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Fallout: New Vegas director took one look at the Strip on a console devkit and thought, 'Oh my god, this isn’t going to run'
Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer reveals how the game's development was hampered by console limitations, leading to the iconic New Vegas Strip being scaled back and leaving some fans disappointed with its perceived underwhelming nature.
Fallout: New Vegas may have released 14 years ago, but so much of what's contained in its tattered vision of America feels eternally impressive. The New Vegas Strip, which houses just a few bright lights and lonely casinos, isn't necessarily one of those things. But when director Josh Sawyer saw an early version of the Strip, he worried it might be too impressive to exist.
While working on New Vegas, Sawyer explains to Edge Magazine in issue 404 that his team at Obsidian were overwhelmed. In 2007, the Fallout franchise had officially moved from Interplay to Bethesda. Sawyer says the latter developer was "quite helpful" in relaying information about the RPG games it had recently become an expert in, but "there is always a lot of stuff that is taken as institutional knowledge that the team that uses it would never think to tell you."
Some of that stuff includes how to make a Fallout game exist on console. Sawyer specifically remembers that, "once we actually started testing the Strip on console hardware, we went 'Oh my God, this isn't going to run.'"
The remedy for this is at least partially responsible for why so many modern Fallout fans find the Strip "underwhelming": "We had to split up the Strip," Sawyer says, "and there was a lot of content that was cut."
"We had three programmers with us on the project," he continues, "and a lot of them were just doing basic maintenance and upkeep, [or] the integration of a new version of Havok physics, for example, which exploded the game for a while." Ultimately, Obsidian got it all under control, and left the exploding to the gnarly atomic bombs.