Fallout: New Vegas director on the “blessing” of working on the RPG: “I never thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again]”
A blessing for Fallout too, as it turned out.

After the cancellation of the first Fallout game he worked on, Josh Sawyer was determined n💫ot to squander a second chance to work on the series when the opportunity to direct Fallout: New V🍌egas arose.
Over the last decade, Josh Sawyer has e✱ffectively cemented himself as a household name in the game industry, directing both Pillars of Eternity games and, more recently, 2022’s medieval art RPG Pentiment. But for many, his crowning achievement will likely always be 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas, a game Sawyer himself regards as a blessing.
While at Black Isle Studios, Sawyer worked as the lead systems designer for a later-cancelled Fallout 3 project 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:codenamed Van Buren. Around five years later Sawyer was working for 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Obsidian Entertainment, and following the release of the Fallout 3 we all know and (mostly) love, Sawyer had the chance to work on the franchise again when Bethesda contracted the studio to develop New Vegas - one Sawyer was not going to pass up. “This is a blessing.” he said of the opportunity in Edge issue 404, “I n♐ever thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again].”
At the time, Obsidian had just come off the back of a canc🐼elled Aliens RPG, near the end of which Sawyer𒁏 had been promoted to director, and with only 18 months to develop New Vegas, he credits Bethesda’s tech with solving a lot of the studio’s prior issues.
“We had put a lot of time and effort into the [Aliens] tech, but it took forever to make areas and basically we didn't have a game.” he began. “Then we ♏got Bethesda's tec💫h, [which] is extremely powerful for rapidly making content, more than any engine and toolset I've ever used. You can make content so quickly with their tools. So I said 'Hey, everybody, we do not want to disrupt our pipelines at all. We basically want to use what's there - add to it, don't change it, just add to it - and make great content."
With the process more streamlined, Sawyer had more time to focus on overseeing the design team but he insists that the designers themselves deserve the bulk of the credit. “They are responsible for conceiving it and executing on it. The only [worldbuilding] thing I w💧as really respo🧸nsible for was the concept and visualization, with Brian Menze, of Caesar's Legion and the NCR military.”
On whether his previous Fallout experience colored his time on New Vegas, Sawyer confir🦄ms that they “did pull over certain things” from Van Buren such as the Burned Man, but that they were not wholesale. “It was more like an aesthetic or an interesting background,” he added. “Then there were other things, like Arcade [Gannon] and Jean-Baptiste Cutting, who was par𒁏t of the Van Graff family, were two of my tabletop characters." At the end of the day, it feels like a blessing for all of us that Sawyer got his second chance.
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You’ll find a couple of Josh Sawyer’s games in our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPG games.

Alex has written all sorts of things for websites including VideoGamer, PCGamer, PCGamesN and more. He'll play anything from Tekken to Team Fortress 2, but you'll typically find him failing to churn through his backlog becaus𒁏e he's too busy playing whatever weird and wonderful indie games have just come out.