While Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer was correct that players would compare the game to Fallout 3 and complain about its bugs, as it turns out, he was also right about what made New Vegas the iconic RPG it is today.
Fallout: New Vegas was developed in only 18 months, and while Josh Sawyer was keen to work on it, viewing it as his last chance to work on a Fallout game, he knew that steps needed to be taken to meet that deadline, including reusing assets and shipping with bugs. "I knew that people would say 'Hey, this basically looks like Fallout 3.' And there were a lot of complaints about bugs. It was very frustrating because we weren't unaware, but you always have to prioritise things." says Sawyer, in an interview from Edge issue 404.
But while the complaints were sure to roll in, Sawyer was confident that the work the Obsidian Entertainment team had put in regarding the game’s freedom of choice would pay dividends, especially on repeat playthroughs.
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"All of our work had gone into the intricate and the freedom of the quests and the critical path, and the faction alliances." Sawyer begins. "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 go 'oh, wow, actually you can beeline straight to the strip."
For Sawyer, ensuring that players had the freedom to play the game however they wanted was to be key to New Vegas’ success, and something that would only become apparent in the long run as players played through the game multiple times. “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."
Check out Fallout: New Vegas among others on our list of the best RPG games.
