Fallout: New Vegas "was not particularly well-received when it launched," game director says: "It took about 5 years for the community to come around"

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As for the devs, it took "maybe a few years more for us to start considering that players actually liked the design choices we had made"

Fallout: New Vegas
(Image credit: Bethesda)

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."

Scott McCrae
Scott McCrae
Contributor

Scott has been freelancing for over three years across a number of different gaming publications, first appearing on GamesRadar+ in 2024. He has also written for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, VG247, Play, TechRadar, and others. He's typically rambling about Metal Gear Solid, God Hand, or any other PS2-era titles that rarely (if ever) get sequels.

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