Fallout: New Vegas Held Back By Consoles, Bugs Too Expensive To Fix

Fans of the Fallout series have their favorite installments, but many consider Fallout: New Vegas to be the best. The developer behind that particular game is Obsidian and in a recent interview, they revealed that the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 limited the title in ways the PC would not have. What’s more, it seems the many bugs found in the game were due to how expensive they were to fix.

Obsidian made the confession when the developers spoke with interviewers from PCGamesN, with lead world builder Scott Everts saying that it would have been much better if it was made only for the PC. Apparently, the release of New Vegas for consoles forced the developers to scrap many of their original ideas in order to cram whatever stuff they could into the limited hardware.

Everts’ comments mirrored much of what many hardcore New Vegas fans noticed in the game, where the towns and bases were somewhat decentralized. It was almost as if the developers merely placed everything in odd locations at random. Apparently, this is not what the developers had in mind.

“We had a lot of plans early on. Like, ‘Here’s where the water is stored, here’s where the farms are, here’s where the government is centralised’. We had it all planned out - it wasn’t just a bunch of random stuff,” he said.

Even though Obsidian clearly had to make huge compromises, the game still came out great, at least when considering what they had to work with. However, Everts stresses that it could have been so much better. While Bethesda properties are known for the virulent presence of bugs, Comicbook.com noted, it could have apparently been so much less pronounced in New Vegas.

“We would have had fewer performance issues. We did break it up a bit, but from my point of view it was a performance-related game and we had to fix things,” he said.

Despite these complaints, however, it’s clear that the developers had fun creating the game. In fact, they had repeatedly said that they would relish another opportunity to work on a Fallout game.