Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer explains why the RPG's opening is a perfect example of respecting the player's skill choices

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"We're paying attention to the character you made, and we're going to give you rewards"

Fallout New Vegas
(Image credit: Bethesda)

Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has explained how the RPG's opening area is masterfully designed to make the player feel rewarded, no matter which skill they'd invested in.

Even if you've played merely an hour of Fallout New Vegas, you'll know Goodsprings, the wasteland, old-west-style town with just a handful of people and even fewer buildings still standing. Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer believes that one of the RPG's world designers brilliantly demonstrated how to reward the player in this opening section of the game.

"Eric Fenstermaker was the designer of that area, and he ensured that every skill you could take would be rewarded within the ghost town gunfight and in the area," Sawyer says in the video below, around the 90-second mark. "That was our way of telling the player 'Hey if you tagged this skill and you just started playing the game, we're here and we're paying attention to the character you made, and we're going to give you rewards for that.'"

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Fallout New Vegas' opening is generally highly regarded among the game's extensive community. In contrast to other games in the series like Fallout 3 or 4, you don't begin by emerging from an underground vault but instead begin as a courier, shot in the head and left for dead by Benny, the RPG's secondary antagonist (and portrayed by the late Matthew Perry).

Later on in the video, shortly after the five-minute mark, Sawyer speaks a little more about 'skill checks' in Fallout New Vegas. "The number of checks across all of your skills probably should be frontloaded. In the first couple of hours you really want to make the promise like 'hey, we are rewarding you for the things you invested in,'" Sawyer says, again speaking to the Goodsprings section of New Vegas.

"As the game goes on, that density can drop off across the board, but as long as you keep rewarding the player for their choices over time enough, then they will feel like they're being rewarded, enough to make it worthwhile," the veteran RPG and Obsidian developer concludes.

Earlier this month in June, Sawyer said players who didn't get along with Fallout New Vegas' very divisive card game should simply "try again." Good luck saying that to anyone who really hated Caravan back in the day.

Xbox officially delays Obsidian's Avowed to February "to give players' backlogs some breathing room."

Hirun Cryer
Hirun Cryer

Hirun Cryer is a freelance reporter and writer with Gamesradar+ based out of U.K. After earning a degree in American History specializing in journalism, cinema, literature, and history, he stepped into the games writing world, with a focus on shooters, indie games, and RPGs, and has since been the recipient of the MCV 30 Under 30 award for 2021. In his spare time he freelances with other outlets around the industry, practices Japanese, and enjoys contemporary manga and anime.