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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."
