Fallout 3 designer Bruce Nesmith previously shared his hopes that a remaster of the game would make the combat better than it was in 2008.

Last week, Bethesda dropped a load of info about its post-apocalyptic RPG series: Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," New Vegas developer Obsidian is returning to the series for a new entry, and Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters.

Granted, this felt a bit like jingling keys to distract from Microsoft's massive wave of layoffs – something one workers' union has already called out – but it's naturally a very exciting prospect to fans.

Speaking to FRVR around the time The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered released in 2025, Nesmith shared his thoughts about a potential remaster of Fallout 3, admitting that the gunplay in the 2008 RPG is "not good."

"It didn’t hold up to shooters at the time," he explained, "a lot of work was done on that for Fallout 4."

And it's true, Fallout 4 did feel more akin to what would be a traditional first-person shooter of that era, making it so players didn't have to rely on the V.A.T.S. quite as much.

"I anticipate seeing a lot of that work [we did with Fallout 4] go into it [Fallout 3 Remastered]," Nesmith explained. And granted, Oblivion Remastered did make some changes to the combat compared to the 2006 original, namely giving new movesets to the melee weapons. So perhaps Bethesda will end up making the shooting in Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) feel more like Fallout 4.

Modders remastering Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 are not bothered by Bethesda's official version: "Our project has been a community-driven passion project for almost a full decade"

Fallout: New Vegas and Pentiment director, Josh Sawyer, has spoken about how he doesn't find it interesting when RPG protagonists can save everyone and fix everything. Instead, his design philosophy surrounds restricting players and forcing them to sit with uncomfortable choices.

Speaking on The Examined Game (thanks Kotaku), Sawyer, who is reportedly working on a new Fallout game, explains that even if RPG players have been "conditioned" to be all powerful, he finds it more interesting when they are forced to make difficult choices.

"I save everyone, I kill everyone. I don't think that's particularly interesting," says Sawyer. "I don't think that makes players interrogate their values, either their own or the character that they're playing. And so I always prefer to kind of create scenarios where it says 'you're going to do your best, and your best is worth trying to do, but it's not going to fix everything, because you just can't. No person can fix everything."

He goes on to describe scenarios where he has incorporated this philosophy "to different levels of success. To favorable or unfavorable reception by the audience." Speaking of Pentiment, a game where you have to 'solve' a murder with no confirmation as to the culprit, Sawyer says that he didn't want to give a concrete answer, so players have to "sit" with their choices.

"With a role-playing game, so much of what we excel at is making the player sort of sit and deal with their choices, which often feel very imperfect," Sawyer says. "That sense of agony, where you're like, 'I have two things to do that are good and bad and I gotta decide which is most important."

Sawyer pulled a similar trick with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, where players are unable to stop the god Eothas. "We also try to telegraph that he's way beyond the ability to physically do anything to," he says. "But players are very conditioned by a lot of RPGs to expect like, 'Yeah, but I'm built different. Like I'm going to be able to take this guy out.' And then you can't."

Another one of Sawyer's controversial decisions was in Fallout: New Vegas where an objective that allowed you to help Mr House while making peace with the Brotherhood of Steel was removed from the game. By forcing players to destroy the Brotherhood in order to help the billionaire, it made them question whether doing House's bidding was the right choice.

"So many problems are just human problems," he says. "They're like part of the reality of life, and being a human being, and living on this planet with other people right now. And even in a fantastic world, there are going to be powers that are beyond you and things that you can't overwhelm."

Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer says it was "pure luck" he directed the RPG at Obsidian: "Almost literally fell in my lap."

As some fans are filled with dread following Bethesda's confirmation that both The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 are being developed using the shiny new Creation Engine 3, words from New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer from six years ago might provide some reassurance.

Since Bethesda's flurry of news last week about its upcoming projects, there have been many concerns raised about the studio using Creation Engine 3 – an updated version of its proprietary engine – for the two biggest RPGs on its slate. Fans worry about bugs and the devs potentially prioritizing modders over the games themselves, but according to Sawyer in 2020 that's now doing the online rounds, it's actually a very easy engine to work with.

During an old stream of Fallout: New Vegas (below), Sawyer was asked if he had "a hard time" developing New Vegas thanks to Fallout 3's "buggy engine," to which he was quick to respond: "No, not at all."

He continued: "I will criticize other stuff in Fallout 3 and 4, [but] this engine is incredibly easy to make content for. Look into my eyes – without GECK [New Vegas' official editor and modding tool] and without the pipeline of this engine, we never would have finished this game in 18 months."

Sawyer reiterated that "this is the best content creation pipeline of any game that I've ever worked on, easily," but that doesn't mean it's without its issues. "It's buggy, you're right, it's very buggy. It's buggy and unstable and it's frustrating, but it's incredibly easy to make content for. Like, no one's gonna sit here and say, like, 'No it's not that buggy.' Like, yeah, it's pretty buggy, but it's fine. Like, that's a trade-off."

He went on to talk about the GECK tool, too, calling it "fast" and saying that "searching is super easy, finding references to things is super easy, scripting is very powerful," and that "iteration loops are super fast." All that made it "awesome."

In fact, Sawyer said that "the only shortcoming of the tools was the dialogue tool." He explained: "We built our own dialogue tool to sit on top of that, and that was fine. Like, it took a little bit of investment for us, but that was it."

Looking back about what Sawyer had to say about the ease of Creation Engine and how quickly things could be made with it, I can't help but wonder if that might be on Bethesda's mind today. After all, last month, it was reported that Xbox is apparently pushing for faster development on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises – something which might prove even more difficult now that a number of Bethesda staff have been laid off.

Needless to say, if a familiar-feeling, easy-to-use engine can help facilitate the demand for more games, it's little wonder that that's the one that's been chosen.

16 years after Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian is returning to the post-apocalyptic RPG series and Todd Howard "could not be more excited."

Todd Howard warns he is no longer thinking of retiring, he will persist until the end of days, asking you to buy Skyrim - and to release a few more games, we imagine.

Todd Howard has been at Bethesda Game Studios since 1994, when it was creating Terminator games, making a massive splash on the studio's popularity after taking on the director's role for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, the game that established the Bethesda RPG for years to come.

Since then, he's directed Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim, and Starfield. And while he's only in his mid-50's now, by the time his Game Director roles on The Elder Scrolls 6 and presumably Fallout 5 come to an end, he'll likely be nearing retirement age.

Speaking to Jason Schreier, Howard is asked about his eventual retirement and says, "The truth is there was a period of time a while back where I pondered what does it look like? Not is it imminent, but what does it look like? And I no longer do."

He explains, "I see the work we're doing. I just love it. I love working with these people. It's really not something I think about."

Howard adds, "Some folks in our industry that are a little older than me, they're just making great stuff, too. So, it's not something I've been thinking about."

One such name who is a "little older" is Hideo Kojima, who on his 60th birthday just under three years ago said he has no plans to retire, and wishes to create things for the rest of his life. But worry not for now, Todd Howard will be around to sell you copies of Skyrim on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix.

Elder Scrolls and Fallout boss Todd Howard says "you'd be surprised how many great ideas I get" from Reddit.

Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard has revealed he's constantly lurking on Reddit and claims the team is consistently taking that feedback on board.

In a thread on r/Games, Howard chimed in with his first Reddit post since the launch of Starfield – well aside from reacting to one post six months ago that modded a cardboard cutout of him into Fallout 4 as the immortal snail – saying "Hey Reddit. I’m a professional lurker and read your comments all the time."

And given Reddit's reactions to Bethesda games at times – just look at any New Vegas thread – this may have sounded vaguely threatening, but Howard adds, "Many here do and we deeply appreciate all the passion for our work."

The thread in question was the post from Bethesda outlining the future of the studio. This post included news about how Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters, Obsidian is making a new Fallout game, and an update on the production of The Elder Scrolls 6. Howard explains, "Today’s info was an attempt at changing that and letting everyone know what we’ve been working on the past several years, and a look at what’s coming. So know we’re constantly listening and keep telling us how to be even better."

Howard also added, "You’d be surprised how many great ideas I get from Reddit. So upvote your favorite and we’ll do it. Maybe."

Unsurprisingly, fans really want Oblivion Remastered to be fixed after a year. One user says, "Please get Virtuous to keep patching Oblivion and give it as much love as you guys gave Skyrim, because it feels abandoned right now, which is a shame."

Meanwhile, another has fears that the upcoming Fallout remasters will share a similar fate, saying, "Pay Virtuous whatever amount needed for the remasters to function well."

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

As Bethesda announces what's going on with the future of the studio, director and producer Todd Howard has acknowledged the layoffs that have hit the studio as part of Microsoft's latest batch of staff cuts.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Howard calls the cuts at Bethesda Game Studios "really tough" for him and his colleagues. This latest round of cuts saw staff at the studio laid off as part of Xbox's seemingly now-yearly mass layoffs – including 18-year veterans of the company like Ray Lederer. Bethesda as a whole also got hit hard as we also saw fellow ZeniMax Studios id Software and ZeniMax Online Studios face heavy cuts.

Howard adds, "This is Bethesda's 40th anniversary, and there have been periods where we've gone through changes," referring to a portion of the 1990s where the studio was on the brink. But now, he says, "We're going through a change so that we focus best on the franchises and what we need to do to deliver for everybody."

Word over the last week is that Xbox has been pushing Bethesda to focus on marquee titles with Bethesda Game Studios on The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, while the wider ZeniMax studios work on Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein.

Howard also spoke about his personal feelings on the layoffs with Windows Central, saying "I've been doing this a long time, whenever you've worked with people for, in some cases, many decades, and they're no longer here, that's really personally very difficult, and difficult for our teams."

These interviews have come alongside word that Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters, and that Obsidian is returning to the post-apocalyptic RPG series for a new entry. But with layoffs across Bethesda and Obsidian, as one workers union has already suggested, it's hard not to see this as Microsoft trying to change the subject.

Video game fans are currently quite unhappy with everything going on at Xbox, with thousands of developers losing their jobs, and calling into question how these diminished numbers will affect development going forward. So a big blowout of every Fallout project everyone wants to know about – with nothing to actually show from them – arguably feels more like an attempt at a distraction or reassurance, rather than it being the right time to drop this news.

It's official: Obsidian is returning to the Fallout series. 16 years after the launch of the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, the venerable RPG studio is returning to the post-apocalypse for a new entry that appears to be entirely separate from Fallout 5. You can count Todd Howard himself among those excited about the news.

"The wasteland continues to expand as we team up once again with our longtime friends at Obsidian Entertainment," Bethesda says in its announcement about the future of Fallout. "We're happy to confirm they're working with us on a new Fallout project. We'll have more to share in the future."

"We could not be more excited to work with Obsidian again," as Bethesda boss Todd Howard tells Bloomberg. Bethesda's level of input into Obsidian's game also isn't clear, but he says "the Fallout franchise is managed out of here and our staff and our franchise teams."

Howard doesn't offer much concrete detail on what Obsidian's game will look like, but believes the "timing is right" for the project to get started. Bloomberg previously reported that Obsidian was working on an Avowed sequel which Microsoft canceled to make room for this new Fallout project.

As part of this news blast, Bethesda also confirmed that Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," and will presumably be released some time after The Elder Scrolls 6. The long-rumored remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were also finally confirmed, so if you're looking for an excuse to learn why these titles are ranked so highly among the best Fallout games, you're about to find one.

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

After seemingly endless amounts of speculation and rumours, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters have been officially announced by Bethesda.

This happened in a Twitter post where Bethesda Game Studios acknowledged the future of the studio following Microsoft's latest massive wave of layoffs – including the future of its big three: Starfield, The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout. While Starfield got some more proof of life and Elder Scrolls got a pretty simple "we're working on it," Fallout fans are eating right now.

Not only has Bethesda outlined the future of Fallout by confirming that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, and that the rumours are true and it will be working with Obsidian Entertainment on a new Fallout game, but the past of the series is also getting some love as Bethesda finally confirms those remasters are happening.

"We also know many players want to revisit previous Fallout experiences." Bethesda says, adding: "While we're not announcing any dates today, we have been working on remasters for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas."

This duo of remasters has been heavily requested and heavily rumored since the release of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered in 2025, and while it's not exactly been a massive secret, this is the first time Bethesda has outright mentioned it's happening. Fallout 3 was first released back in 2008 and marked Bethesda's first outing with the franchise, while New Vegas was helmed by Obsidian Entertainment – a studio at the time filled with ex-Fallout 1 and 2 staffers – and is widely considered the greatest game in the franchise.

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

Xbox subsidiary Obsidian got butchered along with most of the parent company's children during mass layoffs earlier this month, making the original Fallout: New Vegas team even more scarce. New Vegas writer Chris Avellone did the math, and it looks like only 16 of Fallout: New Vegas' total 73 developers still work at Obsidian.

"Some of the ex-NV developers were among those laid off last week, unfortunately," Avellone explains in a July 14 Twitter post on the topic. 21-year veteran art director Dan Alpert was impacted, as was animator Shon Stewart, and assistant art director Paul Fish. "Shon in particular was a big surprise when I heard about it," says Avellone, "he's a great animator."

But many New Vegas developers had already been long gone from Obsidian. Character artist Kevin Manning has spent the last seven years at Riot Games, for example, junior artist Megan Morse hasn't worked at Obsidian since 2012 and is currently an artist at Exodus studio Archetype, and Avellone himself left Obsidian – which he co-founded – in 2015. He's currently fiddling with secret "other projects, including RPGs," he says on Twitter.

Obsidian is now toiling over a new Fallout game – which may or may not be the new Fallout game we already knew about, Fallout 5 – after Xbox canceled its planned sequel to 2025 action-RPG Avowed. So while it isn't exactly thrilling news that only 20% of Fallout: New Vegas developers have jobs at Obsidian after 16 years of layoffs, game cancellations, new opportunities, and plain, old life, it's not a big surprise to me, either.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain returned to Obsidian in 2025 for an unrevealed project, and co-creator Leonard Boyarsky has spent the last decade at Obsidian. This doesn't satisfy the people on Twitter who begged Avellone for his Obsidian stats to begin with, but so little does.

"I wasn't sure about a few people on the list, so this may get revised," Avellone adds on Twitter. "Still, better than nothing and a lot better than yelling back and forth."

Fallout: New Vegas writer says he feels "embarrassed" by some of the Fallout TV show dialogue, but has no notes for "really cool" Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

The Fallout TV show may have a fair few fans as one of Prime Video's most popular shows, but one game writer wishes the scripts were a little tighter. Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas writer and Obsidian co-founder Chris Avellone recently shared his take on the video game adaptation, admitting that he feels "embarrassed" by some of the dialogue.

"I kind of wish the game writing for TV shows like that where they're mimicking a game, would kind of elevate a bit," he told Insider Gaming. "[Cyberpunk] Edgerunners was really cool, no problems there but sometimes I just wish the script quality on the Fallout TV show was a little higher. I guess I feel embarrassed when I see some of the lines being done but it's a fun show."

Avellone, who has also worked on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, was pushed on why he thinks the script isn't quite there. "I don't mean to put all Hollywood writers in this category but I think some of them still struggle with, 'Okay, well I'm writing a game franchise and obviously those game writers didn't really know what they were doing because I'm a respected Hollywood writer and I know how these things are supposed to look,'" he added.

"So I think for some of them it's really easy to dismiss that work and go in their own direction which they think is more solid but the problem is when they do that they don't have any real sense of, they probably haven't played Fallout 3 or Fallout 4 or New Vegas, so a lot of the context has gone and so have opportunities."

The video game writer and designer does love the cast of the series though, saying seeing Walton Goggins as The Ghoul was "amazing" as "he added a lot of legitimacy to the show". Equally, he feels that Lucy star Ella Purnell "has the right features and cast and delivery for being a naive Vault dweller with a little bit of steel in there".

Filming recently kicked off on Fallout season 3. Goggins confirmed the news with a picture of him back in the make-up chair, and some fans have spotted the crew filming in Colorado. There's no confirmed release date yet, but we'll keep you updated on the show's return.

In the meantime, check out our guides to the best Prime Video shows and the best Prime Video movies to watch right now.

Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer says Obsidian took a different approach to level scaling than Bethesda did with Fallout 3 to teach players that "things work a little differently" here, and that "you're going to get your ass handed to you if you're not careful."

Speaking to The 41st Precinct in a video interview you can check out below, Sawyer talks about going back to the OG Fallout when designing a new spin of his own on the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

More specifically, Sawyer loved that the critical path of Fallout 1 "is very open." If you really want to and know where to go, you can waltz right to the late game areas and skip a big ol' chunk of the story. Funnily enough, Sawyer also says that one of Fallout's co-creators, Tim Cain, told him that's down to a bug, but hey, everyone enjoys it enough so it's a feature now.

And a good thing it is, as it made quite the impression on Sawyer.

"I loved how open it was, and so, with New Vegas, I was like, 'I want to get that feeling back where we have difficulty gates,' so we took some of the level scaling out," he says. "It's a much more compressed level scaling range. That's why if you go to Quarry Junction, a Death Claw will just chop your head off. It's to teach the player, 'hey, this is not actually Fallout 3. Things work a little differently. You're going to get your ass handed to you if you're not careful.'"

To bring things to their most basic terms, enemies in Fallout 3 will increase in level and use better equipment to match your level. Return to an earlier locale in the late game and it'll be a nastier place than you remember.

Fallout: New Vegas enemies can certainly get meaner themselves, but only to a point. As such, you don't have to worry about Goodsprings turning into an endgame area if you return at a much later point. It does mean, though, that some of Fallout: New Vegas's areas will punch you in the face if you're not equipped. Think of it as a suggestion that you probably shouldn't be here until you level up. Once you do, though, you'll be able to steamroll foes in a way that isn't typically doable in Fallout 3.

Sawyer goes on to say that this approach to game design meant Obsidian could offer the player the chance to follow Fallout: New Vegas's story, as in Fallout, by skipping parts – albeit with the added challenge of surviving nastier areas.

"What that meant is that we could make the story – you can find Benny immediately," he says. "Like, you can go from Goodsprings straight to Benny. And that's the Water Chip. The design of that is you follow an information trail. I'm looking for this guy, I go here, he's not here but he says go here, go here, go here. But at any time, you can shortcut that. You can go through Scorpion Gulch and you can get to Novak and talk to Manny and then go to Boulder City. Or you can go straight to The Tops if you can figure out a way to get there. So, yeah, I was trying to embody that open spirit of Fallout 1."

I'd say Sawyer and Obsidian's approach to Fallout certainly landed, which is why New Vegas is so fondly remembered even today. It makes the future interesting, too, as Microsoft is reportedly kicking around plans to get Sawyer to head up another Fallout game to capitalize on the success of the TV show, especially as Bethesda won't be getting to that for a long time thanks to The Elder Scrolls 6. According to one former Obsidian lead, there was another Sawyer-led Fallout RPG in the works that ultimately got kiboshed, so it might not be the first time such a project nearly came to fruition. Maybe this time such a thing will stick and see the light of day.

Microsoft lays off Bethesda vet behind Todd Howard's "crazy" Fallout 4 idea, "too many Skyrim weapons to count," the Dwemer, and Mudcrabs – and he may leave games altogether.

The Xbox reset announced on July 6 is the biggest, most controversial restructure in the Microsoft division's history. The broad strokes are simple: Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs, 1,600 of them being immediate layoffs, in a spate of studio spin-outs and redundancies off the back of low profit margins. The company has become unhealthy, according to CEO Asha Sharma, with the restructure aimed at "reset[ting] our content portfolio".

Basically, Xbox is paring back its output to its highest-earning franchises and will be rerouting money and people into them. But with each new day bringing more numbers, outrage, and insights into Sharma's "Resetting Xbox" announcement, I can't be the only one who feels the picture is getting foggier by the hour.

Here, I'm going to go through everything we know so far about the Xbox restructure, from the studios being sold back to themselves as independent developers to the layoffs and consultancy periods we know of right now. I'll touch on how Xbox managed to get here in the first place, and what the reset might mean for all the upcoming Xbox Series X games now that development teams have been cut or divested entirely.

Layoffs

Xbox announced 1,600 immediate "role eliminations" in the first stage of its reset, with the majority coming from ZeniMax studios Bethesda, ZeniMax Online, and id Software, with further instant cuts made at Obsidian.

After receiving a notice from the Texan Workforce Committee, Game Developer reported that 136 jobs in total have been cut from id Software, with a further 22 being made at Bethesda Game Works. This brings us to 158 job losses under the ZeniMax umbrella at the time of writing.

Studio exits

As part of the Xbox Reset, CEO Asha Sharma has announced that four Microsoft-owned studios "will leave Xbox to new management," meaning they are to be sold and will no longer be part of Xbox's in-house developer cohort. In addition, Arkane Studios (Dishonored, Deathloop, Redfall) has entered "required consultation" in Lyon, France, to decide the developer's future.

The four Xbox studios being sold as part of the reset are:

1. Compulsion Games (We Happy Few, South of Midnight)
2. Double Fine (Psychonauts, Psychonauts 2)
3. Ninja Theory (Hellblade, Hellblade 2)
4. Undead Labs (State of Decay, State of Decay 2)

What does the reset mean for future Xbox games?

With the Xbox reset impacting multiple studios with games either in active or conceptual development, the severity will depend upon whether the teams have been cut or the studios themselves sold on.

As Compulsion and Double Fine are being sold back to themselves as independent developers, each will leave Xbox with " their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games" intact according to Sharma's announcement.

Compulsion confirmed in a post on Blue Sky that it will keep the rights to games shipped under Xbox, including last year's dreamy South of Midnight, and Double Fine reiterated that it will also regain full rights to its back catalogue too.

Meanwhile, it looks like Ninja Theory and Undead Labs will retain "funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3" after being divested and sold off to new management. Senua was only recently announced at Summer Game Fest 2026, and State of Decay 3 has been in development for six years and is finally slated to launch in February 2027. It also leaves another question in the air: whether State of Decay 3 will launch on Game Pass at all, let alone on day one, now that Undead Labs is splitting from Xbox.

Aside from slashing its workface, another goal of the Xbox reset is to course-correct the division's poor profit margin by reinvesting time and manpower into flagship franchises. This means Obsidian has had to scrap plans for Avowed 2 altogether, allegedly working on a new Fallout game instead. Off the back of that, Bethesda will continue working on The Elder Scrolls 6 as one of the key tentpole franchises remaining under Xbox, while there's been no mention of Fable 4 developer Playground Games in any of the announcements so far.

Most intriguing to me right now is what will become of Marvel's Blade, which is in development at Arkane. Xbox has revealed very little about Arkane's "required consultation" period, including whether it intends to make redundancies or sell the studio off entirely, so I'll have to get back to you on that one.

As for why any of this was necessary in the first place, I've already touched on the lack of profitability Xbox is experiencing at the moment. But according to Reuters, Microsoft is axing 4,800 jobs across the whole company ("more than 2% of their global workforce") to finance its AI spending. It seems Xbox is just bearing the brunt of that figure. AI is one of Microsoft's biggest interests at the moment, and with Xbox boss Sharma announcing her role as an "external advisor" to the US Federal Reserve on "productivity and jobs" in the wake of AI technologies, it's all starting to sound a little circular.

Obsidian Entertainment is reportedly early in development on another Fallout game, but it's apparently not the first time the studio has tried to jump back into the radioactive wasteland since making Fallout: New Vegas. According to Obsidian co-founder and former developer Chris Avellone, the studio had been working on the idea some time ago until Bethesda got involved.

Amidst all the turmoil in Xbox's suite of developers, Obsidian has seemingly also been affected by layoffs and project restructurings. And as Xbox eyes up its biggest franchises, Bloomberg reports that the studio behind arguably the best Fallout game is hoping to repeat its magic trick.

Part of that report claimed Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer had been directing another game that was similar to Fallout in many ways, but wasn't actually named after or related to the franchise. Asked about that project online, Avellone says he heard from sources at the studio that Sawyer's old project was actually "intended to be a Fallout game" before series steward Bethesda "put the kibosh on that a while ago, so it had to change its direction/tone from Fallout to something 'similar' to Fallout." No reason was given for Bethesda's alleged disapproval of the project.

The RPG veteran also alleges that an Avowed sequel, which was reportedly scrapped to make way for a Fallout game, is "still being worked on (for now) in the hopes of being 're-pitched'" later down the line in some form. Grounded 2 and The Outer Worlds 2 DLC are seemingly still on track.

Needless to say, I wouldn't take this as bulletproof confirmation of anything since Avellone hasn't worked at the studio for over a decade and his sources may be a little rusty.

Bethesda boss says the company must focus on its "strongest franchises" as Xbox layoffs reportedly hit The Elder Scrolls and Fallout makers hard.

Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian is reportedly making a big creative pivot following the latest Xbox layoffs, turning its attention to a new Fallout game and canceling a planned sequel to its 2025 RPG Avowed.

Per Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Microsoft's Xbox restructuring has resulted in the loss of 25% of Obsidian's overall workforce, a devastating downsizing with equally seismic implications for the studio's slate of new projects. Bloomberg reports that Obsidian had been making good progress on a sequel to Avowed, an underrated RPG overshadowed by generational launches like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and massive blockbusters like Assassin's Creed Shadows. That, alongside other unannounced projects, are reportedly canceled.

Instead, Obsidian is said to be working on a new Fallout game, which lines up with Xbox's updated messaging, not to mention explicit guidance from Bethesda president Jill Braff, that tentpole franchises like Fallout need to be a bigger focus going forward. Details of the new Fallout are unclear - including its relation to the already confirmed Fallout 5 - but New Vegas director and Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer is said to be at the helm.

Bloomberg reports that Sawyer had previously been working on an RPG similar in structure and theme to Fallout, but without the Fallout name, at Obsidian. It's unclear if this new Fallout project is related.

I'm disappointed that we're missing out on a potential Avowed 2 due to even more layoffs at Xbox, but some Obsidian employees are reportedly continuing to work on the project in the hopes that it's one day revived. On the other hand, as much as any new developments that emerge as part of Xbox's reset are somewhat overshadowed by such a massive amount of lost jobs and livelihoods, there's no denying the potential in a new Josh Sawyer-directed Fallout game.

After 37 years at Microsoft, veteran who led Xbox Backward Compatibility program has been laid off: "I look forward to watching how Xbox evolves going forward"

Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind Avowed, The Outer Worlds, Pentiment, and Grounded, has reportedly been impacted by Xbox's latest round of layoffs.

Several Obsidian developers took to social media to share the news that they too had been let go as part of Xbox's brand "reset" that cut 1,600 jobs today and will ultimately result in 3,200 cut jobs by the end of fiscal year 2027, according to CEO Asha Sharma.

"I and a good number of very talented game devs were laid off by Obsidian as part of the Microsoft sacrificial rituals this morning," reads a Bluesky post from narrative designer Jay Turner, who has credits on Avowed as well as older BioWare classics like Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. "If you or anyone you know is looking for a Senior Writer/ND with more than two decades' experience in titles like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, please let me know!"

Prior to Xbox's announcement, there were rumors and unconfirmed reports that Obsidian was actually one of several Xbox Game Studios negotiating with Microsoft to avoid full-on closure. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier debunked those rumors last week, but unfortunately it seems the beloved RPG studio wasn't able to escape Microsoft's wrath completely unscathed. The exact number of laid-off developers isn't clear, but reporting from Kotaku indicates that around 60-70 people, or roughly 25% of the studio, was cut.

Kate Dollarhyde, a narrative lead at Obsidian who's written for Avowed, Pentiment, The Outer Worlds, and Pillars of Eternity, said on Bluesky that "many excellent developers" at Obsidian lost their jobs today."

An animator at Obsidian said on Bluesky that they were among "dozens" of developers who had lost their jobs. "Incredibly privileged to have landed my dream job right after school. Obsidian was an amazing place to work," they said.

Up until now, Obsidian had been among the more resilient studios under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella, but as layoffs hit tentpole developers like Bethesda and Zenimax Online, it seems no one's safe right now.

Bethesda union blasts Microsoft as Xbox layoffs hit the Fallout and Elder Scrolls studio, too: "When will this cycle of cuts in pursuit of ever-greater profits end?"

Obsidian Entertainment, the beloved RPG developer behind several cult classic games, is reportedly not under threat of closure despite fears it was in negotiations with corporate owner Microsoft to avoid shutdown.

Numerous reports have claimed that Xbox is planning to carry out mass layoffs, cancel an undetermined number of games, and close entire game development studios soon. Compulsion Games (South of Midnight), Double Fine (Psychonauts), and Ninja Theory (Hellblade) are a few of the developers reportedly negotiating to stay alive.

A new report from The Game Business stated that Obsidian Entertainment is also part of that list, and is currently in negotiations with Microsoft in order to avoid closure. Fears were that certain developers under Microsoft's gaming division could spin off and become independent, find new buyers, or simply shut down for good, but Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier now reports that Obsidian Entertainment is, in fact, safe from closure.

"Despite a report this morning, I can confirm that Obsidian is *not* in negotiations to avoid shutting down," Schreier writes on Bluesky. "Plenty of details are still up in the air surrounding the layoffs (picture will be clear on Monday) but Xbox is keeping Obsidian, according to people familiar with the situation."

Obsidian Entertainment itself has been an absolute powerhouse in the RPG genre for over two decades. The developer first made a name for itself by working on sequels that sometimes eclipsed their older siblings – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Fallout: New Vegas.

After being acquired by Xbox in 2018, the iconic developer's been building out its own franchises with Pillars of Eternity and Avowed, The Outer Worlds and its sequel, Pentiment, and the Grounded duology. Every game publisher under the sun has been chasing bonafide multiplayer hits, and Obsidian arguably made two of them with its survival game series – in one console generation, no less. Needless to say, its closure would have been a huge loss.

Elsewhere, the potential Xbox closures and internal turmoil come amid what CEO Asha Sharma calls a "reset" for the business. "We're not in a healthy spot, so the next 100 days is going to be about resetting the business," she said last month.

Recent reports also claimed Sharma was looking to move faster on The Elder Scrolls, Halo, and Fallout games. Microsoft's fiscal year ended on June 30, 2026, so we should likely learn more about what that reset entails in the coming days and weeks.

We've also reached out to Xbox for comment on the Obsidian rumors, and will update this article if we receive a response.

Obsidian veteran Josh Sawyer thinks RPG choices are best when they're not "purely" good or evil, and Greek plays "knocked it out of the park 1000s of years ago."

Obsidian Entertainment design director and veteran developer Josh Sawyer likes his RPG choices best when they fall outside of the good versus evil moral binary, and thinks games could learn a thing or two from those Ancient Greek tragedies from thousands of years ago.

In a new YouTube video talking about where his inspirations and influences come from, Sawyer says he takes "a lot from plays, actually," since he originally went to school to study theater before switching to the history department. That background probably makes more sense when you consider some of the games he's directed, gorgeous whodunnit Pentiment and Fallout: New Vegas included.

"This will sound corny, but especially because of the games that Obsidian works on, I think a lot about Greek plays," he explains, pointing to Antigone and The Oresteia. "You have a lot of moral and ethical decisions that are extremely difficult [in those plays]. Characters are put in situations that are truly, in the literal sense, agonizing and they're forced to make terrible decisions and those decisions are never purely good or they're never purely bad... I think a lot about that when we think about our moral and ethical choices in games."

The long-time RPG developer isn't on a mission to make every player choice as "agonizing" as what Ancient Greek protagonists go through, but Sawyer reckons it's more interesting to have players "sit and think about it," even if those choices lead to uncomfortable feelings, "because it does force us to think about our values."

Strictly good and evil choices aren't totally off the table, he adds, but players don't really ponder those decisions for quite as long. Sawyer's theory is that many players will decide to build either a good or evil character, and then make choices that align with that moral stance for the rest of the game. To him, RPG decisions are best when "individual choices are just not that clear-cut." Again, choosing who to pass the blame onto in Pentiment is a really good example of this, and Sawyer is right to pat himself on the back for that one.

"So Greek plays, they knocked it out of the park thousands of years ago," he says. "Why not look at them?"

Modern RPGs have largely moved past that moral binary in recent times. Games like The Witcher 3 and Baldur's Gate 3 don't have a bar that goes from red to blue depending on who you smooch or smother, for example. And even Fable, a series that was famous for its totally good and totally evil choices, is ditching that black and white thinking in favor of a reputation system where your actions are subjective. Times are a-changing.

How a parchment of ideas evolved into the RPG work of art that is Pentiment.

Josh Sawyer isn't taking any credit for Fallout: New Vegas's conception, despite the fact that he directed the beloved RPG at Obsidian.

Like most games, Fallout: New Vegas was a collaborative effort with various leads at Obsidian spearheading different elements of the world and story, but in terms of the initial concept, it's fairly established history that studio co-founder Chris Avellone came up with the idea for the starting incident, which is the courier getting shot in the head and being buried in a shallow grave. Sawyer, as director, set the overall vision of the project, but he makes clear in an interview with The Examined Game that he wasn't involved in the initial discussions at all.

"I wasn't part of any of those early conversations," he says. "When I was at Obsidian around 2009, I had been a lead designer on an Aliens project that went very badly," he adds, referring to the canceled horror RPG Aliens: Crucible, "and it was the owners who had been talking to Bethesda. I had no idea that any of this stuff was going on.

"But then Feargus Urquhart, who's the studio head of Obsidian, he came to me and he said 'hey, we're talking to Bethesda about making a Fallout game – I think it was called Fallout 3: New Vegas or Fallout 3: Sin City – but it was a proposal that I believe [Obsidian co-founder] Chris Avellone had written, and I was completely unaware that they were doing this really, but basically he said, 'would you be willing to direct it?', and I was like, 'yeah, what? Of course.'"

Hearing this, I can't help but be reminded of a recent video from Sawyer's old Obsidian co-worker and fellow Fallout royalty Tim Cain, in which Cain explains how he "fumbled" his way through his early career, including his time at Interplay in which he created the Fallout series. According to these two generational RPG developers, the trick to success in this industry is just to really make sure you're in the right place at the right time.

"I didn't pitch New Vegas. New Vegas almost literally fell in my lap, because Feargus just sort of said, 'here you go', and yeah, it was just luck. It was just pure luck, like most things in my career," Sawyer adds.

There's a good reason Fallout: New Vegas remains on our list of the best RPGs to play in 2026.

Time has been kind to Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian's ambitious spin-off action RPG. These days, players appreciate the nuances and sense of place wandering the desolate Mojave desert, but back in 2010, the game lived in Fallout 3's shadow. Once those comparisons faded, director Josh Sawyer believes the release got a fairer look.

"The reception of New Vegas, when it launched, by professional reviewers was positive, but kind of lukewarm," Sawyer says on The Examined Game podcast (below). "People were not jumping out of their seats like, 'This is amazing.' And some reviews were pretty critical."

He notes there were comments that New Vegas "feels like a mod," or "feels almost identical to Fallout 3," or "it feels like an expansion pack." My personal recollection is frustration over bugs and glitches, but viewing Obsidian's project as glorified DLC sounds about right too.

As Sawyer notes, there's a significant overlap in assets and visuals, and coming two years after Fallout 3, it would've been a difficult descriptor to avoid. He clarifies he's "not saying everyone hated it," just the sci-fi adventure didn't land quite as the team hoped.

"It was only over time that there was this sense that people were appreciative," he recalls. "It's kind of like they forgot about the fact that they were annoyed that we reused so many assets and the gameplay was largely the same."

The modding community helped here as well. You can now find a hearty mix of improvements and tweaks that make New Vegas smoother and more enjoyable to play. In any case, if you haven't already played through it, I recommend you do. Just maybe not right after a run of Fallout 3.

Fallout: New Vegas lead says Obsidian has a "Karma Police" force to make sure "however you built your character" in their RPGs, "it's not gonna be the same experience" twice.

One of many things that makes Fallout: New Vegas a standout within the franchise is how well balanced its classes are. Any build you make is distinct and gratifying, an uncommon experience when it comes to RPGs of any type. Josh Sawyer, New Vegas' director, puts this down to a special squad within developer Obsidian who sense-check the player's options.

"We just wanted to set up the player to believe, however you built your character, it's not gonna be the same experience," he tells the Human Can Opener podcast about Fallout: New Vegas. "We're not gonna let you down. We're not gonna leave you out to dry and not give you something to be excited about."

Sawyer, who still serves as a game director at Obsidian, wants to make sure the RPG remains worthwhile and intriguing to players. So, "We have an informal job on the design team called 'Karma Police,'" he says. "At a few points during development, we'll ask a designer to go through all the scripts – usually in dialogue, but also everywhere in the game⁠ – and see 'How often is Guns being checked? How often is Charisma being checked? How often is Barter being checked?'"

There's essentially a spectrum for encounters where one skill is needed, or could be more useful than another, and Obsidian aims to be within a certain threshold on all fronts. "Let's say there's 40 [checks] in Medicine, and there's like, 28 in Science. Great! Get in the ballpark," Sawyer muses. "You don't want to go huge stretches of the game and be like, 'Man, I invested in this skill and it never comes up.'"

I would agree, and I'd go further to say, if you make these internal stats too arbitrary – make them all 35 or something – players would start noticing the patterns through comparison. A little bit of randomness is good to keep us on our toes, and perhaps more importantly, to encourage replays. And if ever there's an RPG that's good for replaying, it's Fallout: New Vegas.

Fallout designer Tim Cain "fumbled" through his career and "didn't think about a sequel" to the first apocalyptic RPG or Arcanum while making them.

Before there was Fallout 3 in 2008, there was Van Buren – the sadly canceled, Black Isle Studios-led third Fallout – and even though it never came to fruition in the end, it could've been one heck of an RPG.

Or, at least, it sounds like it might've been. Obsidian Entertainment's Joshua Eric "Josh" Sawyer, now best known for his work on genre gems like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, seems to think it was shaping up to be quite a game.
He explains as much in a new interview with The Examined Game on YouTube (below), first noting that he "wasn't the lead" on Van Buren, that role belonged to Chris Avellone. He was the lead system designer, however.

Things were complicated over time after the team was stripped and left with a "skeleton crew," though, as Sawyer puts it. Resources "got taken away to work on another project outside of Black Isle." Considering the work that had been done on Van Buren, it was disappointing.

"This is such a bummer because we made a cool demo," as Sawyer recalls. "It looks very dated now, but… it was like 2003 when this demo was finished."

He notes that you can find said demo online, and after a quick search myself, I'll admit it does look pretty dated… but also pretty dang solid. It certainly fits the vibe of the first Fallout games a bit more than Bethesda Game Studios' own Fallout 3 does.

As Sawyer says himself, "I thought it was a really cool demo, and it showed that we were doing some pretty neat things." But, of course, nothing ever came from it, unfortunately.

According to Sawyer, however, publisher Interplay eventually did see it. "They said, 'Well, if we had known that you had made this, maybe we wouldn't have canceled it.'"

It's a frustrating consideration for the Obsidian dev and his former coworkers, as they "repeatedly" asked for acknowledgement of Van Buren. "We invited you over and over and over again, and you never came," he recalls. Sadly, as Sawyer concludes, "they weren't interested in it."

This all lines up with what others have said in the past. Fallout co-creator Tim Cain stated that the original canceled Fallout 3 could've shipped and been "a really good game," for example.

It's upsetting to know Van Buren won't ever see the light of day properly, I suppose – but for the time being, we do have fan-led projects like the Nexus Mods version of Van Buren that are playable for free.

Fallout designer Tim Cain "fumbled" through his career and "didn't think about a sequel" to the first apocalyptic RPG or Arcanum while making them.

Putting together an RPG is hard. Regardless of type, they're nebulous projects that require all sorts of creativity to get right. The Outer Worlds and Avowed studio Obsidian Entertainment would know, since the studio's released quite a few, and according to its findings, putting out a beta build first doesn't necessarily help, though there are exceptions.

At Summer Game Fest 2026, Chris Parker, game director for Grounded 2, explained to us that letting players in earlier can work in some instances, but not for sprawling role-playing adventures. "Obsidian got its first real taste for this with Pillars of Eternity, which was not an early access game per se, it was a Kickstarter, but we were constantly updating the community and letting them know about stuff," he tells GamesRadar+.

"I think we recognized that that sort of relationship with the community can't be replicated with just a bunch of devs hanging out," he continues. "No matter how hard you try, and how Socratic your philosophical discussions may be, you're never going to get that huge big picture."

He admits that "it worked out amazingly well" for the first Grounded, but on the large narrative sandboxes Obsidian also develops, like The Outer Worlds games, the approach is less enticing. "It's not going to make sense for every game we make," he starts. "When you're making a huge, super crunchy story-based RPG, I think that's probably pretty hard to put into early access."

There are exceptions, as Larian Studios managed to figure out, but Parker considers that an outlier. "Baldur's Gate 3 seems to have done it pretty well, so maybe there's room for that," he muses. "But when we're starting a game, it's like, 'Hey, does this make sense for this game,' and I think you're gonna see sometimes for us it does, and sometimes it doesn't."

But, as he sees it, "for Grounded 2, it's perfect." The sequel became available for Xbox Series X/S and PC players in July last year, and PlayStation 5 fans can join in come August.

Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 show "RPGs are as vibrant" now as ever, Obsidian lead says, even if the genre can look "a little tired" sometimes.

Grounded 2 is approaching a meaningful destination on its journey through early access. August 11 marks the launch of a massive new content update, with 'Into the Abyss' opening up the pond for exploration in Brookhollow Park. The community is also expanding, with PS5 players entering the action just as developers Obsidian Entertainment and Eidos Montreal push the survival game to version 0.5. It's going to be a big year for Grounded 2. To learn more about it, and to better understand the challenges of building such a complex project, we sat down with Obsidian legend and Grounded 2 game director Chris Parker.

We spoke this time last year to get into the reveal of Grounded 2. How have you found the last 12 months, as your game moved through the first stages of early access?

Chris Parker, game director: Getting Grounded 2 into early access was a hurdle. But we got it out there and the community has been totally behind it. They loved it, but they also played through all of the content quickly and have been asking when we were going to give them more. So for us on the development side, at both Obsidian and Eidos, our focus has been on getting this done. We've had three major updates since then.

Every time that we think we're done we can take a breath – just one breath, that's all you get, and then we keep going. At the same time, we're constantly processing all the community feedback, and trying with love to figure out how we do as much of it as we can, while recognizing that we can't possibly do all of it. And now we're on the cusp of releasing the largest content update that we've done. It's bigger than Garden, and to be launching on PlayStation 5 effectively makes this our second launch, right? We had the early access launch before, but this is like doing it all over again this summer.

Obsidian has always been very proud of its ability to co-develop Grounded 2 with Eidos, how have you found that collaboration throughout early access?

Chris Parker: I'm the one who has been working with Eidos the longest, because I launched the project with them back when it was in its infancy. They've always been great, but what's interesting about our relationship is that it's not just that we're professional or that we all care deeply about this franchise, but it's that we've learned to continually work together better, and to be stronger as a team over time.

There were a lot of times, getting into early access with the early access of the game, that we had some struggles. We would butt heads on some things, but we would ultimately figure out what the best solution for the game would be and move on. Those things occur less and less often now. What's far more likely to happen is that Eidos comes and pitches something to us, like the story for the pond, and I will just plus-one that with them. Then I'll suggest something and they get excited and plus-one that.

And then at some point, of course, we'll be out of scope and we have to pull it all back again. But it's because we built Grounded 2 into a good place together, everybody is super jazzed about it. We're ready to get in there and make this thing. Ultimately, we just keep getting better at doing this together.

Grounded 2 coming to PS5 feels like a pretty significant milestone?

Chris Parker: Releasing Grounded 2 on PlayStation 5 is huge for us. Obviously, we've been working on it for a while, it's coming out on August 11, and we didn't have the opportunity with Grounded 1 to do this with the PlayStation community. The PS4 and PS5 versions came out a year after 1.0 was released. So almost from day one, we knew that it would be truly amazing to expand the community and include PS5 users.

Getting here and being able to realize that ambition is awesome. Now we have our fingers crossed that PS5 players do want to come into the community, and that they are as genuinely interested in the development of this game as the existing community already is. I think they will, because the Grounded 2 community is super healthy, so we're just excited. It's going to be fun!

Xbox announced it's reinvesting in console exclusivity. Is this something you think about during development, or do you just want your game in as many hands as possible?

Chris Parker: As a game developer, what I want is for the most amount of players to love my game on their platform, whatever that might be. I'm going to put a lot of work into this thing, I'm going to put my heart into it – so I want you to love and enjoy it too. Ultimately, that's it. So there are other people above my pay grade that might have other opinions about what needs to happen with all that. It's not up to me. I'm just going to give it to as many people as I can. And for Grounded 2, I'm just super excited that this time around I get to pull PlayStation 5 players in with me. That's a great thing.

Grounded 2 has enjoyed a strong first year, but how are you thinking about that roadmap moving forward?

Chris Parker: From day one of this project, we had a pretty good idea of how big the park was going to be and a rough idea of how we were going to cut it. We had a solid idea of how many weapons there were going to be and how our weapon tiers were going to work. But the first hurdle was to distill all of that down to get the game into early access – a foundational level of all that stuff, just enough to build everything else on. So then the next steps were to add to the Garden. And I'll be honest with you, our original ambition for the Garden was too big, we had to scale them down a bit, and that content came out stronger as a result.

So yeah, we have ideas for the future, but the most important thing for us right now is the Into the Abyss update that's coming to PS5 and all other platforms on August 11. It's a huge content update with multiple biomes in it, there's a new buggy joining the group, we're bringing back swimming as a gameplay experience, and we're offering some other things that you can do while you're underwater too. We'll be talking about all that later.

How do you balance the need to release big content updates with the demands of a vocal, passionate community?

Chris Parker: A lot of the things that we focus on outside of the big content updates – new regions of the park, bosses, that sort of thing – are things for the community. They are actually more carefully planned, where we see things the community wants and try to deliver that. Custom Game is a good example of that, which is coming back in the 0.5 update. We always wanted to bring it back, but we were like, whatever, we'll bring it back whenever. And the community has been like, 'No, for real guys, we want Custom Game back; come on, give it to us!'

So we talked to Eidos, we did some finagling with the schedules, and we freed up resources to bring Custom Game back sooner. It won't be quite as robust as it was in Grounded 1 at first, but we are getting the big pieces in place and then we'll continue to add to it. So part of our roadmap is looking at something like Custom Game and understanding when we want to finish it, right? We want to do more with buggy progression; we got the first bit of it in with the 'Beat the Heat' update, but when are we going to finish it? So a lot of our roadmap is really about taking something that we have in the game, asking the community what they think about it, and us understanding if they want us to take it further.

Grounded 2 doesn't have a clear 1.0 release date, but it's expected to be on the 2027 gaming release calendar. The 'Into the Abyss' update is coming August 11 to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.

Fallout: New Vegas rumors have been floating across the internet for longer than a tumbleweed takes to roll across the wasteland, but those previous reports are apparently credible, at least according to the prominent leaker who routinely reveals Nintendo news before Nintendo can get to it itself.

Leaker NateTheHate's been a big name within Nintendo circles for a while now. He first tipped everyone off on the exact random evening the Nintendo Switch 2 would be revealed. More recently, he also leaked the existence of the upcoming Star Fox revival and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's remake well before those games were formally announced.

And, now, he's thrown his hat into the ring of countless Fallout rumors. Asked about the credibility of whispers proclaiming a Fallout: New Vegas remake does in fact exist, the leaker simply says, "The previous reports have merit."

Hopes for a rebuilt Fallout: New Vegas first kicked off years ago when improperly redacted court documents from Microsoft and the FTC's court battles mentioned remasters for both Oblivion and Fallout 3 were in the works. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered eventually came to pass, but fans have since been hoping that New Vegas latches on to its older brother's unofficial remaster plans. The Fallout TV show's deep references to the fan favorite game didn't hurt, either.

Windows Central also this year reported that both Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas were getting the remake treatment, citing anonymous sources in the know. Recent toy listings related to New Vegas, a 16-year-old game, mind you, added more fuel to the fire.

It's still worth taking it with a pinch of salt, but given NateTheHate's recent track record, there's no doubt that some fans are now going to be feeling extra confident that a remake is going to surface eventually.

Fallout: New Vegas designer says don't hold your breath for an Oblivion-style remaster: "I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow."

Current Obsidian design director and RPG veteran since the early aughts Josh Sawyer has been making games in some capacity for more than 25 years, but he's still working on creating an armor system he likes as much as the one in the 1992 RPG Darklands.

Sawyer is a known Darklands obsessive, having cited it as one of the main inspirations for his 2022 historical RPG Pentiment, and he's also talked about it in numerous videos on his YouTube channel, so it's no surprise that he holds poor old Avowed up to its immeasurably high standards. Specifically, when it comes to armor systems, he feels Avowed's "is not really what I had in mind."

The latest video on Sawyer's newly reinvigorated channel is aptly titled Armor Chat, and it's a good watch if you're interested in the inner workings of an RPG legend and, crucially, how he thinks armor systems should work in video games, but I'm more intrigued by how candidly Sawyer criticizes his own studio's most recent RPG. Sawyer says "no," Avowed isn't a good encapsulation of his plans for a new "tier system," which he detailed in a years-old video.

"I would say the Avowed armor system is not really what I had in mind by tiered armor when I made that video," Sawyer says. "It was designed as a progression gate, and to a certain extent, it kind of worked, except that nobody liked it," he says, laughing.

Of course, Sawyer worked in an advisory capacity on Avowed and only did "a little bit of writing" on the game, with director duties having been handed to Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds narrative designer Carrie Patel, who left Obsidian in 2025. Still, Sawyer obviously had very direct insights into Avowed's development, and he says the armor system was originally designed "to kind of force the player to upgrade armor and weapons throughout the game," adding that "there were a number of issues with it, many of which were patched out not long after the game came out."

Specifically, one of the main pain points, in Sawyer's view, was that the secondary damage threshold applied to defensive gear would apply a flat damage reduction after the initial percentage-based damage reduction. Sawyer says the issue there was that the additional damage reduction threshold "didn't scale with damage," and it would "be pretty hard for it to scale with damage" because "damage values increased like 20 times their base value." Compare that to other RPGs, where "damage progression is much more modest," and you can see the conundrum.

Instead of all of that, Sawyer says the armor system he had in mind for Avowed was, drum beat, "something more like the old Darklands system," which was "pretty simulative and more historical," with weapons that would "match scale, match leather, match chain, match plate," and if there was an armor type that a weapon couldn't penetrate, it did "quite minimal damage." Sawyer likes that type of system because you can easily visually identify what armor type an enemy is using and determine which weapon type you need to have equipped to deal with them.

At the end of the day, Sawyer admits this isn't "super important talk" even though he's "always thinking about armor." Obviously, he's responsible for some of the most beloved modern RPGs, and it's not as if his games' armor systems are notoriously controversial, but Sawyer's his own worst critic in that department: "Armor presents interesting challenges in game design, and my own systems haven't done a great job of addressing issues that I see with existing systems, but I'm gonna keep on trying."

Fallout: New Vegas director says it's "fine" Crimson Desert's story is so bad that developer Pearl Abyss has to patch it, "even if it isn't ideal."

Obsidian Entertainment is tweaking parts of the free upgrade path to The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition, a remastered package of the developer's capitalist satire.

The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition compiled the base game and both of its expansions a few years ago alongside a series of new technical improvements, fixes, and the addition of grenades that came with two recent updates.

Just last month, the studio announced that the base game would be delisted on platforms where Spacer's Choice is already available (PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5) and promised that anyone who had The Outer Worlds in their digital library before May 27 would be entitled to get Spacer's Choice Edition for free. "That's right, free," it said at the time... although, many players found they were locked out of the game's souped up version and prompted to buy the game again when the time came.

"The Spacer's Choice Edition upgrade was intended to say 'Thanks' to anyone who purchased The Outer Worlds base game by providing them a free upgrade to the newly improved version," the developer now says in an online post. "However, due to various entitlement restrictions and backend issues we weren't able to provide this as smoothly as we wished and our players are, rightfully, upset."

"If you purchased the base game on Xbox One or PlayStation 4 between 4/30 and 5/27, or have any issues with the upgrade, please contact our support team and we'll work with you to make it right. Sorry again for the frustration around this," it continues. "Additionally, the upgrade will continue to be free to PC players if they own the delisted base game. Due to how entitlements work on the consoles, digital owners on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will need to own the base game + DLCs or the expansion pass to be eligible for the upgrade moving forward."

That means players with the last-gen version of the game in their libraries, even if you're now playing on a current-gen machine, will need to own The Outer Worlds, Peril on Gorgon, and Murder on Eridanos to qualify for the upgrades. That's unless you bought the game sometime between Obsidian's original announcement and the repackaged game's launch, in which case you can contact the studio's support team.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain rejoins Obsidian, tells everyone to not bother guessing what game he's working on: "You're not gonna guess right."

16 years since its release, Fallout: New Vegas is widely considered an RPG masterpiece, but when looked at from within the context of Bethesda's notoriously tight 18-month development turnaround demand, it's even more of a monumental achievement. According to director Josh Sawyer, there was even more they wanted to do with the game but had to cut due for time.

In a new video called 'Setting Goals' shared to Sawyer's official YouTube channel, the Obsidian veteran explains how his hopes and goals for Fallout: New Vegas were defined by how little time the studio had been given to work on it. It's no secret that Fallout: New Vegas was built largely using existing Bethesda assets from Fallout 3, but that wasn't only because it needed to fit seamlessly alongside the other games in the franchise – it was also just the most efficient way to do things.

"For Fallout: New Vegas ... my goal was – well, we were constrained by the 18 months from the beginning," says Sawyer. "So, I said, 'let's modestly restructure some of the systemic things that Bethesda did. Try to do as much as we can to emulate their style of open world exploration, and let's try to just tell the best stories we can with the best quest reactivity that we know how to do.' Because there was very little else that we could do in that window of time."

Of course, it wasn't immediately clear back in 2010 that Fallout: New Vegas was about to become one of the most beloved games in the series, as the game was a technical disaster at launch. That said, Sawyer makes it clear that he was confident from the very beginning despite the time constraints he faced.

"I believed in that team," he says. "We had fantastic designers and writers, and I believed that they could make really great quests and content. So, I just said, 'Look, we can't set our sights on anything crazier than this. So, let's just make the best quest content and story content that we can.'

"And that was the goal. And get it done within 18 months, which meant that a lot of other ideas about things that we could do had to just fall by the wayside. So the 18 months wasn't a goal, it was a constraint but we had to work within it and so that's why it became so focused and I think the team did a fantastic job."

Bethesda "lectured" Fallout New Vegas designer for saying the RPG would run at 30 FPS: "'Why do you have a f***ing engine that can't run 30 frames per second?'"

Joshua Eric "Josh" Sawyer, best known for his work on RPG gems like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, explains why Obsidian Entertainment doesn't always favour including romance in its games.

Put simply, as Sawyer says in a new interview with SIFTER on YouTube (below), "the time involved" is a major factor. "It's a lot of work," admits the legendary developer. "Even asking the studios where that is sort of their focus – I think they would say it's an enormous amount of work on top of all the other stuff that the companions do."

I can certainly see how that'd be the case, as a player myself, especially when looking at big RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3. Sure, there's a lot of good dialogue and romance options with the Baldur's Gate 3 companions and all, but how much work did that take? A lot, I'm guessing.

Sawyer continues, describing how, with Obsidian in particular, "sometimes we budget out how much time it's going to take, and we don't think we can do a good job at it… Also, depending on the tone and the style of game, sometimes I personally will feel like I don't think we can make good romances."

That makes sense – and Sawyer clarifies that this isn't because he's not a fan of romance in a game, but rather pickier about when it actually belongs. "It's not like an opposition to their existence. It's just that I don't know if we're going to be able to do it."

The dev uses examples like Pentiment, which includes "love and relationships and romances," but not "RPG-style romances." He also looks to other Obsidian gems, like Pillars of Eternity.

As they don't include romance – along with other recent Obsidian titles, like Avowed – he states a lot of folks believe, "Obsidian hates romance or Obsidian doesn't want to do romance." That's not the case, however. "It's more that it is not typically the wheelhouse we have operated in," as Sawyer concludes. I suppose that checks out. I think we've become a bit too accustomed to expecting extensive romance systems in RPGs, honestly.

Sure, Baldur's Gate 3 lets you rizz up your fave companion – but plenty of other big genre names like Skyrim don't feature as detailed or rich romance mechanics, and they're still very fun. So are Obsidian's games, and they don't need a touch of love to make that true.

Itching to play something fun yourself? Browse through our roundup of the best RPGs out there, or check out a few of the most exciting new games coming this year and beyond.

You probably know Tim Cain best for cheating the original Fallout concept and leading the first game's development – or heck, maybe you know him for his highly quotable YouTube channel, which has generated plenty of headlines both here at GamesRadar+ and across the internet. But Cain's RPG CV includes an extensive list of bangers beyond Fallout, and it seems he's hoping to make at least one more before his second retirement.

That's according to the man himself, speaking in a video celebrating the third anniversary of his YouTube channel. Cain reckons he's starting to run out of topics to speak on and stories to share, and says "the channel is probably nearing the point where I see it being done. I think I've explained to you the game industry as much as I can. I've told all my stories, the fun ones and not so fun ones, and you've heard it all."

But the part the RPG fans will want to see is this: "I think I am going to make one more game before I retire again for the second time," Cain muses, before adding, "but who knows?"

I'm not 100% clear on what Cain considers as his first retirement. He worked at Interplay, where he shipped Fallout, from 1991 through 1998, eventually leaving to co-found Troika Games with fellow Fallout veterans Jason Anderson and Leonard Boyarsky. There, he worked on a trio of cult classics in the form of Arcanum, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

While all three of those titles have armies of fans these days, they weren't enough to keep Troika afloat, and the studio shut down in 2005. He then worked on the ill-fated MMO WildStar before ending up at Obsidian in 2011, where he served as a programmer Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny and co-directed The Outer Worlds.

That's a pretty continuous range of employment, but I think this is where the retirement comes in, as Cain stopped working full-time at Obsidian sometime after the launch of The Outer Worlds. That still didn't stop him from serving as a creative consultant on the second game, so it's definitely a loose kind of retirement, and he's now full-time at Obsidian once again.

Presumably, then, he's figuring on that "one more game" being whatever project he's working on at Obsidian, but he's already teased that he can't say much about it. Fair enough, given that he's barred by an NDA, but even then he's teasing fans a bit: "Don't bother guessing; you're not gonna guess right." So no New Vegas 2, then?

These are the best RPGs you can play today.

Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment ran into a spot of legal trouble over some real-world material folded into the parody-heavy RPG, according to studio and RPG veteran Chris Avellone.

Speaking with YouTuber TKs-Mantis, Avellone recalls butting heads with Bethesda over trademarked material which Obsidian evidently didn't fully account for at the time. This particular discussion begins with a mention of Wild Wasteland, a trait that introduces a range of content and encounters that generally reference other media, from films to older Fallout games.

"We got into trouble for some of those things because it wasn't passed along what some of the jokes were," Avellone says. "We had the Godzilla gecko that Bethesda didn't realize was in there. Holy crap, when they found out. 'Oh great, now we'll get in trouble for this.'"

This issue apparently began with the very beginning of the game, where you're examined by Doc Mitchell.

"We already got in trouble for the Rorschach test because we didn't get the trademark for that, so those folks came to Bethesda and said, 'We're gonna have a fun lawsuit on our hands, so pony up,'" Avellone recalls. "You could hear all the groans over at Bethesda. 'Oh my god, I don't think they realized they should check the trademark for that.' We certainly didn't realize it."

Avellone's comments, both here and elsewhere in the lengthy interview, frame a pretty clear pattern regarding Bethesda's feedback to the New Vegas team, with the studio allegedly giving a lecture about 30 FPS issues and presenting a whole powerpoint about "all the things Obsidian did wrong".

Fallout: New Vegas designer says don't hold your breath for an Oblivion-style remaster: "I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow."

Although these days Fallout: New Vegas is in contention for the title of best Fallout game and is a beloved RPG, generally, it wasn't as universally loved when it first came out back in 2010. You could argue its many technical shortcomings were the main factor weighing down its overall reception, but even the expansions that would later drop weren't all immediate hits with players or critics. Point is, it's safe to say Fallout: New Vegas was something of a sleeper hit for the series, and apparently, publisher Bethesda wasn't shy to highlight the game's initial failures directly to developer Obsidian in powerpoint slide format.

Fallout: New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone recently sat down for a wide-ranging discussion with YouTuber TKs-Mantis (thanks, PC Gamer), and at one point the game's survival horror-tinged Dead Money DLC got brought up. Despite TKs-Mantis's praise, Avellone looked visibly conflicted, which prompted the YouTuber to ask for an explanation.

"The reason I'm making these expressions and hesitations about it is because, despite what I thought would be cool as an examination of Fallout, it was so different than the core experience that it obviously was a huge turn-off for a lot of people, and I completely understand that," Avellone said.

At that point, TKs-Mantis brushed off those concerns with a defiant, "Fuck 'em," which Avellone rebuffed.

"Uh, well, when it comes to sales and reviews, it matters," Avellone said, adding:

"Bethesda used review scores against us for the DLCs for, like, why they didn't want to keep doing things with us anyway. Even though they didn't wanna do anything anyway, so whatever."

It's very apparent throughout this three-and-a-half hour interview that Avellone harbors some unsettled feelings about his stay at Obsidian and Bethesda as a publisher and IP holder – and he's been vocal in the past about his less-than-amicable departure from the studio in 2015 – but assuming his account of this meeting with higher-ups about New Vegas is accurate, it's easy to see why things didn't work out.

"It was fun, it was fun. They had a whole powerpoint. Not even about the DLC, they had a whole powerpoint about all the things Obsidian did wrong, and we were like 'Wow!' and they showed it to us. And we were like… 'OK, this is hugely morale-boosting,'" said Avellone. "'I thought we did a good product for you guys that kept Fallout in the public consciousness, but you guys don't seem very happy about it despite the fact you reaped a lot of the rewards for it.'"

Of course, Bethesda would end up taking the series in-house once more for Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, with Obsidian moving on to eventually create original IP like Pillars of Eternity, The Outer Worlds, Grounded, and Pentiment. There was a time, long ago, when Obsidian had planned to make a Fallout: New Vegas 2, but that "quickly evaporated," per Avellone.

Fallout 5 rumored setting New Orleans was originally discussed at New Vegas studio Obsidian, and veteran dev still believes "there's a lot of potential there"

Fallout: New Vegas 2 was but a sparkle in the eyes of top leadership at Obsidian before plans for a sequel fell apart, reveals the studio's former senior designer Chris Avellone.

In a recent talk with TKs-Mantis, Avellone is asked about Fallout 2 developer Black Isle Studios' canceled Fallout 3, which was codenamed Van Buren. Specifically, TKs-Mantis asks whether his theory that "New Vegas acts as if the events of Van Buren happen" is correct. It turns out TKs-Mantis is "partly right" and that "there are certain things that were gonna take place in Van Buren that do happen during the time of New Vegas," Avellone says.

Other than what Avellone calls "the caravan wars," which refers to a conflict between the NCR and a "merchant mafia" that would've been a major plot point in Van Buren - and which we saw "a little bit" of in New Vegas - "not a ton of" Van Buren's story influenced New Vegas. That said, Avellone confirms he did "try and set up Van Buren for New Vegas," and that's where we get to the thrust of this story.

"That's why all those nukes go off, cause I'm like, 'well, I need to destabilize some regions. Like, not wipe out factions, but I need to shake up both the Brotherhood, I need to shake up the NCR, I need to have them even more at each other's throats in California,'" he says. "And so that was the reason for some of the pre-cursor decisions for some of the DLC stuff and some of the stuff in core New Vegas ... When we still thought we'd be able to do a New Vegas 2, or whatever the title would be, but that quickly evaporated."

Y'all, Chris Avellone just said the words New Vegas 2 in sequential order. Of course, this means very little for a potential New Vegas sequel, and in fact Avellone himself says that "will not happen in the next six years at least, if ever," but just hearing those words from the original Fallout: New Vegas designer is sure to ring alarm bells for a bunch of people.

Avellone is probably right to temper expectations for a potential New Vegas 2. Although there was a credible report from 2022 that "very early" talks were happening at Microsoft, we haven't heard anything since. Naturally, there's always hopium for the huffing, but as recently as November of last year, Obsidian's VP of operations acknowledged the demand for a New Vegas sequel but stressed the studio's focus on its own original IP. That doesn't mean Xbox couldn't tap Bethesda Game Studios to make the game, but those guys are a little tied up with a little something called The Elder Scrolls 6.

Fallout 5 rumored setting New Orleans was originally discussed at New Vegas studio Obsidian, and veteran dev still believes "there's a lot of potential there"

Warm beignets and cold Nuka-Cola – these simple pleasures could be yours if Fallout 5 rumors are true and the upcoming Bethesda game is set in swamp city New Orleans. Or, they could be yours if you go back in time and kiss Todd Howard's feet 900 times, convincing him to release the Fallout game Obsidian veteran Chris Avellone hoped to set in the Louisiana wasteland.

Avellone, who served as a senior designer on New Vegas in 2010, reminisced to YouTuber TKs-Mantis in a chunky new interview about the time "we still thought we'd be able to do New Vegas 2, or whatever the title would be" at Obsidian, along with vague plans for a Fallout New Orleans. Avellone now says, with a little bitterness, that those thoughts about New Vegas 2 "quickly evaporated," and he doubts Obsidian would return to the project any time "in the next six years, at least – if ever." But he still has hope for New Orleans.

"One of the designers-slash-producers on our other projects suggested New Orleans as a location, and I was so stoked for that. It's going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise started by this author-slash-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel, and a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic," says Avellone about a noir series first published in 1983, whose antihero explores his vengefulness in stories often painted in only black, white, and red. It shares a cyanide sense of humor with the Fallout series in how it discusses power and those who wield it, so I'm not surprised Avellone found it magnetic.

"There was one that was written in New Orleans. It was called, like, 'Four Devils, One Hell,' and it's a fantastic story," he continues to say about the 1993 Grendel Tales run whose first issue synopsis could easily be mistaken for a Fallout TV show episode logline: "Montovani is hired by Batiaque to find his brother's murderer and tangles with a Dulac. Batiaque is also murdered. Bixby kills vampires, thinking himself a king's knight, but he is really Grendel's accountant. Gloria preserves art in England and goes on treasure hunt."

"As soon as I read it – while I was doing Fallout research, ironically enough – I'm like, 'Man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad,'" Avellone says.

He continues, "The vibe was so cool. The flavor was so cool, and it's still Fallout, but it's in a different area that felt different. Yeah, there's still a lot of potential there." Avellone isn't alone in dreaming about Louisiana's heat meeting Fallout's fire – plenty of people are enthusiastic about Fallout 5 in New Orleans, including Fallout 76 lead artist and ex-Bethesda dev Nate Purkeypile, who said earlier this year, "Fallout 5 in New Orleans? I mean, that would get my vote for sure." I just wonder what Todd Howard thinks about crawfish.

Bethesda "lectured" Fallout New Vegas designer for saying the RPG would run at 30 FPS: "'Why do you have a f***ing engine that can't run 30 frames per second?'"

Fallout: New Vegas has aged into a beloved RPG, but when it first launched it faced widespread complaints about performance, and specifically its choppy frame rates. To this day, it's generally recommended that you download stability mods if you're playing on PC, as the game was developed on the notoriously buggy, and even by 2010 standards, outdated, Gamebryo engine. According to a new anecdote shared by original Fallout: New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone, there were some folks at publisher Bethesda that had an inkling the game wasn't going to run at a steady frame rate even before it launched.

"I had done an interview about the Gamebryo engine, and someone had asked me, 'hey, is New Vegas gonna run 30 frames per second?'" says Avellone during an interview with TKs-Mantis. "In my mind, it's inexcusable that a game would not run 30 frames per second, so I said, 'yes, it will.' And to my surprise, I'm in this Bethesda meeting, this tech director starts lecturing me about 'you shouldn't have said that.'

"And I'm sitting there taking it, and all I'm thinking back of my head is like, 'Why do you have a fucking engine that can't run 30 frames per second, and then call that your claim to fame and you're the director of technology?' It was so offensive to me. I sat there and I smiled and I took it, but overall that in itself was one fundamental flaw of the technology there."

To Bethesda's credit, it definitely took feedback about New Vegas's performance on board and officially switched to its proprietary Creation engine for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, a decision that likely avoided certain disaster. I can't imagine a game as big and complex as Skyrim running on Gamebryo, and I don't think I want to.

"I've known programmers that worked at Bethesda. They say the engine is all sorts of messes under the hood," adds Avellone. "But that 30 frames per second thing, like, that's on Bethesda, and I'm like, 'Wow I shouldn't be being lectured about that. You are the ones that should be lectured about it."

Avellone doesn't elaborate any further on that situation in the interview, but I can only imagine he felt a sense of profound vindication when he saw the response to New Vegas's unstable frame rates. Although, I suppose it would be a fairly dubious vindication considering he was one of the lead designers on the game and presumably felt a sense of ownership over the final product.

Fallout 2 and New Vegas designer still hates the series' Amazon TV show: "I had to shut it off within a minute"

For many Fallout fans, New Vegas represents the upper echelon of the series. Obsidian's take on the wasteland is nuanced, grounded and a little darker than Bethesda's modern mainline entries. Former devs on 3 and 4 respect how Obsidian tackled the property, but they feel the comparisons can be a little unfair to what Bethesda achieved.

"I initially felt a little touchy about it," Jonah Lobe, a character artist on Fallout 3 and 4, says of fans constantly talking up New Vegas on the Kiwi Talkz podcast. "We made 90% of the art, we built the engine, we did it in a very limited window of time, and we put in all this effort, and they got to just work on the stories."

As such, he found it "a little unfair" because players were basing so much of their opinion on the writing, rather than the technical aspects. But time has tempered his perspective. "As time has gone on, Obsidian killed it," Lobe proclaims. "It did make me feel a little bit sad that our design team could not implement the same scale of really ambitious, multi-arc hug choices, kind of thing."

Nate Purkeypile, a world artist on Fallouts 3 and 4, concurs. "It would've been cool to see more of that versus the completely separate faction thing, which didn't really have the same sort of ramifications in Fallout 4," he adds. "I do think [New Vegas] is a really good game, but it also does some things worse. I think its dungeons and world design are not as good."

The conversation then shifts to acknowledging the hard conditions Obsidian was working in, with a compressed production schedule, and how the consensus has shifted over time. New Vegas launched in a messy state, recovering over years thanks to patches and community mods. All my completed playthroughs are on modded versions of New Vegas, rather than the version Obsidian put on shelves.

"Honestly, I applaud them, I think they did a great job of shepherding the Fallout spirit," Lobe says. "In some ways better than we did."

Todd Howard defends "VO line flub" in Oblivion Remastered since "it's part of the game’s character," but some bugs only stick around because they're "so complicated"

Fallout New Vegas remaster hopefuls are once again experiencing the perils of getting excited over an internet rumor, as the latest theory has been shut down by the very studio at the center of it.

ICYMI, hopes for a Fallout New Vegas were artificially elevated yet again this week when Iron Galaxy Studios, the folks behind Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 and, more pertinently, the Nintendo Switch and VR editions of Skyrim and Fallout 4 VR, shared a post to LinkedIn about its "February company meeting," in which the New Vegas loading screen can be seen. Of course, that was a clear sign that the studio was about to announce some sort of Fallout New Vegas-related project. Maybe the remaster people have been wanting for years? Unfortunately not, it seems.

"Nope! There is nothing to see here," reads a tweet from Iron Galaxy. "Sorry to disturb the volcanoes, but that was just a BTS look at our company meeting. We use that slide every month and has nothing to do with anything Fallout being worked on. As you can imagine, we love Fallout, too. Now pardon us as we retreat back into our vault."

I know what it's like to hope for something so hard that you start to believe it, despite there being little evidence supporting that belief. I've been wanting an Everybody Loves Raymond reboot to happen even though Ray Romano has specifically said it wouldn't work. But it's time to move on, Fallout New Vegas fans. We can do it, together.

In seriousness, this doesn't necessarily mean Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout 3 for that matter, aren't getting remade or remastered. In fact, a report from last year claimed a Fallout 3 remaster was in active development. But what we can say with a fairly high degree of certainty is that Iron Galaxy isn't working on Fallout New Vegas... right now.

Let's all just calm down by reading our list of the best Fallout games, which surely won't trigger any arguments at all.

After rumors of a Fallout: New Vegas remaster were a hot topic earlier this year, an interesting post from the developers of Metroid Prime Remastered and Skyrim for Nintendo Switch has raised a few eyebrows.

Following last year's Oblivion remaster, everyone had the same thing on their minds, when is Bethesda's other major – and better – series, Fallout, getting the same treatment? More specifically, when is the best Fallout game, New Vegas, going to be given a much-needed comeback? Rumors of a remake arrived earlier this year, with a Steam glitch and an Amazon Prime countdown that led to nothing of note. Even Bethesda boss Todd Howard commented on the idea, saying the studio is "working on all sorts of stuff." But a while has gone by and the hype has died down a little bit, so of course right now is when something would happen.

Iron Galaxy, developer of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 and a ton of notable ports – most pertinent in this case being the Nintendo Switch and VR editions of Skyrim and Fallout 4 VR – made a LinkedIn post over the weekend. The post reads, "Today's our February company meeting. It's time to catch up with what the company's been up to and what's coming up next for IG." Nothing too out there for a company to post… except the attached screenshot features a monitor with Fallout New Vegas' loading screen on a slideshow program.

Of course, this could be nothing – it could just be what the person who created the internal PowerPoint chose to open the presentation with. The decision to post the image amid remake speculation could easily be a good way to get engagement on LinkedIn off the back of rumors, too. Of course, that won't stop people from getting hyped that this is a hint for a Fallout New Vegas remaster, but I don't feel like Bethesda would tease it this way.

Fallout 4 is now on Switch 2, and first impressions say the port is way better than the disastrous Skyrim launch last year

Obsidian's 2025 RPG Avowed is now available on PS5 alongside a big anniversary update for all platforms, and as usual it seems the players who've chosen to wait are going to get the game at its best. Although the devs will tell you that the fundamental gameplay remains largely unchanged – if you didn't like Avowed the first time around, you probably still won't like it here – after being "surprised" by players' negative response to the upgrade system, they've taken big steps to fix it.

"I want to be upfront," gameplay director Gabe Paramo tells tells RPG Site. "If you didn't enjoy the core pacing of Avowed, the flow between conversations, exploration, and combat, nothing about that has fundamentally changed. But if you're a player who felt limited in the type of character you could create compared to Pillars in terms of race, or felt like you couldn't fully realize your Fighter, Ranger, or Wizard fantasy, or felt like your playstyle wasn't being supported due to a lack of unique gear variety from region to region, or felt like the economy was too strict and punishing, we've addressed all of that."

Those features – plus the new races and New Game Plus – are the big additions for the anniversary update, but Paramo particularly zeroes in on the economy and upgrade system as a core concern that Obsidian wanted to address here.

"We were definitely surprised by how many people consistently bounced off the upgrading experience," Paramo explains. "We were trying to create a tight gameplay loop. The player completes content, upgrades their gear, and faces harder content. But because the game is open-area, players who really wanted to explore were getting stopped in their tracks in ways we didn't anticipate. They'd push into new areas and hit a wall, not because of enemy difficulty, but because the upgrade system wasn't keeping pace with their curiosity. That frustration came through loud and clear. We've since addressed it and made the experience much more gradual and less binary."

Avowed is divided into four major areas, and the upgrade path more or less matches that progression. You spend your time in each map collecting upgrade resources, strengthening your chosen gear, and taking it to the next tier of rarity, hopefully turning your equipment into gold-tier by the time you reach the end game.

I ultimately found reaching the top-end gear ranking pretty satisfying, when my wizard spent the final hours of the game just raining fire down upon helpless enemies, but I definitely felt more than a little railroaded getting to that point. With resources being tight, I felt like I needed to lock into a playstyle early, and each new piece of gear felt less like a fun chance to experiment and more like something I'd need to immediately break down and feed into my current equipment.

So, it's nice to see Obsidian taking that feedback on board, and, as Paramo puts it, "the friction has been smoothed out significantly." After 20 hours with the PS5 version of Avowed, my colleague Heather reckons there's never been a better time to play the RPG, and looking at this update from the outside I'm inclined to agree.

These are the best RPGs you can play today.

Seeing Xbox Game Studios greet me when I boot up a game on PS5 still takes some getting used to, but damn if it isn't a welcome sight. Following in the footsteps of Forza Horizon 5 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in 2025, Avowed is no longer an Xbox exclusive thanks to its release on PS5 today. And just like Playground's racer and MachineGames globetrotting adventure, I couldn't be happier about the fact that more players are going to be able to discover Obsidian's colorful, Pillars of Eternity-tinged fantasy.

After all, I was head-over-heels for the Living Lands this time last year. From its flexible combat system, to its loveable companions (hello, Kai), welcoming lore reader, and its removal of irksome features that usually cause friction, it felt like the perfect palate cleanser between Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered – 2025 really did start off with a bang for RPG sickos like me.

Naturally I couldn't resist the chance to revisit Avowed a year on, with the PS5 launch giving me the perfect excuse. But I don't feel like I'm repeating history by replaying the same game at the exact same time in 2026, because its big anniversary update alongside its release on Sony's console really does change things for the better – and after sinking 20 hours into a fresh playthrough, I've never been more convinced that now's the time to play Obsidian's RPG (no matter what platform you're on).

Godlike greatness

One of the major additions in Avowed's anniversary update is undoubtedly the new playable races, and they immediately give my replay a fresh feel. On top of humans and elves which were included in the base game, you can now make your Envoy of Aedyr a hair-covered Orlan, Dwarf, or robust, semiaquatic Aumaua. Each with their own starting stats, I opt for the Aumaua since they have two extra Might from the get-go, and I want to make myself a kind of tanky, warrior-wizard hybrid to mess around with the new weapon (more on that later).

By letting me play as any one of the main races that inhabit the world of Eora, Avowed immediately feels like a more complete package. And with more pre-made faces to choose from and extra godlike features to customize my look, character creation has gotten an extra helping of options that I'm more than happy to see – especially since there's now a magic mirror at camp where I can change my look whenever I like.

As soon as my adventure begins, I notice my height is elevated from a first-person perspective, and after briefly switching to third-person, I see how I tower over the Orlan, Garryck. Once I change out my gloves for some bracers, I can see my blue-skinned hands, which at once immerses me in my new Envoy.

It's definitely exciting to be able to make a fresh character and have more options when it comes to stat builds. Plus, thanks to New Game+, returning players who've finished up the game can make a new character with the additions and keep all your unique weapons and abilities (bar the godlike powers, which makes sense for story reasons).

I do wish the world would do more to recognize these character changes, though. Since Kai is also Amuauan, I couldn't stop myself from making a godlike who's the same race as the total sweetheart of a companion. But I was a little disappointed he didn't acknowledge it. In fact, all of the conversations I had with Kai and other companions or NPCs didn't reflect that my character is Amuauan. It was particularly strange when Kai spoke about his people, and I couldn't choose a response that took my own heritage into account beyond being from Aedyr.

I get that for the most part the world recognizes you as a godlike who's been touched by an unknown deity, alongside your role as an Envoy – with the tensions between those two concepts playing into the storyline and the choices you can make – but I would love to see a future update bring in little tweaks that acknowledge these new playable races, even if it's just some small nods to add to the role-play.

Snap shot scenes

Outside of the new character options, another weapon has entered the fray in the form of a quarterstaff. While the wand is a natural complement to magic if you're making yourself a mage-like character in Avowed, the quarterstaff offers a melee option that I enjoy switching to when an enemy gets too close. It's satisfying to thwack enemies with it and sent them flying, and it also looks very fitting for any would-be magic wielder thanks to its distinct Gandalf vibes.

But the one feature I've been most looking forward to is one that also proves to be my favorite new addition in the RPG: photo mode. Stepping back into the Living Lands after a year away has only served to remind just how beautiful and inviting the world of Eora is, and now I can capture picture perfect moments of my Envoy and companions against the beautiful backdrops of Dawnshore, or Emerald Stair.

Enemies respawning in certain areas and more options to tailor and customize difficulty in the options menu are just the cherries on top of an update that has pulled me right back into the Living Lands. Even if you've not been holding out for the RPG's arrival on PS5, the anniversary update is enough of a reason to return to the adventure.

Avowed review: "No Skyrim, but an unforgettable return to form for Obsidian Entertainment"

Avowed was played on PS5 with a code provided by the publisher.

Fallout: New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer says fans took a while to come around on the RPG, despite its current status as one of the best games in the series.

Speaking to Game Informer, Sawyer acknowledges, "New Vegas was not particularly well-received when it launched. It was quite buggy and both players and critics commented on how much we had reused from Fallout 3." In fact, New Vegas still currently sits at a score of 84 on Metacritic – lower than all of the other mainline entries, with Fallout 3 sitting 9 points ahead, at 93.

However, culturally, if you look now at any list of the best Fallout games, or speak to any Fallout fan, there's a good chance that New Vegas will come out on top. From Sawyer's perspective, it took fans a few years to hold New Vegas in such high regard – "It took about five years for the community to come around on the game," to be exact. And then, even with fans slowly beginning to praise New Vegas instead of denigrating it, Sawyer admits it took devs "maybe a few years more for us to start considering that players actually liked the design choices we had made."

But John Gonzalez – lead writer of Fallout: New Vegas – feels that "the thing that made New Vegas special was the kind of ferocious focus on choice and consequence gameplay."

He gives Bethesda credit "for taking this isometric game and turning it into a first-person, immersive, open-world experience, and doing the work of translating that."

When it comes to New Vegas, "It's all about allowing the player to have tremendous amounts of narrative impact, narrative control. And so, I think that for someone, if that's your jam, then you're going to think that New Vegas is the best of the bunch."

Fallout games get a huge boost in players thanks to Fallout season 2, although 3 is way less popular than you'd think.

Obsidian released three games in 2025, but that doesn't mean the studio intends to run an RPG assembly line. Development of Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 dragged on for ages, and it's sheer coincidence they happened to be ready for launch the same year that Grounded 2 entered early access. But the studio is hoping to release games at more regular intervals going forward, and Fallout: New Vegas offers a pretty good example of how it can be done.

With Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian built on the existing technology of Fallout 3 to develop a game in less than two years at the relatively low price of $8 million. "We don't need to change everything every time," Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart tells Bloomberg (paid article link). "We've had this debate internally: Do people really care that we spent an extra hundred person-months on the inventory screen?"

It's a strategy that also worked well for Obsidian's debut title, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, which similarly was built on existing technology and developed in short order. Both KOTOR 2 and New Vegas are remembered as brilliant games offering deeper systems and more engaging storylines than their predecessors – though it's worth noting that both launched in seriously flawed technical states.

Still, maybe there's a happy medium to be found for Obsidian. Bloomberg cites a DICE presentation last year from Obsidian's Justin Britch and Marcus Morgan, who are set to replace Urquhart when he eventually retires. Then, the pair suggested that the studio's best path forward was retaining its current employees, avoiding unsustainable growth, and making more regular games aimed at moderate success rather than industry-shaking ambition.

"You need to keep having at-bats, because at some point, if you can consistently make good stuff, you’ll get those breakout hits," according to Morgan.

Microsoft, still dazzled by the infinite money it seems to imagine in the AI business, is reportedly pushing its Xbox studios toward a difficult 30% profit margin. Obsidian hopes that inexpensive hits like Pentiment, which wasn't a juggernaut but was still profitable, will continue to meet Microsoft's approval. Even if, as Uruqhart suggests, "maybe where we are going to be from a profitability standpoint isn't going to be 30%."

For now, Obsidian has a lot of fires going, including continued work on Grounded 2, original games, and potential new titles in the same universe as Pillars of Eternity and Avowed. The Outer Worlds 3, however, is not currently in the works, and the studio is examining the response to this year's games to make sure it's pursuing the best path forward. Even if that's as simple as, say, deciding Avowed should've had a proper crime system.

"Our job, all of us here, is to go make games that people want to play and buy," Urquhart concludes, "and if we continue to do that, then we have a solid business."

Obsidian has made many of the best RPGs of all time.

From the outside, Obsidian Entertainment seemed to have a great 2025, shipping no less than three games: Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, and Grounded 2 in early access. But as sales of the first two apparently underwhelmed parent company Microsoft, the studio's boss thinks going so hard over such a short stretch of time wasn't the best decision.

Feargus Urquhart, CEO and co-founder of Obsidian, reflects on the year that was for Bloomberg. "They're not disasters. I'm not going to say this was a kick in the teeth," he states, referring to The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed. "It was more like: 'That sucks. What are we learning?'"

Indeed, Grounded 2 provided a sharp contrast, immediately trouncing the predecessor's records on Steam and attracting three million players in its first two weeks. Those numbers compelled Obsidian to "think a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take."

Being in development for six years each, fantasy adventure Avowed and spacefaring sci-fi jaunt The Outer Worlds 2 absorbed a lot of resources and attention, and Urquhart now wants to shave the time per game down to between three and four years. By the same token, he'd like to have a more spread out the company's output moving forward, conceding the strategy wasn't ideal.

"Spacing those releases helps the company manage its resources and not burn everybody out," Sawyer adds. "It's not good to release three games in the same year. It's the result of things going wrong."

Despite Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 being on opposing sides in terms of backdrop and aesthetic, there's a sense that the devs were competing with themselves, putting both out in the space of a year. That's before factoring in all the other games they're up against, including Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Borderlands 4, and Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles.

The RPG market doesn't offer a lot of space right now, and these are projects that deserve proper time for you to soak into their narratives. Obsidian seems to be learning the right lessons from this situation, and with any luck, these games will find their audiences in due time.

After deciding not to charge $80 for The Outer Worlds 2, Xbox head says Microsoft will keep listening to fan feedback but has to run a "healthy business"

Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer is pushing for granular difficulty options in RPGs to make the experience that much richer.

In a video on his YouTube channel, Sawyer was asked about offering more granular difficulty options to players. They explain that they have been doing so with mods for games like The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur's Gate 3. The fan, agroggybrog, then asks whether there were significant downsides to opening up a system like this, or if it was simply a feature that not enough players would be interested in.

Sawyer explains, "Yes, I think they're good. If it cost nothing⁠, which it does not⁠, then I would say let players in-game set their difficulty options however they like, and when it comes to exposing data tables and letting players mod that stuff, just let 'em do whatever the heck they want."

Sawyer explains that he personally has gravitated toward designing around player types rather than your classic selections, as he explains, "I don't think, 'This is an easy player, this is a hard player.' I think you have players that come to the games for different reasons." He adds, "It's more about 'What are they trying to get out of this game?'" He explains there's the likes of Explorers who are "here for a good time, not a hard time," while a Survivalist wants games to be "immersive and simulative in the mechanics."

Sawyer concludes "giving more granular difficulty options is a very good thing," saying that "I think we should prioritize it more⁠ – I think I should prioritize it more."

If a Fallout 3 remaster is happening, I'm hoping it fixes the RPG's biggest level design issue.

RPG legend Josh Sawyer doesn't think Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's launch would have been any better for following the same early-access model as Baldur's Gate 3, even if he admits Obsidian's approach wasn't "perfect."

Pillars of Eternity and its sequel, Deadfire, both had backer betas – exactly as the name suggests, granting early access to eligible backers of the RPGs. In a new video on his YouTube channel (below), Sawyer, the director of both games, is asked if he'd change anything about the backer beta process if he could do it again.

Sawyer notes that game balance wasn't the "primary focus" of the betas, but rather the "overall experience," with the devs at Obsidian hoping to get a grasp of how players felt about everything from "how quests work," to "how dialogue is presented," and the character builds they can make.

"My approach for our backer betas was to use side content," he says. "Things that the player was going to see at some point during the game, toward the middle, not necessarily a load-bearing part of the game. Important, but if it wound up being a little bit of dip in quality because we started early and had to iterate on it a lot and the players in the beta saw it a ton, it wasn't going to really dramatically impact the overall experience and perception of quality."

Sawyer notes that despite the benefits the backer beta brought, "the big miss for us was we really did not have time to do balance passes for Veteran and Path of the Damned" difficulties in Pillars of Eternity 2.

"There were a lot of things to tune and that just didn't get the attention," he continues. "That's my fault. And we did patch that within about two weeks of launch, and we did have to play a lot of catch-up on it. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, but I would have preferred that we had prioritized that earlier in retrospect. That's on me. And it wasn't really about what the backer beta did, it was about how I had people use their time toward the end of the development cycle."

He then points to Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3, which released an early access version of its first act in late 2020, almost three years before the full RPG launched. "I would say that even if we had used, let's say, the beginning of the game," he says. "So, as an example, Baldur's Gate 3, their backer beta, if I recall correctly, was more focused on the early game. And I still think we would have had the same issues, because a lot of the issues were evident because they got magnified over the course of the game.

"The later you get in the game, the more the balance gets out of whack just because there are more numbers inputting into the system. Obviously, you can say that it's evident even in the early game, but I still think we would have run into the same problems if I had prioritized things the same way," he continues. "I don't think shifting the focus or where it went would have made it turn out better.

"And also – and this is not a slam against BG3, but just a sort of recognition – at launch, a lot of people really did not speak fondly of how the third act of BG3 was balanced, and that's probably because a ton of people saw the beginning of the game, the early game, and then the mid-game got a lot of testing. And as is very common in game development, something slipped through the cracks and they later addressed it."

Moving forward, then, even though Sawyer says "I don't think that the way that we ran the backer betas on Pillars 1 or 2 were perfect," he notes that "I also don't think they were terrible or anything." He concludes: "I think I would make better choices about how I spent our resources toward the end of development, though."

Josh Sawyer says there's "a lot of people" at Obsidian who want to make a Pillars of Eternity Tactics game after Avowed, but the "fanbase is not humungous."

Given last year's Oblivion remaster and the renewed interest in Fallout thanks to Amazon's TV show, Bethesda doing remasters of Fallout 3 and New Vegas seems extremely likely at some point in the near future. For the time-being, however, they remain hypothetical, and fans of the post-apocalyptic franchise just suffered a dose of false hope when a Steam glitch indicated something may be happening.

As noticed by a user on Reddit (via PC Gamer), recently, you couldn't leave Steam reviews on Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas for some inexplicable reason. When you went to do so, an error would pop up reading, "You must wait until this product has been released before writing a review for it."

Wait for it to be released? These games are both going on two decades old. They were originally released when the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were cutting edge. By the stated rule, we should be able to leave reviews to our heart's content, is what I’m saying. Unless there’s some form of big update imminent?

Both Fallout New Vegas and 3 are experiencing this issue on steam. Potential hint? from r/Fallout

That's what people started to ponder. "In the weeks leading up to the Oblivion remaster they changed that store page a fair bit, they removed trailers and altered screenshots etc. Not saying this actually means anything yet but they did edit the old store page for Oblivion," says one comment.

"With recent rumors of both games getting remastered, the Fallout page countdown, the Fallout TV show happening and only those two games being affected rn, it's too much of a coincidence to not be," says another. "Don't do that, don't give me hope," another Redditor adds.

Well, in the spirit of keeping expectations in check, I can tell you this is simply a sporadic issue across Valve's marketplace at the minute. Batman: Arkham City and Kerbal Space Program both showed the same message at points over the last couple of days.

Another, slightly stranger happening, is that if you look at the Fallout tab on Steam, it says there are 12 games, but only ten appear. This one's a little harder to explain away immediately, but it's probably just an internal error due to soundtracks being separate products or some such, and not evidence Todd Howard’s about to remedy your January blues in grand fashion.

Sorry, wastelanders, the wait continues. At least Fallout season 2 is currently releasing on Amazon Prime Video week-to-week to scratch the nuclear itch in the meantime.

Fallout 5's "obvious" setting would be New Vegas, says Fallout: London lead, but it's not the location he'd choose: "I would say Texas"

Fallout 2 designer and Obsidian Entertainment founder Chris Avellone says he doesn't think Bethesda understands the roots of Fallout.

Fallout probably wouldn't be in the industry powerhouse position it currently holds without Bethesda taking on the license and creating Fallout 3 – which in turn led to the incredibly popular TV show – especially given Interplay had to sell it due to financial woes. However, there is a stark difference between both eras of the series, not only down to the isometric vs. FPS formats. The original Fallout games have a far more oppressive atmosphere than what Bethesda is putting out, and while the fanbase has grown, the series still has diehard fans yearning for that original tone.

Avellone – who was a designer on Fallout 2, Van Buren (Interplay's canceled version of Fallout 3), and Fallout New Vegas (as well as director of its DLC) – was asked on Twitter about the speculation that Bethesda hates Obsidian or the Fallout franchise at large (which, I don't think makes much sense, but it's weirdly prevalent). He responds, "I don't think Bethesda hates Fallout, they just don't fully understand its roots and arguably, don't care."

He continues, "They own the franchise, and they just want to do their spin on Fallout and make that the norm." Avellone explains that Bethesda's take "usually translates into a colorful, shallow theme park," but he adds, "theme parks are fun for some folks, so if people enjoy it, that’s fine with me." He also shouts out Bethesda for doing interesting things with the franchise with its DLC expansions like Far Harbor, Point Lookout, and The Pitt.

But despite the somewhat critical look of its version of Fallout, Avellone assures that "I don't hate Bethesda, there are things they do well (open-world exploration), and there are things they do badly (telling linear stories in open-world games and their inability to understand how to use the Speech skill). But every developer has their pros and cons."

Fallout creators wanted to buy the IP, but Bethesda sniped them with a $6 million bid: "They would have laughed."

Multiplatform does, indeed, seem to be the future for all of Xbox's first-party studios, and the RPG powerhouse of Obsidian is no exception. Today, the devs confirmed that Avowed is coming to PS5, and revealed a few details about the impending anniversary update – including the fact that we're finally going to be able to play as non-human characters.

Avowed hits PS5 on February 17. That date – almost exactly one year after the game's original launch – will also see the release of a big, free anniversary update including a host of new features across all platforms, including Xbox, PC, and PS5.

The news was announced as part of the New Game+ showcase, which also offered a look at the anniversary update. Here, the devs ran over some of the things we already knew were on the way – new game plus and photo mode, for example – but perhaps the biggest additions are non-human options for character creation. You'll now be able to play as an aumauan, orlan, or dwarf.

In the video above, lead character artist Dmitri Berman explains that multiple playable races were "discussed" early in Avowed's development, but "it's a lot of work and a difficult thing to really nail down, especially in Avowed with its parkour systems, its combat mechanics, all the weapon types, and stuff like that in the game. Our different races are different sizes. They're different shapes. They're a very unique game experience when you play as each one of them in a first-person game, specifically. So it was something new to wrangle for Avowed. We had no time to finish it as we were making Avowed, and now we can give it to the players."

Avowed seemed to go somewhat under the radar in 2025, but for my money it's worth checking out if you missed it. It doesn't offer quite the same storytelling depth as many of Obsidian's most beloved classics, but it makes up for that with some genuinely excellent first-person combat and a series of open-world maps that feel densely detailed with numerous opportunities for discovery. There's a reason we called it one of the best games of 2025.

"RPGs can be divisive": Obsidian chats all things Avowed – how it overcame the Skyrim comparisons, why there's no Baldur's Gate 3-style romance, and what's next for the 2025 gem.

Bethesda lead Todd Howard says there was only one choice of studio when creating a new Fallout game after 3 – Obsidian Entertainment.

Over the last decade or so of no Fallout RPGs releasing, fans have conjured a theory that Bethesda is secretly upset that Fallout: New Vegas was the best Fallout game and decided that no one else would ever get to work on Fallout ever. And while a follow-up to New Vegas would be a welcome move given it's probably going to be 2035 at the earliest before we see Fallout 5 at this rate, I doubt there's actual bad blood between the teams. At the very least, Howard seems to appreciate Obsidian.

In an interview with Game Informer, Howard talks about capitalizing on the momentum of Fallout 3 while the main Bethesda team worked on Skyrim, which led them to Obsidian. "They were the only choice," Howard explains. "They had done something similar with [Star Wars] Knights of the Old Republic 2, and we knew them really well. We knew we were going onto Skyrim, the franchise was back, but we knew there was going to be a long break until Fallout 4 – how can we keep this going?"

Obsidian lead creative designer John Gonzalez explains, "There was Fallout DNA here; there were people who had worked on the original title, and then also the second game." Obsidian was founded by former Black Isle Studios and Interplay staff following the cancellation of the original Fallout 3, Van Buren.

Howard notes that the only instructions Obsidian was given was to work with faction-based gameplay, which the game is beloved for, as Gonzalez notes: "The thing that made New Vegas special was the ferocious focus on choice-and-consequence gameplay." He calls New Vegas "a very Obsidian-focused experience," explaining, "It's all about allowing the player to have tremendous amounts of narrative impact, narrative control."

Bethesda's Todd Howard says "we are doing other things with Fallout that we haven’t announced."

Since Minecraft first burrowed its blocky way into players' brains back in 2009, survival games have gone on to become one of the biggest genres in the medium. The idea of building a shelter and hiding in it from hostile elements and creatures has been adapted into every imaginable scenario, from the depths of the ocean in Subnautica to the farthest reaches of space in No Man's Sky.

The influence of the best survival games can be seen across the industry. Big-budget action-adventure titles such as Tomb Raider and God Of War have adopted elements of survival games – not least the crafting system – while you can trace a direct line from the open-ended zombie survivalism of DayZ to the battle-royale supremacy of Fortnite. Survival games have even changed how videogames, regardless of genre, are made, pioneering the early-access model of development used to create outstanding recent titles such as Hades 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.

Given survival games' ubiquity and influence, then, it might seem absurd to ask whether the genre itself might be dying. Yet as it has grown in popularity, it has also changed dramatically, resulting in a significant shift in both the appearance of games and what's prioritised in them. Consequently, it's possible that survival games are not only dying, but they've reached the brink of extinction without anyone actually noticing.

Dying art

To examine this notion, it's important to specify what exactly survival games are, and the forces behind their appeal and popularity.

Typically, survival games deposit you in a wilderness such as a forest, then challenge you to not die for an unspecified amount of time. At the most basic level, this involves managing various bodily needs such as hunger and thirst (usually represented by gradually decaying meters) by foraging for sources of food and water. Most survival games also allow you to improve your fortunes by crafting tools such as axes, spears and fishing rods, and constructing a shelter where you can store your equipment and hide from wandering creatures and environmental hazards.

The specifics vary between games, but all survival games share the same fundamental draw. Anthony Gallegos, design director on Subnautica 2, perhaps sums it up best with an anecdote.

"I used to work at this one Marvel studio, and we had some coworkers that would occasionally bring their kids to work," he tells us. He recalls seeing one of these children playing Astroneer, a game about constructing bases and outposts on colourful alien worlds. "I was watching this little kid play, and I was like, 'Oh, geez, good luck, kid, that game has no onboarding'. I came back two hours later, and he had made a base that was leaps and bounds above anything I could have fathomed for myself. I was like, 'OK, either this kid's a genius, or survival-game mechanics are just simple enough that they're universally approachable'."

Gallegos believes that the popularity of survival games derives from how they tap into some of our most primal urges. "We're all little monkeys. Everyone's little monkey brains like shelter and food," he says. In other words, just as children build dens in forests and blanket forts in their bedrooms, survival games enable us to simulate the satisfaction of pitting ourselves against the imagined elements.

But this isn't the only reason survival games are so popular. Gallegos has observed that players who discover their appeal also develop an insatiable appetite for them.

"There are a lot of genres where players are very monogamistic. A lot of players are like, 'I only play this shooter'," he says. "MMOs, same way. When all the MMOs were trying to copy World Of Warcraft, people were like 'I'll go play the first free month of it, and then I'm coming back to WOW'."

Whole new worlds

Survival games, Gallegos believes, are different, as in most cases the vast majority of players don't make a long-term commitment to a single experience.

"If I see people play through all the content of Subnautica and then they leave for a little bit until we do a content patch, that doesn't alarm me, because I know what they're doing," he explains. "They just move from one to [another] with their friends, or by themselves. But they play them all."

When this behaviour started is unclear. What's fascinating, though, is that the original Subnautica is both the product of players' ravenous appetite for survival games and one of the chief architects of the genre's proliferation.

Although it came to be one of the most acclaimed survival games, Unknown Worlds' aquatic adventure was not originally conceived as one. "It was an exploration game first, and then they added survival elements," Gallegos explains. "Charlie [Cleveland], the original creator, if you asked him about it, I think he would tell you that he listened to the community to figure out what they wanted."

Yet in reworking Subnautica into a survival game based on community demand, Cleveland established a template for a new kind of survival game, one that took the genre from its (relatively) grounded origins into the realms of infinite fantasy.

Early progenitors such as Minecraft, The Forest, DayZ and Project Zomboid may all have featured fantastical elements such as zombies and monsters, but their environments all looked like the real world and (more or less) functioned according to real-world logic.

If you needed to craft something out of wood, for example, you went and chopped down a tree. If you needed to cook, you built a campfire or a furnace.

In contrast, Subnautica transposed the fundamentals of survival to an alien ocean world with a unique ecosystem, one in which the lessons learned in those early survival games no longer worked. Instead, players had to master a new set of rules to thrive in the game's planetwide ocean. They would learn how to manage their oxygen, which oceanic creatures were edible, and how to craft items in a world without wood.

In this way, Subnautica demonstrated how a radical change of setting could revitalise survival gaming's underlying ruleset. It's an idea survival games have been riffing on ever since, using setting and theme to recontextualise the underlying mechanics.

Examples that have adopted Subnautica's template include the spacefaring survival sim Breathedge, post-apocalyptic airship game Forever Skies and Obsidian Entertainment's Grounded, which combines survival gaming with a theme inspired by the film Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

The A Factor

One particularly vivid example from recent years is Abiotic Factor, a cooperative survival game that casts you as a scientist attempting to sustain yourself within a Black Mesa-inspired research facility.

Abiotic Factor's design director, Geoff Keene, had attempted to break into the survival genre during its early years with the ill-fated zombie survival game The Dead Linger. "It was a survival game back when we were like, 'The zombie genre has died – we're bringing it back to life'," he says.

But Keene's inexperience led to a troubled development, while The Dead Linger also struggled to stand out amid a slew of zombie-themed games. "I was young. We didn't know how to make games back then." Keene went on to develop the social deduction game Unfortunate Spacemen before spending some time at DayZ creator Dean Hall's studio, RocketWerkz. But he was still determined to build a survival game of his own, eventually cofounding Deep Field Games with several friends to create Abiotic Factor.

A core inspiration here was the opening tram ride in Half-Life and its second expansion, Blue Shift, occurring before Gordon Freeman triggers the resonance cascade that dooms the facility. "I just love that little slice of life," Keene says. "Who lives there? Who's doing the stuff there?" He imagined a scenario in which you had to survive for a longer period in Black Mesa, living off food pulled from vending machines and building equipment out of the furniture. "That was the original idea. I want trams, and I want vending machines, and I want lab coats."

Though Abiotic Factor is a survival game, only its base mechanics derive from genre norms, with everything else designed to fit its theme. Its setting, the GATE research facility, is structured to reflect Black Mesa's warren of corridors, with excursions into Xen-style portal worlds where you can discover strange new resources.

The crafting system, meanwhile, is designed to make you feel like you're inventing the items you create, reflecting your in-game role as a brainy boffin. "Our marketing producer, she came up with an idea for a minigame that was sort of based on Wordle," Keene says. "We made this little prototype of moving the items into the slot to make the item. You're given six or eight items or something, and you have to guess which ones are used in the recipe."

Abiotic Factor's scientific survivalism shows how Subnautica opened the floodgates to what's possible in the survival space. But as such there's one big difference between the wider effects they had, in using unusual themes to their advantage.

Subnautica's underwater world made it a pioneer, whereas Abiotic Factor's approach is now the baseline a survival game must meet to stand out.

Indeed, according to Keene, the perception of survival games as a robust, enduringly popular genre is built on the skeletons of countless examples that are released into immediate obscurity. "Most survival games go nowhere, right?" he says. "They release and get 100 reviews on Steam, if they're lucky, and then they just fall off the map."

Because of this, one of the key thrusts of Abiotic Factor's development was to steer clear of ideas or motifs that made it resemble a traditional survival game. "I basically avoided anything that makes survival games a real grind – looking at the ground, picking up sticks," he says. "I think a lot of them fall into that trap where they're like, 'Well, we've got the wood chopping, we've got the picking up sticks and stones, we've got the crafting…' You've got to do something different with it."

Gallegos agrees that developers of survival games can no longer rely on the basic tree chopping and campfire building that popularized the genre.

"At the very least, you need a strong theme," he says. But he also points out that the priorities of survival games have shifted more broadly. For example, modern survival games either heavily support or outright mandate cooperative multiperson play. Abiotic Factor already includes this while Unknown Worlds is bringing co-op play to Subnautica 2.

"We have certain mechanics where, if I hit my air [bladder] in singleplayer, it gives me oxygen. If I hit it when I'm standing next to you, it gives us both oxygen," Gallegos says. In addition, he states that modern survival games are increasingly averse to challenging or punishing players, with death and setbacks treated as an inconvenience to enjoyment. "Survival games often make you want to do anything but lose. You're like, 'I will hoard everything for food. I don't ever want to die. I don't ever want to lose. I will save scum'."

And this brings us to why, despite appearances, survival games may be an endangered species. In the effort to diversify, developers might just have forgotten what they're supposed to be about.

Drive to survive

This is the view of Seth Rosen, a freelance game design consultant and director who has overseen the development of numerous survival games, including Don't Starve Together (the multiplayer expansion to Klei Entertainment's 2013 hit) and last year's Pacific Drive.

"The vast majority of games we call survival games, I think, could more accurately be described as co-op base-building RPGs," he says. "The fact that it's sort of dressed up as survival and you have a hunger meter is just tacking onto what's hot in the market."

Rosen qualifies his position by pointing out that he personally doesn't like the survival genre, despite having designed two games that would conventionally fall into the category. "For me, survival games tend to be two things. One is a mystery box in terms of there's all this stuff and you've got to figure out how it works in the world, so you are poking things with sticks and seeing what they do," he explains. "And it's also a collect-a-thon. It's a crafting and resource-gathering experience, and that's most of what we're doing moment to moment. And I just find it ultimately pretty tedious."

Within this nebula of crafting and base-building RPGs, Rosen says there are "vanishingly few" true survival experiences. "When I think of survival, the word, and movies that are about survival, it's about a character finding themselves against great odds, often in some difficult climate or terrain or strange world that they don't understand, and they have limited resources."

Examples of 'true' survival games by that definition include Creepy Jar's jungle-based Green Hell and Hinterland Studio's uncompromising arctic excursion The Long Dark. In both games, staying alive is nearly always your primary concern, and the environmental hazards you face, such as extreme cold or wild predators, are a constant threat to your continued existence.

But the trajectory of the modern survival genre, in which modes of play such as exploration, creativity and cooperation have been increasingly emphasised, has deliberately reduced much of this friction. "Especially in the multiplayer variants of these things," Rosen points out, "if you die, the penalty is you have to walk back to your backpack. That's not survival at that point – that's adventuring."

As Gallegos observes, many modern survival games perceive the fundamental challenge and busywork of survival as an inconvenience, and there are far more egregious examples of this than the likes of Subnautica and Abiotic Factor, both of which require you to take risks and plan expeditions to improve your situation.

Games such as Redbeet Interactive's Raft enable you to take your entire base with you on adventures, so stepping out for food or other resources demands little forethought.

For Rosen, then, there are many games outside the survival genre that better embrace the ideas it is notionally about, including survival-horror examples. "I think back to Resident Evil 1 and 2, and how hilariously sparse ammunition was. That feels a lot more like survival to me." He also points to 2019's Outer Wilds, and how it challenged players to figure out how its solar system worked in order to escape its time-loop apocalypse that occurred every 22 minutes.

"Outer Wilds is more of a survival game than a lot of what we call survival games," he says. "For a lot of people, it's really satisfying and gratifying to make progress in the tech tree, and improve your walls from wood to stone or whatever. But that's not survival at that point. That's frontiering."

It's worth noting that Rosen's view of how we wrongly categorize survival games extends to his own work. Rosen doesn't consider Pacific Drive to be a true survival game either.

"I think of it much more as a car-maintenance adventure than a survival game," he says. "A lot of our challenges were about figuring out how to put the player into duress mode when they're behind the wheel of a car, which has to protect you to a degree, but also you need to care about the state of your car and maintain it."

That said, Pacific Drive does incorporate many of Rosen's design ideas about how to engender survivalist instincts in a virtual space.

Pacific Drive is all about managing your fuel, your tyres, the overall integrity of your car, and doing so in an environment where there are hazards that can and will harm you. It's a game that is willing to get in your way, and interrupt what you want to do with more urgent tasks that you need to do.

"If you boil it down, the vast majority of what's going on in Pacific Drive is time management or attentional management," Rosen says. "The emotion that is elicited by having to do time management when there are stakes is that fight-or-flight, 'dynamic problem solving under duress' feeling that you get from actual survival."

Getting back on track

Refocusing survival games on actual survival will not be easy. For starters, it doesn't appear to be what the majority of players want.

But in addition to this, making a true survival game that's also enjoyable is very difficult. In their traditional formulation, survival games are built upon a very simple set of systems, namely one or several timers that tick down until they kill the you unless you're able to restore them by some means. Every other system commonly associated with survival games – crafting, base building – is supplementary.

This is what makes survival games so adaptable. You can add these systems into virtually any other type of game, just as Cleveland did with the original Subnautica. But the passive nature of these mechanics also means that making a game specifically about survival is tough, hence why they so often exist beneath other, more interactively immediate mechanics such as crafting and building, and why those mechanics have become more prioritised over time.

With that in mind, what does the future hold for survival games? Rosen believes that bringing survival back to the fore requires better delineation between survival games and crafting/base-building RPGs, though he acknowledges there are obstacles.

"I've been working on a talk about all of this, and one of the things I keep trying to fit into it is this new taxonomy for how to talk about these kinds of games," he says. "But it's so multivalent, and it so often multiplies even within a single title, that I found it really hard to nail down the thing, which I think is why we get this umbrella term of 'survival games'."

Keene, however, thinks the opposite, that survival games will only thrive if they continue to mix with other genres. "I would say there needs to be more hybridization," he says. "I think it's detrimental to survival games to keep trying to copy other survival games. They really need to step out and do more things with it."

Gallegos, meanwhile, falls somewhere between the two. He predicts survival games will become even more focused upon multiplayer, likely taking inspiration from viral hits in the cooperative horror space. "Survival games will increasingly lean into more social mechanics over time," he says, "learning the lessons from major successes like REPO and Content Warning, and looking at the ways people play together."

This is something Unknown Worlds plans to pursue with Subnautica 2. "In the original version of the prototype, I could stand in the doorway to the big sub and block it and just watch you drown. I would do stuff like that all the time, where they'd be like, 'Let me in', and I'd be like, 'What's the password?'" he says.

"We got rid of that for now, but I think we'll be finding ways to bring stuff like that in, ways you can lightly mess with each other, like if we added a mechanic where, when you're swimming to the surface, you could grab someone's ankle and use it to pull yourself past them."

Scrapping for parts

But Gallegos doesn't believe this means survival games will necessarily stray further from their origins. Instead, the right kind of hybridization could reinstate the tension of survival to the genre.

He points to the recently released co-op indie Peak as an example. "It's a climbing game, but you only have a stamina bar," he says. "If you take health damage, it impacts your stamina bar. If you're hungry, it slowly impacts your stamina bar even more. So you eat to get it back to where it was. You heal yourself to get your stamina back. That's a brilliant way to tie all these survival systems into [one] thing the player cares about."

Gallegos also points out that Unknown Worlds plans to elaborate upon the basic survival systems Subnautica 2 will initially launch with. Appropriately, one of the sequel's central themes is adaptation, with players altering their characters at a genetic level to better thrive in its underwater world. Some upgrades will give players access to new areas of the world, while others, planned for the future, will enable them to customise their characters in more specific ways.

But, coming full circle, the extent of these adaptations will depend on how Subnautica 2's community responds to them. "We're definitely going to push our systems over time, but I think we're going to push them more in the terms of [how] hunger will play into this progression system, [or] thirst will play into that progression system. But reinventing those entirely? I'm not sure," Gallegos says.

"We'll have to see. If the fans, in our case, really want us to push it, we will." Survival, after all, is a matter of understanding the environment you exist in. And sometimes the best way to do that, ironically, is to evolve into a different kind of beast.

Check out all the new games of 2026 to look forward to in the next 12 months, from Resident Evil Requiem to GTA 6

In GamesRadar+'s From the Vault series, we're bringing you compelling exclusives pulled from our sister magazines' back catalogues to give you a taste of how we were discussing your favorite Fallout games back when they were first introduced.

Today, we've unearthed GamesTM's hands-on experience with Fallout: New Vegas at E3 2010, featuring interviews with Bethesda and Obsidian as they charted the RPG's future.

Fallout: New Vegas hands-on preview

Bethesda’s ambitious reinvention of the Fallout series poses a daunting challenge for game demos. How do you take a vertical slice of a game whose appeal is entirely rooted in its sprawl, the way it tempts you away from defined objectives with the exhilaration of haphazard discovery, and show it off in isolation?

When Fallout 3 was shown at E3 2008, attendees were treated to a 20-minute demo from its very beginning – the most linear section of the game. Becoming excited about what followed your character emerging into the endless wasteland required a leap of faith. Fast forward to 2010, as we pondered our imminent hands-on session with Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout: New Vegas, it seemed clear that the game could only be effectively demonstrated in two ways: with a small but completely open section of the Vegas wasteland, or the entire game-world with a controlled number of locations to discover.

In both cases, the demo would embrace the qualities that any vertical slice of Fallout should contain: exploration, freedom, and discovery. Fallout is a mosaic in that focusing on any single piece reveals remarkably little. The parts only truly resonate in the context of the whole. Yet while this made our demo an ambiguous representation of just how good New Vegas is likely to be, it also speaks of its major strength.

If it ain't broke...

Obsidian is wisely sticking with the template established in Oblivion and refined in Fallout 3. As Bethesda’s watching representatives directed us to the next destination, the hollow triangles peppering the on-screen compass sang to us once more, tempting us with the promise of new adventures waiting in the desolation. It’s as fine a basis for role-playing as one could hope for, and the Fallout universe remains pregnant with potential.

Indeed, after the phenomenal success of Fallout 3, it’s hardly surprising that New Vegas is doing so little to alter the basics. With 4.7 million units sold in its first week and Lord knows how many more since, we suggest to Bethesda’s vice president Pete Hines that even he couldn’t have foreseen just how receptive the public would be. Apparently, his confidence in the product was greater than we predicted.

“I don’t think it took me by surprise,” he replies. “Obviously, I had a sense of how good the game was, and I had a sense of how big it could be. It probably out-stripped my expectations by a little, but we put a ton of effort into making that game, and promoting it and marketing it. The goal all along was to make it bigger and take it to a wider audience, and I think we were successful in doing that.”

Even if Fallout 3 hadn’t sold in quite the numbers it did, sequels were inevitable – Bethesda paid $5.75 million for the rights to the entire Fallout brand for a reason. So, the existence of New Vegas is no great surprise. The fact that Bethesda chose to bring in an external developer raised a few eyebrows.

“We talked about a variety of different options,” says Hines. “Near the end of Fallout 3 we talked about what [game director] Todd Howard’s group was going to work on next… was there a good fit for us to work with somebody on Fallout that we felt would do it justice? Obsidian was at the top of the list, and pretty much alone on the list. We talk to a lot of studios just to stay on top of what they’re doing, what they’re up to, and what they’re doing next. It means working with studios we like further down the road, and this happened to be a case where we’d had conversations with Obsidian over a period of time. It was the obvious choice – obvious to us, obvious to them, obvious to everybody. It made total sense.”

Dystopian utopia

On that point, there can be no argument. Obsidian was formed by Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Darren Monahan and Chris Jones after the collapse of Black Isle Studios, Interplay’s RPG division and creator of the Fallout franchise.

In addition, the studio had established itself with a string of well-received and commercially successful sequels to existing Bioware games: Knights Of The Old Republic II and Neverwinter Nights 2. “[Obsidian] obviously knew how to use an existing brand and do something cool and new,” says Hines. “They also have a number of guys on the team with background experience of Fallout, starting with Feargus [Urquhart] himself.”

“The conversation really just started with, ‘Would you guys be interested in making another Fallout game, and if so, what would you do with it, where would you set it?’, and so forth. They came back with something, and we were like, ‘Yeah, that sounds really cool.’ We’re talking about guys who know Fallout, so it’s not like they were going to set it in Kathmandu, or Paris. They stuck with the Fallout universe they know, taking it back to the West coast, and using a really iconic location: Las Vegas.”

Obsidian’s choice works on several levels. Washington DC is the seat of American politics and institutional power, and one of the country’s few cities with any sense of history. Las Vegas is its mirror opposite: a gaudy monument to greed, vanity and unbridled consumption. Where Fallout 3 allowed Bethesda to create robotic presidents and missions to find the Declaration Of Independence, New Vegas affords Obsidian the opportunity to riff on glamour, vice and, of course, themed casinos.

“Each of the casinos – Topps, Ultralux, Gomorrah – are all themed differently, and run by individual groups that have a distinct personality,” says Hines. “That’s kind of what Vegas is about. Of course, nothing in the game references modern-day Vegas, but it does have that feeling.”

Within moments of starting the demo we saw posters for a lounge act called ‘The Rad Pack,’ inebriated revellers dancing in a fountain, and wandering prostitutes with nothing more than duct-tape to hide what was left of their modesty.

“In addition to that, Washington was highly destroyed and [New Vegas] was virtually untouched. So not only do you get the symbolic differences between the two locations, but then you get the real, tangible differences." says Hines. "It’s a pretty stark contrast. The primary objective of the art team at Obsidian was to use a very different section of the colour palette for New Vegas, so that when you look at it you instantly see things like blues, and reds, and oranges. Fallout 3 was much greyer, greener, and grittier. That blue sky alone makes such a difference to how the world feels and looks compared to Fallout 3.”

By night, the New Vegas strip is awash with neon – it’s one of the few parts of America that still has regular electricity – but even by day, it’s a bright and vivid environment. As Hines indicated, the sky is free from oppressive, grey cloud cover, and plays host to the sort of radiant sunrises and sunsets more commonly associated with Red Dead Redemption and Just Cause 2. The impact on the game’s atmosphere is profound, and we can only hope that this is reflected in the tone of the individual quests and overarching story.

What lies beneath

In Fallout: New Vegas, that’s where the real pleasure will be found: stumbling upon an endearing oddball character only to discover their disturbing secret; finding a bizarre community living in self-imposed isolation and being welcomed into their unhinged microcosm; being presented with three options, each on offering an equally tempting reward, each one demanding an equally troubling sacrifice.

The demo couldn’t be expected to capture whether Obsidian will accomplish this as skilfully as Bethesda, but by deciding against unnecessary reinvention, the team’s effort is certainly being invested in the right areas.

“We’re not worrying about how we’re going to get this to run at so many frames per second,” admits Hines. “Building off of stable technology helps a lot in getting the content creation up-and-running much more quickly, because you’re not spending all that time in pre-production figuring out how things are gonna work. You’re gonna add some new things, tweak stuff, change some things, but you’re not changing how things render, how collision works, how path-finding works. For the most part, all that’s been solved.”

Obsidian is also taking advantage of that sense of familiarity to subtly expand the gameplay, and Hines hopes it will become a more important part of the overall experience.

“There are enough new features, new elements, new aspects so that it doesn’t feel derivative, but still feels familiar. We don’t need to teach you how to use VATS, or the Pip-boy… How much time did you spend making items [in Fallout 3]? None. Well, now that can become the focus of the entire experience, like it has in Oblivion with all the players who spend their time picking plants and making potions.”

So is Fallout: New Vegas just ‘more Fallout’, as the more salacious denizens of the online netherworld have suggested? Well, yes, and all the better for it. After all, if you loved the previous game as much as we did, you wouldn’t want it to be anything else.

There are embellishments here, new features to become immersed in, and new weapons to try. But most importantly, there will be a vast landscape full of unknown pleasures, tempting you with the peerless sense of discovery that a vertical slice could never hope to offer.

“The new features aren’t going to be things that appeal to everybody,” Hines admits. “Two thirds of people probably won’t even realise they’re there, but for those that do it’ll add a unique touch, and personalize it a little more. I mean, that’s what Fallout is really all about.”

Q&A with Obsidian Entertainment

See where New Vegas ranks in our list of the best Fallout games ever.