Fans of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas

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“One of the [design principles] in New Vegas that was really focused on player freedom, I said from the beginning that you have to be able to kill any character in this game who is not a child as soon as you have a clear line of fire on them,” Sawyer says. “If you want to open a door and have a character talk to them, that’s fine, but as soon as the conversation ends, you have to assume the player has killed that character.”This policy of making sure the story flowed even with any character dead went all the way from the lowest raider to the leaders of each faction, and it all comes back to small-scale and long term reaction from the world. This reactivity is found in the moral dilemmas the game presents players with, where rather than having an objectively good or evil path, players would be faced with decisions that had no clear outcome. One of Sawyer’s favorite examples of this reactivity is the quest “The White Wash.” After learning that a former Follower of the Apocalypse faction member is siphoning off water from the New California Republic in order to help starving locals feed themselves, the player is forced to choose between the lives of the poor crop farmers or the NCR’s own farmers.“We have a timer set so that way later, if you’re wandering around [the NCR sharecropper’s] farm, that farmer will come up to you and go, ‘Hey, asshole, thanks for not figuring out what the hell happened to the water. I lost my plot of land and have to go back to California. Thanks for nothing.’ It’s a small thing. It’s actually very easy to do, but it's something where the player goes, 'Oh my god, this is 10 hours later and here's this reactivity to something I did.’”Another key example for Sawyer is the bounty hunter you meet on the outskirts of the Freeside community, who players can later find dead in an alley. Sawyer compares it to The Witcher 2’s narrative, where the player can experience an entirely different area of the world if they make one key decision over the other. Rather than planning for epic divergences that cause players to get less bang for their buck, Sawyer prefers stringing along smaller moments to help add up to a bigger sense of ownership over a story.“Have a small payoff for these little choices and interactions the player has and it feels much more alive. It makes it feel like it grows and changes over time. It's not about planning for these epic things that diverge in massive ways,” Sawyer says.Perhaps Fallout: New Vegas’ greatest sense of divergence is in how the plot weaves the player character through each different faction, including the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion, and several others. The game purposefully never makes it clear who is the real villainous force of the Mojave Wasteland, again letting players choose on their own who to fight against in the end, including every faction.“I think a lot of people saw the NCR and thought, 'Oh, this is America, the good guys,' but the more they interact with them, the more they realize this is pretty corrupt,” Sawyer says. “Interacting with Caesar's Legion, initially they appear completely psychotic, but then you learn there's this weird underlying philosophy for what Caesar is doing what he's doing. For most people, that doesn't forgive them for what they're doing, but it makes them more comprehensible. I wanted to put players in scenarios where they questioned their own morals and what they really wanted to see in the Mojave Wasteland.”For more behind-the-scenes info on the development of Fallout: New Vegas, the future of Pillars of Eternity, and Obsidian’s canceled Aliens RPG, check out this month’s full episode of IGN Unfiltered featuring developer Josh Sawyer.

Joseph Knoop is a contributor to IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @JosephKnoop