Fallout New Vegas, Bethesda's hated stepchild.

The last few weeks I've been a bit bored with my other games. I was in the mood for some nostalgia and decided to reinstall Fallout New Vegas. This inspired me to write this article.

Fallout New Vegas is by far the best modern Fallout game in many years. From the very beginning of the "modernized" Fallout games, with the revolutionary and exciting Fallout 3, to the most recent -and frankly, lacking- Fallout 76, to the entertaining Fallout 4.

New Vegas had one of the most tumultuous production stages and a rough start, glitch-wise (only to be outshone by Fallout 76). Despite all the hardship and almost not making its release date, Fallout New Vegas became the diamond in the rough, as it were, of the Fallout games.

Those of you who played New Vegas when it first came out may have hit some of the more hilarious glitches; such as the spinning head of Doc Martin, Centaurs Landsharking their way towards you, NPC heads stretching into the nothingness of the Vegas sky, and Bits and baubles violently thrashing about a room at the speed of light.

To understand what happened with poor New Vegas, I think we will start out with a bit of the history of Bethesda and the Fallout franchise.

In 2004 Bethesda Softworks purchased the license to develop and publish Fallout 3. What you may not have known, is that Bethesda had pre-negotiated the option to create two sequels with Interplay Entertainment, the original owners of the Fallout franchise (Fallout 1, 2, Brotherhood of Steel games. All great.)

Three years later, they decided that they wanted to own the Fallout intellectual property after its smashing success with Fallout 3 and outright bought it from Interplay for a whopping $5.75 million dollars (Funny enough, Interplay is now the Licensee of Fallout. They are creating a Fallout MMO.). Bethesda then commissioned the sequel, which turned into the stunning and beautiful Fallout New Vegas.

With their own developers busy working on "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" Bethesda reached out to Obsidian Entertainment, a company founded by several former members of Interplay's original Fallout developers, Black Isle Studios, to develop the game. Bethesda and Obsidian decided to create a game that would continue the "West Coast" story rather than the plot of Fallout 3.

The first snag that this beautiful piece of work hit, happened when Bethesda rejected Obsidian's idea to set the game between the events of Fallout 2 and Fallout 3. Bethesda argued with the programmers saying that they didn't want to step back, and Obsidian tried to convince big papa Bethesda that the New Vegas game would be a perfect bridge between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3.

They argued that it would establish the history of the new series, but Bethesda told them that it was a terrible idea (for some reason…I guess Bethesda likes to try and fail.) but they did approve of setting the game in Las Vegas, thinking that it had some potential.

The plot of New Vegas takes heavy inspiration from the original Fallout 3 that Black Isle had started to develop, but wasn't able to take into production due to the struggling PC gaming culture back in the late '90s and early 2000s.

The most notable example of Black Isle's story was the inclusion of Caesar's Legion, a faction created for the original Fallout 3 storyboard. Obsidian also included other factions from the previous Fallout games and avoided writing any faction as entirely good or evil, but instead as potential rivals depending on what path the player decided to pursue.

This was one of the biggest successes in the New Vegas game in my opinion, as well as Fallout 4.

The game had a somewhat short development cycle of 18 months, because of big daddy Bethesda forcing the studio to rush the game out prior to Skyrim's release. This strict timeline almost made New Vegas not happen, even though it is the best of all the Fallout games. (as I said before, Bethesda likes to try its hardest to fail miserably for some reason.)

What helped the game succeed was the fact that the New Vegas engine was similar to Fallout 3’s, in that both games used the Gamebryo engine. Luckily, Obsidian had code to work with already, and stunningly they were able to improve on the previous installment's source code (The same can’t be said for Fallout 76); with some graphics rendering improvements and new art assets, as well as a rework of the engine to accommodate the extra lights and effects of the Las Vegas Strip.

What’s more, is that Obsidian was able to refine the real-time shooting mechanics and added iron-sights aiming to make playing without V.A.T.S. a more viable option than it was in Fallout 3.

On top of all this, the game was able to establish a new record for the most lines of dialogue in a single-player action role-playing game. The Obsidian team was able to add 65,000 lines of dialogue (all this in 18 months mind you), beating its predecessor and previous record-holder Fallout 3 which contained 40,000 lines of dialogue (Programmed by Bethesda itself hilariously).

Bethesda didn’t have much hope for the game, due to the time constraints they had established for Obsidian themselves, and saw it as just a cash grab. They just wanted to use it as something to hold the players at bay until they could finish their other, “More important", game.

The child that big daddy Bethesda loved more (but still screwed up royally in the beginning, and even through the patching stages.) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda put more faith in this game than they did in Fallout New Vegas, which is why poor New Vegas was in such terrible shape on release.

I believe that the poor, forgotten, and hated stepchild, that was New Vegas would have turned out so much differently had Bethesda put more time and effort into it. Unfortunately, the game was somewhat short and rushed, and Bethesda let a gem slip away because they didn’t believe that the game would be as good as Skyrim.

Despite all this hardship and neglect, and setting up for failure, Fallout New Vegas still stands tall among the modern Fallout franchise as, in my opinion, the best of them.

One only can dream about what New Vegas would have been, had it been cared for more than it was. Fallout New Vegas could have been an even better game than it already is.

Bethesda, unfortunately, is not connected with their fans and what they are looking for, and never have been. Though Skyrim is an amazing game now that they have it finished, New Vegas would have been even better had it had more time and money allotted to it.