Fallout: New Vegas might be the best spin-off currently available. Obsidian Entertainment created New Vegas in an effort to capitalise on the resurrected Fallout open-world game brand after the popularity of the Bethesda RPG game Fallout 3; it’s safe to say that they were successful. Could you imagine a world if Fallout: New Vegas wasn’t a fully released game? It is widely regarded as one of, if not the finest entry in the series owing to its world building, storytelling, and characters. That was almost the case, though.
We’ve known for a long time that Bethesda knew it could trust Obsidian, which had staff from Black Isle Studios (the original Fallout developer) on the team, with the series, but only now have we learned that the original scope was much smaller than what we ended up getting in the end.
In another one of the Fallout 25th anniversary retrospective videos, this time focused on Fallout: New Vegas, series director Todd Howard talked about how the spin-off was born.
“We had finished Fallout 3, and we’re always going into the next project even before that one comes out, and so we had started Skyrim, which everybody knows, and then Fallout 3 comes out and it’s a really big hit for the company and they’re like ‘okay so what’s the follow up?’” explains Howard in the video.
“There was a push, ‘we have this [Fallout 3] now, we made it successful, let’s not let the chance pass by we should do a big expansion pack or something like that?’” he added. “We knew the folks at Obsidian and it was sort of an immediate ‘there’s only one group that we would really want to do this,’ and it actually started as a big expansion pack for Fallout 3 [but] I felt really strongly [that] it should be its own game.”
You can find the video on the Bethesda game Studios Twitter, which goes into even more detail about the development of Fallout: New Vegas. There’s talk of sharing resources, how New Vegas didn’t want to deviate too much from 3, and what could be new and unique for the series at the same time.
If, like me, you want to jump back into Fallout: new Vegas for the umpteenth time, then why don’t you spice up your next playthrough with the best Fallout: New Vegas mods, or even see if there any updates on the Fallout 5 release date if you just can’t wait for Bethesda’s next entry.