Fallout: New Vegas Was Meant To Be An Expansion

Gaming history is full of moments that you’d never expect. It could be a conversation between two developers that led to something being born. Or a movement from fans leading to a type of gaming being made. It may be a project with all the potential yet failed to live up to the hype. These things happen, and you often only realize that it’s happening much later when the developers start talking about it. A great example of this comes from the Fallout series. Those games have had a set of different developers over the years, but it’s the modern ones that most people remember. That goes double when it comes to games like Fallout: New Vegas.

You see, the franchise’s original developer went under after serious financial woes, and that’s when Bethesda swooped in to buy the rights to the franchise and bring it into a new era. An era where the game was fully 3D, was in an open world, and players could do what they wanted when they wanted. The course of gaming history was changed when they did that, and we’re still benefitting from it. The 25th anniversary of the original game is going on right now, and during a video, one of the heads of Bethesda, Todd Howard, noted that at first, Fallout: New Vegas wasn’t going to be a fully-fledged game.

They had just finished Fallout 3 and saw its sales and reaction. They realized they had something great here and needed to keep the momentum going. So what were they going to do? They would make a “big expansion pack.” However, there was a problem: most of Bethesda was working on Skyrim, so they needed some help. Thankfully, Howard knew where to go:

“We knew the folks at Obsidian,” Howard said, “and it was sort of immediate. There’s only one group that we would really want to do this.”

So they went to work, and after a while, Todd Howard realized that Obsidian had something special. So special that it deserved to be more than just an expansion pack. Thus, Fallout: New Vegas became its own entry in the franchise, and that proved to be the correct result. The game helped fuel the hype for the series even more, and even though Obsidian went on to make their own titles in this genre, like with The Outer Worlds, fans still want them to come back to the franchise and see what they can do with it.

It should be noted that Bethesda isn’t letting the Fallout franchise rest while they’re busy doing other things. They’ve already confirmed the fifth main entry, and there’s even a TV show coming from Amazon Prime.

As you can see, the 25th anniversary is going very well, and more will likely come.

Source: Eurogamer