Fallout 76's next update launches today, alongside the new season, Appalachia Under Siege. With it comes a new hostile encounter that sees different factions or forces claim up to "40 unique locations" only to be driven out by you, the player.

Instead of introducing a massive map expansion, new events, and NPCs like we saw in Burning Springs, Infestations seeks to "enrich the existing experience" by making the current map more rewarding and interesting to explore.

"I love seeing all the dots moving around, to me it sounds like the map is 'sizziling' there's stuff going on on the map constantly," Jon Rush, Fallout 76's creative director says in a group Q&A. "And to me that tells me players are in the game, having fun. So Infestations is another one of those forays into adding another layer of experiences on our map."

Infestations will appear randomly around the map with players having to sniff out the specific area for themselves. "The max number will be about five spawning every five minutes," senior systems designer Fahad Khan adds. The infection won't spread if no one manages to or bothers to clear it; it'll just disappear after five hours.

Those who do find the Infestation and decide to take it on, however, will have their work cut out for them, because while this isn't specifically end-game content, it's as near as dammit. "If [players] left at a mid level, maybe wait until you start to see the Infestation get a lot more dots around it before you hop in," Rush says. "These are hard, these bosses are hard, it is end game content to an extent, you do get four star legendaries from these bosses so they're going to be challenging if you go at it alone or aren't with the right people." Welp, it sounds like I'll need some help then.

But luckily, unlike Raids, Infestations won't need to be completed in a group, you can just wait for anyone on the map to show up and help. Carl McKevitt, lead designer on Fallout 76 explains how it's an example of Fallout 76's "emergent social gameplay" and that because of this it "floats somewhere between end-game and casual friendly."

So Infestations is a high risk event, but that's ok, because it's also high reward; "It is one of the easiest ways to get a four star," McKevitt says. "Which is helpful because that's a hurdle that has been hard for players that are in the late but not quite end-game to cross. So we're hoping to see an improvement in players' arsenals as a result of this." Some of the new four star legendary mods you can get from this include: Hauler's, Raging, Satiated, Tarnished, and Vector.

"We have something that we're calling a 'common pool' for our four stars which is about half of what went out with the raids," McKevitt adds. "We're moving towards a system where things that drop four stars will at least pull from the common pool and then pull from an additional 'exclusive pool' to that content. We want to make sure that any new sources of four stars we introduce don't necessarily invalidate the previous sources.

"In this case you'll get the commons plus the newly created ones that came out of this update. We want to try and preserve Raids as where you get some of the top tier most highly desired four stars but getting any four stars is still better than having none."

In terms of other rewards, while there won't be any new Xbox achievements or trophies Khan does confirm that there are "rewards which are specifically geared towards finding and completing infestations both in quantity and type as well. And obviously that's just the initial rollout of those as well, we'll be adding more team based challenges and additional gameplay challenges."

But you'll be able to experience all of this for yourself today, so good luck and godspeed in finding and defeating these Infestations and let us know in the comments if getting four star legendaries is as easy as the devs say it is.

In a recent video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG developer Tim Cain shared his memories of the 1983 videogame industry crash. In particular, he emphasized that, although bad⁠—like, really bad⁠—he doesn't believe the current employment and studio closure crisis matches the impact of the infamous '80s collapse.

Cain got his caveats out of the way early, though: He cited a figure of 10% of game developers being affected by the current crisis, a tragedy for the medium in no uncertain terms. "It is bad," Cain declared. "It's bad. Quote me: 'It's bad.'" With that out of the way, Cain still asserted that "it's nothing like the 1983 crash."

"To me, the 1983 crash is still the biggest [games] industry crash that I've ever seen, ever experienced, and I think ever was," said Cain. "I don't think there's ever been a worse time in the games industry, especially in the United States⁠—it was very centered in the US."

Consoles and console games were tarnished in consumers' eyes, and Cain recalled that this was the first time he and many other gamers switched to the home computers of the time, such as the Atari 800, Apple II, and the grandaddy IBM PC. Consoles' reputation and sales began to recover in 1985, but the jobs were primarily growing in Japan for years after the crash, thanks to the market dominance of Nintendo.

Cain's first industry job involved games on cable set-top boxes, then PC, and he recalled being relatively insulated from the crash professionally. "My first PC game, Grand Slam Bridge, shipped in 1986, and the company folded soon after that," said Cain. After that, he entered grad school, programmed for Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) as a hobby, and didn't work in computer games again until 1991.

"Imagine everyone in the industry in the United States⁠—if you were making an Xbox game or a PlayStation game, or any kind of console game⁠—you were just laid off," Cain said of the '83 crash. "Boom. You don't work anymore. And you're trying to get what few PC game jobs are starting to grow."

By the time the PC market really kicked into high gear in the '90s, according to Cain, a lot of devs who lost jobs in the '83 crash were gone for good. "It was incredibly devastating. We lost an entire generation of game developers. The entire US videogame market collapsed," said Cain. "There were no jobs for console developers of any kind. It was just gone.

"Took about a decade … to even recover those jobs in the PC market, and even longer for the US-based console developer market to recover enough to even say that it was on par with what it was like in 1983."

In one sense, I find Cain's long perspective on the matter comforting: Games still got made, a lot of people still had jobs, and eventually things got bigger and better than they were before the crash. At the same time, I find the parallels to the current state of the industry disquieting:

• An overwhelming amount of games. Some shovelware like the '80s consoles, sure, but not really a quality issue writ large: Even great games struggle to find audiences in the 2020s.
• A general devaluing of games: Subscription services and constant sales leading to the (completely understandable) "I'll wait for it to go on sale" mindset.
• An uneven crisis, largely not felt by consumers. Like how '80s gamers just pivoted to PCs and Japanese games, the industry is global and diversified enough that the end user still gets great games⁠—until their favorite goes offline or ceases content updates.

For a contrasting take to Cain's from industry peers who also witnessed the '83 crash, John and Brenda Romero argued that the current crisis is "definitely crashier" than what they saw back then.

Modder RPGKing117 has had a busy month: He committed the blasphemy of putting Skyrim quest markers in Morrowind, achieved the triumph of cramming Morrowind into Fallout 4, and has no come back for one last job: Making Fallout 1 playable on Fallout 4's Pip-Boys and assorted vacuum tube, monochrome computer terminals.

This sequel mod does not yet have a public release, but will presumably be made available on RPGKing117's GitHub and Nexus pages like the Morrowind project before it. We do, however, already have a YouTube video of the mod in action for our viewing pleasure.

The Morrowind Mod used Fallout 4 Script Extender and the OpenMW source port to run both games at the same time, rendering Morrowind on the in-game screens of Fallout 4. Script Extender allows the player to launch Morrowind from within Fallout 4 and pass your control inputs through both games. A custom version of OpenMW streams its framebuffer⁠—the data sent from your GPU to your screen⁠—onto the in-game screens of Fallout 4.

As for how the Fallout 1 mod differs from the Morrowind one, we won't know the full story until RPGKing117 releases the full project on GitHub. There's a source port like OpenMW available for Fallout 1, Alex Batalov's Community Edition, and my assumption would be that this is what RPGKing117 used in his own project.

If you want to try this mod for yourself, keep an eye on RPGKing117's Nexus Mods or GitHub page for its release. I'm a huge sucker for game-within-a-game gags like this, and I'm always keen to see the farthest frontiers of absurdity people are willing to reach. Plus, much as I love the "Doom on anything" gag, it's nice to see people branch out into other classics.

Prolific Bethesda game speedrunner pekkanen has been on a quiet hot streak: Over the past two months, he has set nine world records in two categories of Fallout 4 speedrunning, first beating the competition before repeatedly lowering his own records.

The categories are Any% and Any% (No Intro), so anything goes, glitch-wise, while the latter category explicitly does not count time for Fallout 4's iconic, but slow-paced and largely on-rails pre-war playable intro. On March 4, he bested longtime runner tomatoanus' 33:51 Any% with a 33:44. Pekkanen then took the No Intro crown from tomatoanus 15 days later on March 19.

Since then, pekkanen has lowered his own Any% record five more times, and improved on the No Intro record twice. As a note, the Speedrun.com Fallout 4 leaderboards do not yet display pekkanen's most recent improvements on the record, only the first month or so worth of optimization.

• March 4: 33:44 Any%
• March 19: 25:36 No Intro
• March 26: 33:28 Any%
• March 31: 24:19 No Intro
• March 31: (god damn same day): 32:54 Any%
• April 11: 32:15 Any%
• April 25: 23:17 No Intro
• April 27: 31:32 Any%
• May 6: 31:18 Any%

As you might expect from a Bethesda game, pekkanen's speedruns are eminently watchable and entertaining⁠—except, of course, for the beginning of the normal, not No Intro Any%. I can see why they made a separate category for it: You just gotta stand there and wait for the scripted parts of the intro to play out. Though it is funny and relatable to hear pekkanen impatiently mash the "use" button waiting for something to happen.

After all that, though? Baby, we're off to the races: Sprinting across the Commonwealth, cooking mutant meat for uncertain ends, engaging in some kind of arcane save-load routine at crafting benches to unlock teleportation and turbo speed, all the stars are here.

As a frequent viewer but relative dilettante when it comes to speedruns, I live for some kind of bizarre sequence of inputs resulting in a burst of godly power or world-altering consequence⁠—that Super Mario 64 trick where you backwards jump into the stairs a few times before getting launched into the stratosphere is the platonic ideal of the form, to me. Pekkanen's Fallout 4 hot streak does not disappoint on this front.

Years ago, at the end of 2021, I reported on him beating his own Skyrim glitchless world record twice in the same week. Since that time, he's been active in a variety of categories for Bethesda's 2011 classic. Going by YouTube uploads, Fallout 4 is a more recent addition to his repertoire, but boy has he taken to it.

Days before committing the world historic sin of putting quest markers into The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, modder RPGKing117 already earned himself a pardon: He created a mod that lets you play The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind on the in-game Pip-Boy and computer terminals of Fallout 4.

RPGKing117 has a nice demonstration of the mod up on YouTube, showing it running on a stationary computer terminal rather than Fallout 4's iconic wrist-mounted menu system. It is, perhaps, not the optimal way to play Morrowind.

Forget the low resolution: That dark, monochrome screen is gonna be the real dealbreaker for a 100-hour playthrough. You'll also need a computer powerful enough to run both games at once⁠—not an absurd luxury these days, but this might not work on Steam Deck.

But who cares about that, nerd? A game within a game is one of the funniest bits you can pull in the medium, by my reckoning, and there is an undeniable anarchic joy to seeing the 2002 RPG rendered in this way. My favorite little touch: The in-game cassettes with Morrowind's box art that you can pick up and drag around, maybe decorate your house in Sanctuary with.

Under the hood, the mod is fairly simple to understand. "OpenMW runs in a hidden window locked to 876x700 which gets upscaled to 1024x1024 and streams its framebuffer directly into Fallout 4's Pip-Boy display in real time," RPGKing117 wrote on the project's GitHub page. "A custom F4SE plugin handles the holotape trigger, the shared-memory bridge, and input passthrough so keyboard controls reach Morrowind while you're in-game."

That relative simplicity doesn't mean it was easy to get running, though. "It took quite a lot of work, countless hours of beating my head against a wall but I am quite proud of the outcome, RPGKing117 wrote in the video description of the mod's demonstration on YouTube. "I hope anyone who tries this out, enjoys it."

I'm enjoying just looking at it. You'll need the Steam versions of Fallout 4 and Morrowind, plus the Fallout 4 Script Extender to run the mod. You don't have to grab the essential OpenMW source port yourself, though: The mod runs a custom fork of OpenMW included with RPGKing117's installer on GitHub.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, who is known for… well, co-creating Fallout, has been a font of videogame wisdom on his own personal YouTube channel for the past three years: That time is fast approaching its end, though, as Cain feels like he's coming to the end of both the stories he wanted to share when he began the endeavour.

"I do seem to be winding down on my list of topics," says Cain in his latest. "I wanted to point out, the channel is probably nearing the point where I see it being done. I think I've explained [to] you the game industry as much as I can, I've told all my stories, the fun ones and the not-so-fun ones, and you've heard it all."

Those stories include how he got hired at Interplay because of his mastery of THAC0, the ill-fated Interplay version of Fallout 3, and the company in-fighting that plagued Wildstar. But he's also shared plenty of his own personal developer wisdom: How to follow the adage 'less is more' and, most importantly, actually changing my opinion on RPG respecs a little.

The thing that raises my eyebrows, though, is the revelation that Tim Cain might be going in for one last hurrah before he retires properly: "I think I am gonna make one more game before I retire again for the second time, but who knows."

As for what that is? Probably not another Fallout game, or any other of Cain's classic RPGs, for that matter. Back in January, Cain described himself as being "over making other people really wealthy with my own creations". He also doesn't seem all that enthused about creating a whole new IP, either.

Chances are he'll keep doing what he's been doing since he came out of semi-retirement, lending a hand at Obsidian. Previously, Cain had been offering more limited aid to games like The Outer Worlds 2.

While I'm a little sad for the list of very good games his aversion to treading old ground crosses off the list—Cain's worked on not just Fallout, but also Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Pillars of Eternity (though if he's still at Obsidian, some Pillars-adjacent thing is still in the running). I'm sure whatever he lends his hand to next is bound to be just as solid.

In regards to his channel? "I think the chance of there being a 4th anniversary video is small." He doesn't write it off as a possibility, but there might be a day in which he passes the torch on to other developers-turned-YouTube sages before this time next year.

In a recent interview with YouTuber TKs-Mantis, former Obsidian creative director Chris Avellone revealed that the studio got in a spot of minor trouble over its depiction of the Rorschach Test in Fallout: New Vegas.

When you wake up in Doc Mitchell's house in Goodsprings, the second step in character creation is a Rorschach Test administered by the doctor, with your answers determining your recommended tag skills. It's a riff on the GOAT exam in Fallout 3, itself a tongue-in-cheek reference to the character creation quiz at the beginning of The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

I guess I just always assumed that the Rorschach Test, the psychological assessment where a person gives their free associations from viewing ink blots, was public domain at this point⁠—after all, its namesake and creator died 104 years ago in 1922. Bethesda and Obsidian apparently shared this misapprehension when they included it in New Vegas without giving Big Rorschach a slice of the pie.

Avellone mentioned the kerfuffle as part of a longer discussion of New Vegas' Wild Wasteland trait, which included fourth wall-breaking references. "We got in trouble for some of those things," said Avellone, "Because it wasn't passed along what some of the jokes were.

"We already got in trouble for the Rorschach Test, because we didn't get the trademark for that. Those folks came to Bethesda and said we're gonna have a fun lawsuit on our hands, so pony up! You could hear all the groans over at Bethesda. I don't think they realized they should have checked for trademarks⁠—we certainly didn't realize it."

This anecdote is how I learned that trademarks can be renewed indefinitely, rather than having a set lifetime like copyright, and a Swiss publisher has maintained its claim to the Rorschach Test for decades now.

It all has a similar twang to how the "Happy Birthday" song is still copyrighted⁠—though I much prefer the Metal Gear Solid 5 version anyway. However much Bethesda had to pony up, it was worth it: Doing a Rorschach Test to determine your character's skills is an all-time RPG bit.

It also led to "Two Bears High-Fiving," a gag that keeps on giving. An early New Vegas mod added this as a possible answer to, well, the ink blot that looks like two bears high-fiving. The original project has since been removed, but another version was created by author Nehred in 2023.

This mod was shouted out with a Wild Wasteland NPC in New Vegas' Honest Hearts DLC, and even turned up 15 years after New Vegas' launch in Avowed. "Two Bears High-Fiving" is an achievement you can get for summoning a bear to fight another bear.

In a recent interview with YouTuber TKs-Mantis, former Obsidian creative director Chris Avellone said that he dislikes how Fallout: New Vegas' Wild Wasteland trait was implemented, and thinks it should have been separate from character creation.

This came out of a discussion of the more zany sense of humor to be found in certain Fallout games, and how it may not be to all tastes. Interviewer TKs-Mantis expressed his appreciation of Wild Wasteland offering players a choice whether or not to engage with such content⁠, prompting Avellone to deliver his critique.

Wild Wasteland can be chosen as one of two traits at the start of New Vegas, character-defining abilities with positive and negative aspects. Wild Wasteland causes unique encounters to spawn in the game world, all of a more wacky or fourth wall-breaking character.

"It is one of those traits⁠—and Fallout 3 also had these traits⁠—where, if you choose it, you get more content," said Avellone. "You might be saying, 'Ok, well just choose it.' Well, the problem is, that's something that you're taking in character creation that's actually depriving other people of the full content.

"My preference would have been, it's an option in the interface … I think that would have worked better. That would have been more fair, rather than tying it into character creation."

Avellone said that he did not like the way Wild Wasteland overshadowed the other traits at character creation, and that, "from a system mechanics standpoint, you're actually telling players that, 'Hey, you're gonna want this choice, regardless of other options, because this gives you more content.'"

"That's biased," Avellone argued. "For me, I'm like, 'Well, I'm gonna choose that no matter what. Because I don't want to miss a damn thing.' I want as much of the experience as I can get. It's not even a question."

TKs-Mantis did bring up a strong counter-example, though: YCS/186, the unique version of New Vegas' Gauss Rifle. YCS/186 appears in an encounter that's overwritten by Wild Wasteland, its band of mercenaries replaced with an alien incursion. Their captain drops the series staple Alien Blaster, a weapon that's certainly fun, but not something you can hang a whole build on like YCS/186.

I disagree with that sentiment for the most part, even if I understand the critique. As I get older, I like more friction in my RPGs, consequences and sacrifices that maybe even impact me on a mechanical level. I really dig that Wild Wasteland means you don't get YCS/186, for example, or that you have to pass on a beneficial or build-altering trait to see these scenes.

I used to always hate that in 3rd Edition D&D, there's practically no mechanical reason to be any race but human⁠—their extra feat at level one is unmatched. But these days, when I choose to be a mechanically inferior Half-Orc in Neverwinter Nights anyway, the gameplay sacrifice makes me feel even more ownership over that choice.

It's something you lose in a game like Baldur's Gate 3, which understandably avoids such alienating anachronisms altogether. So which way, New Vegas replayer? The beastmode YCS/186, or simple joys like a Zybourne Clock reference and that really good gag with the cyberdogs playing poker in Old World Blues?

In a new video on his YouTube channel, Obsidian studio design director and Fallout: New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer described the company's largely vibes-based approach to which quests make it to its RPGs' signature "where are they now" ending slide shows. Along the way, he dove into the decisionmaking around a fairly minor New Vegas quest that got the treatment.

"When deciding what does or doesn't get an ending slide," asked a viewer named Lorena, "Is that up to the individual writer/designer working on the related questline, or is it more the creative director assigning what's important enough to get an ending slide?" According to Sawyer, "it's mostly arbitrary," with a given game's director making the call. In his experience, designers would hardly ever "lobby for their quest to be in ending slides."

"Usually, there's stuff we kind of take for granted and assume are going to go in," he explained. "For example: Major choices at the end of the game, faction alliances … companions usually have their own sets of endings.

"It's largely just based off of stuff that we think is gonna be interesting and entertaining to the player. It's not necessarily about how big or important the quest is."

On the subject of entertainment over importance, Sawyer turned to Flags of Our Foul-Ups, a New Vegas quest by former Obsidian designer Travis Stout (now at Massive Entertainment). "There's a bunch of NCR soldiers who suck," was Sawyer's topline summary. "They're just huge screw-ups, and they're in trouble because they're doing so bad."

In classic Obsidian fashion, you can pass any number of skill checks to help them out: Speech to convince them to put ego aside and work together, Science to falsify records and make them look better, combat skills to train them, etc. You can also just give them drugs⁠—the fictional combat stimulant, "Psycho," to be specific⁠—and the consequences of that particular choice are what really got the gears turning.

"I think it was that choice specifically that made us wonder: During the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, what would actually happen to these guys," recalled Sawyer. "It was the drug one where we were like, they'd probably become war criminals. They'd just go berserk and start killing all sorts of people that weren't even involved in the conflict. We decided, 'Let's do end slides for that.'"

"Driven into a frenzy by their use of Psycho, The Misfits inflicted heavy casualties on the Legion during the defense of Camp Golf," reads the Psycho ending for the quest. "At first they were commended for their valor, but eventually, desperate for more of the chem, they turned on travelers in Outer Vegas. For their dishonorable conduct, the NCR court-martialed and executed them by firing squad." Yeeesh.

Back to ending slides writ large, Sawyer reiterated that the team has to hit "the major beats" like main story, factions, and companions, with anything after being discretionary.

"There are time limits," he said. "We have to illustrate all the ending slides. We have to write them. We have to record them. While that might not seem like a lot of work individually, it kinda adds up, all the different permutations. For example, some companions will have [up to seven] different ending states."

One thing that really impressed me with our running RPG of the year, Esoteric Ebb, is how it handles failure and save scumming, the practice of abusing a game's save/load feature just to get your desired result at every turn⁠—we all do it, at least sometimes, and we all feel guilty about it.

Save scumming risks ruining the stakes of a story and making me feel invincible⁠—or at least like I'm bowling with bumpers⁠—but sometimes I'll just feel railroaded into having no other option in a dice rolling RPG like this. Other times, I'll get a one-in-a-million failure rolling a skill I've put a ton of points into, and that just feels terrible.

Esoteric Ebb does a genuinely good job of showing its players interesting, cool things when they fail⁠, scenes that I wanted to remain part of my story, and not erased via metagaming intervention. What's more, there's an in-game resource to reroll failed checks ("Shards of Jor"), and using it is much faster than trying to reload a save. I asked Esoteric Ebb's designer, Christoffer Bodegård, for his thoughts on this design problem when we spoke after Esoteric Ebb's launch.

Bodegård said that he thinks in terms of the player being able to "design their own experience." What if they're a "bad designer" who flees from consequence at every turn? "I usually go with, 'Just let them go wild,'" Bodegård told me, saying that, if they're having fun, it's not a problem. He's not there to be offended as your dungeon master, after all, and if a DM is dealing with a rowdy table who won't play by the rules, "maybe that's not the table's fault, necessarily."

So we're not passing any judgement on the lumpen scummer, but Bodegård still wants to offer a well-paced, well-structured experience, no matter how players might react to it. That's where clever design that makes it feel like it's OK to fail comes in. Bodegård cited two major early encounters as examples of how he approaches the design challenge.

In the second room of Esoteric Ebb, there's a mysterious character who presents as your benefactor, but clearly also has their own agenda. You can make a difficulty class (DC) 33 Wisdom check⁠—practically impossible⁠—to deduce their whole deal. If you fail, no sweat, you can retry it with a Shard of Jor, while your investigation and other story revelations will lower the DC.

Succeeding at the check leads to a major sidequest, but there are other ways to get on the trail, too. "It's a tutorial on how to play the game," said Bodegård. "Which is: Don't save scum, just let it happen, and you will be taken care of. I am your DM, trust me. I don't always succeed perfectly, but I do it enough that you should be able to trust me."

The other early game roadblock Bodegård dove into was accessing the magically sealed tea shop crime scene at the center of Esoteric Ebb's mystery. "You're not going to succeed the first time, that's OK," Bodegård said. "You're going to make it into the tea shop later. This [Strength check] is going to be lowered. You can find Knock, you can find Grease, and make the planks easier to rip apart.

"You're going to find a back way in. You can find the password from the Coinlord. You can convince him to give you the password without swearing an oath. You can have a low Intelligence and guess the password. It's a bunch of different stuff stolen from Fallout, obviously, like all good things."

Bodegård said that these considerations come together "to build an illusion of agency" within the confines of the story he's put together. "The player feels like they can actually do whatever they want," said Bodegård. "I try my best to not break that illusion."

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has a new video going over some of his principles for game design, and as you might expect has some strong opinions on the intersection between design intention, and what players actually end up doing.

"Rule one, our game is non-linear—don't assume that players will go somewhere first or talk to someone first," says Cain in a new YouTube video called Eight Level Design Guidelines. "I wanted to remind level designers that just because you put a guard outside the town, don't assume that everybody will stop and talk to that guard."

Cain clearly has a bee in his bonnet about guards specifically, and is soon freewheeling through examples of why the above is bad practice: "If you want to force that, you can put a gate in the town that doesn't open until you talk to the guard or, worse, force the guard to go into conversation with the player."

So in Cain's world, it's time for that guard to meet their maker. "I point out that if you're capable of shooting that guard from long distance and killing them, I'm gonna go into that town without talking to the guard. And you may think well, at that point, it's OK because everyone in the town will attack you."

But Cain's principle is basic: don't expect players to ever act in the way you expect. "In general, I just like to remind level designers, don't assume anything the player is going to do in a particular order. Your job is to provide a nice map for them to play on and not make such assumptions."

Cain has previously spoken about the ineffable sadness when he sees a design document that relies on something like locking players in a room until they've done a particular thing, and says this shows a misunderstanding of why someone's playing a game in the first place.

"If at this point you don't know what all of this is in service of, you're going to run into problems," says Cain. "You should know why. Why am I doing all this? Why did I make this setting and tell this story with these mechanics? Once you've listed your goals, everything should fall from that."

Cain also recently posted a video outlining his love of Dungeons & Dragons, and how that game has informed his own design principles. So whaddya know: we owe Fallout's existence to an admiral and his officers teaching him to play D&D in 1979.

Fallout: New Vegas writer and former Obsidian creative officer, Chris Avellone, has given a new interview to Fallout content creator TKs-Mantis, and it's a hefty one. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising assertion is that Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas (I've asked Bethesda about this, and haven't had a response yet), but there's plenty more: including one particular road not travelled for the series, alongside a healthy crank on the specul-a-tron about where Fallout might go next.

When being asked about the early stages of Fallout: New Vegas' production, the host mentions the potential of a setting like New Orleans. "Holy shit," says Avellone, "Yeah so one of the designers / producers on one of our other projects suggested New Orleans's location, and I was so stoked for that.

"It's going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise that was started by this author-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel. And a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic. There was one that was written in New Orleans, it was called Four Devils, One Hell."

I haven't read this, so I looked up a plot summary, and it involves a PI investigating the murder of a chef while four Grendels manifest their own visions of hell in New Orleans. One "is insane and believes himself to be a knight in the service of Charlemagne" and likes to fight vampires, one's trying to mess with the PI, one's an English curator on the hunt for some mysterious treasure, and the last is a gentlemanly gambler. I can kinda see where some of that might map onto Fallout's own brand of post-apocalypse.

"It's a fantastic story but as soon as I read it, which is while I was doing Fallout research ironically enough, I'm like, man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad," says Avellone. "'Cos the vibe was so cool. The flavor was cool. And like it's still Fallout, but in a different area that felt different. There's a lot of potential there. [It would've been] so sweet."

Elsewhere in the interview, another location pops up: though not in relation to New Vegas. Avellone offers up some thoughts about what the Fallout TV show has done well and not-so-well, before ending with "the show's laying all the groundwork for whatever I guess Fallout 5 is going to be as far as I understand it."

He's asked about the fact that Bethesda supposedly said 'don't do San Francisco' when pitching, and confirms with a simple "yeah." Bethesda also later asked for the removal of a line of dialogue in New Vegas that said San Francisco was nuked. Asked whether he thinks this means Fallout 5 is heading to San Francisco, Avellone says "it's quite possible."

Avellone left Obsidian in 2015, citing creative and business disputes with management. He has since written for several notable RPGs, including Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and is currently collaborating with Red Info, the studio founded by Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz, on a future title. As for New Vegas, the hopium continues to waft around a mooted remaster, the most recent rumours landing last month.

Fallout: New Vegas is one of those games that only seemed to rise in peoples' esteem as time's gone on—especially since it seems like a milestone marker for the last remnants of the series' more oldschool CRPG spirit before Fallout 4 saddled gamers with a voiced protagonist.

But it's a matter of public record that Obsidian wasn't brought on for further projects—which, according to writer on the game and prolific videogame narrative guy Chris Avellone, was something Bethesda really hammered home.

During a recent interview with YouTube channel TKs-Mantis, Avellone made what I can only describe as a series of faces as his interviewer praised the New Vegas DLC Dead Money, which is infamous for stripping you of every belonging you own to build a more survival horror-esque atmosphere.

"The reason I'm making these expressions and hesitations about it is because—despite what I thought would be cool as an examination of Fallout, it was so different from the core experience that it was obviously a huge turn-off for a lot of people."

And while TKs-Mantis tries to brush these concerns aside, Avellone insists that "when it comes to sales and reviews it matters—and also Bethesda used review scores against us for the DLCs for, like, why they didn't want to keep doing things with us anyway. Even though they didn't wanna keep doing things with us anyway. So whatever."

His subsequent comments ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as he left Obsidian on bad terms with upper management in 2015, then encountered further controversy when allegations of sexual misconduct saw him removed from Dying Light 2 in 2020 (those charges were later dropped in 2023)—basically, he's not got a lot of reason to mince or be careful with his words. Still, they're nonetheless wild. According to Avellone, Bethesda raked Obsidian over the coals with slides.

"It was fun, it was fun—they had a whole powerpoint. Not even about the DLC, they had a whole powerpoint about all the things Obsidian did wrong, and we were like 'wow!' and they showed it to us. And we were like… 'okay'. This is hugely morale-boosting."

He continues: "I thought we [made] a good product for you guys that kept Fallout in the public consciousness, but you guys don't seem very happy about it despite the fact you reaped a lot of the rewards for it."

As far as Dead Money goes, Avellone says that he thinks "the vision for [a] survival horror experience … Was a little too different from the core experience of Fallout that was kind of a turn-off to people." Which, hey, fair enough. I think it's probably true that weird, novel experiences tend to age better, removed from the expectations that come as a package deal with most DLC.

I'm a lifelong RPG reroller: I'm obsessed with restarting these things over and over until I'm sure that my first time hitting the credits will be perfect. My white whale for the past 15 years? Fallout: New Vegas, one of my very favorite games, which I finally completed for the first time after 323 hours and I don't know how many characters.

Part of my problem was New Vegas' myriad mechanical and story possibilities: Cowboy sniper, or unarmed ninja? Yes Man, or NCR? After a propulsive and semi-linear opening that takes you in an arc from Goodsprings through Novac, the game opens up in pure open world possibility.

The fact that you can't keep playing after finishing the main quest incentivized me to try and do everything before heading to Hoover Dam⁠. I'd always take a break to play something else before achieving that goal, and by the time I came back to it? New character, baby.

That midgame was one major filter for me, another was hesitation of a different kind at the start of a playthrough. I realized recently that I've literally never played New Vegas without some kind of mod: Even by the time I got it for Christmas 2010, the scene was already out in full force tweaking the game.

This time around, I went minimalist, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it was the first time I ever made it to the credits. Hear me out: If you're a lifer and it's been a long time since you've played the vanilla game, or you haven't beaten New Vegas at all, you should try taking it easy on the mods.

Hatsune Miku NSFW Companion NVSE Required

I love mods and I love modding⁠. I think mods should always be allowed, if not encouraged by studios. I never want Bethesda modders to stop being authentically themselves, no matter how many AI voice catgirl companions they inflict upon the world.

But I'm more in it for bug fixes and standalone experiences as I get older. Most of the explosively popular Bethesda modding communities are focused on experience tweaks⁠—visual, mechanical, sometimes story changes to the base game to make it better fit the mod author's (and potentially other players') desires. I never want to yuck anyone's yum, as the kids say, but this can get out of hand.

"Skyrim Transformed: 1,000 Mod List 4K Remaster 2026 RTX 5090," harangues some YouTube title under footage of a game that is simply no longer Skyrim, the analogue, no-AI predecessor to Nvidia's disastrous DLSS 5 showcase. "Oh yeah, New Vegas is the best game ever, but I could never play it without my 90GB modlist," your most annoying friend will assure you. "Just follow this 17-step guide and decide whether you want the 'vanilla++' or 'turbo overdrive' version." Enough.

New Vegas has tacticool weapons packs that John Wick would find a tad overwrought, and some real out-there sex stuff that would make the Marquis de Sade blush. At a certain point, it might be too much choice, and your experience can stray too far from the certifiable RPG classic at the heart of it.

It's no longer a discrete game, but an open-ended wish fulfillment platform, one whose definition and structure can liquefy in the face of so many 4K texture packs and combat overhauls. You may have seen this sentiment expressed before, maybe a meme about it, or even felt it yourself: "I spent three hours figuring out my Morrowind modlist, made a character, and never got out of Seyda Neen."

Creative restriction can be a beautiful thing, and I find I bring more to a game when it's demanded of me by that game. Being able to tweak and customize every minute detail of the experience risks adulterating it, like bowling with bumpers. The promise of fully bespoke AI games and TV shows that react to your every whim is the dark logical extreme of this drive.

Just a little a mod, as a treat

This isn't my moral screed against using these experience tweak mods at all⁠⁠—with the notable exception of all the tacticool ones and at least some of the sex ones. They will not be allowed into the Kingdom of Heaven. But it can be helpful to give yourself permission to play these games un-, or at least minimally-modded.

I'm sure the Viva New Vegas project is great, and I respect the work they do, but trying to figure out how to make its nested .exes and dependencies work on Steam Deck felt like doing my taxes. Instead, I just dug up the same bug and crash fixes I've been using since like, 2013:

• Anti-Crash
• Tick Fix
• Heap Replacer
• Yukichigai Unofficial Patch

I also allowed myself the indulgence of two experience tweaks: Ranger Helmets Neck Covers⁠—I mean come on, all the official art has those necks covered⁠—and Improved Ranger Coats, which makes New Vegas' signature outfit fall flat like an actual longcoat instead of billowing like a cotillion gown.

I found it very gratifying to have this (relatively) back-to-basics experience with New Vegas, and it paired well with my first time trying its "you have to eat and sleep now" Hardcore mode. It felt fitting to have my least-modded playthrough be one of my most memorable and successful.

Of course, I'm also a filthy hypocrite: I'm eyeing one major mod for my next playthrough, and I don't think anything can dissuade me. I'm talking about the JSawyer Mod, New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer's unofficial collection of mechanical tweaks to make the game much harder, particularly in Hardcore Mode. But hey, it feels like less of a mod if it's from one of the lead devs, right?

Fallout: New Vegas writer and former Obsidian creative officer, Chris Avellone, says don't get your hopes up for an Oblivion-style remaster of the game, and his reasoning is a bit of a doozy.

"I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow to make a remaster of New Vegas at all," says Avellone in an interview with TKs-Mantis (spotted by GR+). That's a pretty eyebrow-raising assertion, given that what the studio and Virtuos managed with Oblivion, but Avellone argues there's a unique roadblock with New Vegas: "the very last milestone" Bethesda gave Obsidian Entertainment was to "deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build" for $10,000.

"For reasons unknown to me, but I have suspicions, [Obsidian studio head] Feargus [Urquhart] decided not to cash out that milestone, and did not deliver it," says Avellone. "It's not a strange decision if you feel, which would not be out of the realms of possibility, that the New Vegas experience cheated him out of X amount of money.

"In which case cutting off the revenue stream for that product for a time would be a possibility. I could certainly see that. And I'm not saying Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas, they may have aspects of the code… but everyone that I talked to after that period of time said they had no idea how to reassemble it."

The idea that Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas seems absurd: I've reached out to Bethesda reps to ask whether there's anything to it.

"What that milestone really meant was if all those assets are given to Bethesda, that means they can recreate the game at any time," says Avellone. Things get a little thornier when you get to how Bethesda would actually approach such a project: the Oblivion remaster uses a fork of Unreal Engine 5 that somehow incorporates the original Gamebryo engine.

"One of the only ways they could do [a New Vegas remaster]" would involve a similar approach, with Avellone adding that the mooted Fallout 3 remake will be a good opportunity to "try out that process… just to see what all the all the problems and issues are as a result."

These days, both Bethesda and Obsidian are owned by Microsoft, though Avellone argues that just because the two companies have the same owner doesn't mean they're necessarily going to play nice.

Avellone himself left Obsidian in 2015, citing creative and business disputes with company management. He has since done contract writing on a number of notable RPGs, including Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Most recently, he has collaborated with Red Info, the studio founded by Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz, on an unannounced game.

The rumours around a Fallout 3 remaster have been swirling for years, and things like the success of Oblivion Remastered and the wildly popular Fallout TV series make it seem almost like an inevitability. Similar levels of hopium waft around a mooted New Vegas remaster, with the most recent only last month.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, RPG veteran and Fallout Designer Tim Cain talked about the first time he was ever exposed to Dungeons & Dragons, a pivotal influence on the developer: Some of his mother's coworkers showed him the ropes all the way back in the Carter administration. Oh, and they happened to be high-ranking US naval officers.

"If you started playing D&D on a computer, where there's no DM, the computer handles it all, … you don't have to learn how to run the rules," Cain said, contrasting his experience of learning D&D from first principles with how the game now informs so many assumptions about gaming and role playing.

Cain's mother worked at a Judge Advocate General (JAG) office, a division of the US military dedicated to legal affairs. "She came home one day and said, 'The boys at work are playing a game, we've been invited over this weekend to play,'" Cain recalled. The "boys," as Cain's mother put it, "were some captains, I think one admiral in the Navy," according to the developer. "We drove over on a Saturday and spent I think four to five hours at their house."

The seamen were playing sans-miniatures, something which surprised Cain at the time. "A good first two hours were just making a character," said Cain, who had played computer and board games before, but had never encountered anything like 1st Edition Advanced D&D's snarl of classes, rules, and contingencies.

Cain's first character? Unable to decide on just one class, he multiclassed right out of the gate with an elf Fighter/Cleric/Magic User⁠—a little bit of everything. "There wasn't really a limit to what kind of questions I could ask and what actions I could specify I was doing," said Cain. "Stuff was written on my character sheet, and I wanted to do it all.

"Everything that day was new. I wonder if you've had a day like this too, where you're sitting down, and you're playing this crazy game unlike anything you've ever played … The polyhedral dice were new, I'd never seen anything like that."

Cain said he was "absolutely enthralled" by the new game. "On the way home, I was super-excited. I was talking to my mom all about the game." While she eventually withdrew from the play session itself to trade chili recipes with one of the officers' wives, Cain's mother was supportive of his interest: "My mom just turned to me and said, 'Do you want to stop at the game store on the way home and see what they have?'"

The rest, as they say, was history. Cain got the AD&D Monster Manual and a boxed set⁠—presumably the 1977 version of the Basic Set, given the timing? He and his friends would voraciously play D&D in the coming years. In addition to eventually leading development on one of the great D&D games, The Temple of Elemental Evil, Cain has said that his deep understanding of 2E AD&D's THAC0 system helped secure his job at Interplay.

While it's certainly possible that Cain could have discovered the game somewhere else, it sounds like that fateful afternoon and the tutelage of the DM, who Cain called "Captain Dave," were the perfect introduction to tabletop roleplaying. So I feel pretty good saying a hearty "thank you" to Captain Dave for Fallout, Arcanum, and all the other games Cain has worked on or influenced⁠—there are a lot of them.

Some mods are utterly transformative: Tweaks to the baseline experience that feel like they were always there, or standalone campaigns worthy of their own retail release. I'm not talking about either of those today. I'm talking about Fallout: New Vegas for the PS3.

Last October, Nexus user Pope74220⁠—presumably not the actual Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ⁠—uploaded the original Fallout 3 mod: A perfect Gamebryo engine facsimile of New Vegas' "Greatest Hits" Ultimate Edition box for Sony's PlayStation 3. That's the one that came a year or so after launch with all the DLC, plus a nifty red plastic Blu-ray band. It appears to be an unarmed weapon you can punch people with, and I love how detailed the model is—it's even got the blurb on the back and all the info boxes below.

In January, modder Zhang Yue Zhi brought things full circle, porting Fallout: New Vegas for the PS3 into Fallout: New Vegas for the PC⁠—it even has an added chance of insta-killing any character you hit with it, but only if you're rocking the beloved Wild Wasteland perk. Ivan Perdona on YouTube has a nice video of the New Vegas version in action.

Before reading up, I'd assumed this was a project to bring the overall experience closer to that of New Vegas' PS3 port: 20-30fps, 720p, probably even more crashes than the other versions somehow. Like many cross-platform games of the seventh console generation, New Vegas' PS3 port was worse in every way than its Xbox 360 version. I think that's part of the appeal here, at the risk of over-explaining the joke: The PS3 deluxe re-release has a certain pathetic je ne sais quoi to it

It's also how my fiancee first experienced New Vegas, and she still loved it, which speaks to the brilliance of Obsidian's design⁠—not even the Cell Processor could diminish that greatness. If you would like Fallout: New Vegas for the PS3, it appears to go for $15 to $60 on eBay, depending on the version and its condition. You can also download the mod for the game of your choice from the New Vegas or Fallout 3 Nexus.

You might have read—on some website called PC Gamer dot com—that Fallout 4 megamod Fallout: London (FOLON) is a genuinely impressive modding achievement, cramming a "DLC-sized" Brit-Fallout expansion into Bethesda's 2015 RPG. It's also the biggest singleplayer Fallout release we've had in over a decade.

But there were moments during development that project lead Dean "Prilladog" Carter and his team worried FOLON might not make it out the door. In a chat in the latest Edge magazine, Carter recalled "moments of uncertainty" during FOLON's five-year development when the devs worried that Bethesda might not be all that happy with a humungo-mod like theirs using the Fallout setting and branding.

Luckily, those fears proved unfounded, and Carter gives "props to [Bethesda]" for being chill about FOLON. Then again, perhaps the company is just happy to have the Fallout name continuing to gin up hype—Carter notes that "I do feel that the publishers increasingly rely on user-generated content, because it keeps their games alive for longer."

It's not like Bethesda had a singleplayer Fallout of its own on the horizon that FOLON could suck up oxygen from—maybe it's useful that something is out there keeping people excited about the series, even if it's not from Bethesda.

I reckon that's part of the thinking going on at the studio, though by means all of it. After all, Bethesda was famously chummy with the devs of Skyblivion—the mod remaking Oblivion in the Skyrim engine—around the time of Oblivion Remastered's release, and those two projects are more-or-less direct competitors.

"Over the years we have had lots of contact with Bethesda," said Skyblivion lead K Rebel, in the same issue of Edge. "I was even invited to their office last year, and we are on good terms." I reckon Todd Howard's just as eager to see how the mod team fixes Oblivion's dungeons as the rest of us are.

I don't necessarily want someone to come into my house and immediately know that so much of my spare time is spent sitting in front of a screen—there, I said it. So many video game posters and prints you can get are so garish and obvious, sometimes you just need something a bit more subtle. Especially when making your house as aesthetically pleasing as possible is more popular than ever.

Holly Sweet Illustration has answered my prayers, creating a museum-esque series of wildlife identification prints inspired by video games. Instead of stripping sprites, flowers, and foragables from the games themselves, each piece of the natural (virtual) world has been redesigned in watercolours to replicate a vintage style to make it look like something straight out of the Natural History Museum—and I'm utterly obsessed.

These prints span all sorts of games too. Whether you're an avid player of The Sims and want your decor to pay homage to your beloved Cow Plant, or if you want to stop and smell the Nirnroot in Skyrim, or even take a break from trudging through the Wasteland in Fallout, Holly Sweet has you covered. Yes, I'm amazed at the variety of games on offer, but I'm more impressed with just how many plants I've missed in the vast majority of these games now they're in front of me.

However, one of my favourite pieces from Holly Sweet has to be the Flowers and Fungi of Red Dead Redemption. I swear, I spent more time riding around on horseback tracking down all the wildlife I possibly could so Arthur could sketch them in his journal than I did doing the normal gunslinging activities expected from a cowboy. I mean, when you make a world so big and full of life, who isn't going to make the most of it? Someone who's keen to finish the story, probably, but the foraging quests are some of my fondest memories of my time around Valentine.

I find the Flowers of Fungi of Minecraft print impressive too, because everything looks so familiar yet lacks the blocky appearance we're used to seeing with Minecraft's wildlife. I know that the majority of plants in-game are based off their real-life counterparts, so at least there are plenty of reference images for those. But still, it's such a subtle piece of Minecraft art, anyone who hasn't spent hours in the Overworld wouldn't immediately make the connection when they see it, it's such a case of "if you know, you know" which I love.

The same goes for the Flowers and Fungi of Stardew Valley, though I think this could probably be a print series within itself given how many crops and creatures the game is home to. You've got your realistic plants like daffodils, sweet peas, and sunflowers, but you've also got Stardew's own, like the fairy rose and magma cap mushroom. You probably wouldn't even realise this until you read the information at the bottom of the print listing all the plants.

It's not just flowers and fungi either. Holly Sweet has branched out to create entomology prints for video game critters like the Butterflies of Animal Crossing and the Spiders of Pokémon, which I would love to see more of, but can only imagine how much time goes into making the unrealistic bugs in games like Pokémon look like something you'd find lingering in the corners of your house. It's probably best I don't spend any amount of time brainstorming, given how just typing about spiders gives me the heebie jeebies—but the prints are there, so I don't have to!

Fallout season two recently ended and, as one of Amazon's biggest hits, you can bet it won't be too long before we're all enjoying season three. We already noticed player numbers double as a knock-on effect from season two's premiere, but the show has had an even bigger impact on the games than we first realized.

The data comes from key reseller G2A.com (first reported by MCV UK) and focuses on Fallout's PC sales across the two years of the show running. Get ready for some jargon:

• Permanent Growth: While Season 1 (April 2024) triggered a massive acquisition spike, sales throughout 2025 stabilised at a baseline significantly higher than the pre-series era.
• The Anticipation Surge: Sales volume in the month immediately preceding the Season 2 premiere was 78% higher than the average monthly volume of the previous quarter. This demonstrates that the ‘Halo Effect’ now begins weeks before a show actually airs.
• Sustainable Growth: Even during the gaps between seasons, the ongoing interest remained multiple times higher than the early 2024 baseline, proving that the show successfully onboarded a permanent new audience.

There are obviously some caveats here, primarily that G2A is only one digital outlet, and far from the biggest (it's also been the target of harsh criticism from game publishers in the past). But here it does seem to be reflecting a wider trend: looking at the SteamDB entries for both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 shows an enormous spike in players over April and May 2024 (the show premiered on April 10, 2024). In both cases the player counts shot up by roughly ten times, with Fallout 4 at one point averaging just under 200,000 daily players.

I mean, those are not bad numbers for a singleplayer game released in 2015. G2A further says that Bethesda's habit of issuing "complete" editions of its games pays off, with over 60% of purchases on its platform being for the "game of the year" editions that include additional DLC. "New fans clearly preferred paying for the full lore experience over the base games," notes G2A.

It even says that the show's focus has an impact, noting that the Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition saw a "relative market share increase of 12.5%" during the launch window for season two. Season two of the show, of course, is set in New Vegas.

And yes, even the classics have benefitted. Obviously their playercounts were never going to rival the more recent Bethesda games, but Black Isle's original Fallout games saw exactly the same kind of spike at around the same times. Even Fallout Tactics saw a boost, which is quite something.

G2A's data incorporates every entry in the series apart from Tactics: all editions of Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, Fallout 2, and Fallout Classic Collection. Yeah it is all a bit Captain Obvious. But what this should really drive home is that Bethesda needs to pull its finger out, and give us a new post-apocalypse to play around in.

I admit it, when I think of Fallout 3, the immersive sims of yore are not the comparisons I leap to instinctively. But having checked out a recent RPS chat with FO3 lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, you know what? I see it. I see the vision.

"We let you play as any type of character you want, and there are all these systems. And so, if you want to shoot your way through or sneak your way through, we have to support all of it," said Pagliarulo, who also worked on Thief 2 and 3. "Trying to do that… it was not like back in the day of Thief 1, where they put in the fire arrows because they wanted to appeal to Doom and Quake players who wanted a rocket launcher."

Pagliarulo wanted to go further with FO3. "We had done Oblivion, but I knew that we could take it even further in Fallout 3," he said. That meant things like a better stealth system (though still a profoundly exploitable one, if my memory serves) and mechanics like Fallout's crippled limbs system—almost directly ported over from Deus Ex's. Pagliarulo wanted "As much immersive sim as was humanly possible, that I could bring in, was really what I wanted to do… I love the original Deus Ex. It’s a huge influence on me."

Who among us doesn't remember misusing a LAM mine in DX and having to drag our stumps over to a medkit on the other side of the map? Who among us did not, at some point, also blast our legs off in FO3?

"You see this with a lot of people who worked at Looking Glass, or Ion Storm Austin," said Pagliarulo. "Those are folks who went on to work for Arkane on Dishonored, so that DNA has definitely spread throughout our organisation. But yeah, I really wanted to bring that to Fallout 3 as much as I could."

It's an interesting take and one that—as RPS notes—Pagliarulo has chatted about before. Though I don't think I'd call FO3 an imsim, not quite, I do get where he's coming from, and I've probably not given the game enough credit for what it attempted to do (and what New Vegas went on to do later).

Fallout fans eagerly anticipating a New Vegas remaster got a big ol' snort of the good stuff over the weekend in the form of a social media post from Iron Galaxy Studios, which shared—in a very subtle, nothing-to-see-here style—some idle (or perhaps not) musing about what it's getting up to.

"Today’s our February company meeting," the studio wrote (via GamesRadar). "It’s time to catch up with what the company’s been up to and what’s coming up next for IG."

Today’s our February company meeting. It’s time to catch up with what the company’s been up to and what’s coming up next for IG.

— @irongalaxystudios.com (@irongalaxystudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-03-04T02:55:04.753Z

Not the most rip-roaring bit of prose ever posted, but what caught eyes wasn't the words, but the image: That's not just some generic "please stand by," my friends, but a Fallout: New Vegas loading screen.

Now, does that mean, unequivocally, that Iron Galaxy is working on a New Vegas do-over? Of course not. It's possible that whoever took the pic just happens to have that image as their desktop wallpaper. The fact that it's slide 1 of 72, as seen in the right-hand monitor? Possibly a mere 'wait for everyone else to join the meeting' message, selected entirely at random and with no greater meaning or intent. Hey, it happens.

Still, it behooves me to point out that this might not be entirely coincidental, too. Iron Galaxy's best-known recent work is probably Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4, but it's also worked on numerous game ports over the years including Fallout 76 and the VR versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4. So if someone was working on a New Vegas remaster, it's not entirely unreasonable to think that Iron Galaxy would be it.

And yes, just in case you haven't been keeping up, there is much interest in a remastered New Vegas—and as Bethesda learned with last year's Oblivion remaster, there's probably some bucks to be made on it, too.

There have been a couple false starts in the past, including a Steam glitch and an ill-advised Fallout TV show countdown, and fellow PC Gamer guy Shaun Prescott told me that it'd be weird if Bethesda went ahead with a New Vegas remaster without doing Fallout 3 first—and yeah, fair enough, but maybe Todd Howard just really wants people to stop bugging him about it. Still, this sure feels like something, doesn't it? It's a little premature for full-on rejoicing but even I, an inveterate hater, have to admit that it sure looks like New Vegas fans are in for some very good news, hopefully very soon.

The signature of Fallout 76's latest free update, The Backwoods, is obviously the addition of everyone's favourite elusive cryptid, Bigfoot. But the patch also brings some much-needed changes to events and activities. For starters, you can actually tell their icons apart now.

"One of the first things you guys will notice is that we've differentiated between public events and activities in Update 66, and one of the ways you can tell that right now is with an icon," senior systems designer Kevin Wienecke says in a presentation.

"Activities are made for one to five people or so, and they pop off every 10 minutes. There are up to three that can happen at any one time. But then we also have public events, they're meant for more people, with lots of players in mind. They're balanced appropriately, and they have more rewards."

Players can earn more rewards if they stay until the end of an activity, which is when an uninvited guest could pop up. It could be a three-star legendary boss or even Bigfoot, who is a four-star with an exclusive drop. But even if you don't want to stick around for this after-match fight, you'll still get more out of the activity now as XP is rewarded according to your player level. "So the higher level you are, the more XP you get," Wienecke explains.

Around 50 events and activities have been adjusted in this latest update. "We tried to concentrate on the broad strokes, lots of changes without disrupting the events that everybody likes," Wienecke adds.

Other than an XP boost for higher levels, uninvited guests, and new icons, some activities and events have been shortened, so they don't feel like a drag. "We've tightened up the timers a little bit," Wienecke says. "That's a good example of the changes that we've made, wherever we felt that it was kind of dragging on a little bit, we tried to tighten up the timers."

Besides activities and events, there are also new performance improvements to the Pip-Boy: "It may not sound like a big deal, but it is, "creative director Jon Rush says. "Once you get in and start messing with it, you'll definitely feel the difference."

Fallout 76's next update is nearly upon us, or upon us for those in the public test servers. Update 66, The Backwoods, brings a huge amount of tweaks and changes to events as it delves into the barren Ash Heap, bringing with it a new signature feature: the uninvited guest.

"So we see here a creature from the forest draws near," Kevin Wienecke, senior systems designer, says during a developer demonstration. "What could it be? Oh, my goodness, a four-star, legendary Bigfoot.

"This is one of the new cryptids that we've introduced in this patch, and it's the first time a four-star enemy has been seen outside of the raid. And as such, he is balanced appropriately. He's got a big club, and he throws exploding ticks at you, what else would you expect?"

There's now a chance for an extra boss to appear at the end of an event. It doesn't necessarily have to be Bigfoot, but he is the best option, as all the other uninvited guests are just three-star bosses, so they won't drop as good loot.

"He has a reduced set, so it's not the full set that you would see in Gleaming Depths," Wienecke says. "But Bigfoot does have an exclusive [four-star] drop that no one else has. That's a bit of a rare drop for him, but it's called the Thrill Seekers mod, and it's a good one as well. So hunters are going to really want to be on the lookout for when Bigfoot spawns."

But if you want the four-star drops, you'll have to make quick work of Bigfoot, because as generations of cryptid hunters will tell you, he's an elusive catch. "I'll also mention that while fighting Bigfoot, he has a limited time when you fight him," Wienecke explains. "So it's a bit of a DPS race to see if you can kill him before he disappears. You're going to want to do as much damage as you can, as quickly as you can."

"Eventually, he heeds the call of the forest, returns to his arbour palace," creative director Jon Rush adds.

You'll have five minutes to kill Bigfoot, not an impossible task, but surely a stressful one. But this isn't the case for the other uninvited guests, who are just three-star bosses. "They're significantly weaker, so you can kill them without much of a problem," Wienecke says. "They're still a problem. They're a fun little surprise. One of them is actually pretty tough, but they don't have a time limit."

Honestly, the most surprising thing about this update is that it's taken so long for Bigfoot to be added. A staple of cryptid North America, I'm sure he's been wandering around Appalachia, wondering what all the hubbub is about with all these new ghouls emerging from the Hillside Cavern and scorched beasts roaming the skies.

"We wanted it to be like a spontaneous thing," said Wienecke. "It just shows up. You're like, 'Oh, my God, what the heck is that thing?'" But not everyone will be excited to see Bigfoot. I know I'll be a little cautious if I encounter him after an event with my scrawny level 55 ghoul.

Worry not, just because Bigfoot is there doesn't mean he's keen for a fight. "The party crashers only have a chance to spawn once the event concludes," Rush says. "So if you're a lower-level player, and you finish the event, and then Bigfoot's running at you, you don't have to stick around. It's an added bonus."

Bethesda worthies have recently been on the interview circuit, reminiscing about all the good times when the studio was making Fallout games (note: it has been 11 years since a singleplayer Fallout game, and eight since the release of Fallout 76). Game Informer's excellent oral history of Fallout is one of the best, not least because we get to hear design lead Emil Pagliarulo recall that time he thought having an entire subway system under DC would be cool… until he realised endless underground tunnels were dull as hell.

One of the most interesting topics is the setting, with many at Bethesda delighted to work on a destroyed Washington DC because lots of them lived there. "It's cool to work in an area that you're deeply familiar with, because then you can include things that [other] people may not be familiar with, unless they live here," lead artist Istvan Pely told PCG recently.

Washington DC isn't exactly short of landmarks, but this in itself forced the team into some choices about what parts they would actually build. Behind the scenes, much of Fallout 3's wasteland was being constructed using modular assets but, obviously, that's not suitable for an iconic building that most players will already have an idea of.

"Our team was small and a lot of architecture was built out of kits," says Pely. "You know, we had modular buildings and we could flesh out the world with office buildings and suburban buildings and stuff like that. But when it came to the iconic—like the Jefferson Memorial, the Capitol, and all that—those were unique pieces of art that would take an artist a while to make."

For studio head Todd Howard, what mattered was the setting having that basis in reality that allows the player to "reach and touch the world." Then the player "probably wants to go to a few places and see what they look like, but you still don’t know this world. If [the setting is] something that’s completely unknown, like, you don't know what you’re going to find at all, you have no pre-thought of that area, I don't think it works as well for a Fallout game, as opposed to, 'Oh, I can’t wait to see what this landmark looks like, or this landmark looks like!'"

All of which led to an amusing decision around the White House, which has a good shout of being the single most iconic landmark in America's capital.

"There was no gameplay around the White House," says Pely. "Level design never said, 'Hey, we want to do this here,' so it was easy to overlook; usually if the designers don't request some assets to build out the [design], it doesn't get made. And then we're like, we can't ignore [the White House], so it was, like, 'Put a crater there. People will buy it.'

"Of course," laughs Pely, "it is our version of [Indiana Jones] shooting the guy rather than pulling out his whip and going into a fight."

I must confess, I always thought this was an awesome bit of world-building in Fallout 3 rather than a bit of a clever dodge. After all, the whole idea is that the world as we knew it got embroiled in a nuclear war that wiped out most of humanity: it just made sense to me that the White House was no longer standing, same way as I probably wouldn't expect to see the Kremlin survive.

There's plenty more across these various interviews, and in terms of how the sausage gets made I particularly enjoyed Todd Howard's recollection that the big inspiration for VATS was Burnout 2's Crash mode. And the fact that Bethesda thought people would enjoy the game ending in a full stop: "They hated it!"

We've recently had a bonanza of Bethesda interviews to mark… well, it feels like they were all done to mark the end of Fallout season two, which is a bit odd. But nevertheless, among them is Game Informer's excellent oral history of Fallout, in which the great and good from the studio reminisce about bringing the now-seminal series into 3D.

One of the biggest decisions was where the game would be set, with Bethesda's art team eventually stoked to go with Washington DC: mainly because lots of them lived there. "It's cool to work in an area that you're deeply familiar with, because then you can include things that [other] people may not be familiar with, unless they live here," lead artist Istvan Pely told PCG recently. "Like the DC metro and all the underground tunnels: You don't know they look like that, but those were pretty true to the actual ones in DC."

True, but maybe not that true. The idea of doing the DC metro system was attractive, but the only game lead designer Emil Pagliarulo had seen attempt DC "was an expansion for Duke Nukem." That meant there were plenty of opportunities "to really push on the Americana aspect of Fallout" with the likes of the Capitol or the Lincoln Memorial, but endless tunnels is a different matter.

"Originally, we had this thought that the Metro would be connected completely underground," says Pagliarulo. "And we realized it was just too sprawling. It was too big. We had to cut down sections, and it’s a lesson we’ve learned over the years: that being realistic sometimes isn’t fun. Because realism can be fun depending on the type of game you’re making, but traversing miles of underground subway stations turns out… very realistic, not very fun."

Fans of the Metro series may well disagree, but building a game based entirely around a metro system is an entirely different prospect to that metro system being an annexe to an open world (and it says a lot that, outside of the original game, Metro itself chafes at the limitation).

"Our team was small and a lot of architecture was built out of kits," says Pely. "You know, we had modular buildings and we could flesh out the world with office buildings and suburban buildings and stuff like that. But when it came to the iconic—like the Jefferson Memorial, the Capitol, and all that. Those were unique pieces of art that would take an artist a while to make."

I think we can all imagine what a huge Bethesda metro system underneath Fallout 3's wasteland would have been like and… yeah, they probably made the right call here. Not least because all the trains would have been running on the arms of NPCs.

Fallout, so the large box that PC games used to come in when life was good tells me, is a post-nuclear roleplaying game. It's also, it turns out, a post-nuclear tabletop roleplaying game, a fact I think I've never really consciously registered until now.

But it's fixed in my mind now, because Humble is selling a truckload of Fallout tabletop stuff for the low, low price of 'variable, but not a lot'. It contains 61 items, though nearly half of those are print-at-home 3D-printer designs and a few more are things like game cards and other assorted sheets. Still, there are a whole bunch of game book PDFs in there.

What kind of game books, you ask? Timely question! Why, you can pick up things like the core rulebook for Fallout: The Roleplaying Game (not to be confused with Fallout, the roleplaying game, the videogame), without which much of the other stuff would be rather vestigial.

There's also the starter set, rules and add-ons for Wasteland Warfare (that'd be the Fallout wargaming branch), campaigns, GM screens and booklets, and NPC packs that will let you easily chuck in familiar faces like the Fallout TV show cast, or some Enclave bods. The full 61-item kit and kaboodle will set you back $25 (£18).

$15 (£11) will shave off a few of the 3D-printing packs, plus some NPC packs and other paraphernalia and net you 39 items. Meanwhile, $5 (£4) will get you eight items, most notably the core rulebook.

A small (and I mean quite small—spending £18.39 for the full lot carves off £0.92 for charity) portion of your spend will go to the American Civil Liberties Union, which regularly throws down with the government and corporations to protect people's rights. Which seems, ah, quite important right now.

Tim Cain is back with another YouTube video and that means two things. The first: my career, such as it is, can continue for at least another day. The second: it's time for some delicious original Fallout reflections.

Today's video was a discussion on tone in games, and the responsibility that game directors have to keep their settings coherent. Sometimes, that means shooting down ideas that aren't bad, maybe they're good, but that just don't work with the tone a particular game is going for. By way of example, he offers up the time he shot down the notion of Terminator-esque murderbots in Fallout.

Cain's mentioned this briefly before—notably in an earlier video on Fallout's biggest influences—but he puts it in a bit more context here. "In Fallout… making the original game, somebody wanted a Terminator-style robot. You know, an endoskeleton and chonk chonk chonk. And I'm like: 'That does not belong in here. We're a '50s imagining of the future! Go look at Mr Handy. Mr Handy and Terminator robot do not belong in the same universe! At least, not the tone of our universe.'"

I defy anyone to hear Cain say that and not think immediately of Fallout 4, whose plot revolved around the personhood and potential liberation of an underclass of androids. I like Fallout 4 fine—better than Fallout 3, even—but its main quest always felt out of step with the setting as a whole: more Blade Runner than '50s sci-fi.

So I reckon Cain was bang-on back during FO1's development. Something else he's bang-on about: talking raccoons. "I cut the raccoons, the talking raccoon race, because I didn't feel like it met the game's tone. It wasn't a bad idea, it just didn't meet the game's tone."

I can put the dots together, Tim, don't you worry. Fallout 5 confirmed: this one's about some sort of raccoon slave revolt.

The thing that makes Fallout New Vegas endlessly replayable is being able to choose who to side with out of its various factions. You want to work for the NCR? You want to help the Followers of the Apocalypse? You want to collect scalps for Caesar? That's on you.

Looking back at Fallout 3 for Game Informer's oral history, designer Emil Pagliarulo pointed out that in Bethesda's first Fallout, "There are no factions. You can't join the factions, right? You join the Brotherhood of Steel, but that's the main quest. I remember at one point, our lead animator at the time, Hugh Riley, he made a comment in a meeting that said, 'We have the opposite of feature creep. We have feature seep,' meaning that we were cutting things. We were really smart about cutting things, because we knew that we couldn't do it."

Knowing they were heading into Skyrim development shortly after Fallout 3, and that it would be a good long time before they could make another Fallout, Bethesda turned to Obsidian to help fill the gap. As game director Todd Howard said, "We went to [Obsidian Entertainment] and said, 'Hey, would you like to do something?' And all we gave them was, like, 'We want you to do something and use factions.' We didn't do a lot of faction gameplay [in Fallout 3]."

Given a directive to make something Bethesda couldn't do central to their game, Obsidian knocked it out of the park. While the big choice in New Vegas is whether you side with the NCR, Caesar's Legion, Mr. House, or go fully independent, along the way you're making a load of smaller choices about who to side with, and who to sidequest for.

You meet the Boomers as part of the main storyline, but whether you hang around and help them with their giant ant problem and array of busted solar panels is up to you. Same goes for the Kings and the Great Khans and the Three Families and everyone else. Every town has its own measure of your reputation. By the end of the game, the Mojave is a map of people who are thriving or rotting—all because of you.

The funny thing about Arc Raiders is how friendly it is. Trios mode is fairly reliably violent, and you'll occasionally get popped by people like Fraser, but in solos mode most players are, unexpectedly, quite cooperative. It's a little weird, given the nature of videogames, and developer Embark Studios was perhaps a little surprised by it, in a good way: Art director Robert Sammelin said in December that "we were certainly hoping that we would see cooperation happen, but I think to the extent that it happens at launch, and seeing how people treat each other socially is heartwarming, it is really uplifting to see."

Embark isn't the only studio whose players have done something unpredictable with the world they're given. In an interview with The Game Business, Fallout 76 creative director Jon Rush said Bethesda was surprised that players turned out to be a lot friendlier than developers assumed they'd be.

"Before we released the game, we were like… it’s post-apocalyptic, it’s Fallout, they’re going to all want to kill one another," Rush said. "It’s the complete opposite. The complete opposite. It’s been great to see that. I’ve never experienced a community as great as the Bethesda Game Studios community."

That friendliness came to the fore recently in response to the influx of new Fallout 76 players, drawn to the game by Amazon's hit TV series. Instead of preying on fresh meat as you'd expect hardened post-nuclear survivors to do, wasteland veterans stepped up to help the newbies get off to a good start.

"We’re always making small adjustments to the game here and there that make it a bit easier for new players to hop in, or make it easier for players that are coming back after a little while," Rush said.

"But honestly, I’d say a lot of the onboarding was done by our wonderful community who recognized all of these fresh vault dwellers emerging from Vault 76, and set up camps outside … giving them free stuff and showing them things, 'look at what I built.' So it was very much a concerted effort between us and our community, welcoming this influx of brand-new players and returning players."

I compare that to my many-years-ago 'onboarding' in a different multiplayer survival game, Rust, which consisted of being held at gunpoint along with another guy by three heavily armed players who ordered us to strip naked and drop all our stuff, none of which they had any use for, after which they took it all anyway and then shot the other guy because he was lipping off too much. And hey, it was kind of fun in its own perverse way, but honestly? I'll take a friendly community any day.

Fallout season 2 is wrapped up and, no, we didn't get a surprise remaster dropping at the end. Instead, senior Bethesda types have been giving a bunch of retrospective interviews about the series, the latest of which is a mega-feature from GameInformer that dives into the creation of Fallout 3 and where the series went from there.

One thing I confess I'd forgotten about the game is the fact that, at launch, you could roll credits on it and then… the game would just end. I do remember being conscious of it at the time, and knowing not to start the final mission ("Take it Back", a blowout spectacle with the Liberty Prime robot that ends with the player making certain permanent, life-altering decisions), and then all of a sudden Bethesda announcing that the game's first expansion would 'fix' the issue.

Turns out that Bethesda was caught completely off-guard by the reaction to the game ending properly, rather than allowing you to continue to roam the Wasteland. Which to be fair to them is probably because… well, Fallout and Fallout 2 both ended when you completed the main quest.

"The one thing that we did, we ended up changing in Fallout 3, we were like, 'Well, like the other Fallouts, it has to end,'" recalls Todd Howard. "You know, 'We’re having this type of character system, these other perks are going to work, and then when you finish it, it’s going to end. You’re going to get this video and then the game ends.' And we thought, 'This is Fallout! It’s great!'"

Reader: it was not great.

"People hated it! They expected, like, 'Why would the game end?! The [Elder Scrolls] don’t end!'," says Howard. "And so we were like, 'Well, that was our commitment to that.' And we were sitting around talking about it as we got into DLC, we’re like, 'What if it didn’t end? How would we do that?'"

Bethesda's solution would arrive roughly six months after launch with the game's first expansion, Broken Steel. The studio went for that good old narrative classic whereby, as long as you activate the purifier, the player character will wake up two weeks later rather than dying, having been found unconscious. What can you say: It just works.

"We kind of went back to the drawing board and figured out a way, as gracefully as we could," says Howard, before adding with some commendable honesty: "I’ll give us an average grade on that, to make the story continue."

Narrative fudge it may have been but it was undoubtedly the right decision. Even if ending the game when the credits roll would've been faithful to the Black Isle originals, something about everything just stopping doesn't feel right in a Bethesda open world. You put so much time into these games, and there's so much to find, that it almost feels a tiny bit like punishing the player for completing the main quest. Needless to say Fallout 4 would not repeat the mistake, though New Vegas said screw you guys and did it old-school (though it did have the grace to create a last-ditch save players could return to for DLCs etcetera).

Elsewhere in the interview the game's leads go into VATS, which lead artist Istvan Pely recalls barely working before launch, and its origins in… Burnout 2's Crash mode?

With Fallout season 2 wrapped up, it feels like we've been deluged with everything except, y'know, a new Fallout game of some kind. Hopes were high that we might get a remaster at the show's end, or even two, but whoa there cowboy: that ain't how Bethesda rolls.

Instead, Bethesda's great and good have been conducting a bunch of retrospective interviews about the series, the latest of which is a mega-feature from GameInformer. In this, the key creatives behind Fallout 3 go a little deeper into the game's VATS system, the delicious slow-mo shooting feature that allowed players to more-or-less pause combat and pick a spot, before restarting and watching the gore fly. Well, when the camera let you.

The game's lead artist, Istvan Pely, has previously reminisced about how Bethesda barely got the feature working before the game shipped, but here we're going back to the origins of the system. Which were basically that, erm, Bethesda knew it didn't have the time or the expertise to compete with the best-in-genre shooters out there.

"Bethesda, as a studio, hadn’t done gun combat since they did the Terminator games back in the day," says lead designer Emil Pagliarulo. "So creating gun combat was a real challenge. And gun combat is a lot different from, you know, there are melee weapons in Fallout, but most of the combat in Oblivion is melee. It’s up-close, and most of the combat in Fallout is ranged.

"We knew we were never going to be able to, with the time and resources we had, create gun combat that was on par with Call of Duty or Battlefield. So, that led us to creating the VATS system—the Vault-Tec Automated Targeting System."

One of the happy accidents here is that the original Fallout games had turn-based combat, and there's a little echo of those roots in how VATS interrupts the real-time action to let players make a more calculated decision.

"I remember pitching it and then talking to Emil about it, him coming with, 'This is how it could work,'" says Todd Howard. "It’s sort of like [Star Wars:] Knights of the Old Republic at the time, phase-based combat, you can set things up. And this game, Burnout, which was this racing game where you crash."

Howard here seems to be referring to Burnout 2: Point of Impact specifically, which had a "Crash" mode in which the goal was to accumulate points by causing as much damage as possible in a single crash. Essentially, you drove at a traffic-heavy intersection as fast as possible and, on impact, the game would switch into a slow-mo camera mode that lingered over all the beautiful destruction you'd just caused. And Todd liked that.

"So Crash mode in Burnout with body parts mixed with phase-based [outcomes]", says Howard. "We had this little presentation and, you know, 'but imagine the car parts are, like, eyeballs and guts!' That was part of the 'Okay, this needs to be kind of over the top,' but also, you could stop the game, and your character can make some decisions. And that’s where you felt the stats of your character more than the run-and-gun, which we did a number of things with your character stuff there."

Howard is realistic about where Fallout 3's combat eventually landed, even if VATS was a great saviour. "Frankly, it ended up where people will play it," says Howard. "It doesn’t feel great in your hands because, you know, it’s not the best first-person shooter, even for its time. It’s kind of handicapped as it comes to that, but it still came together really well."

Not everyone is so down on where they ended up with VATS which, for all the jank, is just tremendous fun to let loose in. "It’s my favourite system," says Pely. "I’ve never been great at first-person shooters, and I play exclusively using VATS. And any game now that doesn’t have it, I miss it—I wish I had it."

Sometimes, a game needs time to age before we come to appreciate it—as is the case, Josh Sawyer, studio design director at Obsidian, claims of Fallout: New Vegas. Considered a cult classic, and potentially the best "modern" Fallout game (I put "modern" in air quotes there because it did come out 16 years ago. Sorry), New Vegas captured the last shreds of that oldschool RPG magic before Bethesda went ahead and made Fallout 4.

In a recent mega-interview with Game Informer, however, Sawyer maintains that New Vegas was nowhere near a beloved classic back when it first came out: "New Vegas was not particularly well-received when it launched. It was quite buggy and both players and critics commented on how much we had reused from Fallout 3."

That's a bold claim, Mr. Sawyer, let's see how it holds up—back in 2010, Craig Pearson gave it a solid 84 in his Fallout: New Vegas review. Hah! We liked it before it was cool! But just to be sure, let's look at the actual text, shall we? I'm sure Pearson didn't complain about how much Obsidian reused… Oh. "New areas, characters and factions, but the same clunky inventory and character models. Two years to stay exactly where you were."

Egg on our face, then. Fair enough, Mr. Sawyer. Sorry, Mr. Sawyer.

In fairness, in pure numerical terms, an 84 is "A great game with exceptional moments or features; touches of brilliance. We love it" per our own reviews policy, but his assertions on the specifics hold water.

Sawyer continues: "It took about five years for the community to come around on the game and maybe a few years more for us to start considering that players actually liked the design choices we had made." Those being the really quite brilliant story (which Pearson praised) and the breadth of ways you could handle its primary antagonists, which includes literally walking up to wannabe-Ceasar and defeating him with facts and logic in the middle of his own war camp.

John Gonzalez, who was the lead creative designer on New Vegas, mostly concurs—and tips his hat to Bethesda for doing a lot of the mechanical legwork before them: "I played a lot of Fallout 3 and I think Bethesda deserves enormous credit for taking this isometric game and turning it into a first-person, immersive, open-world experience, and doing the work of translating that.

"I think that what you have in New Vegas is a very Obsidian-focused experience. It’s all about allowing the player to have tremendous amounts of narrative impact, narrative control. And so, I think that for someone, if that’s your jam, then you’re going to think that New Vegas is the best of the bunch."

That is, in fact, my jam—but I will take a point of pride in the fact that we still pretty much liked it, and still do.

The cross I bear—probably the heaviest burden borne by a human being in history—is that I'm doomed to annoy basically all the loudest segments of the Fallout fan community. Do I love the direction Bethesda took the series in with FO3 and FO4? Not really. Do I think the studio—and especially FO3 and 4 director Todd Howard—harbours a secret hatred in his heart for the games Bethesda didn't make, or that he's some Johnny-come-lately who probably doesn't even like Fallout 1 and 2? Also no.

How do I know this? Because I feel it in my soul. Also, Howard pointed out he's been a Fallout fan since the first game in Game Informer's recent oral history of the series, so there's that too. "I was at Bethesda at the time when [Fallout 1] came out. It’s my brother who actually played it first. He’s like, 'Have you played Fallout?' And I said, 'I haven’t had the chance yet.' He said, 'You’ve gotta play it.'"

Never one to ignore a clearly marked quest objective, Howard got right on it by, ah, purloining his brother's copy. "I actually stole his disc and never gave it back to him," Howard recalls of his crime.

He loved it, of course. "I loved the vibe of that game," even moreso than other games—tabletop and otherwise—that went for something similar, like Gamma World and Wasteland. "The rules of the world and the vibe of the world, they were just brilliant and so unique."

It's a quirk of fate that Howard can now lavish praise on Fallout's rules for being unique. Originally, the plan for Fallout 1 was to base it on Steve Jackson's Generic Universal Roleplaying System, or GURPS. Alas, Jackson didn't gel with the game's ultraviolence and eventually pulled out, leading FO1's devs to develop the SPECIAL system in its stead.

Howard had the precise opposite reaction to Jackson, and now recalls that he particularly loved "the Vault Boy and the way it would wink at the player in certain ways." Jackson, meanwhile, disliked the juxtaposition of the breezy Vault Boy and the game's violent content. But it was part of the first game's potent admixture that meant Howard "played it to death."

As reported by IGN Japan, prolific Japanese director Mamoru Oshii loves Fallout 4⁠—like, more than anyone I've met or heard of in my entire life. In a new video celebrating the 30th anniversary of Ghost in the Shell, Oshii revealed that he has played 2,000 hours on PlayStation, followed by another 8,000 on Steam.

According to a machine translation of the IGN Japan article, Fallout 4 was Oshii's immediate answer when asked his favorite game, estimating a 10,000 hour playtime across console and PC. He referred to it as "a game that seems to have been made for my own desires," noting that VATS aiming jelled with his relative lack of facility with twitch aiming⁠—though he has, apparently, gotten at least one Chicken Dinner in PUBG.

Oshii also had a very trenchant observation about violence in RPGs: He appreciates Fallout's verisimilitude, how its ultra-violence makes sense in its post-apocalyptic setting. He contrasted this with Cyberpunk 2077, where the violence can clash with the relative civility of Night City.

I've often pondered this myself: V's individual body count on a given Tuesday is a statistical anomaly that brings Night City closer to "active warzone" than "lawless berg." Get me an experienced translator and 30 minutes, though, and I might convince Oshii to try a sneaky pacifist run.

But the auteur seems to have a very… particular way of playing Fallout 4 that may not translate to any other game. Oshii gave the skinny to Automaton near the end of 2025: No factions, no glitches, no companions but Dogmeat, no settlement building, and no main quest stuff aside from maybe killing Kellogg. "I will basically ignore the main story and instead carve out my own path through slaughter and looting," said Oshii.

"Players of Fallout 4 will ultimately be guided to the game’s ending by contacting and joining one of the organizations," Oshii explained, but he was dedicated to a fantasy of a lone wolf survivalist. "Whether it’s the Brotherhood of Steel, the Minutemen, or the Railroad, I’d much rather be beaten to death by Deathclaws, repeatedly bludgeoned or shot by Super Mutants, or raid raider hideouts for loot. Living day to day like this is more fun and lets me keep my ideological integrity."

He particularly hates the Brotherhood of Steel, likening them to the Nazis, killing them wherever he finds them, and decorating his home base at the Red Rocket gas station with so many of their empty power armor suits, the game began to chug. Hardcore.

This feels like an alien way of playing the game to me, but is it really that far off from other players' tendency to ignore the main quest, maybe even download an alternate start mod to immerse themselves in the world more? It speaks to Fallout 4's staying power and flexibility that Oshii found such a niche playstyle so engaging.

“I can only marvel at my own passion for pushing past level 100," Oshii concluded, "But well, you could also call me an idiot.”

Fallout 76 has enjoyed a massive turnaround since its launch in 2018. What initially seemed like a folly, stripping away so much of what made Fallout such a long-lasting, beloved series, has, over the years, transformed into a quality sandbox prequel. The big improvements really began with the Wastelanders update, which reintroduced an essential part of the RPG: NPCs.

It was such an obvious and immediate glow up that it still seems bonkers that this was absent at launch, with no indication it would change. This was Bethesda's vision for Fallout's first not-quite-massively-multiplayer-game. Of course it landed with a thud.

Game director Emil Pagliarulo, chatting to Game Informer, describes Bethesda's attempt to turn Fallout into one of the trendiest genres, the multiplayer survival sandbox, as a "big swing" where the team unfortunately struck out.

Part of that big swing was that it shouldn't have NPCs. "At the beginning, we wanted it all to be player-driven, so there weren't NPCs." And for Fallout, I guess, that is a pretty huge swing, given what NPCs usually bring to the table. But why take a big swing like this? Why cut out something that has only ever made Fallout games better?

"I play a lot of games, and nothing bores me more than a game that's like a clone of another game," says Pagliarulo. "It's like playing the same thing over and over; you change the setting, you change this, it's still the same thing. And we want to do something different. And we tried to do 76 without NPCs, and have it be player-driven—that was a conscious decision to try and make something different."

The desire not to just do the same old thing over and over again certainly makes sense. But the idea that removing NPCs makes a game more player-driven is wild. Fallout is one of the most player-driven RPG series around, in part because of its NPCs and factions. Players get to influence and react to these characters, so they actually bolster player agency.

"It's hard when you're the first one trying to do something," Pagliarulo adds, though I might suggest that there's a reason nobody had tried to take NPCs out of Fallout before. He then mentions another thing Bethesda tried to do first: "Horse Armor was like the first DLC! We didn't know what that was going to be like, but it didn't stop us from trying!"

Sometimes it's worth not trying.

All credit to Bethesda for adapting when players hated its vision, though. Wastelanders wasn't just an update; it was a top-to-bottom overhaul that finally made Fallout 76 worthy of the name. Though even while acknowledging that Fallout 76 was improved by Bethesda listening to its players, Pagliarulo still seems to be adamant that its rise in popularity was in part down to "us not being afraid to do something different".

Pagliarulo also notes that one of the challenges of designing a game like this comes from its players. "The internet is a lot of things, but it is not patient, right? There's this immediate gratification that gamers want, and they don't understand game development or how hard it is to do things and how long it takes."

There's definitely a disconnect between devs and gamers, and there's still a lot of demystifying that needs to be done when it comes to game development. But expecting players to be content with a game that had a rough launch full of bugs, crashes and the absence of critical features is a bit much. Outside of early access games, gamers aren't buying games speculatively, hoping that maybe the game will improve or eventually feature all the things they were hoping for.

This one was definitely on Bethesda, not impatient gamers.

It might be an unpopular thing to observe—please do not throw tomatoes at me—but whether you like it or not, Bethesda has spun a huge success out of the Fallout franchise, even while shuffling further and further away from its classic RPG roots. Ow, ouch! I asked you nicely to not throw tomatoes at me! I'm on your side!

I genuinely am not a fan of Bethesda's light-handed approach to RPG mechanics—the pre-voiced player character of Fallout 4, for instance, has me almost entirely disinterested in playing it despite the fact it's gathering dust in my library. But Bethesda's made a bajillion dollars and has a hit TV series so, like, what do I know?

That's a sentiment echoed in Game Informer's recent mega-interview, wherein the publication speaks with… well, just about everybody involved in Fallout, including its past iterations, the current TV show, and more recent games. This includes Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the two masterminds credited with the creation of the Fallout franchise writ large before it passed into Todd Howard's chess-piece callused hands.

Cain tells the publication that, overall, "I like what [Bethesda] has done." However, "it's not what I would have done. I know Leonard and I especially, we talk about these things a lot. We would have gone in a different direction, but obviously, sales say people love what they did, and I'm looking at my glass cabinet full of Fallout goodies, some of which are from 1 and 2, and some of which are from 3 and 4. So…"

It is hard to argue with the merch you've got on your literal shelf, this is very true. Boyarsky echoes that he also liked Fallout 3 and 4: "I liked both of them. I felt like where they were going with some of the art stuff was really cool in Fallout 4. I thought Fallout 3 was really good for what it was looks-wise, but it did have a little bit of that green overcast thing, and I feel like it wasn't as crisp as I might have wanted it to be, but this is hindsight talking.

"But I think Fallout 3, for me, was much closer to what we would have done with it in terms of RPG-ness, as opposed to something like Fallout 4, where they moved away from it a bit." It's interesting to hear that the third game was a happy medium—which makes sense. As much as I love a crunchy RPG, going full isometric grit probably isn't that popular anymore.

Founder of Interplay Productions (the studio that made the original Fallout) Brian Fargo more-or-less concurs with Boyarsky's opinion that Bethesda's nailed the aesthetic, explaining that the studio "treated the games like they treated the Amazon series.

"[They said] 'Let's focus on the world's sensibilities and feeling. And if we nail that, then the audience who came from before will appreciate it'. I think that's what you've got to give them credit for, because it was between the music and the aesthetic and everything else, you could tell, they placed that up on the forefront.

"And then, they did whatever they wanted with it, which, whether it was Fallout 76, Fallout 4, or the Amazon series, it all led with the vibe and aesthetic of what the original games were. I believe that was their focus, and you've got to say, it worked." Be still my RPG-loving heart, you do unfortunately gotta say it.

Spoilers ahead for Fallout season 2 and Fallout: New Vegas

It's been a strange season on the Fallout TV series. As a massive Fallout: New Vegas fan, I was extremely hyped when I learned that the show was taking a trip to the Mojave Wasteland, especially as I really rate the first season. It's one of those rare videogame TV adaptations that hit the nail almost squarely on the head for me, similar to Arcane, but by comparison, the second season has been pretty meandering.

It played like a highlight reel for the Mojave Wasteland as Lucy and The Ghoul slowly sauntered their way towards The Strip—they saw radscorpions, Caesar's Legion and NCR remnants, even The Kings, albeit in ghoulified form. Meanwhile, Maximus made some ill-judged decisions, causing a minor civil war in the Brotherhood of Steel before going mano a mano with like a hundred Deathclaws. It was an enjoyable romp in places, and despite how nonsensical it got at times, I felt like I was at least able to piece together some idea of the past events that occurred in the Mojave.

The problem? Despite theories, I see no evidence that Courier 6, Fallout: New Vegas's protagonist, was involved in any of them. I get the TV show not wanting to make one of the game's endings canon and alienate a portion of players, but narratively, I think that approach lacks guts, and the show went too far in the opposite direction. It's why, when you look at the Mojave Wasteland, seemingly nothing has happened in the intervening 15 years that wouldn't have occurred anyway, apart from the obvious: shit got worse.

The moment it struck me was when they revealed that the Deathclaws from Quarry Junction (which Courier 6 is tasked with eradicating in Fallout: New Vegas) are actually alive and well, plus thanks to some kind of Enclave Deathclaw mind control, have taken over The Strip. It's a little thing, ultimately just a small quest in the game, and it is mentioned that they're a new pack of Deathclaws. But it got me thinking: there isn't a single event that I can conclusively point to as being something Courier 6 did.

There's the obvious, right? Someone killed Mr. House. When The Ghoul is speaking to him, he mentions that his body became "something of a target for wandering travellers with something to prove," and that he was poisoned, shot, and bludgeoned with a crowbar. But I don't think there's much evidence this was Courier 6. If it was, why wasn't Yes Man installed in the Lucky 38 afterwards? And if the Courier was working for the NCR or Caesar's Legion killing House, why didn't either conclusively triumph in the war for the Mojave?

It's also worth remembering that Benny was planning to kill Mr. House and install Yes Man anyway before Courier 6 was ever involved, but more likely, it sounds like some third party assassinated House and then left. Maybe Ulysses or something? Okay, well, how about the Platinum Chip? Nope, I'm afraid it doesn't look like Courier 6 delivered that either. If they had, surely Mr. House's army of upgraded Securitrons would've been able to defend The Strip from a pack of Deathclaws, which also would have been the case if Yes Man had replaced him.

If anything, the whole 'Cold fusion being the key to House's victory' effectively overwrites the Platinum Chip entirely as a narrative device, since Mr. House says the exact same thing about the chip when Courier 6 talks to him—that it was the final thing he needed to complete his schemes. And even if killing Mr. House was the one important thing Courier 6 did, well, you didn't even do that since he's alive and well.

Okay, well, how about Caesar's Legion and the NCR? Surely Courier 6 impacted the war somehow? Well, as I see it, there's evidence that Caesar's Legion won the second battle for Hoover Dam (which it was predicted they would in the game without Courier 6's influence). I think the fact that their main force is in the Mojave Wasteland proper, hence how they're able to march on The Strip in the finale, and the fact that Camp McCarran has fallen, which we see in one of the credit sequences, is evidence of that.

No, I think what stopped Caesar's Legion from taking The Strip and Freeside was Caesar's death, not at the hands of Courier 6, but from his brain tumour, which we know was killing him in the games, and that caused the factional infighting we see in the TV show. This definitely seems to be the case when you consider he had time to write and leave a last will and testament. I think the fact that Caesar's Legion and the NCR have been decimated after constantly battling for 15 years is evidence that there was no third party, like Courier 6, around to make a conclusive difference the way they did in the game.

Though it pains me as a fan of Fallout: New Vegas, I genuinely think Courier 6 died when Benny shot them in the head, and is buried in Goodsprings—it just makes too much sense with the state of the Mojave Wasteland in the TV show. Just like the Deathclaws of Quarry Junction returning as if they were never gone, Fallout Season 2 feels like a dark alternate reality where we get to see what would've happened if Courier 6 was never there.

Maybe I am nitpicking, but I think it would've been far more interesting narratively if the show had just picked a side rather than creating a weird stalemate in the Mojave where basically nothing changed for 15 years, besides, that is, The Kings inexplicably becoming ferals and Deathclaws taking up residence in The Strip. Then again, with Caesar's Legion and the NCR about to fight over Freeside next season, maybe we'll finally learn if Courier 6 was ever actually there.

In the mid-1990s Interplay Entertainment acquired the Dungeons & Dragons licence, and would go on to publish Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale. The team working on a little post-apocalyptic RPG that would eventually be called Fallout was largely left to its own devices in the shadow of those projects, which turned out to be for the best.

Why did this group come together in the first place? Because Fallout's co-creator Tim Cain lured them in with a pizza party.

Talking to Game Informer for an oral history of Fallout, Tim Cain related the story. His actual job was to program the installers for games, but he'd made a sprite engine in his spare time. He wasn't allowed to approach people assigned to existing projects with it, however. "So, what I did was I reserved a conference room for 6 p.m.," Cain explained, "which was when everybody was supposed to go home, and then I sent emails saying, 'I'll be in that conference room with pizza if you want to come and talk to me about games we could make with this sprite-based isometric engine.'

"I really thought that tons of people were going to show up, but I think it was about eight people showed up. And I didn't realize at the time, but I was self-selecting for go-getters, and Leonard [Boyarsky, Fallout's art director] was somebody who came."

Since there were so many fantasy RPGs in the works at Interplay and elsewhere at the time, they decided to make a science-fiction game instead. At first, the idea was to make a sequel to Wasteland, which Interplay had developed though it was published by Electronic Arts. Cain downplays the influence Wasteland had on Fallout, however.

"Wasteland," he said, "which Interplay had made before but didn’t own the rights to it, didn't factor huge into that. People talk about how much it's got an influence. Some of the people on the team really liked Wasteland, and everybody looked at it, but we wanted to do our own thing."

Brian Fargo was one of those people who really liked Wasteland, having been director on Wasteland before serving as executive producer on Fallout. "When we kicked off any titles at Interplay," Fargo said, "we would do what's called a vision document, which was, 'Okay, what are the tenets of this product?' I remember there was a lot of back and forth, and you know, what were the aspects of Wasteland? Because it started off as a sequel to Wasteland, and then we ended up having to pivot because EA said, 'No, not going to happen.' We were being hopeful for a while, but ironically, that pivot ended up being wonderful because we ended up with Fallout, which obviously ended up being a good thing."

Fallout's everywhere now, with half a dozen games and two seasons of television under its belt, but it used to be "a B-tier product," as series co-creator Tim Cain recently told Game Informer. A lot went wrong during development and the team didn't have much power to do anything about it, but Cain said that constraints and hardship may have been key to the game's eventual success.

"That sprite engine I wrote had limitations we had to work around, and those workarounds ended up making the game really cool," said Cain. "But it was one of those things that, at the time, it felt like, 'Oh no, another setback,' and it turned out to be a positive thing in the long run. It did help me view things differently years later."

For instance, Fallout was originally going to be an adaptation of Steve Jackson Games' GURPS, the "Generic Universal Roleplaying System" and a staple of '80s tabletop. But when the team showed the game to Steve Jackson himself, he was put off by Fallout's ultraviolence juxtaposed with its smiling Vault Boy mascot, and pulled out of the project.

Designer and art director Leonard Boyarsky recalled that this led to the creation of the SPECIAL stat system, "which was way better for a computer game than trying to make a really faithful GURPS adaptation."

Then there's Wasteland, which Fallout might have been a sequel to had publisher Interplay been able to secure the rights. But as Wasteland designer and Interplay cofounder, Brian Fargo, recalled in the interview, "EA said, 'No, not going to happen.' We were being hopeful for a while, but ironically, that pivot ended up being wonderful because we ended up with Fallout, which obviously ended up being a good thing."

Tim Cain has talked in videos on his YouTube channel about how the team wanted to distance itself from Wasteland and do its own thing, noting that "some people on the team were flat out worried that we would get [the license]." Regardless of how Fallout might have been different were it a Wasteland sequel, things obviously worked out in the end.

"So many negatives turned out to be positives, said Cain."Even being called a B-tier product, which, at the time was an insult, you know, 'We can’t wait for you to get done with this so we can put you on D&D or something,' turned out to be a great thing because we were pretty much ignored for years," he continued. "No one really cared about what we were doing because there wasn’t anything huge tied to it, and that just let us kind of do our thing."

That's not to say the team knew it would pan out at the time. As Boyarsky recalled in the interview, "I wish we had the email, because I sent [Tim] an email. I said, 'In a week, everyone’s going to know how great Fallout is' before we shipped. And Tim emailed me back, and he said, 'In a week, we’re going to be asking whether people want fries with their meal.'"

Amazon's Fallout TV show season 2 has come to a close. Some loose ends were tied up, and more were teased, ready for season 3, which will start filming in the summer. But it's not all just about emotional character arcs—let's put our main characters' progress into cold, hard numbers, or levels, to be exact.

Spoilers ahead for Fallout season 2

At the end of the first season, the levels for each of our main characters were slightly skewed, or at least not where you'd expect them to be. Despite being the main character, Lucy only managed to get to level 8, while The Ghoul sat somewhere around level 89, and Maximus managed to reach level 9. Thaddeus also somehow managed to reach level 50 after accidentally turning himself into a Ghoul (more on that later).

So, to wrap up season 2, I've decided to take stock of everything our main characters (plus Norm and Hank) got up to over the course of the eight episodes and see whether they managed to get more or less XP this season. But I'll let you know now, it's not looking good for most of them.

The Methodology

I used the same method as I did in my previous article, where I calculated the levels at the end of season 1. But as a small recap, I used Fallout 3's framework for levels as Lucy establishes skills like repair, science, and speech at the start of the first season.

All characters were also still in survival mode (which does grant more XP) but set to a low level. Just with the Yao Guai in season 1, those New Vegas Deathclaws went down a little too easily for my liking.

XP is awarded when a new minor or major location is reached, for killing raiders or Wasteland creatures, with the big 'uns granting a little more XP. But the most XP is given for completing quests or side quests.

Lucy: Level 9

Total XP gained: 1,150XP

Lucy did not manage to surpass her stats from the first season, largely because she failed her major quest of bringing her father to justice. She spent all season yapping about how she'd atone for her father's sins and make him pay in some way, and while she did get the upper hand for a short while in the end, he beat her to it. He gave nothing helpful away about his possible ties to The Enclave and wiped his memory before Lucy could get anything else out of him.

And then when it came to the Legion, Lucy managed to fail the speech checks so badly she ended up on a crucifix. So yeah, not a lot of XP this season.

She did, however, outdo herself in the killing department this season and managed to find some very key locations. These are just some of the ways Lucy gained XP:

• Hacking a Terminal.
• Finding her father.
• Fighting radscorpions.
• Murdering the ghoulified Kings gang in a drug-fueled rampage
• Implanting a brainwash chip.

Unfortunately, all of this amounted to just one measly level gain as Lucy is currently sitting at level 9, with 6,207XP gained in total, meaning she's just 993XP away from getting into double digits. You'll get 'em next season, Lucy, don't worry about it.

The Ghoul: Level 89

Total XP gained: 1,640XP

The second season wasn't too hard on The Ghoul; while he didn't do quite as well for XP as he did in season 1, it was close. Again, the biggest barrier to this was his quest to find his family. While he does know where they are now, he got juked out at the last minute, as they weren't in the underground vault for management.

Here are just some of the ways in which he gathered XP throughout the season:

• Killing a shedload of raiders plus some radroaches.
• Teaming up with Thaddeus and Maximus to take on a New Vegas Deathclaw.
• Awakens Mr House with cold fusion.

All of this wouldn't have amounted to The Ghoul managing to make it to level 90, but level 89 is still a very impressive place to be in, especially since the max level you get to in Fallout 3 using mods is level 99. So close.

Maximus: Level 10

Total XP gained: 1,215XP

Maximus finished the first season with 6,600XP in the bank, meaning he was just 600XP off reaching level 10, and I'm happy to say that he managed to make it by the end of the second season.

Now level 10 with 7,875XP, Maximus is just 875XP away from level 11, something he will undoubtedly reach by the end of season 3, or by the beginning, depending on how quickly the war between NCR and Legion kicks off.

Here are some of the ways Maximus secured XP:

• Took out Xander Harkness while in Power Armor.
• Managed to destroy a securitron.
• Killed a butt-load of New Vegas Deathclaws.

The most impressive feat is that Maximus was also one of the few characters to actually do what he set out to do. By the last episode, he had found Lucy, although he didn't manage to hand over cold fusion. We have The Ghoul to blame for that.

Thaddeus: Level 50

Total XP gained: 790XP

Thaddeus is my favourite character in the Fallout TV show. He's funny, wacky, and wanders the Wasteland a little aimlessly but always manages to scrape through—he reminds me of how I play.

He managed to get a whopping 790XP over season 2, which is only slightly less than his amount he scored in the first season (186,700XP). Here's how he got there:

• Operated a child sweatshop for processing caps.
• Helped take out New Vegas Deathclaws.
• Ran from the Brotherhood of Steel with cold fusion.
• Convinced the Brotherhood of Steel leadership (very briefly) that he was the Commonwealth emissary.

Sadly, 790XP is nowhere near enough levelling up, especially to level 51. However, I'm starting to think that Thaddeus didn't deserve that massive ghoul-boost. When he first took that mysterious inhaler from the travelling salesman, I thought it was slowly turning him into a ghoul. He certainly looked the part in season 2 as his nose was all but ready to drop off, but then he lost his arm and grew an extra mouth on his neck.

This isn't the usual course of a ghoul, even if Thaddeus did take a knockoff inhaler, but I have a feeling he may be turning into a whole different beast instead—a centaur.

Centaurs are experiments created from the Forced Evolutionary Virus, usually by combining multiple animals alongside radiation, but I wouldn't put it past the TV Show to shake things up a bit and do something absolutely horrendous to poor Thaddeus. But with that said, if he ends up turning into anything other than a ghoul, I will be stripping him of his 50 levels, sending him back down to level 7 with just 3,786XP to show for all his efforts.

Norm: Level 4

Total XP gained: 1,530XP

Norm actually managed to get out of the Vault this season, albeit with some assistance. The only problem was that while he was certainly curious, he didn't really have a solid aim in season 2.

He did, however, still manage to get some XP in the following ways:

• Opened the management cryopods.
• Hacked into a couple of terminals.
• Stumbled across a major location.
• Convinced VaultTec's brightest young minds that he was actually a superhuman (despite his clear incompetence)

I was a little sad to see how Norm's arc ended with buds buds. A part of me was hoping he'd fit into the leader role and actually help them navigate the Wasteland, which would eventually lead him back to Lucy. But he still had a pretty good go at it.

Hank: Level ???

Total XP gained: 2,355XP

Hank, on the other hand, had one of the best arcs in season 2. I absolutely loved to see him get on with his work and thought the slow-burn reveal that he may not be working for Vault Tec was fantastic.

As a tried and tested businessman, Hank was very efficient in his XP gathering in the second season, gaining the most XP out of all the characters this season. Unfortunately, Hank also stumbles into the same issues The Ghoul has in that he's not exactly new to the Wasteland and so can't really start at level 1.

Here are some of the ways Hank gained XP this season:

• Managed to carry out multiple successful chip procedures.
• Killed a couple of people who got in his way.
• Successfully got into Vault Tec's underground New Vegas facility.

Hank also managed to come out on top in a weird way. Yes, he erased his memory with the chip implant, but not before sending his R&D out into the Wasteland and successfully reporting his successes back to The Enclave. It seems he all but accomplished what he set out to do.

The sequel to Fallout 2 being developed by Black Isle Studios in the early 2000s was codenamed Van Buren, and when it was shut down in 2003—after which Bethesda picked up the ball, but made a completely different game—it became a kind of lost relic for Fallout tragics.

Van Buren's the mythic could-have-been that almost-was, a Fallout RPG that would have had everything we loved about the first two games in it and none of the stuff we didn't love about the Fallout 3 we eventually got. Because it never got made it can stay perfect in our imaginations, never having to live up to reality.

That doesn't stop modders from wanting to make it real in their own ways, though. There's a mod to recreate Van Buren in Fallout 2's engine called Fallout Yesterday, and a project that's supposedly remaking the whole game as it would have been. However, since a bunch of ideas from Van Buren were eventually re-used in Fallout: New Vegas—like Caesar's Legion, the Big MT, and Joshua Graham—you can see why there would be an advantage in remaking Van Buren as a mod for the game that already has some of the relevant assets.

If this sounds familiar you may remember when the project was called Revelation Blues, the name under which it released a demo last year. It's now been renamed The New West, and the teaser trailer above released conveniently after the climax of Fallout Season 2, when interest in New Vegas is the highest it's been in years. Not that you'd know it from Bethesda's silence on the remaster front.

The trailer feels like classic Fallout and sets up the plot of Van Buren—there's a prison run by an AI called Odysseus, which you're set to escape from in the opening, and a New Plague out there in the wasteland. Half of this is soundtracked by Johnny Cash singing Wayfaring Stranger, which would make a great nickname for The New West's equivalent of The Lone Wanderer.

You can keep up with the progress of Fallout: The New West on its website, and the demo from back when it was called Revelation Blues is still up on Nexus Mods.

That's a wrap on Amazon's Fallout season 2, folks. The final episode has now aired, tying up some loose ends. But not everything has an answer—there is a third season after all—and many fans of the series are still left wondering what exactly the events of the second season mean for the game's canon.

Major spoilers ahead for Fallout season 2 episode 8 and Fallout: New Vegas

"We talk about it a lot," Todd Howard says in an interview with GamesRadar. "Even when we do games, we talk about, 'Hey, what existed before, and how do you remain respectful to it?' I think what we try to do is tell the story from the perspective of the people in the world, and sometimes you're gonna get conflicting accounts."

One big complaint Fallout fans have levied against the second season is that it kind of messes with the lore and canon of Fallout: New Vegas. You see, in the game, there are four endings depending on which party you side with:

• Caesar's Legion: The Legion drives the NCR out of The Strip back to the Mojave Outpost, bringing a brutal civilisation to the Wasteland.
• New California Republic: The NCR celebrates a second victory at Hoover Dam and establishes control over the Mojave Wasteland and The Strip.
• Yes Man: The Courier drives the NCR and the Legion out of Hoover Dam and secures an independent New Vegas with the help of Yes Man and the securitrons.
• Mr. House: House takes control of the Hoover Dam and drives the NCR and Legion out of New Vegas, regaining control of the city he once ruled.

There's never been any confirmation as to which one of these endings is canon or even the right choice, although every fan holds their own answer in their hearts. But as the Fallout TV show is indeed canon to the wider game series, some believe they've been able to decipher what the true ending is.

At first, it appeared that Mr. House's ending must've been what happened on account of him still being present at the end of the season on his famous TV screen. But now I'm not so sure.

At the start of episode 8, he tells Cooper, "It's good to be alive again. Over the years, my body became something of a target for wandering travellers with something to prove. I've been poisoned, shot, and bludgeoned with a crowbar." Does this mean the Courier did end up putting a bullet in House's head, but he just had a failsafe in case that very thing happened? Perhaps, it certainly seems like something House would take into account and prep for.

The TV series showrunner, Geneva Roberson-Dworet, even mentions in the interview that she "doesn't see it that way" and instead of trying to confirm a single canon ending, they tried to "open the question up of whether they did and also introduce [the Enclave] as one of the most powerful entities in this universe."

"Oftentimes, it's intentional that things are up for interpretation, and we have our own view of things that, you know, this series is gonna go on for a while yet," Howard adds. "But I think it's good to open up those conversations, and you may get history, you may get conflicting reports on how some things went."

I'm sure everyone will come out of the last episode of season 2 with their own opinion as to what it all meant for New Vegas' canon. But in my eyes, I feel as if this confirms the Yes Man ending. Both NCR and the Legion are in a weakened state; neither seems to have control over the dam (although the Legion could've won and then lost strength when the civil war broke out), and The Strip seems to have descended into chaos as a family of Deathclaws has moved in, potentially meaning that the Courier didn't upgrade the securitrons, meaning they couldn't keep the order.

Who knows. It certainly seems that any canonisation of a single ending wasn't intentional. Anywho, we're about to see another fight for New Vegas, as the NCR, and the Legion are both seen converging on the city in the finale, and House is still alive, so I guess we'll figure out who the real winner is sometime next year when season 3 airs.

Every Fallout game is meaningfully different from the last, and the series includes some of the best games you'll ever play. It's an easy recommendation to anyone with a passing interest in computer roleplay, and even easier now that you can get every game in the series (including the black sheep, Tactics) along with a boatload of DLC for $77. That's almost as cheap as a crate full of puppets!

That's thanks to a live Steam sale, which you can peruse at your leisure here if you're itching to figure out what all those Magic the Gathering cards are about.

If you're not sure which to buy and would rather start with just one, here's the main series rundown. The original two Fallout games are top-down, turn-based masterworks that, while pretty old, are landmark CRPGs and furnished the series with its iconic juxtaposition of atomic age aesthetics, grisly hyperviolence, and sardonic humor. The first Fallout game is my personal favorite, and don't let its vintage fool you—as 90s RPGs go, it's approachable.

Fallout 3 and the Obsidian-developed New Vegas come after the series was bought from the original publisher, Interplay, by Bethesda. These 3D open-world RPGs are both widely celebrated for their storytelling and real-time shootouts (though the V.A.T.S. auto-aiming system lets you put your fate back in the hands of dice, if you'd like). You can't go wrong with either, and should probably play both if one strikes your fancy. New Vegas is perhaps more of a fixer-upper, but its character writing is acclaimed and its setting is a prominent inspiration for the TV show's new season.

Fallout 4 is more recent and streamlined than 3 and Vegas, and it builds out Bethesda's familiar open-world formula with base-building, more detailed crafting, and punchier combat. The RPG aspect takes a back seat, but there is a robot who will call you by the name Mr. Fucker if you like. And with guns like these, you may not even care that the dialog trees have been trimmed.

Then there's Fallout 76, a survival-craft game that recovered from a rough launch to become one of the better games in its genre. It plays very similarly to Fallout 4, features one of the best and most beautiful open worlds in the series, is your only real multiplayer option, and has lots of nods to the TV show (though they aren't all free).

Whatever you decide, it's hard to go wrong; Fallout has become the phenomenon that it is for a reason. The Steam sale is live through Feb. 6.

The Fallout TV series sure is good at making us want to play Fallout games, huh? A single moment in this week's episode, where a sick suit of NCR power armor was unveiled alongside the stirring Fallout theme, had me itching mightily to reinstall a Fallout game—any Fallout game, really—for a fresh playthrough.

If you feel the same, it sounds like a great time to dive into Fallout 76 because it's completely free to play from now until February 5, which will carry you through to the Fallout Season 2 finale next week.

If you want to wear that dope NCR power armor from the show in Fallout 76, though—that ain't free. That ain't even close to free. The Fallout 76 Mojave Bundle, which includes that tasty NCR armor skin, a Legion Legate outfit, an NCR flag and neon New Vegas sign, a fancy lookin' new super sledge, and a few other odds and ends, will run you $30 USD.

That's pretty steep, especially considering everything else Fallout related is on sale on Steam at the moment. You can actually buy Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4 for a total of $17.50, or two months of Fallout 1st (which gets you a private world and a monthly allowance of in-game currency in Fallout 76, among other things) for $26. But $30 for a few outfits, camp decorations, and a sledge? Kind of a lot.

Of course, if you don't mind waiting a while, the Mojave Bundle is bound to go on sale eventually, and probably within a couple months. Looking at Fallout 76 previous bundles, for instance, the Pitt Recruitment Bundle was also priced at $30 in September 2022, but by mid-November of that year it was on sale for 40% off. Same with the Skyline Valley Lost Treasures Bundle in 2024, which went on sale less than two months after it first appeared.

Maybe waiting a bit is the best strategy. Speaking of which, if you haven't seen Fallout Season 1, it's going up on YouTube this week for the low price of completely free. Don't wait too long to watch it though, because it'll only be available until February 11.

Odds are solid that Fallout: New Vegas is your favourite Fallout. Hell, odds are good that it's your favourite game, period. It shouldn't be, though. I'm sorry to tell you that up until yesterday, Fallout: New Vegas has been unforgivably bad. The dirt-worst.

This is, of course, because up until yesterday New Vegas had absolutely no bespoke sneaking animation for its canine companion Rex. Unlike the game's human companions, whenever the player dropped into a crouchwalk while accompanied by Rex, the daft mutt would simply… remain standing, plodding along behind you like you were on a jolly in the park and not on a stealth mission of immense importance.

No longer. Thanks to a modder named Wombat, Rex's crippling leg-bone issues are a thing of the past. Once you've got Dog Sneak Animations installed, dropping into a crouch (so long as you're out of combat) will have your pooch friend join you, shuffling along the floor flat on his legs like he's sidling up to you to say sorry for eating the sofa cushions.

Spiritual leaders are calling it the thing that might finally unite humanity. It is, frankly, rather adorable, and a great entry in that list of mods that fix things you literally never thought about before, but that become essential as soon as you clap eyes on them.

"It's meant to look funny and cute," says its creator. The people agree that it does: "You just made one of the most soulless looking companions have an amazing personality. Why is this so peak?" asks an ostentatiously zoomer YouTube commenter. "This guy they call Wombat, he might just be the best to ever do it," writes a sage Nexus Mods user.

Wombat has form for these kinds of exquisitely-done animation mods. They've graced our pages before for their comprehensive overhaul for New Vegas' third-person movement animations (it's cooler than it sounds) and for turning power armour into the walking tank it's truly meant to be. They're a modder on a mission. That mission: make New Vegas' animations way cooler 15 years after it came out.

I'm currently maxing out the amount of Fallout I can squeeze into everyday life. With the ongoing second season of the TV show, a replay of Fallout: New Vegas, and the usual pitstops in Fallout 76, I see VATS every time I close my eyes.

But that's probably pretty common for fans right now, especially for those enjoying the second season so much they want nothing more than to experience it for themselves. And while New Vegas obviously has the most accurate in-game locations, Fallout 76 also has some excellent nods to the show with the latest Burning Springs update.

The Burning Springs update opened up a whole new area of the map, introducing players to the sandy wasteland of Ohio. There's the Rust King's domain, the odd, deteriorating traveller hub, and even some giant plastic dinosaurs. It's no surprise that the vibe shifts once you step across the border, as creative director Jon Rush has revealed a couple of times now how the area draws "its main influences from Fallout 3 and New Vegas."

You can see the influence when walking into areas like abandoned Athens or the Rust Kingdom, home to the Rust King and his violent followers. There's also Dino Peaks mini golf, which pays homage to Dinky the T.Rex, but feels more like Quarry Junction thanks to the multiple Deathclaws that will rise from the dirt and hunt you down when you get too close—I learned that one the hard way.

There's also the famous Red Rocket chain, as seen in the first season of the TV show and Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. But this time it's called The Chop Shop, as it's a former Red Rocket station which currently serves as a raider outpost.

But if you really want to get as close to the TV show as possible, then might I suggest wandering down to Highway Town so you can meet none other than Walton Goggins' The Ghoul. As it turns out, he's just killing some time in Ohio, dishing out bounty hunts to whoever wants to earn a couple extra caps—or whoever's just looking for an excuse to hunt someone down.

This is where I've been spending most of my time as of late, and I will say it's the perfect chaser after watching the latest Fallout season two episode. So if you're looking for an extra way to enjoy the Wasteland, Fallout 76 certainly has some great spots to check out.

When people call the modern Fallout games "first-person RPGs" a part of me dies. A significant chunk of the appeal of them, just like The Elder Scrolls, is the option to flick back and forth between first-person and third-person at the press of a button. When I'm in a cramped tunnel full of ghouls with an air-cooled automatic rifle and a depleting supply of .308 rounds, I want to be in claustrophobic first-person. When I'm jogging across the countryside in a duster, or swinging a golf club at Fiends coming from every direction, I want to be in open third-person.

Modders have tended to focus on first-person animations, both because it's the more popular view and the easiest to tweak. Which is why it's taken until now for modder Wombat to bless us with a full third-person animation overhaul for Fallout: New Vegas. And yes, it does cover NPCs as well.

Enhanced Animations – 3rd Person Movement is apparently the first in a series of planned Enhanced Animation mods. As Wombat explains, "It covers all general movement animations when standing, which include idle, walking, running, jumping, and landing animations, all with directional variants. There are also some extra animations for melee weapon and minigun attacks, a bit of [a] teaser of what's to come in the future."

It also includes some bug fixes for animation issues that weren't covered in the previous 3rd Person Animation Fixpack mod, which focused on things like fingers bending at unlikely angles, stutters at the end of animation loops, and the way characters slide along the ground for a moment if you stop moving while turning the camera in third-person.

While some of the tweaks in the Enhanced Animations mod are extremely specific, like the one that makes leaning back while holding a minigun look less back-breaking, the improvements for melee attacks and jumps made during movement should be much more noticeable.

To install this mod you'll first need to install the kNVSE Animation Plugin and the JIP LN NVSE Plugin, both of which you may well have already as they're basic prerequisites for multiple mods. Then you can go ahead and add Enhanced Animations – 3rd Person Movement, and you'll be ready to minigun airborne cazodors to your heart's content.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, prolific RPG developer Tim Cain broke down what his average daily schedule looked like while working on the original Fallout at Interplay Entertainment. Along the way, he reflected on the grueling pace of work he took on, and why it felt more acceptable in 1995.

Cain sets the composite average day in '95, about a year into development. This is distinct from the irregular preproduction work that came before, as well as the even more blistering, seven days a week schedule he kept during the game's final stretch in 1997.

Cain would wake up at 6:00 AM, take care of his cat, then reach the office by 7:00⁠—homemade loaf of bread in hand⁠, recipe helpfully under the video's top comment—to get an early start on coding tasks when there were no meetings to interrupt him. Cain would check in with members of the team at midmorning, excepting the ones who requested to be left alone.

Cain's lunch habits⁠—he would return home to make something each day⁠—touch on an economic reality that makes me wish I was born 20 years earlier. He was living paycheck to paycheck, and so largely avoided eating out… in order to pay off the mortgage he took on a house in Southern California. Not to take anything from Cain's fiscal discipline and hard work, but these days in the games industry, you're probably feeling the same squeeze sans property ownership.

One fun tidbit regarding that house: Fallout assistant producer Fred Hatch rented a room from Cain for much of the game's development. "I need a little extra money … and he needed a place. So it worked out great for both of us."

Cain would stay until 7:00 or 7:30 in the evening after lunch, coding for Fallout if he could, but more often getting called to meetings with other producers or departments at Interplay. He would eventually share much of this burden, including mandatory project reports, with Hatch. "I don't know who read them," said Cain. "I suspect sometimes they weren't read, because sometimes they had questions in them and the questions never got answered. But the reports got written."

"I often drove to work in the dark and drove home in the dark," Cain said of these 12+ hour work days. At night, he would eat, compile detailed notes on Fallout's progress and the day's events⁠—part of how he's able to make such comprehensive videos about this time in his life—then be in bed by 10:00 PM.

At this midpoint of Fallout's development, Cain also revealed that he would typically work eight hours on Saturdays, something he jokingly referred to as "Timmy Time." With minimal-to-no meetings or production demands to eat into his time, Cain would work on programming extra tools or features that his colleagues requested throughout the week: "I'll give you the feature if you give [me] content," he summarized.

Cain rarely found himself alone on Saturdays, with other Fallout devs or employees on other projects also coming into the Interplay offices. In one amusing example of extracurricular labor at the company, Cain recalled that some QA testers were staying late, but not collecting overtime⁠—they just wanted to play more Fallout. Cain took that as a sign they were onto something special, though apparently it gave one Interplay executive some California labor law-related conniptions.

"I know a lot of you are like, 'It's horrible, they're abusing you with crunch.' I wanted to do this," Cain said, arguing that "there's nothing more exciting" than seeing the hard work directly result in improvements to a game. "I hope some of you get to experience, at some point, making something that you love so much, that you devote time to it because you love it, not because you're being made to."

Cain seems to have no illusions about whether this sort of work schedule has a place in modern, industrial-scale development, however. "I'm glad things have changed, that was unsustainable," he said. "But it was also absolutely amazing."

Between the new season of the Fallout show, New Vegas' 15th birthday, Fallout 4's 10th anniversary, and our interview series celebrating all of the above (complete with print cover story!), I've been in a bit of a Fallout mood. I smashed through Fallout 3 in a week and change over Christmas, I'm getting asymptotically close to the end of a New Vegas run I started in November, and I've put a humiliating number of hours (28.2, according to Steam) into Fallout 4 in just the past five days.

My cold take: New Vegas is still my favorite entry in the series, including the 2D originals. My hot take: Fallout 4 is a vastly superior game to Fallout 3, and deserves more credit than it gets in RPG snob circles. The writing is much better than you remember, with more interesting quests and characters than Fallout 3⁠. The color, vibrancy, and general art direction look fresh even 10 years on. The gunplay is so much better and more satisfying than the prior 3D Fallouts, and the weapon customization is a genuine advancement over what you see in New Vegas.

That's not even getting to the settlement building stuff, which Fallout 4 generally has gotten its proper due for. It's been particularly illuminating to see the contrast between my subsistence powergamer auto turret and water purifier penal colonies versus my Animal Crossing and Stardew-loving fiancee's thoughtfully-planned communities.

Something that's made all the difference for me, though, and which may change how I approach Bethesda games (and other RPGs) in the future, is Survival Mode. Fallout 4's harder than hard setting borrows ideas from New Vegas' similar Hardcore Mode, but takes them even further. Here are some of the topline changes:

• Ammo has weight and adds to your encumbrance, you can carry less in general, and you take damage if overencumbered.
• You get hungry, thirsty, and tired, requiring you to see to those basic needs, while most drugs and medicine spike your thirst meter.
• Fast travel is completely disabled.
• There's a Survival-only system of diseases and parasites⁠—swimming and eating uncooked food are just two risk factors.
• Enemies no longer show up on your compass.
• Perhaps most punishing of all: You can only save your game by going to sleep at a bed. You get a temporary "exit save" on quitting the game, but that disappears once you load it.

Jesus Christ. It sounds tedious just writing it down for this story, and that isn't even all of the changes. Survival does throw you a few bones, though: You get double the experience from killing enemies, the increased frequency of legendary enemy spawns means more legendary items, and you generally do more damage thanks to an "adrenaline" bonus that increases the longer you go without sleeping. Still, the bottom line remains more friction, more challenge, more things to keep track of at any given moment.

Hardcore to the mega

A great paradox of RPGs is that they're almost always fantasies of cultivation, accumulation, and growth⁠—number go up⁠—and I've never played a single one whose challenges keep pace with that progress. The genre comes with a reverse difficulty curve, where the early game is the hardest part. I don't know if it's something that can be "solved" as much as "accommodated," since the power fantasy is a crucial draw.

But I often find the early parts of RPGs, particularly Bethesda and Bethesda-adjacent open worlders, to be the most memorable and exciting. The world still feels big and threatening, and I haven't yet fallen into the mechanical rut afforded by an OP build⁠—I'll encounter tough scrapes where I have to improvise my way out. Quests or expansions that take away most of your toys, like New Vegas' Dead Money, can recreate this feeling later in the game, but they can't consistently sustain it.

Survival Mode has extended that window in Fallout 4 in a way that's made me see the game in a whole new light. The Commonwealth feels bigger than it did when I first visited in 2015, even though I came back with a pretty good understanding of the map. I'm paying closer attention to everything, stopping at more locations, and taking it slower because the game forces me to be careful, lest I lose a ton of progress and have to repeat it again.

I spent the first 10 hours doing laps around Concord and Sanctuary, clearing out locations but also accumulating cash and purified water at my little survivalist outpost before even stopping in to say hi to Revolutionary War reenactor Preston Garvey and his dopey little friends. 30 hours and 28 levels into the game, travel still feels costly, random encounters may spell doom, and saving my game at a dirty sleeping bag in a ruined gas station can feel like an utter lifesaver.

Even with a full sneaky sniper guy build at mid to high level, typically the point where these games start going down too smooth, Fallout 4 still feels threatening and textured. It's less about sheer difficulty, and more how it engages me on multiple levels. Oblivion Remastered on Legendary is difficult, but it's not captivating in the same way⁠—guys just take a million hits to go down.

PCG senior editor Chris Livingston once spent five years playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion as a normal NPC. YouTube video maker Any Austin recently conducted a similar experiment with Cyberpunk 2077 over a 21-hour stream, roleplaying as a Night City waiter despite there not being any in-game mechanics to support it. His conclusion about the experience has really stuck with me: "If you want to get more out of something, put more into something."

As I've gotten older, my heart hardened and my imagination dimmed, I've struggled to really roleplay in RPGs like I used to. But years of playing FromSoftware games have inoculated me to the tedium and repetition I might experience getting instagibbed by a grenade, losing twenty minutes of progress, and having to start the hike from Sanctuary yet again. The iron discipline enforced by Survival Mode has made me invest more of myself into Fallout 4, and my experience has been richer for it.

Part of why I still feel so far away from finishing New Vegas is that I'm already an immortal badass cowboy sniper god zooming around the map and checking off quests, Hardcore or no. I clearly needed harder stuff like Fallout 4's Survival Mode⁠. Next time, I'm definitely grabbing New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer's sickos-only jsawyer mod. I want to check out Skyrim's survival deal later this year⁠—that one even adds hypothermia. There may be something wrong with me.