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]”
Nov. 2, 2024A blessing for Fallout too, as it turned out.
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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.
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.
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You’ll find a couple of Josh Sawyer’s games in our list of thebest RPG games.
Alex has written all sorts of things for websites including VideoGamer, PCGamer, PCGamesN and more. He’ll play anything from Tekken to Team Fortress 2, but you’ll typically find him failing to churn through his backlog because he’s too busy playing whatever weird and wonderful indie games have just come out.
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