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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stability mods if you're playing on PC, as the game was developed on the notoriously buggy, and even by 2010 standards, outdated, Gamebryo engine.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.
