Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has revealed which ideas made it into his game from his former studio's canceled version of Fallout 3.
Sawyer's career got started at Black Isle, the legendary CRPG studio behind the first two Fallout games, and D&D RPGs like Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale. Towards the end of the studio's life, the team - including Sawyer - was working on what would have been Fallout 3, a project codenamed Van Buren. Black Isle would be closed down and the project canceled before it could be brought to life, but that didn't stop Sawyer from borrowing a few ideas for New Vegas several years later.
In an interview with Sector, Sawyer was asked what he brought to the Mojave from Van Buren. In response, he said that "there's a lot of stuff," although much of it was eventually modified. Citing fellow Black Isle developer Chris Avellone's work on Fallout 3, Sawyer notes, for example that "there were ideas like [major protagonist faction] Caesar's Legion that came over, although my interpretation of Caesar's Legion was very different from the design in the initial documents."
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Individual characters also made the jump; Joshua Graham, the Burned Man, had a presence within Van Buren, but was also changed substantially; companion Arcade Gannon was originally a character that Sawyer played in an early tabletop campaign version of Fallout 3.
Sawyer notes that there were plenty of other, "big and small elements" that he pulled across, but that now, 14 years after the game's release and more than two decades since Van Buren's cancelation, "it's been so long that it's hard for me to remember." That, he explains, is "why I don't answer when fans ask me stuff online. It's gotten to the point where my memory is actually influenced by other people talking about it. And I don't even know if I'm telling the truth anymore."
With the rise of the Fallout TV show, Sawyer did have a reasonable amount to say about his time on New Vegas, particularly as its player counts climbed in the show's wake. From his vibes-based weapon design to his true RPG inspiration in the face of Fallout 3-related criticism, we learned an awful lot about the Mojave in the past couple of months.
12 years later, I ruined my Fallout: New Vegas replay before I even started it.
