brilliant story (which Pearson praised) and the breadth of ways you could handle its primary antagonists, which includes literally walking up to wannabe-Ceasar and defeating him with facts and logic in the middle of his own war camp.

John Gonzalez, who was the lead creative designer on New Vegas, mostly concurs—and tips his hat to Bethesda for doing a lot of the mechanical legwork before them: “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 the work of translating that.

“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.”

That is, in fact, my jam—but I will take a point of pride in the fact that we still pretty much liked it, and still do.

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