Vault 34 was inspired by an area from Fallout 1
called the Glow, also by CR Army Depot.
If you can get all the way to the bottom
of Vault 34 and deal with all this crazy stuff going on
in it, you get this enormous cache of weapons.
We wanted people to really just grit their teeth,
and be like (groans), there's gotta be something good
at the bottom of this,
and then they get to the bottom,
and they just carry out truckloads of unique weapons
and mini nukes.
That's totally fitting for a game set in Vegas,
because it's a gamble;
you keep coming back,
and you're like, "I'm gonna get it this time."
I'm gonna find something.
(electronic jazz music)
Fallout New Vegas occupies an interesting space
in the sort of Fallout universe,
because a lot of people's first exposure
was Fallout 3, which was made by Bethesda,
and then Fallout New Vegas was developed
by a bunch of people who worked on the original games.
What do you think makes New Vegas what it is?
Well I think it's trying to marry a lot of the things
that Bethesda brought to the Fallout franchise,
when it made Fallout 3, because you're trying
to introduce it to a mass market.
Fallout 1 and 2 were very popular among hardcore gamers.
Fallout 3 really took it to a mainstream audience.
We wanted to really see,
can we take the stuff that Bethesda's developed,
but recast it back on the West Coast,
and continue some of the plot elements
and the characters,
and the factions from the first two games.
(V.A.T.S. beeping)
(gunshots)
So you worked at Black Isle,
who made the original Fallout games, so to speak,
and you were attached to what would have been Fallout 3,
the sequel to Fallout 2.
Yeah.
And some of the stuff carried over from that to this.
You could play it either as turn based,
or real-time-with-pause,
sort of like a--
There's a game that Micro Forte made,
called Fallout Tactics,
that was a squad-based Fallout game,
and they had both a turn-based mode
and a real-time-with-pause mode.
At that time, there was a lot of pressure from retailers
that turn-based games were not things that people wanted,
so I said, "I really wanna make this a turn-based game",
but we knew that we had to make some concessions,
and so we were planning on having both modes supported.
(gunshots)
So why didn't Fallout 3, the one that you were working on,
ever get finished?
It's because the parent company of Black Isle studios,
Interplay, was in a difficult financial situation
for a really long time.
We had put off working on Fallout 3 for years,
working on various other projects,
always expecting, "well, you know,
we're gonna get a chance later".
We really didn't get a chance to start working on it
until Interplay was already really in a lot of trouble.
The founders of Obsidian left Black Isle to form Obsidian,
I left Black Isle, and then everything just kinda collapsed,
and in the process,
Interplay sold the rights for Fallout to Bethesda.
This is The Strip.
Joe Sanabria, our lead artist,
put a ton of time into researching Rat Pack era Vegas;
we wanted to come up with casinos that felt like they fit
the vibe of that era, but were not direct rip-offs.
Things like the tops, and the lucky 38,
like we're really trying to invoke these feelings
of the sort of classic golden era of Las Vegas.
A lot of people have said,
"oh, why don't you put in Caesars Palace?"
Well, we probably have to license that from (laughs)
Caesars Palace.
Was it your decision to make it set in Vegas,
or was that sort of just passed under you guys?
That was part of the owner's original discussion about
the concept of where the game should take place.
They felt that it should be on the West Coast;
Bethesda was doing stuff on the East Coast.
We had also talked about things
like New Reno from Fallout 2,
we said, "Alright, okay, what about like, New Vegas,
so we actually go to post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.
The American Southwest is full of like lots of weird things,
so there's so much crazy stuff in the Mojave".
One thing that we learned by looking
at Fallout 3 and talking to the developers
at Bethesda, who worked on Fallout 3,
they try to make sure that there's always
at least three landmarks visible from any point on the map.
So we knew that having large, prominent landmarks
was a very important part of the feel
of what made a Bethesda game.
Yeah, it's that level of exploration;
just like, "what is that, I need to go see what that is".
Exactly.
I'm a really big fan of the Cabazon Dinosaurs,
so if you go out in the desert and you come across
the Cabazon Dinosaurs, they're hard to miss.
And also in Bakersfield,
I think they have the world's largest thermometer,
and so I really combined the Cabazon Dinosaur
with the world's largest thermometer to get this landmark,
and it is visible from most of this part of the map.
When you went to go work at Obsidian,
were you--
you just thought you were done with Fallout forever,
and then suddenly Bethesda swoops them up,
and you didn't really see yourself being a lead designer
on a new Fallout game, did you?
Oh no, I didn't think I'd get
to work with the franchise at all.
I mean, once I left Black Isle, I figured that was it,
and when Bethesda got the rights,
I figured, well, okay, they're gonna be developing it
from now on, so I'm never gonna see that again.
So I read that Fallout 3, the Bethesda version,
was in development since like 2004, when they were still,
you know, tinkering about with Oblivion;
did you just put that stuff out of your mind,
did you completely block it out,
is it like photos of an ex,
or were you sort of morbidly curious?
No, no, I was certainly interested in it;
I mean I sorta figured that they were gonna develop a game
that was more in line with the Elder Scrolls games,
in terms of their perspective, the emphasis on exploration,
and really allowing the player a ton of freedom to explore,
so it wasn't like I thought that Bethesda was suddenly
gonna make the game that we were trying to make.
You know, my background
is in making Dungeons and Dragons games,
or games that are like Dungeons and Dragons games,
and those are very math heavy;
I just try to think about the audience.
What is the audience, and what are their expectations?
There is a big audience out there that played Fallout 3
without having to do a lot of crazy number-crunching
like you might do if you sat down to play D&D
or something like that.
(gunshots)
One of the things I said is, to the designers,
you can't design quests with invulnerable NPCs.
If you have an NCP that talks to you,
you get one conversation with that NPC,
meaning you open a door and that NPC talks to the player,
and after that conversation ends,
you have to assume that the player kills them.
Your quest has to be robust enough to withstand that.
Because as a person who plays
and DMs in a lot of tabletop games,
that's something players do;
they don't like the DM's story,
and they get really aggravated,
and so they start messing with things;
they start killing NPCs,
they start punching people in the face;
this was one of the first areas we made,
and so I said,
"hey, if the player wants to go crazy in Novac
and just start murdering everybody, that is okay".
I'm probably gonna get ki--
probably have to fight him when I go up there.
He's probably not too happy
about what you've been up to.
No;
hey Cliff.
(gunshot)
Oh!
Sorry, my man!
Was there anything you desperately wanted
to put in New Vegas that just didn't work,
or couldn't happen?
There's a character in the game named Cass,
and she is a hard-drinking lady,
and we had this idea of her and the courier
getting into this sort of drinking match,
and blacking out, and then having
a cutscene where you wake up--
well, you wake up but you're still kind of blacked out,
and you're in front of the King, at the King,
who's essentially an Elvis impersonator,
and he's marrying your characters.
And then it just blacks out again,
and you wake up, and you have wedding rings,
and you basically just got this Vegas-style wedding.
Oh, that's perfect.
But it would have been very, very nice.
Cutscenes were a thing that were very hard for us to do,
and very expensive for us to use, so that one,
we were like, "ah, how many would even see this",
and we were like,
"it would be really cool,
but we just can't afford to do it",
so we didn't.
I remembered playing Fallout 1,
and being absolutely terrified
when I first came across a deathclaw,
and it was pretty late in the game.
They're nightmares!
They are very difficult.
This is actually a sort of controversial area
that I'm going into,
which is quarry junction.
I put this sort of in the way of Vegas.
It was not meant to actually block the player;
it was meant to make it challenging for players,
but a lot of people were kind of used to being able
to go wherever they wanted.
Actually, I have a lot--
Thankfully I'm in godmode,
otherwise I would just be completely--
But I mean, this is what this area is;
it is just chock-full and keep in mind,
the level of this character;
I have high explosives, I have perks;
it is hard, and I have heard a lot of tales
of people who, they came to quarry junction, and they died.
And they eventually got frustrated and they left,
and then they got to eighth level,
and they got a trail carbine, or something like that,
and they had some combat armor, and they're like,
"alright, I'm going back to quarry junction".
And they get there, and they get a little ways in,
and then they die.
And then--
Sometimes that's how it works.
And sometimes that's how it works;
and then by that point in time,
they're fast-traveling a lot.
Toward the end of the game, the person's like 25th level,
they have fully upgraded everything,
and they remember that quarry junction exists.
They stumble across it on some side quest,
and they go in
and they just stomp everything into the ground,
so that when they finally clear all of quarry junction out,
they really feel very satisfied.
(explosion)
New Vegas is a wonderful game, it's out there in the wild,
Thank you.
People have picked it apart, left and right;
is there anything you feel like
too many people skipped over,
or not enough people know about?
Mmm, no;
I think the fans are really thorough and they've dug,
and dug, and dug, and they found really everything
at this point.
They've dug so deep now, they're making up things,
like, you know, that we never actually intended
to go into the game.
They still, you know, years later--
I have a very active Twitter and Tumblr accounts,
and even though I'm currently working on other games,
I still get more questions about Fallout than anything else.
So that begs the question,
are you done with Fallout forever,
or is there a chance you'll work on another one?
That's the other thing that people ask all the time.
I would certainly love to work on a Fallout game again;
I know there are tons of people at Obsidian
who would love to work on a Fallout game again;
if we were given the chance, we'd certainly love to.
Well I think there are people out there who would probably
play another Fallout game from Obsidian.
I'd hope so.
Josh, thank you so much for chatting,
and more importantly,
thank you for making Fallout: New Vegas,
because it's a blast.
Thank you very much.
(electronic music)