Firstly, let’s be honest with ourselves. We’ve all done and we’ll continue to do it. Fallout 3‘s save scumming tactic is nearly as old as games get but Josh Sawyer, Director of Fallout: New Vegas and Pentiment was not a fan. The reason for the tactic was down to Fallout 3 ‘s randomization when it came to dialogue options. For example, if you tried to convince an NPC to pay you more caps for a quest the odds of it working were at times random. You could simply load up a previous save and try again until you got the result you desired. Sawyer says he wasn’t a fan of that mechanic and endeavored with Fallout: New Vegas to “get away from that mentality.”
Speaking to Kinda Funny Games, Sawyer said “I looked at how Fallout 3 did their percentage-based skill checks, and I didn’t like the randomization and the save scumming that resulted, meaning people reloading a lot,” Sawyer continued “One of the biggest takeaways from that was trying to get away from the mentality that because a dialogue option is unlocked, you should always pick it because it’s always the best option.”
It was because of this shift in mechanics that Sawyer aimed to encourage players to think more about the dialogue they were choosing as opposed to focusing on which options they had unlocked. This in turn helped to inform the dialogue and choice-based mechanics going for both Fallout: New Vegas and Pentiment.
He stated: “In Pentiment we tried to look at it like, there is this central storyline that runs through, but there are significant choices about individual people and relationships that play out over the course of the game, and you get to see a lot of those smaller choices reflected in the actual ending. People see the aggregation of all these little things they did come to play at the end.”
This decision was made with only an 18-month development cycle on Fallout: New Vegas. Even Sawyer described the development as “crazy” given Obsidian had never used the game engine Fallout: New Vegas was developed on before.
In the interview with Sawyer said he’d be open to “working on [Fallout] again” and would love to see the sequel to Fallout: New Vegas venture to “California or the Midwest.” I think all Fallout fans can agree that we’d love to see Sawyer and Obsidian return to the franchise.
Source: Kinda Funny Games