Fallout: New Vegas is often held up for delivering the peak of role-playing variety in the modern Fallout RPGs, but when it first launched in 2010 it was widely derided as a busted-up pile of junk that made Bethesda games look bug-free. Fallout: New Vegas lead and Obsidian veteran Josh Sawyer has had to remind fans of the now-beloved game’s difficult launch, refusing to entertain any revisions of history.
Following comments that “it took about five years” for Fallout fans to warm up to New Vegas, Sawyer took to Bluesky to hammer his point home.
“Do people think they remember the initial reviews of F:NV better than I do,” he wrote on Thursday.
In a reply, he stresses that, despite some praise, plenty of early user and critic reviews of Fallout: New Vegas were harsh. And I’ll tell you right now: they were, because they should’ve been, because that game was busted busted.
“There was another game that sold very well at launch that did not review amazingly… you may know it as… Cyberpunk 2077!!!” Sawyer adds. “I hope that people now recognize that it is a great game (IMO) but that its reputation at launch was not fantastic.”
Not having it, hearing it, or indeed suffering it, Sawyer notes in a Friday post that, “some people are stubbornly holding on to their beliefs and saying, ‘That’s not how I remember it.’ That’s okay because there is an easy explanation: you are wrong. I hope this helps you on your journey through life.”
Even putting technical issues aside, Obsidian’s approach did take some getting used to for some fans. Fallout: New Vegas sits below all four numbered or mainline Fallout games on Metacritic, including the 1997 original and, ironically, Fallout 4, which faced some criticism at launch specifically for offering shallower choices and consequences in its role-playing.
Time has perhaps been a secret ingredient here, and not just in the ‘heart grows fonder’ way. Sure, it’s allowed New Vegas devotees to keep singing the game’s praises while folks who don’t like it move onto something else. But also: the depth of its role-playing sandbox allows for replays that feel particularly fresh over time, with heavy narrative choices potentially warping your entire playthrough. Compared to more recent entries like the oddball Fallout 76 as well as the heavily re-released Fallout 4, there’s still a special something to the setting, story, quests, and crunchiness of New Vegas.
Bethesda made Fallout 3’s VATS system to avoid competing with Call of Duty and Battlefield, taking influence from KOTOR and Burnout: “Imagine the car parts are, like, eyeballs and guts!”
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