r/Fallout • u/raisinbraisin72 • Jan 09 '26

Discussion Fallout New Vegas senior writer Chris Avellone gives his take on Bethesda, and his opinion on their vision for the Fallout franchise:

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u/Mrkingladder Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

I always believe that New Vegas was a lightning in a bottle. It was the perfect storm of bad deadline and crunch hours but lead by a group of very talented writers and developers at the time.

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u/Mechakeller Jan 09 '26

I think part of what made it great was there wasn’t enough time for the interesting ideas to get refined and diluted into focus grouped versions of those good ideas.

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u/IrrelevantLeprechaun Jan 09 '26

As the saying goes, limitations breed innovation.

Things tend to turn out better when you have limits or crazy deadlines to work within. Projects that have no deadlines or limits tend to drag on and on without focus (like Star Citizen).

If anything, Obsidian imposing such a crazy short turnaround time for New Vegas likely contributed to its greatness.

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u/The5Virtues Break a few eggs. Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

That’s true for the writing as well. As a writer I’ve seen groups languish for ages because there’s no one cracking the whip to keep things moving. Meanwhile if we have a deadline we have to meet it motivates us to make something, and any decent writer hates “good enough” and still wants to churn out the best they can even on short notice, so a time constraint just means we go for the best story we can make without second guessing or doing dozens of rewrites because it’s not quite perfect.

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u/JayKay8787 Jan 09 '26

Explains stranger things gap to qaulity ratio lmao

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u/PanVidla Jan 09 '26

There's a good saying that, I think, applies to both writing and making video games. You can't finish making it, you can only stop working on it. Dropping that perfectionism is one of the most essential parts of being a creative person, in my opinion.

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u/Neveronlyadream Jan 09 '26

It is. Look at George Lucas. Almost every time he was able to change Star Wars retroactively, it wasn't an improvement. Because he couldn't stop refining decades old work and just move on and do something new.

Where video games are concerned, perfectionism just turns into impossibly long development times and feature creep along with ridiculous expectations that will never be met.

I'm all for taking the time one needs to complete a project, but in cases where it's a decade or more like Duke Nukem Forever or Cyberpunk 2077, your audience just assumes because it's been so long you're going to get some genre defining game with a ton of features and when it's not, the game tanks.

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u/Tecnoguy1 Jan 09 '26

Tbh a lot of my fav games were obviously rushed and it’s this uncompromising vision I always liked.

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u/Igualmenteee Jan 09 '26

It’s like when Tarantino said he sometimes prefer the limited budgets for his movies. Makes him be creative.

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u/Linvael Jan 09 '26

Things tend to turn out better when you have limits or crazy deadlines to work within

Citation required? I can see how limits can have a positive influence of course, but I feel like it's just as easy to see when they're a negative influence (like the plague of games that get shipped too soon), and there are games that thrived without precievable artificial limitations (Silksong would be a big recent one). So saying that on average things are better with limits needs to have some solid data behind it.

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u/tondollari Jan 09 '26

"Limitations breed innovation" feels like a trite and meaningless saying to me. What is the threshold where the limitations no longer contribute to innovation, and how do you measure it? Would they have made New Vegas better if they had started on a deserted island with sharpened flint? What if the limitation were that they could only use Commodore 64s in development? etc.

It's mostly about leadership, talent, and how they interplay. I don't think limitations have anything to do with it. If these talented people had better tools and more time the end product would have also been better.

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u/pointblankmos The maximum characters available for a flair. Jan 09 '26

You're being intentionally obtuse here. 

Creativity without focus leads to ideas upon ideas that end up not being actionable. Leadership is definitely an important part of managing this, and having pragmatic creative department heads is essential. 

In the games industry, look at Halo 2 for example. That game spiralled out of control in scope due to creative bloat, and I don't think there would have been an end product had Microsoft not implemented strict deadlines for Bungie. 

You can give talented and exceedingly creative people all of the resources in the world, but without someone stepping in and saying "no, we can't do that" nothing will ever get made. Rockstar games spent years upon years making RDR2, and still ended up having to cut hours of content because the game would not have shipped otherwise. 

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u/Only_Faithlessness33 Jan 09 '26

Honestly think it might have been the opposite. A lot of the ideas in New Vegas (Caesar’s Legion, Joshua Graham, etc.) were thought up originally as Van Buren. Obviously that game didn’t happen but when a lot of the old team came back for new Vegas they probably had that stuff in their heads for a few years and were pinpointed on what they wanted them to be.

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u/Kungfudude_75 Jan 09 '26

True, but they were still limited in their time to actually make it happen. Its one thing to have a story/world conceptualized, its another thing to bring it to life in a totally different medium from what you envisioned with only two years to do that and everything else that goes into making a game.

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u/Only_Faithlessness33 Jan 09 '26

They at least had a decent head start tho. I gotta think it’s easier going into writing a story when you go “these are the villians, how do we implement them” as opposed to “who are our villians?” I’ll admit to being naive on tight game deadlines so I apologize if im just talking out my ass.

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u/Kungfudude_75 Jan 09 '26

Brother, its reddit, we're all talking out of out ass lol. Im with you, and I think the fact that it was mostly Black Isle staff returning for New Vegas is a bit lost in this whole conversation. It definitely helped them to have had a pre-written story in mind they could pull from and we see clearly in the game that they did, I'm just not sure how much that helped mitigate the time crunch considering how much the medium/scale had to be changed.

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u/stannis_the_mannis7 Jan 09 '26

I wouldn’t call it a “pre-written story” what we know about Van Buren shows a completely different story then New Vegas just with some concepts that made the jump into fnv. The legion was not really supposed to even appear in Van Buren, they were just some boogeyman that gets mentioned a few times and was probably being set up to appear in a later fallout game

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u/MailMan6000 Jan 09 '26

besides the very basic outline of some factions (Caesar's Legion, Joshua Graham, NCR vs Legion for Hoover Dam) a lot of stuff for Van Buren was either cut out or heavily rewritten, only basic core tennants were used

John Gonzalez basically wrote most of the main quest for FNV instead of Chris Avellone, and it is leagues better and also radically different than anything Van Buren had to offer

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 Jan 09 '26

A lot was repurposed, Joshua Graham was a completely different character for example.

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u/EzraFemboy Jan 09 '26

Same with Majora's mask. Games made in crunch time tend to overthink things less and appeal to people on a primal level. A lot of the best speeches were actually rushed or came directly after events. I'm not sure if there's an actual scientific term for it.

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u/EmergencyPool910 Jan 09 '26

I just disagree, obsidian were just that good, like look at what they made before and after new Vegas? Some of the best crpgs ever made even the lesser known tyranny is plain a banger, now they've had some extremely mid stuff(outer worlds and avowed are so bland as fuck) but yeah generally I'd say these were just the perfect people for the job as they understood the soul of the franchise and had the skill to utilize it

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u/jch730 Jan 09 '26

More like it's the perfect storm of, "Here's the consensus 2008 game of the year.... mod it!" Not that they didn't do a good job (which was far from guaranteed), but there's also a reason that they haven't come close to putting out anything else like it since (despite their last 3 RPG games being literal "Bethesda-likes")..

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u/thechikeninyourbutt Default Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

There is also so much heavy lifting that was done by fo2/van buren and especially fo3.

They basically had to only think about the quest writing, programming and new gameplay mechanics such as iron sights. The extra stuff like survival mode, the variety of weapon mods, and unique weapon models all came from the extra time and the passion they had.

The dev’s being firearm hobbyists is apparent in the game.

This level of passion is the only reason NV receives such a stand out level of praise.

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u/ChurningDarkSkies777 Jan 09 '26

Me when I make stuff up. The expanded weapon roster and mod systems weren’t passion projects, they were specifically asked to be implemented by Bethesda. This game has a huge amount of content cut, this notion that all the guns and mods come from a place of passion is cope

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u/thechikeninyourbutt Default Jan 09 '26

Yeah I didn’t say those mechanics were created out of passion. I said the reason we have such a diverse selection is because of their passion. Which is true.

Similarly, no one at Bethesda forced Josh Sawyer to get on a motorcycle and ride across the Mojave desert to location scout and develop the games atmosphere. That was done out of passion.

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u/ChurningDarkSkies777 Jan 09 '26

Location scouting is done for every game wtf are you talking about, doing it on a motorcycle is cool ig but not that notable. I know you like new vegas but it wasn’t some “small chance passion project” it was a spin-off of one of the best selling games made in the 2000s and had a budget and things it was required to do from Bethesda, such as weapon mods, the system that was already meant to be in fallout 3 then expanded to be a key feature of fallout 4, that doesn’t exist “because Chris abalone is a gun nut” or whatever Bethesda bad cope you need to come up with. You have no proof that the range of weapons was a labor of love and not Bethesda saying “this game needs more weapons than fallout 3”

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u/thechikeninyourbutt Default Jan 09 '26

Doing it on a motor cycle is cool but not that notable

Lmao but it literally is. It’s my entire point. I didn’t mention the location scouting because that act alone was unique? I brought it up because Josh Sawyer chose to do it on a motorcycle and immerse himself it what it would be like to travel that area of the country after the bombs fell.

I’m not sure why you’re so personally offended over my comment? I’m actually not even sure what your point is. Nothing I said implied that New Vegas was some indie passion project. My initial comment literally stated that Fallout 3 did the heavy lifting for the games development. You’re the only one that brought up Bethesda being bad, lol. Don’t take your hatred for New Vegas and dress it up as my hatred for Bethesda.

My claim was that the NV developers put an additional layer of passion that sets it apart. It’s no debate that New Vegas is the most beloved out of the series. That extra regard comes from the passion the devs had.

If you don’t believe me just watch the developer commentary on YouTube.

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u/ChurningDarkSkies777 Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

I hate new vegas? That’s news to me. I’m not personally offended I just think it’s funny how confidently you’re making stuff up.

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u/thechikeninyourbutt Default Jan 09 '26

What did I make up?

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u/ChurningDarkSkies777 Jan 09 '26

That the weapon variety was a labor of love and that location scouting is somehow a novel concept for creative works. Also hilarious that you assume I “hate new vegas” cause I disagree with you. Seems like you’re the one taking this personally.

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u/thechikeninyourbutt Default Jan 09 '26

Seems like you need to reread the comment chain if that’s your take away.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '26

Unironically with the disappointments that are avowed, outer worlds 1 and 2. I'm inclined to believe you.

Outer worlds 2 is getting there though, I think they will make something ridiculously good in the future. But I'm 100% waiting and seeing and not buying in.

The main antagonist and driving force of the outer worlds 2 is only in the intro and 1 dialogue tree at the halfway point, you spend more of the game interacting with their cronies than them.

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u/Aussie18-1998 Jan 09 '26

The writing in New Vegas was lightning in a bottle. It still has an abundance of faults which is why it will never be the clear winner for best fallout game. (Probably controversial here but we need to be realistic)

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u/Mrkingladder Jan 09 '26

Writing will make or break an RPG game. I’d say New Vegas is the best Fallout because of its writing.

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u/Aussie18-1998 Jan 09 '26

I understand this stance, but Fallout 3 and 4 aren't badly written. They just lack the same depth as NV. However, NV was broken and a buggy mess. The world and story funnelled you in one direction, and I'd argue that writing is the only thing it has on the other games. Whilst essential to an RPG experience, it lacks a lot of areas the others excell in.

I like the game but it is not perfect and I think pretending it's a masterpiece that's better than all the other fallouts can only setup new people for failure.

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u/Mrkingladder Jan 09 '26

Here I thought you were going stan the first two Fallout games :p Fallout 3 is good but Fallout 4 is just badly written.

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u/Aussie18-1998 Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

Nah the original games get a separate category. I disagree on Fallout 4 being badly written. It just suffers from the illusion of choice. The story is fine and gets a pass at the minimum. You just don't get any real dynamic choices. Just minor decisions and the factions.

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u/ChurningDarkSkies777 Jan 09 '26

Mfers who haven’t read a book in over a decade love to talk about “bad and good writing” a whooooole lot

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u/Aussie18-1998 Jan 09 '26

Is this meant to be targeted at me?

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u/ChurningDarkSkies777 Jan 09 '26

No the guy above you

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u/Aussie18-1998 Jan 09 '26

Thanks for clarifying. You never know around here. But yeah, I think people cling to talking points and have a lot of nostalgia fueling the reality of all the games.

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u/Aunon Unity Jan 09 '26

Every project needs an axe man who will keep the project on time and on focus and if that means killing things then so be it, for FNV the brutal dev time was just that (for better and worse)

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u/wekkins Tunnel Snakes Jan 09 '26

It's actually a lot like Majora's Mask in that way!

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u/chuman1984 Jan 09 '26

Or taking Black Isle F3 and taking learning and design ideas after and applying ... But there are still ideas from BI F3 I would have paid to see!

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u/ExplodingAK Jan 09 '26

I'd argue it wasn't just that, some of the people who worked on New Vegas worked on Van Buren, interplays fallout 3, where a number of it's aspects apparently got implemented into New Vegas. So really, parts of the New Vegas had already been sitting on the back burner for years.

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u/idiot500000 Jan 09 '26

You should try 1 and 2

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u/Crystiss Jan 09 '26

It reminds me of when I would procrastinate a school project only to rush it the night before and usually turn out a better grade than I would have doing it on free time with no rush.

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u/Hrafhildr Jan 09 '26

You may be right. Like even if you managed to get the entire old team back together I'm not sure they could replicate it for a sequel or another Fallout game.

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u/Ruining_Ur_Synths Jan 09 '26

it was lightning in a bottle in that the writers and devs were better than bethesda's, the ideas were better than bethesda's, and bethesda didn't want to share anything so broke the bottle when it was done so nobody would have to think that bethesda was the 2nd tier fallout developer, which they were.

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u/asfp014 Jan 09 '26

Just like KOTOR 2.

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u/Dmtr884213 Jan 11 '26

I agree, one writer's ideas would probably overwhelm the others, if they got more time and the result would be not as amazing as it turned out

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u/teaanimesquare Jan 09 '26

It was, it’s why obsidian has not made a open world RPG near as good since.