Fallout: New Vegas' Van Buren remake mod Revelation Blues has a new name and a second demo dropping soon

If you keep an eye on the big, ambitious Fallout mods that’re always in the works, you might have heard of Fallout: Revelation Blues. Its developers have been plugging away at remaking Van Buren – the version of Fallout 3 which was in development at Black Isle Studios before being cancelled in 2003 – as a New Vegas mod for the past few years. While they released a first demo last year under the Revelation Blues moniker, the group have decided to re-christen their project Fallout: The New West ahead of releasing a second demo at some point soon.

Ahead of that, the name change has been set in stone by the release of the fresh teaser above and the launch of a new website. Why the switch from Revelation Blues? Well, one of the mod’s devs going by the handle Caveman6667 has explained on Discord that the group concluded Revelation Blues was “a mystery of a name for many passersby and isn’t a grabby title”. The New West, meanwhile, they feel fits the mod better, as it’ll feature “many allusions and references to the Old West”.

So, out with the old and in the New West as the modders gear up to release a second demo, this time focused around Van Buren’s opening sequence. You’re in Tibbets prison, a pen run by an AI dubbed Odysseus, and you’ve gotta break out of that joint while a new plague’s also on the loose in the section of American southwest the mod’s set in. The modders wrote in a Discord post put out alongside the teaser that they’re “fairly confident” they could put a release date on this Tibbets demo right now, but have instead elected to play it safe and simply declare they’re “very very very close” to delivering it.

As outlined on the sparkly new website, the New West crew’s current plan is to get this “alternate start demo” out of the way, then “follow it up with the entirety of act one of the game as a vertical slice”. If you’re keen for a taster of what the mod’s full experience’ll be like, they’ve also provided the following handy blurb outlining its key tenets and aims:

In many ways, it tells the same broad story envisioned by Fallout: Van Buren, but restructured and expanded to form a cohesive, playable experience. The project’s primary narrative goal is to take the disparate plot threads and unfinished concepts found in the original design documents, including for example, the NCR–Brotherhood conflict, the Great Tribal War between Caesar’s Legion and the Daughters of Hecate, the fight for the soul of the Mormon State and much more, and weave them into a satisfying, unified narrative that adheres to the main plot as described in the design documents.

Players assume the role of a new protagonist,released from captivity in 2253, known as “the Prisoner”, and the story is set in an alternate continuity that predates and reinterprets the events of Fallout: New Vegas. Unfortunately due to many Van Buren concepts being folded into FNV, we cannot set the project in the same timeline. Our secondary goal is to incorporate many of the modern gameplay conveniences introduced through Fallout: New Vegas and its more than fifteen years of modding, while preserving the distinctive mechanics and design quirks of classic Fallout found in the original design documents.

While I’m not as voracious a Van Buren lore sponge as other Fallout enjoyers, the New West’s re-creation of a wasteland adventure we never got has certainly piqued my interest, so here’s hoping the upcoming demo’s a good one. If you fancy giving the mod’s first demo – Burham Springs – a go in the interim you can find it on Nexus Mods.