Fallout: New Vegas was originally meant to be an expansion for Fallout 3
Ain't that a kick in the head?
As part of the celebrations for Fallout's 25th anniversary, Bethesda has been uploading retrospectives on the history of the series.
The latest video discusses Fallout: New Vegas, and Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda and one of its most public figures, revealed the game was initially conceived as an expansion for Fallout 3.
Howard said following the success of Fallout 3, there was a "push" internally to ride the momentum the game had created. The decision was made to add a "big" expansion pack to the game.
Development on Skyrim at that point had started, so Bethesda considered companies they could have work on it instead. "We knew the folks at Obsidian," Howard said, "and it was sort of immediate. There's only one group that we would really want to do this."
Howard continued, stating the project Obsidian was working on "actually started as a big expansion pack for Fallout 3" but he had felt "strongly" that it should be its own game.
The expansion eventually was changed to a full stand-alone game called Fallout: New Vegas, and has become a beloved part of the Fallout series despite suffering from the bugs and crashes that are now synonymous with Bethesda games.
Towards the end of the video, Ashley Cheng, managing director at Bethesda, stated he had a lot of respect for Obsidian for the work they did to "take someone else's engine and technology and tools and build something fantastic with it".
Obsidian has since created Grounded, which had its full release out of Early Access last month. We called it "a delightful mix of harsh survival and warm-hearted design" in our Grounded review.
Next up will be Pentiment, on Xbox, PC and the cloud this November.