It must be annoying to be told over and over again for years that you plagiarized the system of your game from another. Moreover, that you were born as DLC and have the soul of one. Although ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ has a gigantic fan base (and, after the series on Amazon Prime Video, we can say it’s a bit toxic), the truth is that it has always felt a bit like a patchwork of ‘Fallout 3’, although its director says exactly the opposite.
Here, fighting
Josh Sawyer has now said in an interview that his spin-off was not based at all on ‘Fallout 3’ and instead looked to a very different game: the first ‘Fallout’. It may not seem like it, but the truth is that they are played in completely different ways, just look at the combat and the point of view. Don’t blame him for not inventing his own system: they only had 18 months to develop the game. It turned out quite well.
“We took an already made game and made a spin-off without really changing the technology behind it, we focused mainly on the content”. And who can blame them? In a year and a half, there’s not much time for anything else. The good thing is that this gave them the opportunity to focus on the dialogues and the different consequences of your actions… and, in the long run, it has benefited them.
And precisely these dialogues and this system come from the first ‘Fallout’. According to Sawyer, “much of the philosophy with which I made New Vegas was from the first game, or how I interpreted it. For me, it was foundational in understanding how role-playing games should be made”.
At its core, this is a lesson about not letting ourselves be defeated by bad circumstances, a classic “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. Do you have to make a kind of pseudo-DLC for ‘Fallout 3’ that no one really cares about? Take it to your own territory and do it your way. What’s the worst that can happen, that it becomes a complete success?
