Fallout: New Vegas director on the “blessing” of working on the RPG: “I never thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again]”

Josh Sawyer, known for his work on Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Pentiment, shares his experience directing Fallout: New Vegas, highlighting his determination to make the most of the opportunity after a previous Fallout project was cancelled. Sawyer credits Bethesda's technology for streamlining development and allowing him to focus on design and worldbuilding, emphasizing the contributions of his design team.

After the cancellation of the first Fallout game he worked on, Josh Sawyer was determined not to squander a second chance to work on the series when the opportunity to direct Fallout: New Vegas arose.

Over the last decade, Josh Sawyer has effectively cemented himself as a household name in the game industry, directing both Pillars of Eternity games and, more recently, 2022’s medieval art RPG Pentiment. But for many, his crowning achievement will likely always be 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas, a game Sawyer himself regards as a blessing.

While at Black Isle Studios, Sawyer worked as the lead systems designer for a later-cancelled Fallout 3 project codenamed Van Buren. Around five years later Sawyer was working for Obsidian Entertainment, and following the release of the Fallout 3 we all know and (mostly) love, Sawyer had the chance to work on the franchise again when Bethesda contracted the studio to develop New Vegas - one Sawyer was not going to pass up. “This is a blessing.” he said of the opportunity in Edge issue 404, “I never thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again].”

At the time, Obsidian had just come off the back of a cancelled Aliens RPG, near the end of which Sawyer had been promoted to director, and with only 18 months to develop New Vegas, he credits Bethesda’s tech with solving a lot of the studio’s prior issues. 

“We had put a lot of time and effort into the [Aliens] tech, but it took forever to make areas and basically we didn't have a game.” he began. “Then we got Bethesda's tech, [which] is extremely powerful for rapidly making content, more than any engine and toolset I've ever used. You can make content so quickly with their tools. So I said 'Hey, everybody, we do not want to disrupt our pipelines at all. We basically want to use what's there - add to it, don't change it, just add to it - and make great content."

With the process more streamlined, Sawyer had more time to focus on overseeing the design team but he insists that the designers themselves deserve the bulk of the credit. “They are responsible for conceiving it and executing on it. The only  [worldbuilding] thing I was really responsible for was the concept and visualization, with Brian Menze, of Caesar's Legion and the NCR military.”

On whether his previous Fallout experience colored his time on New Vegas, Sawyer confirms that they “did pull over certain things” from Van Buren such as the Burned Man, but that they were not wholesale. “It was more like an aesthetic or an interesting background,” he added. “Then there were other things, like Arcade [Gannon] and Jean-Baptiste Cutting, who was part of the Van Graff family, were two of my tabletop characters." At the end of the day, it feels like a blessing for all of us that Sawyer got his second chance.

You’ll find a couple of Josh Sawyer’s games in our list of the best RPG games.