Fallout: New Vegas occupies a somewhat strange place in the Fallout canon. Widely considered the best Fallout of the Bethesda era (though I personally preferred Fallout 3), it is also viewed by many as something of a stepchild: no matter how many times Todd Howard persistently denies it, some fans remain left with the feeling that Bethesda – which didn’t actually make New Vegas – would rather bury it.
Given all of this, and not forgetting that both Obsidian and Bethesda are now Microsoft studios, it’s not surprising that there are occasional glimmers of hope that there will be a new Fallout from Obsidian. But would Josh Sawyer, the project coordinator, lead designer and systems designer of New Vegas, be interested in leading the project? Well… sure. Under certain conditions.
“Sure,” Sawyer said when asked during a recent Q&A session if he’d be interested in directing a new Fallout. “With any project, I think it’s about, ‘What are we doing, what are the boundaries that we’re working within, what am I allowed to do and what am I not allowed to do?’ I think with any intellectual property, especially one that I’ve worked on before, the question is, what do I want to do this time that I couldn’t do last time? And if those constraints are really limiting, that’s not very appealing, because who wants to work on something where what they want to explore can’t be explored?
“I love the Fallout IP. I think there are still a lot of stories there that can be told and questions that can be asked… Company. But yeah, you know, with any intellectual property, it’s kind of like that. “Would you like to work on this or that?” I don’t know. What are we allowed to do and what are we not allowed to do?”
Sawyer’s comments aren’t far removed from those of Tim Cain, one of the co-creators of the original Fallout. When asked earlier this year if he would return to the series, Cain said it would depend on whether the project offered him the opportunity to do something he’d never done before.
“Every RPG I’ve ever made offered me something new and different that made me interested in doing it,” Cain said in June. “It was the game itself that offered me something interesting that made me think, ‘Ooh, I want to do that, I’ve never done that before.’
“If someone came to me and said, ‘You want to make a Fallout game?’ I would say, ‘So what’s new?’ I didn’t even want to make Fallout 2, so why would I want to make a new Fallout? What’s different about it?”
Frankly, I don’t think it’s very likely that Sawyer or Cain will ever return to the Fallout grind scene, precisely because Bethesda’s RPGs are such iterative experiences where the system is more important than the narrative – and that’s not the kind of thing either of them are likely to enjoy. One can only dream, and it’s still possible that Microsoft will throw the series at either of them and say “do what you want,” but given the current state of the video game industry – which is heavily risk-averse and focused on big hits above all else – I’m not going to hold my breath.
