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Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer explains why the RPG's opening is a perfect example of respecting the player's skill choices
Fallout New Vegas' opening area rewards players for their skill choices, demonstrating how game designers can make players feel valued and invested in their characters.
Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has explained how the RPG's opening area is masterfully designed to make the player feel rewarded, no matter which skill they'd invested in.
Even if you've played merely an hour of Fallout New Vegas, you'll know Goodsprings, the wasteland, old-west-style town with just a handful of people and even fewer buildings still standing. Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer believes that one of the RPG's world designers brilliantly demonstrated how to reward the player in this opening section of the game.
"Eric Fenstermaker was the designer of that area, and he ensured that every skill you could take would be rewarded within the ghost town gunfight and in the area," Sawyer says in the video below, around the 90-second mark. "That was our way of telling the player 'Hey if you tagged this skill and you just started playing the game, we're here and we're paying attention to the character you made, and we're going to give you rewards for that.'"
Fallout New Vegas' opening is generally highly regarded among the game's extensive community. In contrast to other games in the series like Fallout 3 or 4, you don't begin by emerging from an underground vault but instead begin as a courier, shot in the head and left for dead by Benny, the RPG's secondary antagonist (and portrayed by the late Matthew Perry).
Later on in the video, shortly after the five-minute mark, Sawyer speaks a little more about 'skill checks' in Fallout New Vegas. "The number of checks across all of your skills probably should be frontloaded. In the first couple of hours you really want to make the promise like 'hey, we are rewarding you for the things you invested in,'" Sawyer says, again speaking to the Goodsprings section of New Vegas.
"As the game goes on, that density can drop off across the board, but as long as you keep rewarding the player for their choices over time enough, then they will feel like they're being rewarded, enough to make it worthwhile," the veteran RPG and Obsidian developer concludes.
Earlier this month in June, Sawyer said players who didn't get along with Fallout New Vegas' very divisive card game should simply "try again." Good luck saying that to anyone who really hated Caravan back in the day.