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"
Nov. 6, 2024Good thing it did!
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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 necessarilyone of those things. But when director Josh Sawyer saw an early version of the Strip, he worried it might be too impressive to exist.
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.
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].”
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Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.
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