Great news: if you were gearing up to deliver a searing oration against something Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Pentiment director Josh Sawyer said a decade ago, he'd like to hear it too. In a recent chat with the Human Can Opener Podcast, the RPG vet discussed the ways that game developers all draw inspiration from one another, and how he's downright certain he doesn't have all the right answers when it comes to RPG design.

"We learn from each other," said Sawyer. "One of the writers on Disco [Elysium] wrote to me a little while after Disco came out and they were proposing a talk that was, in a way, a sort of updated response to a talk [I gave] in 2012 about narrative choice. From what I recall he was somewhat apologetic about, like, 'Hey, I'm gonna suggest this talk that's sort of—hey, we can do better than this now'."

Sawyer, of course, did not mind. "I'm like, 'I certainly hope, fuckin', 10 years we can do better!' I wrote that a long time ago and also I don't think I have all the answers on this stuff. I'm doing the best I can. If this is useful, hopefully it inspires other people."

After all, Sawyer does the same kind of critical appraisal to other devs' work. "I look at stuff and I go, 'Hey that's cool, but I have an idea how to make it better,' and then I do something and someone sees that and says 'Hey that's cool—or it's not cool—I have a way to make it better.' This is just gonna keep going on."

Sawyer points at branching dialogue as an example of an RPG tradition that feels very "locked" in terms of how RPG devs approach and structure it, but notes that, even there, "We still find new ways to do it, and other people after I'm gone are going to figure out other new ways to do it.

"We just keep inspiring each other. It's not an animosity thing. It's just, do the best you can, [and] get inspired by other people."

In a recent appearance on the Human Can Opener podcast, Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer talked about how the studio approached balance in Fallout: New Vegas, particularly with skill checks in dialogue and making sure different character builds got unique, cool reactivity throughout the game.

"Some people think I'm preoccupied with balance," said Sawyer. "I want people to build characters and have a good time with them. You have to think a little bit, but I don't like it when players have a character concept that they build, and it's like 'Oh, you just built a fundamentally bad character.'"

After Troika closed and before the likes of Owlcat, ZA/UM, and Larian really took off, Obsidian was practically peerless when it came to this sort of design in RPGs. Much love to BioWare, but it would typically just rely on a persuasion skill to win conversations and avoid fights.

Obsidian's always been great at letting you deploy odd skills in dialogue and the world, like recruiting a new sheriff for Primm with Science, Barter, or Speech in New Vegas. This also extends to combat: Sawyer cited New Vegas' removal of the Big Guns skill and divvying the relevant weapons into Guns, Energy Weapons, and Explosives as an example of design supporting build diversity.

"I don't want people to have to invest in the skill, and then [we] try to support it throughout the game," said Sawyer, referring to the steady flow of relevant big guns a separate Big Guns skill would have required. "Or worse, not support it throughout the game, which is kinda how Fallout 1 worked. If you tag Big Guns in Fallout 1, you're not gonna see a big gun until The Hub⁠—good luck!"

As for skill checks, Sawyer said that he endeavors to make sure a given RPG's skills are always "useful in a really meaningful and unique way." He argued that designers have to build trust with players in this regard—I flashed back to all the times I've sat before a character creation screen and wondered "Is this a game where persuasion matters at all? Will I be punished for wanting to be a sneaky rogue?"

Sawyer pointed to how former Obsidian designer Eric Fenstermaker, who built the starting town of Goodsprings, ensured New Vegas made a good first impression to build that trust. Sawyer didn't cite specific examples, but I thought of how, in the quest Ghost Town Gunfight, a player's Sneak, Explosives, Barter, Speech, and Medicine can all be used to influence how things play out.

"We just wanted to set up the player to believe, however you built your character, it's not gonna be the same experience, but we're not gonna let you down," said Sawyer. "We're not gonna leave you out to dry and not give you something to be excited about.'

The developer caveated that "it's not about perfect balance," and went on to describe one of the practical measures Obsidian takes to ensure each skill gets sufficient play throughout a game. "We have an informal job on the design team called 'Karma Police,'" said Sawyer. "At a few points during development, we'll ask a designer to go through all the scripts⁠—usually in dialogue, but also everywhere in the game⁠—and see 'How often is Guns being checked? How often is Charisma being checked? How often is Barter being checked?

"It's not about 'perfect.' Let's say there's 40 [checks] in Medicine, and there's like, 28 in Science. Great! Get in the ballpark. You don't want to go huge stretches of the game and be like, 'Man, I invested in this skill and it never comes up.'"

Sawyer also touched on one of the great tensions in designing videogame RPGs versus tabletop ones: This sort of reactivity and accommodation is something a game master can do on the fly, rather than having to anticipate player needs years in advance. He recalled a college friend who "bent over backwards" to work with one of Sawyer's RPG characters, an architecture specialist.

"I think that what good DMs and good game designers do is, in RPGs, they want you to feel like, 'Yeah man, I did a Survival run and I got all these cool interactions,'" Sawyer concluded. "We just want players to have that experience."

There's one thing all videogame adaptations in film and TV have in common: they stink. Or at least, that's how it felt for a long time—personally, I stopped adding the caveat 'good for a videogame adaptation' after I watched the Fallout show and learned these things didn't have to be somewhere between middling and godawful. But what do Fallout's designers and developers think of the show?

We know series co-creator Tim Cain loved it thanks to his YouTube channel, and more recently, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer said in an interview with The 41st Precinct that he enjoyed both seasons, watching them as they came out—and Sawyer specifically had some love for the show's interpretation of his game's factions and setting.

"I think it's an amazing adaptation, honestly," he said in the interview. "I know that the bar is not always very high for TV or film adaptations of videogames, but I think it's one of the best that I've seen, certainly." While there are things he might have done differently, he dismissed those as personal nitpicks: "Any writer is gonna look at something and be like 'meh, I don't know if I'd do that.'"

As far as the show's take on New Vegas itself is concerned, Sawyer said he loved Justin Theroux's take on the character and wasn't "too bent out of shape" about changes that were made to suit the script, like the Dinky the Dinosaur landmark being turned to face a different direction than it is in the game (that might sound like an extremely small detail if you haven't played New Vegas, but trust me, people have opinions on this stuff).

"I get why people get upset about that, but also the scene wouldn't work at all [if Dinky's orientation matched the game]," he laughed in the video. "Maybe people will say I'm a traitor to Fallout now, or something. But I don't know, I thought it was a good representation of a lot of the iconic stuff."

That lines up with what Sawyer has said in previous interviews, where he noted he thought of himself as "a guest" working on Fallout rather than someone who'd need a say in how it's represented in a TV show a decade and a half later.

Fallout: New Vegas is an incredible game, and its factions are its best part. The New California Republic (NCR), Caesar's Legion, and the Securitrons of Mr House are omnipresent in the Mojave, and there's barely an NPC in the game that doesn't shine light on some new aspect of each one.

So many of New Vegas' interactions add texture to its factions because, well, that was the whole point. In a recent appearance on The Examined Game podcast, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer said that one of his and his team's key goals for the game was "to make sure that the people in the factions felt like they were humans that were their own people.

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"When a faction feels monolithic," Sawyer continued, "Where every member of the faction is just like, 'I'm this guy, I believe in this thing, and this is the thing that everyone believes in.' One, nobody's like that, and two, it paints too simple of a picture for the player and their decision making."

Sawyer summons the NCR as a particular example of this design philosophy in action. "I think one of the things that people really wrestled with, with something like NCR, is that NCR is composed of a lot of different people, and some of those people are extremely virtuous and well-meaning, and some are well-meaning but bad-doing, and some are actually malicious and petty and they suck. That's a democracy, right? That's being in a republic."

I have to agree that this kind of texturing with the game's characters made New Vegas one of my favourite games of all time. My own personal favourite example? Canyon Runner, a Caesar's Legion slavedriver who is not, all told, anything more than a minor character. He encompasses a lot, though: for all his bragging about the Legion and his fidelity to it, he constantly, subconsciously slips up in ways that reveal he has not completely shed his previous tribal identity. Caesar's entire pitch—that he will remake the world from scratch by remoulding its inhabitants' identities into something singular and homogenous—is revealed as a total lie, all through some dialogue with a side-character.

"You have to wrestle with the fact that it contains multitudes," said Sawyer. "And then, Caesar's Legion, it's like, 'Well, there is an ideology here. And there is Caesar himself, who has a certain intellect that makes a certain amount of sense from a certain perspective, sort of. But then you have his rank and file, who are, for the most part, really repulsive and abhorrent in their beliefs and their outlook.

"I like it when factions and people are complicated and the player, over time, they have to keep thinking about—not just the people they're talking to, but also their place in it, because they're a participant, right? I think when role playing games are at their best, you feel like you are really at the center of these decisions and you can't control everything, but you can control a lot."

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer (UK) #287.

What stands out most about Knights of the Old Republic II is that it’s less a sequel than a deconstruction. At times, an assassination. Most licensed games, at least those that don’t just put familiar characters into a platform or kart racing game, are incredibly careful. They give us the accepted face of their licence, and maybe sprinkle on a few jokes and meta-references for the hardcore fans. They’re respectful. They don’t tread on any toes.

KotOR 2 goes for the throat. It’s a game about questions and about darkness, and designer Chris Avellone is particularly keen to peel back the more uncomfortable niceties of its universe, such as the convenient split between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the damage that leads to those labels.

Much of it is designed to invert the original game, as BioShock 2 did with its predecessor. KotOR was, by and large, set in the light side of the universe: a heroic quest, noble warriors fighting evil from a position of moral authority and righteousness.

There was a Dark Side path and moral choices, but it was clear what you were ‘supposed’ to do. Rise up. Become a Jedi Knight. Beat up the guy in black armour who wants to conquer the galaxy. It was the right story at the right time, the Star Wars experience everyone wanted. KotOR 2 uses the same engine and style for entirely different purposes.

For starters, it takes place primarily in the dark—among the poor and criminal-controlled corners of a galaxy still scarred and bleeding from both the Mandalorian Wars and a brutal Sith assault that has largely wiped out the Jedi Order.

The player character is no hero, but an outcast, the Exile, banished for making a difficult decision at the right time, who draws allies not by need or force of charisma but a subconscious Force Bond that binds them (much as the Mark of Torment drew suffering souls to The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment).

Fallen knights. Assassins. Gangsters. Bounty hunters. All of them primarily defined not by their potential, but by their pain. In KotOR we met spunky young Twi’lek Mission Vao and her bodyguard Zaalbar—a Wookiee who owes her a life-debt. KotOR 2 brings us a similar case with bounty hunter Mira and Hanhaar, the difference being that Hanhaar sees this, not unreasonably, as slavery. He’s also a sociopath, restrained only by that one scrap of culture.

Far from a cuddly teddy-bear looking to protect his human, he longs to free himself by killing her, ideally horribly, on the grounds that her death will free him. Yet at the same time, he’s too caught up in the concept to listen when she tries to tell him that he doesn’t owe her a damn thing and can just leave.

Easily the most successful of the team is the Exile’s mentor, Kreia, whose presence can best be described as like going on an adventure with your mother-in-law. Kreia can be mistaken for an assault on Star Wars’ simplistic morality, there for parables such as helping a beggar and then seeing him beaten up as a demonstration that even good acts can have deadly consequences.

That’s overly reductive. Firstly, her belief system is every bit as dogmatic as the Jedi/Sith code, only revolving around balance and self-reliance. Second... spoiler alert… she’s the villain. Like everyone else, her philosophy ultimately comes from pain – betrayal, exile. She’s not a character you’re necessarily meant to agree with, just one there to make you think.

For the most part, doing good deeds in KotOR 2 does result in good things happening. It’s just that the game also wants to explore how the road to Hell can be paved with good intentions, and how good people can fall without realising it. Jedi historian Atris, for instance, is too busy seeing the Dark Side in you to notice how quickly she herself fell.

By this point, you’ve probably noticed something – a lot of talk about story, not a whole lot about the game. Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. KotOR 2 suffered from one of the most premature launches of the last decade. Not only did it have just a 14-16 month development cycle, but LucasArts ended up dragging it back from 2005 to 2004. It showed.

A New Hope

Over the next few years, fans created the Sith Lords Restored Content mod – installed by default on the Steam version. Much of the missing content, including voice files, turned out to be there all the time, just disabled. This mod switches it back on.

As a result, the KotOR 2 we have now is a far superior game to the one that came out in 2004. The catch is that even at the time it was a clumsy RPG. That’s partly due to the graphics and controls, not helped by KotOR having been primarily designed for the Xbox (which, as we all remember, had a potato instead of a graphics card). It’s partly because of the combat, which was still rooted in the D&D style of BioWare’s past games: a massive clash between cinematic action, constant pausing and barely concealed dice-rolling.

Also, the rush to get the game out in a year didn’t leave much time for niceties. So much of the game feels like it’s taking place in a shoebox, albeit one found a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Great chunks of the game were pulled, much of what was left was rough as old boots made of sandpaper, and the final chapters were embarrassingly incomplete. Some levels were little more than linear corridors containing the same handful of enemies to fight. The already spartan design became downright minimalistic.

Most awkwardly of all, most of the Companion plots were simply unfinished. There’d be a scene on the last world where, for instance, two of the droids on the ship were having a showdown, and then… nothing. We never went back to finish that, the Exile instead having an atrocious final boss fight while being chased by flying lightsabers, in a scene that begged for the Benny Hill music, and then the whole planet exploding with an almost apologetic shrug.

It doesn’t help that by far the worst part comes at the start. The Exile wakes up on the abandoned Peragus station, which desperately wants to be a System Shock experience full of looming electronic horror, but is actually the dullest couple of hours this side of Myst.

Thankfully there’s a mod to skip it on subsequent playthroughs, but too much story is drip-fed here to do that the first time around. Later worlds improve on this, highlights including a two-part civil war on Onderon and a battle between rival bounty hunters on Nar Shaddaa. Still, few scenes have the raw zip of infiltrating Korriban’s Sith Academy back in the first game. You may return to the planet in this one, but like much of the galaxy, it’s in a bad state.

In short, as a raw game, KotOR 2 doesn’t hold up that well. It’s not awful, it sometimes shines, but even post-fixes, it wears both its era and its tortured development on its sleeve. If you’re going to try it now, especially for the first time, it really does have to be for two things: the writing and the characters. Kreia especially is one of the best game characters ever written, never mind in the Star Wars universe, and while the issues that Chris Avellone raises may have been covered in the Expanded Universe, they’re a breath of fresh air in a mainstream game. Even if it’s not quite an RPG classic, it’s very much a game to respect – and a great example of how flipping the perspective on a licence can be endlessly more interesting than playing things straight.

Obsidian Entertainment, developer of Fallout: New Vegas, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds, is being sued in a class action lawsuit that alleges it "engaged in a systematic pattern of wage and hour violations under the California Labor Code and Industrial Welfare Commission ('IWC') Wage Orders."

As reported by GamesRadar, the case has been ongoing since October last year, but it was raised to attention by Reddit user macken_zee on the r/pcgaming subreddit, following an amended class action complaint being filed in January.

The case and subsequent amendment were filed by plaintiff Victoria Turner, which matches the name of a QA lead on The Outer Worlds 2 who has also worked on games like Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The suit currently defines the class as anyone currently or formerly employed at Obsidian "as non-exempt employees in the State of California" from October 9, 2021 up to the date of the class certification, though Turner is also looking to certify class members who left employment at the company on or after October 9, 2022.

The complaint alleges that Obsidian "increased their profits by violating state wage and hour laws" by failing to "pay all wages (including minimum wages and overtime wages)" as well as wages "due upon separation of employment."

The suit also claims that Obsidian failed to pay wages due to the plaintiff and class members in a "timely" fashion during employment, and that it failed to "provide lawful meal periods or compensation in lieu thereof" and "lawful rest breaks." It further claims that Obsidian did not "reimburse necessary business-related costs" or provide "accurate itemised wage statements."

In a response filed in early March, Obsidian said that it "denies, generally and specifically, each and every allegation" made by the class action lawsuit. It then laid out 38 points in its defence, including that employees "consented to and/or acquiesced in the alleged conduct by Defendant of which Plaintiff now complains."

There's been little movement on the case since March.

Back in 2019, Obsidian senior designer Brian Hines told PCGamesN that "Obsidian is not a crunch studio, which is one of the things that keeps people staying there for a long time." Employees would occasionally be asked to put in additional hours "for a week or so", but this was "always a request" that developers were free to decline, he said.

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.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG designer Tim Cain outlined how he's seen the internet change games and game development, from the first message boards to the ubiquity of streaming content. As with everything, there are pluses and minuses, but he seemed deeply concerned with the state of commentary about and around games.

Charting overall progress, Cain describes a trend from possibility to restriction for developers, and open to closed-mindedness on the part of gamers. Absent a unified discourse, Cain thinks the 1980s allowed for a much more freeform environment for developers, one without calcified genres and largely free from the burden of consumer expectation.

Cain said that the late '90s was when he first noticed a shift in gaming tastes due to the internet, with the proliferation of message boards and guides supplanting an earlier DIY ethos where the only supplemental reading to be had was a game's manual and maybe a print magazine⁠—like PC Gamer, say. 32 years strong, baby.

The next seismic shift, according to Cain, was the rise of video content and influencers. With the former, Cain notes that the importance of clips and streamability has affected what gets made and how developers think: "What part of our game would make for good clips," as he put it. This has always been a struggle for me as a CRPG fan: Most of them make for sucky videos, thanks to the zoomed-out perspective and walls of text. No part of a CRPG makes for good clips, I'm sorry to say.

Much of the video was devoted to how Cain sees trends in videogame tastemaking. In particular, he argued that parasocial relationships and alignment with preferred influencers have supplanted informed, critical review for most gamers.

"Many gamers don't even look to influencers for reviews, they look to influencers to be told what to think about the games," said Cain. "People don't form opinions from the online video, they're handed an opinion from the online channel they're watching.

"I've seen reviews go from 'this game has less combat and more puzzles and dialogue for you to interact with than this other game,' to, 'This game is stupid and slow -paced and made for casuals, I think you should skip it.' That's a huge difference in how games are presented. They find someone they just like, and then that person's opinion becomes their opinion."

Cain allowed that an alignment of taste is actually a healthy, normal thing to look for in a reviewer: If you know you share preferences with someone, it makes sense to seek out their opinion when you're thinking of buying a game.

But as Cain notes, this balkanization goes beyond preference and fun into that generalized moralizing and hysteria you see around game design, the phenomenon of people having extremely strong opinions about games they will never play. "More people seem to be abdicating their own judgement to that of people they see online," said Cain. "I don't want to think about it, you tell me what I should think about it."

Cain didn't mention this, but I was reminded of how everyone cheers for or against the concurrent player metrics of games they don't play, but either enjoy or despise the vibes of. Cain argued that designers, in turn, can be incentivized to place an undue emphasis on how individual influencers might react to their work. "It's probably not a healthy way of designing a game," said Cain.

As for what's next, Cain said he has "no idea what the 2030s are going to be like." Will it be further entrenchment and siloing, or a conscious consumer reaction against the current moment? I know I'm hoping for the latter, while the former is almost guaranteed to happen.

But I think we can all agree on one thing: If you abdicate your judgement to anyone on the internet, make it the handsome, charming, and informed writers of PC Gamer. Our opinions can be your opinions, as long as you keep clicking on those links.

Regular readers of PC Gamer dot com slash author slash Joshua dash Wolens will know that, so far as I'm concerned, no videogames news is as exciting as "An old game is getting a patch for some reason." Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 hitting 2.7 out of nowhere? Ecstasy. Pillars of Eternity getting turn-based mode? Hold me up, I'm feeling faint.

Today's resurrection: The Outer Worlds 1. Specifically, its Spacer's Choice remaster edition, which got a relatively minor update today "to test our release pipeline and fix a few issues that are in the game," and will be getting a far more stonking one in the hopefully near future: "The second patch will be larger bringing performance fixes, lighting changes, a host of other quest and gameplay fixes, and bringing in a brand-new feature to the original game: grenades!"

Which is pretty cool, if you ask me, but it's all leading to something more ambivalent: the original version of The Outer Worlds is getting delisted from PC storefronts come May 27. If you already own that version, fret not: it won't disappear from your library. As an added bonus for original-version owners, they'll all get the Spacer's Choice edition free, just so long as it's in their library before May 27.

The Spacer's Choice edition was, you might remember, tarred and feathered when it first launched for being rammed full of bugs. Virtuos and Obsidian have chipped away at those bugs since those days, though, and when I played the game a couple of years ago I found it in a mostly serviceable state.

Still, I suspect it's still just claggy enough that the Microsoft/Obsidian overmind anticipated potential controversy if they just elevated it to being the default edition without doing any work at all, so I'm glad they pre-empted it by coming back to do more work and even bolting on a whole new weapon type.

I'd prefer if that work got done and the original was still available for purchase, just for archival reasons, but I suppose that's not the world we live in.

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."

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.

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.

As reported by The Toyark, Hasbro recently opened preorders for an Amazon-exclusive action figure two-pack in its primo Black Series line, one that revisits the all-timer Star Wars RPG and perennial PC Gamer favorite, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords. Unfortunately, the dang thing's already sold out.

Included in the pack is the Sith edgelord and cover art real estate hog Darth Nihilius. This nasty freak's killer character design has endured through the years, and he's memorable as something more like a Lovecraftian force of nature than a bad dude. Nihilius' metaphysical hunger was such that he'd kill entire planets just by touching down on them.

The figure looks great, with a mix of cloth and plastic elements, plus the creepy suggestion of a human face under his signature death's head mask, but Nihilius isn't the main event here. This is, to my knowledge, the first official action figure we've ever gotten of Kreia, a.k.a. Darth Traya, Kotor 2's true antagonist and beloved Objectivist grandma.

Burned first by the Jedi, then the Sith, Kreia equally loathes the pious dogma of the former and Chaotic Stupid autocannibalism of the latter. She sees in KotOR 2's Jedi Exile protagonist both a tool of revenge and discipline against those who wronged her, as well as a philosophical synthesis for the Force, a way forward that is neither Jedi nor Sith.

Before her 11th hour betrayal (Darth Traya, get it?), Kreia's also a companion in the game. She's super mean, lectures you all the time, pits your companions against each other, lies to them, lies to you, just generally wreaks havoc aboard your ship, the Ebon Hawk. She's a gaslight gatekeep girlboss of the highest order, the Black Lodge inverse of Avatar's cuddly Uncle Iroh, and perfect in every way.

It's a great sculpt on the figure, really capturing Kreia's sneering contempt of whatever she happens to be looking at, and I love that she comes with three lightsabers and clear plastic stands to make them "float"—Kreia fights with telekinetic floating sabers in your final duel. I was surprised that they gave her both hands⁠—one is cut off very early into KotOR 2⁠—but maybe her right hand is easily removed on the figure?

If you too would like a little action figure of an old crone in a black robe with three lightsabers and her creepy goth nephew, well, too bad. It looks like Amazon has already sold out on preorders. But hope springs eternal⁠—if there's enough interest, Hasbro could always make more. Good things do happen in this fallen world sometimes.

Pillars of Eternity turned 11 years old last month, but Obsidian just put out a transformative update for the venerable CRPG: A full turn-based mode alongside the game's original real-time with pause (RTWP) mechanics. The mode had previously been available via a Steam beta branch since last November.

There's a whole list of patch notes for the update, but we're sort of "gonzo" here at PC Gamer. We do things by the gut. I loaded into an old save right before the fight with Lord Raedric to feel things out⁠—this early optional boss is the proverbial deep end for testing out new mechanics. My verdict? I loved it, and this is definitely how I want to do my next playthrough.

Pillars' turn-based mode is generous with your movement, but stingy with actions: You only get to do one thing per turn⁠—no action point manipulation or D&D Extra Attack. It sounds limiting, but it makes every decision important. Pillars 1's new implementation has a big advancement over the one in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, though: You can take multiple turns in one round.

In Deadfire, it works the old fashioned way: Initiative affects the order your characters and the enemies act in a round, with each character going once. Transitioning from RTWP, this punished certain builds while uplifting others. Ciphers, who attack with weapons to build up magic juice and cast spells, were inherently disadvantaged compared to Wizards, who can just whip out their best nukes from round one.

Since everybody has the same number of actions, heavy armor is king⁠. In RTWP, you act faster in light armor and with lighter weapons via a "recovery" mechanic⁠—basically a cooldown on every action⁠—but that wasn't translated into turn-based.

In Pillars 1's new turn-based mode, recovery is brought back to the fore: Better recovery translates both into acting before your enemies, as well as getting to take extra turns after they go. Ciphers get a lifeline, since they can now attack and cast in the same round, while light armor with low recovery now feels even more powerful than in RTWP. Hard crowd control like stuns or charms were already critical in Pillars, but now they strike me as even more important to success.

The fight with Raedric definitely felt easier to me than in RTWP, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing: Pillars is a difficult, complicated CRPG with a cavernous skill ceiling. Turn-based is weirdly how I'd recommend both a total greenhorn and a returning veteran play: The former for a gentler onboarding, and the latter for something fresh.

My only concern now is that Deadfire's older turn-based mode might feel like a downgrade coming from the new hotness. But I'll just slap on some full plate and put my beloved Cipher class on the shelf once the time comes. Hey, Deadfire's own 10-year anniversary is coming up in 2028, maybe it can get its own fresh coat of paint then.

I, for one, embrace the turn-based epoch. Pillars' own lead designer, Josh Sawyer, explained his thoughts on the rise and fall of RTWP to me in an interview at last year's Game Developers Conference. More recently, Star Wars Zero Company designer James Brawley defended RTWP even though he specializes in making turn-based games⁠—he thinks innovative designers will help its star rise again, just like they already have with turn-based combat.

I love Neverwinter Nights. I would count myself among the top 100, maybe even top 50 fans in the world of this joint BioWare-Obsidian, Forgotten Realms and D&D-based CRPG series. While not super obscure⁠—we're not talking Brigand: Oaxaca or The Sum: Nous Aurons⁠—NwN 1 and 2 aren't RPG A-listers. They're not sexy. They don't sit at the cool kids table with Baldur's Gate 3 and Disco Elysium.

Neverwinter Nights 2's first expansion is a quiet all-timer, a realheads know CRPG with a surprisingly mature take on the Forgotten Realms and a uniquely haunting atmosphere⁠—it's like the Heat to Planescape: Torment's Manhunter. A big part of MotB's unforgettable atmosphere is its music, a particularly underrated aspect of this already-underrated RPG.

The track above, "Death God's Vault," is killer on its own, but one of the scenes it accompanies still floors me all these years later. I think the dialogue writing and Fred Tatasciore's (Saren in Mass Effect, among many other roles) delivery lands even if you don't know what the hell's going on.

When PCG senior editor Wes Fenlon told me he'd be speaking to its composer, Alexander Brandon, who's much better known for the techno Y2K banger OSTs of Deus Ex and Unreal, I begged him to deliver a question from me on behalf of all CRPG goblins.

Unfortunately, the best I could come up with was, "Hey, remember Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer?" But even this elicited some in-depth recollections from Brandon. And I'd never clocked before that MotB's soundtrack was a collaboration between Brandon and another all-time great videogame composer.

Dark turn

"Alpha Protocol was in development, and, at the time, Obsidian's model was one and a half projects or two and a half projects [at a time]," Brandon told Wes. "It was like, we have a full-on game in development with either a DLC add-on pack or the start of another full-on project."

Brandon was full-time audio director at Obsidian at the end of the 2000s, and his credits with the studio include MotB, Neverwinter Nights 2's other expansion, Storm of Zehir, and the killer spy RPG, Alpha Protocol.

He fondly recalled the Obsidian team at the time, including one of his hires, Scott Lawlor, who is now audio lead on Overwatch. Brandon had strong praise for MotB creative lead George Ziets, who is credited with the expansion's singular story⁠—Ziets founded his own studio, Digimancy Entertainment, in 2019.

I hadn't realized until now that Brandon also worked on the soundtrack with Womb Music, the prolific audio duo of Rik Schaffer and Margaret Tang who, among many other projects, were behind the performance direction and unforgettable soundtrack of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. The range on display here is particularly impressive to me: VtMB's dreamy '90s grunge is about as far removed from MotB's atmospheric dark fantasy as the synthy beats of Unreal and Deus Ex.

Womb Music was already contracted for MotB's soundtrack before Brandon was hired in-house at Obsidian, but he described a fruitful collaboration with Schaffer on the music.

"If you're gonna audio direct a project, and you're a composer, you selfishly write some tracks yourself," said Brandon. "And I was just like, 'I would like to do this.' And I did. So there was the track from the original Neverwinter Nights 2 which was done by [Heavy Melody Music]. We took that, we took the theme that Rik Schaffer originally wrote, and then I added to that for what ended up in the game."

Base game NwN2 mostly reused the first game's soundtrack, but it also had a few new tracks provided by David Fraser and Neil Goldberg of Heavy Melody. The main theme is great in its own right: Mysterious, yet stirringly epic. Schaffer and Brandon's spin on it for the DLC is a darker, more foreboding reprise that turns frantic and propulsive. It really sets the mood: "This ain't your daddy's Neverwinter Nights 2."

"Rik did not say, 'Oh, you ruined my track,' which is great," recalled Brandon. "And the [Heavy Melody] people didn't care. I wrote another couple of themes that I really liked, like Mulsantir, one of the central cities."

Those were the magic words for me: Mulsantir's theme might be my favorite in the whole soundtrack. This small city is an entrepôt for The Forgotten Realms' distant Rashemen (where Minsc from Baldur's Gate hails from), and Mulsantir is a distinctive place, full of tension and contradiction.

It's both cosmopolitan and reclusive. Urbane merchants rub shoulders with masked witches, and the city boasts a theater, a berserker lodge, a temple for the god of death, and a second, secret temple for the dead god of death. Mulsantir is a welcome reminder of civilization after MotB's creepy dungeon crawl intro, weirdly cozy yet also deeply sinister.

That's a tough tangle of vibes to get across in a single, looping, ambient audio track, yet Brandon nailed it. The Mulsantir theme is comforting and nostalgic, with a touch of sophistication, but it also has this dark undercurrent. It sounds mournful and defeated to me, reflecting the town's grim history, and the opening notes in particular speak to Mulsantir's mysteries and secrets.

"I was like, Okay, what is a quintessential sounding, D&D medieval-ish thing? I know that the styles have gone in many different directions," recalled Brandon. "Baldur's Gate does its own thing. But [MotB] was fun. It was great working in a fairly antiquated BioWare tool and the story was really fun.

"Man, like that weird thing that just attaches to your back and whips its tentacles out. It had some really neat ideas that set sort of a darker D&D mood. And I enjoyed that."

Hey, so did I, man.

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.

Steam kicked off its Spring sale today and as usual, so much of my wishlist is on sale that I'm paralysed by choice. I probably won't buy anything. But I do know for certain that if I didn't already own Fallout: New Vegas I'd definitely be buying that, because it's going for a measly 99 cents.

Just under a buck is an extraordinary price for the very best Bethesda RPG that Bethesda didn't actually make (Obsidian made it). Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 both have their charms, but neither are as simultaneously funny and disturbing as New Vegas, and neither offer choices as consequential. Sure, it has loads of freaking cazadors, but you learn to cope.

I poured at least a hundred hours into this beast back in the day, on a PlayStation 3 no less, which was hugely prone to crashes and save file corruptions. It was basically broken, but I loved the goddamned thing anyway, especially in hardcore mode, which felt truly immersive in that pre-Day Z world.

If you do get it (and you should), PC Gamer contributor Dominic Tarason has this brilliant step-by-step guide on how to make Fallout New Vegas feel like a modern game. New Vegas mods are abundant, and there's probably even one to get rid of cazadors. But I also don't think you really need to do anything with New Vegas to have a load of fun with it: I installed it on my Steam Deck last year and it runs brilliantly.

New Vegas has had a bit of a moment lately thanks to the second season of the Fallout TV show, which saw its carriers visiting the Strip. And yes, the show's New Vegas plotline inevitably got Fallout fans arguing about the canon.

If you want all the New Vegas DLC bundled in, the ultimate edition is going for a fiver. If you want to play the other modern 3D Fallout games, they're all heavily discounted in the Steam sale as well.

In a talk at the Game Developers Conference, Obsidian senior systems designer Robert Donovan spoke about dialing in the difficulty of The Outer Worlds 2⁠—a great game you ought to play⁠⁠—but one I found to have a particularly noticable reverse difficulty curve.

Instead of the challenges ramping up as you get more familiar with the game, RPGs tend to start out hard and get easier. They're fantasies of growth and accumulation⁠—number go up⁠—which runs counter to a game getting harder as it goes on, and I don't think I've ever played one where the challenges keep up with how strong you get.

The Dreadlord of the Doomkeep is just never as tough to beat as a level one goblin with an iron dagger that can kill you in one hit. It's not just a TOW2 problem⁠—you can see it in Fallout, Baldur's Gate 3, even talkies like Disco Elysium.

It shouldn't be surprising that people who make RPGs for a living are thinking about this even harder than we are as players. Donovan's talk focused on how he approached hit points and damage while making The Outer Worlds 2, and how that translated into difficulty.

"My game director, Brandon Adler, said that we wanted to maintain the feeling of Emerald Veil throughout the entire Outer Worlds 2 game," said Donovan. Emerald Veil was the opening area of the first Outer Worlds, and the team thought it stuck the landing in terms of difficulty and balance. "Weak things are weak, and strong things are strong," as Donovan put it.

When first designing The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian mapped tiers of enemy health and damage directly onto a curve pulled from Emerald Veil, with an initial target of a more "flat" character progression: Instead of having your guy be exponentially more powerful at level 30, like they might be in D&D, you'd be twice as strong numerically.

But that "crushed" progression just didn't feel good. "When you play the game and you pick your upgrades, getting a 1.5% upgrade didn't feel meaningful to the player," said Donovan. "We wanted the choices to hit harder than some other competitors in the genre, and so what we wanted was something like a 10% boost so as soon as you hit that level, as soon as you pick that skill, you felt it immediately." And this really did translate to the final game: One of my favorite parts of TOW2 is its allowance of varied, weird, and overpowered builds.

Testers consistently found TOW2 too easy, eventually leading Donovan to a "hits to kill" system for determining enemy strength: Hit points can be so abstracted as to be meaningless, so Obsidian instead focused on making sure the number of shots it took to kill an enemy with a set weapon on Normal difficulty made sense and felt fair.

"Virtually every player is going to play the game on Normal," said Donovan. "There are some real sickos out there that want to start on Very Hard, but unfortunately, there are not very many. So we knew that getting normal right was our priority one.

"Each of our difficulties, from Story to Hard and Very Hard has some straight multipliers on top of the balance that we had already done. It would be nice to have a more robust difficulty set of options, a suite of cool stuff: More enemies, fewer enemies. But ultimately, we felt like if we got the balance right, we could just multiply it up and down and succeed at our goals."

Not an unreasonable strategy by any means: Doom designer John Romero has said that he personally tested every level he made on Ultra Violence, the second-highest difficulty of five. One thing that struck me was the diversity of players Obsidian had to account for: There are going to be story-focused or less hardcore players who could bounce off TOW2 if it demanded too much optimization from them. On the flip side, what about the buildcrafting freaks?

"We thought if we got it right for the intended player, then it would be close with players who really didn't want to engage with the systems, or for players who were super engaged with the systems," said Donovan. "It turns out, players who are super engaged with the systems are absolutely going to blow your balance out of the water as soon as possible.

"And again, there's not much you can do about that without hurting the game for everybody else. You've got to let the super optimizers run wild and hope that they crank up the difficulty on their next playthrough."

In one playtest, equal percentages of respondents found the game too hard, too easy, and just right. "No matter what we changed, somebody was going to get mad," said Donovan. "But at least we were close. It felt like we were close."

That division seemed to hold for post-launch reviewers: Donovan quoted reviews that found TOW2 tediously difficult, way too easy, and even just right. Personally, I came down somewhere between the last two: It started out just right on Normal, but by the end of the game I was cranking things up and still finding it a bit too smooth.

"We found that the final boss and that sort of capstone to the whole game, the big climactic finale, was just a little bit too easy, so we put our thumb on the scale and we made it harder," recalled Donovan. "Arguably, we didn't make it hard enough, but that's probably a talk for another time."

I wasn't able to find out either way in my review playthrough: In classic Obsidian fashion, I was able to talk the final boss into killing himself, one of the hallmarks of a Good RPG™. So maybe the real difficulty curve was the friends we made along the way⁠—TOW2 still turned out a great game, with my main mechanical complaint being something it shares with the best of the best.

"Perhaps we did not quite nail that fun in the end, but someone on Reddit said they were having a great time," Donovan quipped. "I guess we're gonna call it a W."

One of many good ideas Obsidian had for Fallout: New Vegas that tragically had to be cut for time was that you'd be able to keep playing after the ending slideshow, sidequesting across a version of the Mojave Wasteland that reflected your decisions in the main campaign. And while modders restored a version of that vision a while back, now we've got a closer look at what Obsidian originally planned.

The recently leaked beta full of cut content is the source for this, and as the video above shows it's mostly additional dialogue relating to which ending you chose. If you sided with the Legion, Caesar's forces take over the Strip and merchants like Lupe the water vendor close shop and leave while Easy Pete waits on his porch to give those gosh dang Legionaries "a face full of dynamite for their trouble." If you help the NCR win at Hoover Dam, your companion Cass is pleased you delivered the Legion "a royal asskicking". "I ain't looking forward to the taxes, though," says a prospector.

Meanwhile, if you pursue independence for New Vegas, the King declares it "a new golden age," while the Brotherhood of Steel takes over the Helios One power plant and your supportive pal Yes Man stops being quite so obsequious. Finally, putting Mr House in charge results in him letting you keep your apartment at the Lucky 38 while Lily the nightkin tells you she's "so proud of her little angel."

These lines are being restored thanks to the Post-Game Dialogue Restored mod, a work in progress that you'll also need to have the Functional Post Game Ending mod installed to make use of.

Pepperidge Farm remembers: It usually takes about five years for everyone to decide an Obsidian Entertainment game was actually really good. In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, it seems to have only required exactly 12 months for Avowed, last year's action-RPG spinoff to Pillars of Eternity, to get such a reappraisal.

It's still the same, great game. I loaded into Avowed to check out its big anniversary update, and found the changes closer to Cyberpunk 2077 1.5 than Cyberpunk 2077 2.0: A lot of little niceties, extras, and quality of life changes, but nothing transformative. That's okay in my book⁠—Avowed didn't need to be transformed⁠—but this game has had a bizarre, uneven reception.

A Bloomberg interview with director Carrie Patel shortly after launch implied that it was hitting sales targets, while a more recent Bloomberg piece on Obsidian characterized it as a slight underperformer. Avowed reviewed well: PCG Australian editor Shaun Prescott gave it an 82%, and Metacritic has it at a flat 80. But Avowed was the victim of one of those weird, ambient hate cycles we see now⁠—more halfhearted than with Star Wars: Outlaws or Assassin's Creed Shadows, but there.

A quick YouTube search pulls up hour-long, well-watched videos from close to launch with titles like "Avowed - Obsidian's Broken Promise" or "The Deserved Disaster of Avowed." Things were rough on X, "The Everything App," in the lead up to and immediate aftermath of release.

I have a crystalized memory looking at the comments on Avowed's character creator reveal (never look at the comments) and seeing users freaking out that it had a "body type" selection instead of "gender," then saying some pretty nasty stuff about trans people.

As far as I can tell, there were three main types of aggrieved commenter: The aforementioned gender warriors, people who didn't understand you needed to upgrade your weapons, and people who wanted it to be Obsidian's Skyrim instead of a more Mass Effect or Witcher 2-adjacent RPG, just in first person.

But that seems to have all died down, and the people who got the most mad about it have probably moved on to Highguard or something. I've even seen a few "I hated this game in 2025, it's fine now" vids and comments, even though nothing substantive has changed.

You're just allowed to like Avowed now, similar to how the narrative around Cyberpunk 2077 changed in 2022 with its first major content updates and the Edgerunners anime, even though it was fundamentally the same game as at launch.

If you haven't tried Avowed, the real game changer is that it's 50 bucks now, not $70. $50 should be the normal price for a new, big game⁠—I'm drawing on the gut here, not the fake science of economics; see also how a graphics card should cost $300. My conspiracy brain would like to blame Game Pass for why Avowed had to launch at $70 and The Outer Worlds 2 was almost sent out to die with an $80 price tag.

I'm committed to a full replay at this point, I think, and it really is the perfect time to buy Avowed if it passed you by last February: It costs what it should, and nobody's posting about it being part of a war on the family or white race anymore.

It's been exactly a year since Avowed released, and Obsidian has continued to support it with new classes, new skills, and better optimization. To coincide with the new PS5 edition, Avowed just got its biggest update yet, adding New Game Plus, three new playable races, and a new weapon class.

Character creation will now let you select Dwarves, Orlans and Aumauans, which is a big step up from the choice between a human or Elf. To refresh your memory, the Orlans are those furry cat-eared creatures, with the most memorable in Avowed being innuendo-happy Yatzli. Companion Kai was an Aumauan: they're big and lanky half-fish half-human beings. All races have different starting attributes too, which compliment new background choice stat boosts. It's starting to feel more like an RPG.

If you're halfway through a playthrough and feel annoyed that you didn't get the chance to start as an Orlan—and I can't blame you—there's a new Magic Mirror you can access at camp to change your race or godlike features, ie, those weird fungus growths that mark you as a godlike.

New Game Plus is what you'd expect: it lets you restart with all the weapons and armor you acquired in an initial playthrough, as well as all unlocked abilities with the exception of godlike ones. Enemies are more durable and powerful, and the player's attribute points cap has raised from 15 to 30.

There's also a new photo mode, and new difficulty sliders, lest those dreamthralls get the better of you. A new quarterstaff weapon class has been added, which is "a new bludgeoning weapon that comes complete with wand style stun finishers"

The full patch notes—and they're long—are on the Obsidian website.

In a new video from The Outer Worlds director and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, he talks us through tone in videogames. Tone is a tough thing to nail down. It's easy to feel, but hard to describe and harder still to execute well. Cain points to The Outer Worlds and its strict adherence to only portraying a particular type of discrimination as an example of why its tone felt off to a lot of players.

"One thing we did have as a rule was, we didn't want discrimination that was racial or gender[-based], like misogyny, or any kind of other discrimination except discrimination based on societal class, and then you could tell all your discrimination stories through that lens," Cain says. In its attempt to make its message and tone clear, it seems The Outer Worlds may have oversimplified to the point of causing confusion.

"That made the tone of the game feel off to many people because they were like, 'I think what they're talking about is a discrimination thing,'" Cain says. "But it was always, 'I don't like you because you're a janitor and not a doctor,' or something along those lines."

It does feel a bit naive to try to explore class in a vacuum, even in a game where you go to space. Being exploited by our capitalist economy sucks for everyone getting thrown into the meat grinder, but women get called dramatic while men get pain killers even though they've all had their limbs chewed up by the machine.

Cain concludes, "it's really hard to define and quantify tone," and different department heads are often at odds with each other, too. Cain says an artist might want a weapon locked to a specific class because it suits the visual identity, but a game designer then has to think about loot tables and if other players will be disappointed they can't use the shiny toy. Someone has to step in and make a decision: preserve the tone, or not?

The Outer Worlds and its sequel are very clearly anticapitalist in their messaging, but as our own Online Editor Fraser Brown writes of The Outer Worlds 2's "toothless satire of capitalism," "Obsidian has absolutely nothing to say about the ideologies that push the game forward, beyond just pointing at them and saying 'Look, isn't this awful?', which, you know, duh."

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.

I'm gonna show you two clips of walking in videogames: The first is from The Outer Worlds 2, and the second is Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

Here's The Outer Worlds 2…

…and here's KCD2.

You seeing what I'm seeing? The difference is small, but the effect is huge. In The Outer Worlds 2, which I finally got around to playing this week after hearing great things, I don't feel like a real person while moving around. I feel like a camera, perfectly hovering in place and magically stabilized as I plop one foot in front of the other. It's as if Adam Jensen installed gimbals in his eyeballs.

I'm talking about headbob: the subtle camera movement of first-person games that mimics the body's natural bob as it walks or runs. Headbob is so established and omnipresent in first-person games that it's rare we have an occasion to acknowledge it. When headbob comes up, it's usually because a game has too much of it.

The Outer Worlds 2 has no headbob. Zero, unless you're sprinting. Your neck is totally detached from the motion of your body, and it's driving me up the wall. It's distracting, ugly, and comes off as a totally unforced error. I didn't realize just how necessary head jostling is to believe I'm looking through a person's eyes, especially in an RPG.

It's not like The Outer Worlds 2 is the only first-person game to ever go bob-less, but it might be the only modern RPG of its kind to do so. I had to check to make sure: Fallout 4 has a little headbob, as does Skyrim. Cyberpunk 2077's bob is very noticeable, even a little too jerky while sprinting. Both Kingdom Comes have it, of course. The only other bob-less first-person RPG I can recall is, well, Obsidian's other 2025 game, Avowed.

So why has Obsidian taken this extremely minor, yet personally offensive stance on first-person cameras? I doubt it's purely an accessibility concern—it's not uncommon for headbob to trigger motion sickness, but that's why thoughtful studios provide an option to turn headbob off. To leave it out completely tells me Obsidian's steadicam is a stylistic preference.

Maybe the thinking is that The Outer Worlds 2 is an FPS, so no bob makes aiming a little easier and more consistent. That's the reason many competitive shooters (like Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six) have no camera bob, but it's not unheard of for even those developers to decide a tiny bit of headbob helps their FPS more than it hurts it.

My favorite example is Overwatch: Blizzard uses headbob sparingly to give heroes a unique gait. As demonstrated by the YouTube channel New Frame Plus, hulking tanks like Reinhardt and Orisa have a small camera jerk between steps. Heroes that are meant to feel lighter than air, like Mercy, have no bob at all. Junkrat has the slightest, barely perceptible camera bounce every other step to accentuate his peg leg. Isn't that cool?

The Outer Worlds 2 does have some bob, but it's always separate from your still head. Your hands sway up and down while you're holding weapons—part of some generally excellent animation work I've seen so far. If Obsidian made traditional shooters where your guns were always glued to your hip, I think that arms-only sway would be fine.

But I don't like to wave guns in the faces of random townspeople while I'm playing an otherwise immersive RPG, so when I'm not using them, they're holstered. As soon as my screen goes blank in The Outer Worlds 2 (which is a majority of my time so far), the spell is broken. I'm comfortable calling that a failure of the game in this instance—I could just keep my gun out all the time, but then I'm trading one annoyance for a bigger one. You let me holster my stuff, Obsidian, not me!

The lesson I'm taking away from this experience is that headbob is even more important and load-bearing than I realized. I never appreciate it while it's there, but I sure do miss it when it's gone.

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.

Obsidian released three major games in 2025, at a time when most major studios—especially those owned by Microsoft—struggle to ship one. Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were big tentpole first-person RPGs of a kind the industry used to dine out on, while Grounded 2—an early access survival crafting game set in a miniature world, co-developed in two years with Eidos Montreal—was ostensibly the more niche affair.

Nevertheless, it was Grounded 2 that proved a big hit, whereas Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 both failed to meet the sales forecasts set by Microsoft, according to a new Bloomberg report.

"They’re [Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2] not disasters," Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart told Bloomberg. "I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’"

The disappointing results—and the success of Grounded 2—have led Obsidian to "think a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take." Urquhart wants Obsidian to make games in three to four year cycles.

"We don’t need to change everything every time," he said. "We’ve had this debate internally: Do people really care that we spent an extra hundred person-months on the inventory screen?"

Avowed was clearly a pain point for Obisidan. In development for seven years, it started as an online-focused hybrid of Destiny and The Elder Scrolls before the project was scaled back. "My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’" Obsidian director Josh Sawyer said of the initial scope.

Nevertheless, it looks like Avowed, and the Pillars of Eternity universe it belongs to, has a future. Obsidian will keep making games in the Avowed universe, while also working on "completely new games" and expansions for The Outer Worlds 2 and Grounded 2. As for a third Outer Worlds game, the studio isn't working on one.

While two of Obsidian's three 2025 RPGs failed to meet Microsoft's targets, all were critical successes. Ted Litchfield thought The Outer Worlds 2 "surpassed its predecessor", while Fraser called Grounded 2 "one of the best survival games I've ever played". I called Avowed "an engrossing and gorgeous action-RPG set in one of the most engaging fantasy worlds around".

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.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain is now out of retirement—sort of. After five years of remote consultancy work for Obsidian and some other unknown companies, Cain is now back in California working full-time for the Outer Worlds studio. In his latest YouTube video, he breaks down how those years went, how he feels about being back in an office compared to working remotely, and shares some insights all freelancers can relate to.

Between June 2020 and December 2025, Cain was in what he called semi-retirement. He was still working on games as a consultant, but as a freelance, remote contractor. After moving to Seattle, he couldn't stay at Obsidian full time as it wasn't prepared to have out-of-state employees.

He says that working on different games and with different teams was "so much fun," but "when you're a contractor you're constantly looking for the next thing." I freelanced for two years, and I never managed to escape that overwhelming feeling that I needed to find more work, so I completely understand why he went back to California and Obsidian.

"I'm not in charge of a project, I'm not a director," Cain says. "You can think of it as more of a consultant. It's like what I was doing in semi-retirement but exclusive, just for Obsidian, and a lot deeper." Now, rather than just working on one part of a game or on one project for a fixed amount of time, he can really get into the weeds with people, and he's much happier working this way.

"Remote work isn't all sunshine and lollipops, and it doesn't work for everybody. It just doesn't," he says when talking about why he's glad to be back in a physical office. "If you think it does and you argue it does, I either think you don't know all the data or you just want to stay remote for your own personal reasons, and you're trying to turn it into a professional reason."

What seems to be the best part of working alongside other developers for Cain is the fruitful conversations he can have. "Just in the last seven weeks, I've had so many interesting conversations with artists, level designers, narrative designers, system mechanics guys, and even one person who primarily does audio stuff," he says. "These conversations would never have happened over a video call. How do I know? Because they never happened over video calls."

It does seem that part of why these conversations never happened over video calls is because he was a contractor, rather than purely because he was remote. He says previously, people worried about how many hours were left on his contract, so they may be put off asking him for help on a problem, but now devs can just message him on Slack, or he can pop into their office.

There are also other perks to being in an office, like bagel day. "Uncle Tim doesn't need to eat a bagel every morning, but dang, Uncle Tim likes a bagel once a week," he says. When you've got someone with as much experience as Cain, he can even help people with their game problems while queuing up for baked goods, so it's easy to see why he prefers in-person work.

"I love this. I love it," Cain says. "It's what fits me well for this stage of my career. And I'd like to think I'm helping out a lot of people in their stages of their careers. That's what unretirement is like for this guy."

The first major content update for the backyard survival sim Grounded 2 went live today with a new Garden Patch biome, new creatures (friendly and otherwise), and "the mysterious Tang effect," the result of an experiment gone wrong at Ominent Practical Technologies that's corrupting the soil, water, and unsuspecting creatures alike.

Toxic Tangle adds a new vine-choked Garden biome, "ripe for exploration, stacked with vertical climbs, secret stashes, and probably a bug or two you didn’t see coming." And of course danger, as Obsidian warned players to "bring your best gear—and maybe a backup plan."

New creatures include black ants, fireflies, wasps, rust and potato beetles, earwigs, crickets, wooly aphids, "and something much bigger"—the Snake Colossus, I presume? There's also a sweet new mount, the Ladybug Buggy, "a heavy-duty, tank-style mount equipped with a pressurized water cannon" that can blast enemies and rinse away Tang. The Ladybug Buggy also has a powerful charge and slowly regenerates health over time.

Mutations have been divided into actives and passives, and the builder toolkit has been expanded with new kits. The Garden MIX.R and O.R.C. wave challenges are also now live.

"Alongside this update, we’re preparing for the return of Playgrounds Mode, entering PTB (Public Test Beta) in February with all the core tools from the first Grounded," Obsidian wrote. "Whether you’re building mini-games, boss arenas, or custom gauntlets, Playgrounds will give creators the tools they need to thrive."

The Toxic Tangle update is live now—check out the full patch notes below.

New Features

Ladybug Buggy

• Eliminate your opponent with its anti-air cannon and be sure to clean the sky from any foes you meet along the way. With it, clean the Tang buildup you come across or decrease the Tang building on other friendlies....or enemies. Be sure to refill your reservoir at water sources around the park to never run out of ammo.
• It's the most tanky and robust buggy yet, capable of healing itself and it has a slight resistance to the new tang effect spread across the Garden. Even with a cannon strapped to it's back that isn't its only mean of attack as the ladybug can unleash a powerful ramming maneuver that will knock your opponent out.

Tang

• Ominent's latest experiments with sour resources have unsurprisingly... gone out of control, and now the garden is tainted with sour spills and caustic lakes. 

Masked Stranger Boss fight

• The Masked Stranger may have withdrawn from your first conflict with her; however she is far from defeated. Be on your toes as you could expect to see her again in the Garden and she may not be alone.

Snake Colossus

• The unstoppable slithering serpent slinks savagely throughout the Croquet Court near the outside wall of the Garden. Prepare to meet our largest colossus yet! 

New sap bandage

• Now an easy way to heal your buggy!

Passive vs Active Mutations

• Mutations are now split between active and passive. Active mutations will work like normal and still need to be equipped and swapped based on your situation. Passive mutations currently work with your weapon set and will be applied automatically when you switch equipment. There will be more passive mutations coming throughout development.

New Content

Garden Questline

• New Landmarks
• Anthills
• Labs
• Ranger outposts

New resources

• Gloom Shroom
• Cactus Flower
• Fertilizer
• Keylime
• Pumpkin
• Potato
• Carrot
• Corn Dog
• Pretzel
• Chrysalis Hide
• Returning resources: Lint, Gunpowder Clump, Wood Splinter, Rust, Pinecone Piece, Spiky Bur, Sturdy Marble and Quartzite

New Creatures

• Cricket
• Pincher Earwig
• Whipper Earwig
• Woolly Aphid
• Rust Beetle
• Potato Beetle
• Wasp
• Wasp Drone

Armor

• Cricket Cap
• Cricket Vest
• Cricket Shin Guards
• Earwig Kasa
• Earwig Cuirass
• Earwig Greaves
• Serpent Hood
• Serpent Mail
• Serpent Boots
• Rusty Boots
• Rusty Robes
• Rusty Circlet
• Potato Beetle Helmet
• Potato Beetle Chestplate
• Potato Beetle Shin Guards
• Wasp Greaves
• Wasp Breastplate
• Wasp Helm

Weapons

• Cricket Lute Bow
• Earwig Sword
• Caustic Ruin
• Sour Banger
• Sour Katanga
• Hearty Arrow
• Great Mint Arrow
• Great Spicy Arrow
• Great Venom Arrow
• Boom Stick (unique weapon)
• Discord (unique weapon)
• Crimson Reapers (unique weapon)
• Wither Sting (unique weapon)

Trinkets

• Pincer Pincher Trinket
• Fabulous Femur Trinket

Founder’s Pack Update

• High Roller's Dice Bag
• Champion's Brazier
• Champion's Banner
• Adventurer's Table
• Throne of P'wn
• Minotaur Mount

New Buildings

• Ponic Patch
• Ladybug Nest
• Floor hatches
• Snake roof Kit
• Pumpkin Kit
• Mushroom Kit (reskin)
• Thatch Awning Kit
• Acorn Stairs Kit update

New Garden ORC Waves & MIX.R

Mutations

• Hauling Hero (returning)
• Bardic Inspiration (revamp)
• Sour Sensation (revamp)
• Whittle Wizard (revamp)

General Changes:

• Artbook has been updated with new Toxic Tangle content
• New main menu art has been added

Balance Changes:

• Fabulous Femur:
  • Trigger chance reduced from 20% -> 7%
  • Crit buff reduced from 50% -> 25%
  • Buff duration reduced from 5 -> 3 seconds
• Pinchwhacker
  • Base Damage reduced from 33 -> 30
  • Stun was reduced from 7 → 6
• Volatile Capacitor Shock Damage reduced from 15 → 10
• Shellshocker Shield Shock Damage reduced from 45 -> 30.

Returning Content & Features

Creatures armors, weapons

• Firefly
• Black Soldier Ant
• Black Worker Ant

Armors

• Firefly Head Lamp
• Black Ant Legplates
• Black Ant Arm Guards
• Black Ant Helmet
• Black Ant Shield

Weapons

• Black Ant Sword
• Rusty Spear

Crafting Station

• Glue masher, (updated & new recipes)

Community Requested & QOL Features

• Made sure the order of items and bestiary were consistent
• Updated the pebblet path and curved pebblet path cost to 3 pebblets
• Create more space between players and their buggies for a more fluid experience
• Added coordinates in the map menu
• Upgraded weapons now keep their hotpouch assignment
• Jerky rack and roasting spit interfaces updated and now allow for proximity chests
• Unique weapons can now be crafted via the workbench
• Glowsticks glow brighter and longer
• Drawn arrows can be cancelled

Holiday updates

Valentine's

• Chocolate smoochies (returning)
• Smoochies Chunks (returning)
• Valentine’s Fortune (returning)
• Cupid’s arrow (returning)
• Great Cupid’s arrow (new)

Bug Fixes

• Seasonal decorations can remain in your base past their respective holiday months without resulting in a crash.
• Corrected the player’s jump speed and distance while jumping (from a sprint) on player-built structures.
• Fixed various Out of the World gaps in the terrain.
• Any fix that changes the “Map” in any way has a chance to move geometry (your base) as an after result.
• Milkweed pods in front of the Snackbar no longer fall through the terrain.
• Corrected an issue that allowed Dandelion Tufts to be triggered while standing on a surface’s edge.
• The Hauling Hero mutation only works while on foot (not available while riding buggies).
• Fixed a bug where the camera lens could not be repositioned when in freecam mode.
• Fixed an issue where players would not have control of their character for a few seconds after loading their game.
• Agatha Brief’s press badge no longer appears with a distorted holographic texture.
• SFX from the Fireworks Launcher can now be heard from farther distances.
• Adjusted the placement of some early-game resources to ensure players can easily reach them.
• Fixed an issue where a client could take over the host’s buggy if players both whistled at the same time.
• Corrected an issue that could result in players instantly dying when knocked off their Orb Weaver Buggy.
• Using the Omni-Tool to chop down resources while standing on a player-built structure is easier / requires less specific positioning.
• Creatures move more intuitively around fallen crow feathers.
• Weapons thrown at AXL no longer fall through the terrain after inflicting damage.
• Mosquitoes no longer fall asleep while midair.
• Corrected an issue where the player inflicted more damage via status effects on higher difficulties.
• SFX associated with the Masked Stranger’s calls will no longer persist in the pause menu (if the player pauses the game mid-call).
• O.R.C. creatures no longer appear without wearing their O.R.C. receivers.
• Corrected an issue that would automatically repair damaged gear after loading a save file while playing on Mild difficulty.
• Resource Finder tooltips now change the buttons or keys displayed if the player swaps between keyboard and controller while it’s on‑screen.
• Staff attacks no longer home in on creatures that are actively underground.
• When the game auto-saves while the player is midair, the save file will now accurately list the player’s location.
• Splatburst explosions have an area of effect more accurate to their final location (before exploding) when thrown in interiors.
• Fixed an issue where the player wasn’t able to unlock Gold Cards while on a buggy.
• Sturdy Marble and Spicy Candy no longer overlap each other in anthills.
• Corrected an issue where a player’s buggy could remain infinitely downed (without actually being knocked out) when certain save/load conditions were met.
• Players should no longer load into the world before their location is fully loaded.
• Included slime as a listed resource the Snail can drop in its creature card description.
• The Snail should no longer stretch and warp in surreal and horrific ways when observed from a far distance.
• Fixed an issue where the Wolf Spider and Praying Mantis Nymph would not respawn in the Pine Hill region.
• Corrected an issue where the Loot Luck: Caterpillar and Loot Luck: Garden Snail buffs did not specifically boost item drop rates for those creatures.
• Opening a treasure chest with a full inventory will no longer cause the loot inside the chest to disappear.
• Fixed an issue where gnats could fall through the terrain if killed above specific puddles.
• Attacking sacks of accumulated resources will not cause them to disappear.
• Spears thrown at a downward angle in first-person view now follow a trajectory more accurate to the reticle.
• Mosquitoes are more accurate when using their 3‑hit combo.
• If attacked by a player standing on their back, ladybugs will prioritize bucking the attacking player off.
• Fixed an issue where building UI elements would get unintentionally discolored during Masked Stranger calls.
• Fixed an issue where the player was able to throw certain items through walls (often resulting in them becoming inaccessible).
• Savvy players can no longer avoid triggering O.R.C. waves by refusing to build spike traps; the O.R.C. waves will now find an opportune time to strike.
• Crow Feather Pieces burst out of chopped crow feathers in a less violent and more easily collected way.

Public Test Fixes

• Resolved an issue where the Grass Side Table would disappear when updating to the Winter Update.
• Addressed a problem where the Sour Seed would disappear for clients.
• Corrected an issue where the Sour Seed would vanish after a Save/Load.
• Resolved an issue where the scanner that starts the fight with the Mysterious Stranger would not appear after a Save/Load.
• Fixed an issue where the player could not easily obtain an unassigned buggy in the nest.
• Adjusted Handy Gnat movement so it properly maps to player movement controls.
• Cleaned up various art placeholders still left in the PTB build.
• Cleaned up miscellaneous placeholder strings around the PTB.
• Addressed multiple issues preventing players from placing blueprints or building.
• Corrected an issue where rotten potatoes required two Sour Bombs to explode.
• Addressed an issue where Raw Science was not spawning on saves made in 0.2.2.5.
• Resolved a problem where the ORC raid notification prevented the player from sleeping.
• Eliminated a crash caused by PEEP.R tracking more than one item; PEEP.RR was moved back to 4 on all platforms.
• Corrected an issue where the SCAB.2k Scanner was visible to clients in multiplayer, allowing the multiplayer team to trigger the Mysterious Stranger fight early.
• Fixed a situation where Passive Mutations became stuck and could not be unequipped, including cases where they remained equipped across multiple loadouts.
• Prevented the Sour Seed from being lost after saving and loading.
• Restored ability to use Large Pallets.
• Adjusted armor upgrade behavior so Bulky and Sleek paths no longer shared identical stats during path switching.
• Updated Sour Staff behavior so projectiles matched intended length and reliably connected with targets.
• Ensured that recipes unlocked properly when analyzing the correct resources.
• Addressed a crash that occurred when Alt‑tabbing on PC.
• Resolved a foliage‑related crash that could occur under certain conditions.
• If you’ve lost the Sour Seed, it will respawn after you’ve slept.
• Bur Weed now respawns properly for players.
• Scorpion animation optimizations.
• Players should now no longer get thrown out of the world when getting off and on your buggies.
• Fixed a crash relating to the BUILD.M menu.

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.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer dug into how he thinks about difficulty when making a game⁠. Ultimately, he sees it as less a question of setting immutable challenges for players to overcome, and more anticipating what they want out of the experience and responding to that.

"Do you have any insights into, or thoughts about exposing extremely granular difficulty options to players?" asked viewer agroggybog. They went on to explain that they were an avid modder, digging into the guts of games like Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire to tweak the progression curves of player stats⁠—which is about as granular a difficulty modifier as you can get.

They further asked for Sawyer's thoughts on the cost/benefit analysis of letting players get so far into the weeds "officially," or at least baking in the modding freedom to do so.

"If it cost nothing⁠—which it does not⁠—then I would say let players in-game set their difficulty options however they like," said Sawyer. "And when it comes to exposing data tables and letting players mod that stuff, let 'em do whatever the heck they want."

The nature of this question has changed over the course of his career, though⁠—he pointed to Black Isle and early Obsidian RPGs like Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Fallout: New Vegas as games that easily allow for this level difficulty customization through modding. According to Sawyer, it's "more difficult to expose those things, especially on a data level" these days.

In terms of offering such "micro-difficulty" options in-game, he characterized it as a relatively deprioritized aspect of making a game, given the challenges and limited resources characteristic to game development. "I'm not saying this is the way it should be," said Sawyer. "I'm saying this is the way that it typically goes in game development."

But when working on difficulty settings in RPGs, broad or granular, Sawyer has gravitated toward designing for types of player, rather than level of difficulty. "I don't think, 'This is an easy player, this is a hard player.' I think you have players that come to the games for different reasons," Sawyer said. "It's more about 'What are they trying to get out of this game?'" To that end, he broke down RPG enjoyers (and thus Obsidian's target audience) into three broad categories:

• Explorer: People with jobs, or "here for a good time, not a hard time" according to Sawyer. "Likely time-limited and involved for a story that they enjoy, and they don't want to redo things."
• Adventurer: The Joe Sixpack median RPG player who "wants a little more friction, wants a little more challenge," but they probably don't know what THAC0 is and understandably don't care to find out.
• Survivalist: Real sick puppies, the ones who complete Pillars of Eternity's "The Ultimate Challenge" or relax by playing Fallout 4 on Survival. Sawyer notes that, while they may appreciate aesthetics and story, they want games that are "immersive and simulative in the mechanics."

Only three types may seem reductive, but it really does cover the sorts of RPG players I've met and been. Me and my friends all used to be adventurers, but now I'm a survivalist and those friends are lawyers and scientists (explorers, if they play at all).

One thing Sawyer said that got me thinking was that "Survivalists aren't necessarily interested in Pentiment," an amusing assessment of the combat-free mystery adventure. On a second glance, though, its complex network of choices and consequences could be an example of immersive or simulative mechanics⁠—it's certainly an aspect of design that guys on RPG Codex like to argue and get mad about, which is survivalist-coded.

Towards the end of the video, Sawyer echoes some of the ideas he shared in an interview with us at last year's GDC: Starting with complex, difficult mechanics and features, but being able to collapse them into simpler, easier modes of play based on player preference. One example he gave in the video was bullet drop, the kind you see in Call of Duty or Battlefield. In an RPG, that's survivalist red meat, but possibly annoying for an explorer or adventurer. Sawyer's solution? Giving players the option to turn it off entirely.

"In the end, giving more granular difficulty options is a very good thing," Sawyer concluded. "I think we should prioritize it more⁠—I think I should prioritize it more."

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.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is, you may have heard, the 40th best videogame you can play right now. Ask certain incredibly cool members of the PC Gamer team and they might even tell you it's actually higher than that. But it's also not a super difficult game—it's fairly easy to assemble a party that can make mincemeat of any foe they happen across.

Would it have done better if, instead of its more general backer beta that focused on player response to the game as a whole, it had adopted a Baldur's Gate 3-style early access period, where an early portion of the game was released and used to aggressively fine-tune balance in particular? Its director, Josh Sawyer, doesn't think so.

"I still think we would have had the same issues," said Sawyer in response to a question from a fan. "A lot of the issues were evident because they got magnified over the course of the game—the later you get in the game, the more the balance gets out of wack, just because there are more numbers inputting into the system."

After all, BG3's balance wasn't perfect. "This is not a slam against BG3, but just sort of recognition: at launch, a lot of people really did not speak fondly of how the third act of BG3 was balanced.

"That's probably because a ton of people saw the beginning of the game—the early game—and then the midgame got a lot of testing. And, as is very common in game development, something slipped through the cracks, and they later addressed it." That is to say, even with its long time in the balance oven, even BG3 still had its issues when it hit, because it's a mortal game made by mortal hands.

"It kind of has less to do with the backer beta and more to do [with]: once you get your feedback from the backer beta, where are you gonna spend your time to make sure it has the maximum impact? And that's really more of a 'director priority, production reality' concern."

Sawyer points at another game as a point of comparison: Obsidian's own Grounded. "Not that there's no story in Grounded, but it's very light compared to a game like Deadfire," says Sawyer, "in terms of density of dialogue and things like choice and consequence and quests that can play out in different ways and things like that."

In other words, it's a "very gameplay-focused game," which means there's a narrow area for devs to focus on when it comes to player feedback. Where Deadfire (or BG3's) early days saw players critique everything from balance to story to dialogue to voice acting to anything else you can name that'd be part of a big, sweeping RPG, the devs of Grounded "could really just focus on those core things.

"That isn't to say that it's easier, but it's just easier to make the focus be entirely that for a backer beta."

In other words, no, a more BG3-style early access wouldn't have dramatically improved Deadfire. Hey, you ask me? There's nothing to improve.

Have you ever sat down and counted how many different types of quests there are in an RPG? We often hear how many total quests are in a game—Skyrim has 273—but how much variety is there really? Fallout co-creator Tim Cain explains the nine core types of missions you can be given, and, to my surprise, kill and murder are two separate categories.

If you just want to know the nine kinds of quest, then here they are: murder, kill, the infamous fetch quest, collect, delivery, the often maligned escort quest, talk, puzzle, and timed. Murder involves dispatching of a "particular person or set of people," whereas a kill quest will involve killing a certain amount of generic enemies, like five alligators, Cain explains.

We all know what a fetch quest is—go here, get this item. A collect quest is different in the same way a kill quest is—gather a set amount of an item, like 20 nirnroot. A delivery quest is what Sam does in Death Stranding—you receive an item and take it to a destination or person. An escort quest is similar, only you need to deliver a person instead of an item, so they're often trickier. All of The Last of Us can be considered one long escort quest.

One that sounds obvious when Cain mentions it but I didn't think of myself is the talk quest. These typically involve you having to convince an NPC of something, like telling V's downstairs neighbour in Cyberpunk 2077 to open up and chat to his buddies on the force. Then there's the puzzle quest, where you've got to turn stone pillars or slot gems into holes or aim mirrors a certain way.

And finally, there are timed quests, which a lot of people absolutely despise. Cain says these are "frequently modifiers on all the existing" quests, where you're given one in-game day to kill those five pesky alligators, but they can be standalone, too, if you just have a specific amount of time to get to a quest receiver.

Cain explains that the more of these quests you have in an RPG, the more player agency there typically is. In the original Fallout, for example, you have to save a woman called Tandi from a band of raiders. You can either kill all the raiders, fight the boss in unarmed combat, buy Tandi, or convince the boss you're the ghost of his father and convince him to release her peacefully. So, a kill, murder, fetch, and talk solution, respectively.

There is a downside to having lots of quest types, though. "If your budget is fixed, which is 99.999999 percent of budgets, more of one thing means less of another," Cain says. "If you want all these quest types in your game and you wanna support them all, with all the additional design, code, and art needs that are gonna come with them, and QA and debugging needs, you're probably gonna have less of something else."

So, next time you wonder why a game has a bunch of bugs, be grateful for all the quest variety. Or, if there are very few types of quest, marvel at how few bugs there are. Hopefully that's the way it goes rather than you getting the worst of both worlds: bugs and a lack of variety.

What are your New Years' resolutions? Well, scrap them (you were gonna anyway, let's face it)—because your new one is to play Disco Elysium if you haven't already. Ranking highest on our top 100 list for years, until Baldur's Gate 3 came along, this all-timer RPG is currently around $3 on Fanatical.

That's because it's part of the Best of Platinum Collection on Fanatical, which is a real doozy. In case you're not familiar with how these deal bundles work, you can get three to four games for $3.33 a pop, five to nine games for $3 each, or over 10 games for $2.90—basically, your minimum spend is at least $10, but you are getting some solid value for some excellent games (prices in GBP are the same, which isn't how conversion rates work, Fanatical). The list includes:

• Fallout 76, which I hear is actually pretty good nowadays
• Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition, which is worth it by virtue of being Fallout: New Vegas
• Fallout 3, which I'm blood-pact obligated to tell you is inferior to New Vegas, but still worth playing
• Disco Elysium, a game PC Gamer absolutely loves to bits, myself included
• DOOM (2016), a real solid FPS by any metric
• Robocop: Rogue City, which caused our very own Andy Chalk to admit he was wrong about a videogame
• Four entire Steamworld games, a bundle within a bundle!

These are just the heavy hitters included in the deal, but if you want to flesh out your library on the cheap, you can't go wrong with the games on offer. We're talking two all-timer RPGs bare minimum and, best of all, these are all Steam keys, so you don't have to do the scary thing of installing a different client.

The bundle ends in just under 19 days from the time of writing—or January 31—but it is, unfortunately, a 'while stocks last' situation. Fanatical only has a limited number of keys, so if you've got a tenner to fork out for some classics it's worth doing so now. At the very least for a game that raised our expectations of what an RPG can do.

I don't know when the first argument about a videogame was had, but something tells me it was before the first videogame was finished. Still, things seem to have gotten much worse in recent years, and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain took to his YouTube channel Friday to discuss the issue of "arguing about games" at length.

"People have always had different tastes and they wanted different things," Cain said in the video. "I think each one of you, individually, knows what you want. Where things break down is, you don't seem to realize or recognize that there's a lot of other people out there and they all want different things. And this isn't just gamers, developers do this too."

Cain acknowledged there's no right way to make a game; disagreements over how to properly optimize a game, what features do and don't belong, and so on all come up during the dev cycle and years after a game has released. An example he gives in the video is RPG romance.

Whether you loved or hated how horny Baldur's Gate 3 was, it's clear that romanceable party companions are as popular as they are polarizing—and Cain said he's been pressured to include them even though they aren't to his taste.

He also pointed out bad-faith critique. For instance, no one wants a game to crash, but Cain said some players are quick to lambast the developer and the game's fans when bugs give them trouble: "'Obviously, it was made by a stupid developer who's stupid,'" goes Cain's G-rated impression of an angry internet comment.

Cain blames the modern intensity of online arguments on an industry that's grown quickly, leading to a glut of contradictory tastes, and consequently, games developed in accordance to contradictory feedback. "All the different gamers out there, the huge variety of gamers, they want different things. A lot of the arguing I see online is gamers arguing past each other."

Even worse, consolidation has funneled much of the money and attention into games that need to make a huge return on investment and appeal to as many players as possible. "There's a possibility to make a lot more money," Cain explained. "Used to be, we were excited if a game sold 10,000 units. Then a 100,000, then a million. Now we want 10 million or 100 million.

"This generation of more money has caused a lot of consolidation of the games industry into fewer and fewer companies that can publish. They wanna make more money … that changes the nature of how games are decided to be made."

As a result, publishers are trying to bag increasingly broad audiences full of people that, as Cain said, may have fundamentally different priorities. When they butt heads online, "you should acknowledge [other viewpoints] exist, but you don't because you either don't want to or it would wreck your argument."

Cain said this anger goes every which way, including at developers like him. "Not all gamers," he qualifies his sentiments in the video. "A lot of gamers though. Or I should say, loud gamers. I don't think I ever go anywhere that has a forum group where developers aren't being called stupid and/or lazy and/or greedy."

The video continues with Cain's ideas about the effects of all this online vitriol. He posits that game developers leave the work as a result, that gamers are pulled more toward the indie game scene and away from anything that reeks of the industry—a decision he thinks is "awesome"—and that the arguing is used to make a quick buck. Considering the way the attention economy has reshaped the internet, it's easy to see what he means.

"People make money off getting eyeballs and clicks, and so people out there have a monetary reason to keep the arguing going," he said in the video.

As for what to do about all this, Cain ends the video with a suggestion that gamers vote with their wallets rather than argue with other players on social media⁠—he didn't mention it, but the sales success of Assassin's Creed: Shadows relative to the right wing social media campaign against it certainly springs to mind here.

While huge triple-A games won't be moved by an isolated customer's decision, Cain reckons it's "the only way forward through this I can see, and I hope you do it."

There's a type of myth that survives not because there's any evidence for it, but because it flatters the preconceptions of a particular group of people. Take the notion that Todd Howard, head honcho over at Bethesda Game Studios, clearly seethes with resentment about how much Obsidian knocked Fallout: New Vegas out of the park. Is there evidence for this? Nope—quite the opposite, actually—but it endures because it jibes with the worldview of certain Fallout fans who see Bethesda as perverting the series.

Regardless, here's one more bit of evidence for the 'Howard doesn't hate Obsidian' pile: in a chat with Game Informer (via GamesRadar), Howard said that, when it came to a non-Bethesda studio making a Fallout game, it was Obsidian or bust.

"They were the only choice," said Howard. "They had done something similar with Knights of the Old Republic 2, and we knew them really well." In 2004, Obsidian put out Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2—a follow-up to BioWare's KOTOR 1 that more than a few people (myself included) came to regard as their favourite of the two games, and that despite the fact Obsidian had barely over a year to make the whole thing.

So Bethesda knew Obsidian had form for doing great work in other people's series, which was just why Howard wanted to nab the studio for New Vegas. After all, the alternative was Fallout lying fallow: "We knew we were going onto Skyrim, the franchise was back, but we knew there was going to be a long break until Fallout 4—how can we keep this going?"

You give it to Obsidian, of course, both because of all the factors already listed and because the studio had "Fallout DNA," in the words of New Vegas' lead creative designer John Gonzalez. "There were people who had worked on the original title, and then also the second game," who were able to create "a very Obsidian-focused experience" that was "all about allowing the player to have tremendous amounts of narrative impact, narrative control."

It really paid off quite well. New Vegas is a classic, having sold over 11 million copies by 2015 and, as a result, no doubt made quite a bit of money for Bethesda itself. If I were Howard, then not only would I not resent Obsidian for Fallout: New Vegas, I'd be trying to get it to make me another one.

One of the most beloved NPCs in Fallout's history is a pile of bones in the sand. The story of the Survivalist, Randall Clark, is not the biggest nor the flashiest told in the Fallout series, but it's remembered as one of the most moving and tragic. It maybe also doesn't hurt that getting to know this guy post-mortem can get you kitted out with his sick armor and custom rifle⁠—Bethesda even made a limited run of statues of the character.

Scattered throughout New Vegas' Honest Hearts expansion, Clark's journals are an autobiographical account of the bombs falling and his experiences (and eventual death) in the world that followed. It includes the loss of his family, his adventures as a solo survivalist, and run-ins with various others, like a group of children that he becomes caretaker for in his old age, unwittingly laying the groundwork for a new tribal culture you meet in the present day, the Sorrows.

For New Vegas lead writer John Gonzalez, it was one of the only things he wrote for the RPG's lauded series of DLCs before leaving Obsidian in March 2011 to work on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. As he recently told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield, he regards it among the best stuff he's written, period. "It's one of my favorite bits of content that I've written in a game," he said.

New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer assigned the character to him with a rough outline: "This was somebody who was trained, had military training, and so was able to survive in these arduous circumstances," Gonzalez recalled. "I don't remember if the brief had more than that. It may have. I think that, as I recall, I sort of worked out the story as I went."

Holotapes and journal entries are the rare opportunity in the dialog-heavy, choice-driven RPG genre "to write something in prose," Gonzalez said. While characters like Yes Man were created specifically to account for the player, the story of Randall Clark could be told in a vacuum, where nothing the player did could affect the outcome. "It was an opportunity to, at a small scale, do traditional storytelling," he said.

"I just found it to be a very affecting, kind of tragic story," Gonzalez said. "It hits certain notes of adventure that are entertaining and fun, but the underlying guilt that he carries, and the loss of his family, and the attempts to start again, and how that goes wrong, and then this very sad but very beautiful ending of his life.

"I don't know where that stuff came from exactly, any more than any other writer really knows exactly where stuff comes."

Since the DLC's release, Gonzalez said he's "read over the stuff four or five times" and thinks to himself, "'Okay, yeah, that didn't suck. That was good.'

"I remember⁠—it's like you discover this as you're writing it⁠—but the moment there's this elderly couple that saw the explosion, and so they're blinded, and he shoots them through the head simultaneously," Gonzalez recalled.

"It's a very calculated act. It's a practical act, but he actually does it in a way that is intended to not have anyone experience shock or horror or loss, so that they die simultaneously, which also, in some way, echoes the loss that he's had⁠," said Gonzalez. "He's trying to spare a couple the loss that he's experiencing, knowing that his family has just been killed. God, you're going to get me emotional if I talk about it."

You can read more insights from Gonzalez, as well as all sorts of other Fallout-related stories, in the latest issue of PC Gamer's print magazine.

There are no squeaky-clean factions in Fallout: New Vegas. Caesar's Legion is outright authoritarian and psychopathic, Mr. House's ruthlessness and egomania make him hard to trust, and while the New California Republic is comparatively easier to live with, it's far from heroic.

As lead writer John Gonzalez told PC Gamer in an interview with associate editor Ted Litchfield, that's all by design: "I remember when we were just kicking off the project, [New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer] coming into a conference room and saying, 'Okay, so we're not doing any good or evil, black and white stuff. We're doing everything in shades of gray. It's going to be moral ambiguity and complexity.'"

But another mandate from Sawyer required that the player also have utmost agency: "The player has to be able to get through this game killing everyone they meet the moment they meet them, and also killing absolutely nothing at all," Gonzalez recalled. That's where Yes Man came in.

If you haven't played New Vegas, Yes Man is a robot sporting a goofy grin and an inability to decline any command or truly be disposed of. If the player kills him, he simply transfers to another metal body elsewhere. Yes Man was designed as the perfect consigliere to assist in a takeover of New Vegas, outmaneuvering all the other factions, and the player can take over his original owner's plan without missing a beat.

Gonzalez explained he was created to give the player an out if they managed to make enemies of the entire wasteland: "What if the player just torches every single [faction]? What if you kill House, you blow up the NCR on the strip, you assassinate Caesar? What the eff is going to happen? I was cogitating on that, and I had this thought: Well, what if you just had a main quest giver who you effectively couldn't kill?"

Fortuitously, the idea made for a pretty entertaining character, as well. "It is this sycophant who engages in the ultimate unhealthy relationship with you," Gonzalez said. "You blow it apart, and it comes back and says, 'I'm so sorry. It was me, not you.' Of course, [voice actor] Dave Foley milked that for all it was worth, he was a great choice."

It also gave the player a viable critical path through the game should they off everyone else. It makes New Vegas admirably reactive where other RPGs are not. Games like Morrowind and Oblivion, for example, mark certain NPCs as essential—in the former, killing an essential NPC "dooms" a save, rendering the main quest impossible to finish, and in the latter, essential NPCs can't be killed at all. Fallout 3 and every Fallout game after New Vegas make extensive use of unkillable essential NPCs.

Gonzalez has come to believe that the narrative consequence of the Yes Man approach is that the player is never forced through some of New Vegas' hard choices. He reckons that, by considering the choice between Caesar's Legion and the NCR, players come to understand both better.

"[The NCR] immediately read as, Oh, they're familiar. I understand who they are. They're kind of a nation state. They're kind of like the United States. They must be the good guys," explained Gonzalez. "But of course this is 2006 when we're writing this. And the United States is embroiled in Iraq and the NCR is embroiled in the Mojave wasteland, basically doing a land grab and there's a lot of corruption.

"Maybe you would look at that and you go, 'Well, they're corrupt, but they're better than the other options.' And then you've got Caesar, and he's just terrifying, but he also seems like, 'Well, okay, maybe it's this environment? Maybe that's why it's like this?' … When he's talking about the NCR, there are some moments where you're like, huh, okay, that's interesting. His argument that the NCR was never actually a republic, but was actually a kind of ancestral dynasty. Okay, that's interesting."

Gonzalez said that Yes Man offers a way around all that to a "rebellious, individualistic" playstyle that says, "'I'm going to do this on my own, with the help of Yes Man.' And I think that releases some of the moral pressure from the game." While it's "really entertaining stuff," Gonzalez said "I think that questline may have been a mistake, because it lets you get through the game without getting your hands dirty."

That said, he concedes that it's been a while since he's reviewed the quests in detail, adding that "it seems like it worked for people, so that's cool." Whatever Yes Man's impact on the game was, he's certainly a memorable lightning rod for the game's humor.

"I love, for example, the moment where he starts to kind of gloat about how he arranged for this courier to be assassinated, and all the clever things he did for Benny. And then you tell him, like, 'oh, that's me,'" Gonzalez laughed. "He's like, 'Oh, I guess maybe I should be happy about that. Whenever you're getting counsel or advice from him about how to handle the different tribes, the wasteland, everything, he always wants you to just kill everybody, basically. He always thinks that's the best option."

You can read more about New Vegas, as well as all sorts of insights from various Fallout developers, in the latest issue of PC Gamer's print magazine. It's a super way to support print journalism, and I'm not just saying that because I have to!

Artist Deimos' Fallout: New Vegas-inspired work is so good, it's been highlighted by the game's director, Josh Sawyer, as well as actor Danny Trejo, who voiced ghoul vaquero Raul Alfonso Tejada and seems to have taken a special shine to how Deimos portrayed the gunslinger's early exploits in Mexico.

I'm not a huge fan art guy, but Deimos' work speaks to me—it reimagines this classic game through the lens of fine art, a style that emulates romantic painting, but applied to the side stories and characters of a 2010 RPG. 2281 Overture feels like a particularly illustrative example, showing a Mr. House-aligned version of the game's final battle with every companion ringed around the Courier (something you can't pull off in an unmodded game). I always think of Liberty Leading the People when I see it.

You Feel a Little Woozy and Quarry Junction are great too: The first shows a weary courier leaning on the stock of the Dinner Bell unique shotgun, surrounded by dead Cazadores and with the Nightkin companion Lily proudly waving a poison antidote in the background. Quarry Junction shows a panicked Courier clutching Deathclaw eggs and hiding behind a car, hastily fumbling with an explosive's trigger while the endgame monsters search for them.

Deimos took the experience of being brutalized by New Vegas' memetically terrifying nightmare wasps and a moment from an arduous fetch quest, respectively, then dramatized them well beyond anything the game's now 15 year-old iteration of Bethesda Game Studios' frankenengine could render, no matter how many mods you pump it full of.

Deimos' pieces are like little snapshots of an impossibly perfect New Vegas remaster, or the daydreams you had about the game when you first played it. I had to get in touch with the artist to find out what the game means to him, how it informs his art, and, most importantly, what it felt like to get shouted out by Machete himself⁠—twice.

One for my baby

"It felt amazing," was the unsurprising answer Deimos provided over email. "A big star such as him being very supportive of my work is such a surprise, it feels like he’s a very proud, caring grandpa sharing my works on social media."

While Deimos is "pretty sure there are a lot of people out there or any long video essays that can articulate the wonder of that game way better than I do," he had a well thought-out response for what draws him to New Vegas. "People don’t lie when they say that they still keep finding something new about it after each playthrough," he said. "Every small thing you do there really does affect the outcomes and endings.

"Perhaps it is special for me since it’s my first RPG where I actually did try to roleplay and imagine things in my head as I go, and of course those little things that I keep imagining while playing is what gave birth to the art that I've made."

After first coming to the series through Fallout 4, a friend got Deimos hooked on Obsidian's cult classic spinoff, and scrolling back through the artist's Instagram, you can see how it's been a source of artistic inspiration for a long time. "I just know that I’ll be drawing a lot about it for years to come," Deimos told me.

One signature of Deimos' I particularly enjoy is how he draws New Vegas' protagonist, Courier Six, who is a classic RPG blank slate. Deimos shows them in variations of the game's signature Ranger armor, but with one eyepiece of the mask knocked out, allowing a degree of expression while still preserving the character's anonymity, and the viewer's ability to "see their Courier behind the mask," as Deimos put it.

One of his go-to outfits to portray is the Elite Riot Gear from the Lonesome Road DLC, but the other draws on New Vegas' modding community in a clever way, incorporating what is, for many players, an essential part of the New Vegas experience. "It’s my interpretation of the Courier armor mod by TheCourierModder," said Deimos.

The mod in question pairs the pure drip of the Ranger gear with a shorter utility jacket and some other flourishes. Despite some artistic liberties, like using the Honest Hearts DLC's Desert Ranger helmet, Deimos thinks his take still has "the spirit of that mod, which was heavily inspired by a cosplay by TheGeeksterChief on Reddit, which also has the same jacket and scarf silhouette.

"I always wanted my Courier to not appear 'canon' to the game, since every Courier is different, and I wanted to personalize mine. The reason why I picked that design is that I want the centerpiece of my paintings to make it feel like it's part of the community; hence, I add modded aspects of the game to my paintings."

I wanted Deimos' more in-depth take on AI image generation, not just because of its general relevance to working artists, but also his own prior statements on the matter. In addition to "No AI" messages in his social media bios, Deimos' many sketch vs. finished product videos almost read as proof of work in an environment where even legitimate artists are getting hit with the AI accusation.

"I am eternally grateful for my fans, as if someone suspects me of using AI, they immediately correct them," Deimos told me. "Anyone who thinks that I use AI, I won’t hold it against them, as AI art is so disgustingly prevalent nowadays.

"I need every artist to hear me in this part, I believe it’s innate in humanity to appreciate real human-made art, I think there is still a great and functioning market for people who are still into actual art, that’s where we would have to appeal to nowadays, but the silver lining might be is that we will never appeal to shallow people who wrongfully claim AI art as their own hard work."

In addition to following Deimos on Instagram or X, you can get high-quality prints of his work via Etsy or his website.

The Outer Worlds 2 is not the best RPG of 2025⁠—that's Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Depending on who you ask it may not even be Obsidian's best game this year—at least one PCG editor thinks it was Grounded 2, and I almost couldn't choose between it and Avowed. It speaks to the studio's deep bench and catalogue that in a year Obsidian launched two other games, The Outer Worlds 2 is still a standout.

Obsidian's games rarely seem to get the praise they're due at launch, for one reason or another. Pillars of Eternity, Pentiment, and the first Outer Worlds strike me as notable exceptions. Otherwise, KotOR 2, Mask of the Betrayer, New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, Tyranny, and Deadfire are all games that took years to achieve cult classic status, let alone the couple that have finally become universally acknowledged classics.

Deadfire and New Vegas launched in the shadows of more immediately lauded RPGs⁠—Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Mass Effect 2 respectively⁠—and I distinctly recall reviewers and commenters discounting them in favor of those more polished or mechanically innovative competitors, a situation that rhymes with TOW2's comparisons to KCD2 this year.

Those Obsidian contenders haven't supplanted their competition, but they've had long tails, and these days they're shown more respect in RPG sicko circles than they received at the time. So I'm putting my chips on The Outer Worlds 2⁠—and fuck it, Avowed too⁠—right now.

Skillful play

My favorite aspect of The Outer Worlds 2 is how its skill system weaves into dialogue and quest resolutions. I am an easy mark when it comes to character build-based dialogue options in RPGs, especially when they rise above just slamming the "persuade" button every time you want to avoid a fight. At its heart, this was the core design of Disco Elysium, and one of my favorite moments in New Vegas is the Legion Centurion interrogation at McCarran where a high Intelligence stat lets you freak him out by speaking Latin.

Every quest and sequence in The Outer Worlds 2 has at least one variation or branching option based on how you've built your character, and most have a smorgasbord of possibilities. While the speech skill remains, as ever, the GOAT for doing non-combat stuff in an RPG, it isn't always an instant win button. When I spoke to TOW2 director, Brandon Adler, and design director, Matt Singh, earlier this year, they told me that was a major priority in development.

I'm replaying Fallout: New Vegas at the time of writing, and I've already maxed out almost every skill with a ton of game left to play. That's a fun power fantasy in its own right, but TOW2 goes in the opposite direction: You can comfortably invest in and get close to maxing out four of 12 skills on a single character, five if you carefully optimize your build.

TOW2 does a great job delivering this feeling that your character build has its own, unique path through the game, without making you feel some kind of FOMO for all the choices that aren't available to you. There are a few memorable quests where I just didn't have the skills to pursue the resolution I might have preferred, but other, equally interesting paths were still available to me.

Elsewhere, locked doors and terminals can be bypassed by pickpocketing the right key. Many difficult speech checks can be circumvented via dialogue options unlocked by your prior choices, or even information you got from talking to the right person.

I had a great moment along those lines with the final boss: I'd managed to spoil for myself that the classic 'talk the bad guy down' option required a maxed-out speech skill, while my build was based on, but also restricted by, one of the game's flaws⁠—special perks with negative trade-offs⁠—preventing me from hitting the final level of the skill. I'd resigned myself to getting a slightly less than perfect ending, but my careful sleuthing and completionism throughout the game actually unlocked another, easier speech check to talk him down.

All of these options and choices result in genuine consequences, both while you're playing the game, and when you kick back to watch that classico 'where are they now' slideshow at the end. This is a smaller game, with fewer quests, locations, and outcomes than New Vegas, but TOW2 boasts a proportional level of complexity. I was shocked at how much it keeps track of, how many moving parts it has, and how they all influence each other.

The Outer Worlds 2 is not to be slept on: It is another great RPG in a quiet hot streak from Obsidian. In 2030, when everybody decides this game was always a heater, I will look back on this article with a feeling of smug satisfaction⁠—hopefully I'll have been made First Citizen/President for Life by then, too.

Obsidian has been one of my go-to RPG studios ever since its first game, Knights of the Old Republic 2, came out in 2004. And between 2004 and 2018, it released 12 games, eight of which absolutely belong in every RPG lover's library. We're talking Alpha Protocol, Neverwinter Nights 2, New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity and its sequel, Tyranny, and yes, even South Park: The Stick of Truth.

That's an incredible list of games, and while some of them are looking a bit long in the tooth these days, I can't bring myself to not recommend every single one of them—and that's not just because PCG news writer Josh Wolens would curse me if I badmouthed Alpha Protocol.

Since 2018, though? Things haven't been so great.

The Outer Worlds and its sequel, along with Avowed, have plenty of defenders. They reviewed well—including here—and have their fans. But they're missing what made Obsidian's previous games so absurdly compelling: the best-in-class writing, the big risks and quests that stick with me years later.

It feels like its acquisition by Microsoft has taught it to be cautious and boring, just like its risk-averse owner. But it's wild that its biggest swings happened at a time when it was flying by the seat of its pants, constantly being burned by publishers. Now it has the full support of an astronomically huge and wealthy publisher, and it's just been playing it safe.

At least when it comes to RPGs.

Its best game this year is another safe bet, a trend-chasing survival game, something I honestly couldn't imagine Obsidian doing outside of Microsoft. But Grounded 2, just like its 2022 predecessor, is a brilliantly creative co-op survival romp that I'd much rather play instead of Obsidian's modern RPGs.

Where Avowed and Outer Worlds presents us with stale settings, Grounded works magic with a mundane world that it's recontextualised. In the first game, a garden, and now a small community park. These locations are somehow more magical than a mysterious fantasy island. A messy picnic table becomes a gargantuan mountain that must be cautiously scaled; an overturned ice cream cart becomes a frozen hellscape full of scorpions; a little decapitated robot becomes… well, a very big decapitated robot.

Even Grounded 2's combat is more fun. Yes, I said what I said. It's a lot more slight, sure, lacking as it is a large RPG's weapon variety and broader range of mechanics. But density doesn't equate to fun. The Outer Worlds 2 might, on the surface, have more appealing murder tools, but I can't remember a single fight that I actually found entertaining.

20 minutes into Grounded 2, I was fighting for my life inside an ant hill, trying to escape with an egg that would eventually become my mount. It was dark and I was facing an entire army of critters. I may or may not have left my girlfriend to die after we went in different directions. Every fight was terrifying. But I wasn't just fighting generic hostile enemies. These are animals with their own sets of behaviours, which can be exploited.

And each adventure, big or small, is bolstered by the potential for new discoveries. Killing someone in The Outer Worlds 2 might net you some ammo, or maybe a new weapon if you're lucky, but there's a good chance you'll get nothing at all, aside from a tiny bit of XP.

Killing something in Grounded 2, meanwhile, might give you the ability to craft a whole new set of armour, a brand new weapon, building materials for your fancy house, or something even more exotic. With every kill, your gear and makeshift base benefits directly. There's a point to all the death. It's for science! You're constantly building up your toolkit, finding new objects to analyse and turning all that carnage into building projects.

You can have a real adventure in Grounded 2. An arduous trek all the way across the map, fighting off spiders and 'roaches and scorpions, culminating in a vertigo-inducing climb up a bin, where at the top you might find some materials that will effectively give you magical powers. It feels like you're really delving into the unknown and taking risks.

Even Grounded 2's companions are better. Sure, your pet ant isn't exactly chatty, but I'd much rather have a one-sided conversation with a bug than spend any more time getting to know my fellow adventurers in one of Obsidian's new RPGs. And they're actually helpful! They're not just meat shields. My ant can enlist other ants to help us in our war against nature. It can also assist me with my building projects, or simply serve as a mount, gallivanting all over the park.

Can you ride… erm I've just realised I can't remember the name of a single companion from The Outer Worlds 2. Oh! Val! That's a person. Or maybe a robot. OK. Can you ride Val? No you cannot. Sorry Val, you're not as good as an ant.

Grounded 2 doesn't feel like a classic Obsidian game. The writing and quest design aren't the standout features here. But unlike Avowed or The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian has found something to replace them with: a setting that feels novel, and a world teeming with challenging adventures where you're wrestling with a living ecosystem.

Obsidian might not be making my kind of RPGs anymore, but at least it's making my kind of survival games.

PCG recently reported on what our own Jody Macgregor called a "humdinger" of a Fallout: New Vegas discovery: a pre-release build of the game from a month before it went on-sale. The find was made by a new YouTube channel called Games' Past, and is two gigabytes larger than the release version of New Vegas and filled with cut or altered content that the team has been slowly teasing out.

Now there's more. The pair of Xbox 360 devkits that contain the build also have a drive containing early versions, in some cases very early versions, of the New Vegas DLC. The recovered files include PDBs with debug information that's invaluable in reverse-engineering efforts, and now the intrepid explorers have accessed cut content from the expansions, although some of it is far from what would be considered playable.

Perhaps the biggest find is in the third DLC, Old World Blues, which has significant differences from the release version, and in particular a room that's restored to former glory. In the release version of Old World Blues there's a VR room that has been wrecked, and has no functionality. Here it works. Kinda.

Spoilers head if you want to experience this for yourself rather than reading about it. Activating the VR terminal in this beta build now transports you to a new portion of the wasteland at night, equips you with some basic weapons, and then tasks you with finding three bodies while remaining undetected. If you are detected, a siren goes off, you're blown away by a shot out of nowhere, and have to start again.

Should you complete it successfully, then in the true spirit of New Vegas, the build crashes down around you. The team notes that the VR room in this build already contains logs referencing the equipment being broken, as it would be in the final release, so even though it's present and functional here the decision had probably already been made to cut it.

A version of Lonesome Road, the final New Vegas DLC, is also present, but is dated seven months before release. It's essentially the framework for Lonesome Road, the basic locations and environments, but with hardly any detail, items or NPCs.

It does, however, contain Lonesome Road's final encounter with Ulysses, who in the release version is a rather talkative character. Here when approached he says "Hello. I am the antagonist."

Your response options are "I thought as much! Time to die, cheese weasel!" or "Don't do it bro! Let's hug it out!" Should you choose the second Ulysses responds simply "I only act out because I want attention."

That's so good it really should have been left as-is.

Perhaps the most notable thing is how much moodier New Vegas looks in these earlier iterations, with much gloomier lighting broken by shards of neon. It's a very different vibe from the final game, and if you ask me it looks great, funky textures and all.

The data mining of these builds will continue. Earlier discoveries include Mr. House's second securitron girlfriend named Marilyn—cut from the final game, but present for an entire conversation in this pre-release archive. There's also an earlier version of Mr. House with additional cut dialogue, in which he gets rather saucy if you're playing a female character with high charisma.

It feels like Games' Past has a lot more to discover, and what will be especially interesting is what modders make of some of these changes. There's a whole bunch of cut and unvoiced dialogue in these builds, as well as things like holotapes and NPCs that didn't make it through to any release. It's certainly a good time to be a New Vegas fan: but next year might be even better.

Does the wheel always need reinventing? Of course not. If it did, we'd have some really weird cars. Welcome, everyone, to my dissertation on why Avowed the rather good video game, is, in fact, rather good—despite its tendency to cling to RPG clichés that feel thoroughly played out in 2025.

I am an unashamed enjoyer of big, open-world RPGs. If there are gamer archetypes, I would class myself as an explorer. Someone who gets a kick out of climbing a big digital mountain just because it's there, that sort of thing. Avowed feels, in many ways, like a game designed to scratch that itch.

Right from the off, you're thrown into a fantasy landscape that looks to be ripped straight from the cover of a dollar-store novel—except rendered in all the gorgeous Unreal Engine 5 loveliness you could hope for—and are immediately tasked with stomping all over it.

Well, map by map, I mean. While The Living Lands are vast, they've been broken up into sizable chunks, each with a huge amount of variation. There are cave networks, sprawling fields, dwarven mountain complexes, and hidden temples. Places you want to get lost in, divided into sections that feel charmingly old-school in their implementation. Avowed is an odd creature—somehow managing to feel both cutting-edge, yet stuck in the past.

The gameplay loop looks like this: You make your way to a hub town, pick up quests from Artus the Helmet-shiner, Barry the Fishman, and Sally the Goblet-collector, run off into the wilderness, and come back with quest items, loot, and some hints as to what's going on with this fungus-plague that everyone's so worried about. Occasionally, Artus, Barry, and Sally have dialogue options to consider, most of which lead to what feels like the same eventual result.

As you can probably tell, I can't remember the name of a single character. Also, this is the same loop you were probably enjoying in open world RPGs circa 2005. It's so far away from being revolutionary or genre-pushing that, at points, it feels like a game that's been trapped in amber and polished in 2025 for others to enjoy.

There's a hidden god plot to uncover, an existential threat to stop, a you-are-the-chosen-one (I mean, envoy) who's linked to the whole shebang through birthright narrative. It's a tale that feels like you've heard it before for the most part, none of which is helped by most of the dialogue being delivered by stoically still NPCs that feel like cardboard cutouts compared to the roving, interactive ones you'll find in something like, say, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

But, while the plot lurches along in fits and starts, the quest design and dialogue trees feel archaic, and the combat feels underbaked, the Living Lands are still allowed to come alive in their presentation.

Whistling deserts, grimy, bubbling swamps, frozen mountains, boiling lakes of lava. Again, none of it crushingly original—but all of it so beautiful, so well-defined in its art style and presentation, that I couldn't help but spend entire Sundays exploring every nook and cranny. It's got scenic vistas for days, and I enjoyed picking my way through nearly every one of them.

I also can't remember the last time I stopped so often in a game simply to soak in the atmosphere, nor the last time I actually muttered the word "wow" under my breath at a new discovery, or pitch-perfect moment.

At one point, in one of the better-written quests, one of my companions asked me to place an item atop a set of stones on a desert cliff face overlooking the sea, in memory of a lost love. I saved the game at this point, then jumped in a few days later to go exploring once more.

I loaded up my save, and stopped. I listened to the whistling wind. I watched the sand drift past the dunes behind me and filter through the cracks between the memorial stones. I heard the lap of the waves, and almost, for a moment, felt the salt on my skin. I thought about my companions' loss. I thought about life.

Games are unlike any other medium. In terms of telling their stories, presenting their worlds, I think we can all agree they have a long way to go.

Certainly, Avowed could have been a whole lot better at grabbing its players by the short and curlies and pulling them through its narrative with more gusto, more interactivity, and more gameplay innovation. It doesn't reinvent the RPG wheel, so much as dig an old one out of a dusty cupboard and coat it in UE5 varnish.

But its world design is so compelling in its own right, it almost doesn't need to. It's there to be explored, to be gawped at, to be immersed in and enjoyed. It's a lovingly rendered, sprawling, slightly messy visual feast, with enough panache to keep you playing not because you want to advance the plot, but because you want to see what's around the next corner. It creates moments, not through revolutionary writing or gameplay, but through sheer aesthetic design.

It's far from perfect, and likely won't be mentioned in the same breath as many of the other great games of this year. But in terms of those that have wowed me in 2025, I have to give it to Avowed. It's got a world worth exploring, and that, my friends, does it for me.

"Season ruined," Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer (Pentiment, Fallout: New Vegas) declared on BlueSky alongside a clip from Stranger Things' recently released fifth season. In the video, Finn Wolfhard's Mike Wheeler expounds on the power of Dungeons & Dragons' Cleric class⁠—specifically AD&D 1st Edition's Cleric.

"Even cooler, she can cast a Dimension Door," Wheeler claims while listing the Cleric's capabilities. "BULLSHIT," Sawyer can be heard exclaiming from off-camera. Sawyer and other viewers began tallying up some of the show's other tabletop inaccuracies. Here are a few, from both this season and prior:

• Commenter Blake Barton notes that the show's characterization of the Sorcerer is anachronistic, with the modern class not appearing until 3rd Edition in 2000.
• A roll of seven when casting Prismatic Spray, resulting in the violet version of the spell, is described as causing blindness ("WRONG!" Sawyer hollered over a clip of this moment).
• One commenter, danyq, pointed out that the show has referred to Thieves as "Rogues," the class' name in 3E and beyond.

Season ruined

— @jesawyer.bsky.social (@jesawyer.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-12-22T00:08:58.721Z

While not the worst thing going down in our world of sin and cruelty, I was struck how a show so heavily drawing on D&D for its imagery and plot could keep getting it wrong. I also find it weirdly joyful and life affirming how, as PC Gamer senior editor Wes Fenlon put it, D&D realheads like Sawyer "know this detail and can pull the exact 1980s reference book off the shelf to prove the doubters wrong."

Literally, it turns out. "Walked into Josh's office this morning and he was holding a copy of AD&D," wrote Obsidian narrative lead Kate Dollarhyde. "I thought, 'What could he possibly be doing with this?' But didn't ask. I see now he was posting."

"It’s interesting, because the Duffers are about 10 years younger than me and they’ve admitted they’re more Magic: The Gathering aficionados than D&D players," Sawyer told me via email when I reached out about these muck-ups in the show. "The D&D experience of the kids on Stranger Things is similar to mine."

That experience began with the Basic and Expert Sets of D&D, before branching out into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. "I met an older kid (Tony) at the public library who introduced me to both Bard’s Tale and 1st Edition AD&D," said Sawyer. "Tony was the Eddie Munson of my RPG development.

"My friend group played fast and loose with AD&D rules when we were in grade school and middle school, but that generally bent toward rule lawyering in early high school, then extensive house ruling in late high school."

The mention of house rules segues into a devil's advocate defense I've seen for the Stranger Things kids messing up those rules: What could be more true to life than tabletop players, especially kids, getting stuff wrong or making their own changes? But Sawyer argues this doesn't fit how the cast is characterized elsewhere, while there's another, far more likely explanation in real life.

"The way Eddie browbeats Erica before letting her join suggests that he takes the game way way too seriously," Sawyer said. "In my experience, high school groups either follow the rules as written (RAW) or they house rule with intentionality based on the tastes of their group. I.e., it’s more understandable in the first season, less plausible in the fourth and fifth seasons.

jfC

— @jesawyer.bsky.social (@jesawyer.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-12-22T00:08:58.632Z

"The other thing that makes me look sideways at the errors is that so far in the fifth season, the lines aren’t just wrong for 1st Edition (which is what they’ve been playing), but they're correct for 5th Edition."

The Rogue name and Sorcerer class are both later innovations that remain in 5E today. Trickery Domain Clerics do gain access to Dimension Door now. And while a violet Prismatic Spray banishes the target to another plane in 1st Edition AD&D, it causes blindness in 5th Edition. "Taking that into account," argued Sawyer, "It’s less plausible that the kids are making errors or using house rules, much more likely that the writers referenced 5th Edition materials."

This isn't exactly a capital offense or anything, at least in most US states at the time of writing. But I found myself convinced that pointing this stuff out rises beyond rules lawyering for funsies into a genuine critique of the show. Stranger Things is a period piece, after all, and the only direct exposure many younger viewers might have had to a more alien version of Dungeons & Dragons⁠.

I find that sort of unfamiliarity or disconnect to be one of the most interesting things a period piece can do. Instead, the show opted for something smoother and more digestible⁠—a wasted opportunity given D&D's place of pride in Stranger Things' plot, and a series of anachronisms that can clearly grate on viewers in the know.

"The oldheads are going to catch all these things," Sawyer concluded. "I didn’t play D&D Companion, Master, or Immortals, but I’ve played everything else from Basic and Expert to 5th Edition. I also made a few A/D&D games in my professional career, so these rules were seared into my brain. Forty years of tabletop gaming dies hard."

If you've played New Vegas, you're familiar with Caesar's Legion. Slavedriving, overtly fascistic, and wrapped in the aesthetics of the Roman Empire⁠—but with football pads instead of lorica segmentata. It seems like the kind of faction that would be hard to present as anything but one-dimensional, abject evil.

As it turns out, giving the faction's leader some real substance—even allowing him to make his case in full—was lead writer John Gonzalez's precise objective, though he sometimes worries he did too good a job on that front.

"[I had] to write a character who had tried to present a robust argument for authoritarianism," he told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield. But now, after seeing the rise of fascist movements in the intervening 15 years? "I was like, could we back off of that now?"

"One of the things about writing fiction, if you're going to try to write it in a way that's not preaching to a choir, or that's not propaganda," Gonzalez argued, "is that you have to try to make your adversaries as strong as possible.

"If you want to write a story where one of your main themes is actually freedom, like liberty from tyranny, you can't just make your tyrants cardboard villains. You have to make them as substantial as possible in some way. That was really the driving force with Caesar, but occasionally I've wondered if that was done a little too well."

If you haven't played New Vegas, you can meet with Caesar directly and pick his brain at length. He is a cruel nationalist and imperialist, but remarkably well spoken⁠—partially owed to his education with the ironically humanist, pacifist faction, The Followers of the Apocalypse⁠—and backs up his every action with detailed, if heartless and objectionable, political theory.

"Long-term stability at all costs," Caesar says in a notably self-serving and subjective assessment of the Pax Romana, Rome's golden age. "The individual has no value beyond his utility to the state, whether as an instrument of war, or production."

It's almost comical how deep the rabbit hole goes (the norm for Obsidian RPGs). When Caesar cites Hegelian dialectics, the player character can ask, "'Hegelian dialectics?' What's that?" and receive Caesar's full, if highly debatable and biased, explanation. Gonzales gives credit to Josh Sawyer for that bit, though: "I don't know that you can spend a whole day with Josh without hearing about Hegelian dialectics."

When PC Gamer's Litchfield mentioned he went down this rabbit hole with Caesar at only 15, before he had even heard terms like "dialectical materialism," Gonzales laughed and replied, "Hopefully … we don't have to exculpate you from some kind of flirtation with dictatorship or authoritarianism."

It's easy to see where Gonzalez's unease comes from. You can still see social media threads pop up every now and again trying to make a case for Caesar's ideals and actions, and we all exist only a few clicks away from a Discord server where some nasty freak is proudly rocking a Caesar's Legion profile picture while putting the most vile things you've ever heard in writing.

While every Fallout game's story has intense political implications (it's literally set in the ruins of society), none hold so close a lens up to the warring philosophies in the wasteland as New Vegas. For more from this interview, Gonzalez also spoke at length about Mr. House, another New Vegas character he wrote, and the robotics mogul's disturbing resonance with modern Silicon Valley magnates.

You can also hear more from Gonzalez and other Fallout developers in a series retrospective in the upcoming issue of PC Gamer's print magazine. Read all about videogames, without ruining your sleep schedule with blue light! What will they think of next?

The Fallout TV series returns this week, with season 2's episodes dropping weekly until February. This season of the show has opted for the setting of New Vegas, and PCG's Ted Litchfield recently had the opportunity to speak to the lead writer of Fallout: New Vegas, John Gonzalez.

As well as some inconveniently correct observations on the lack of credit and residuals for videogame writers, Gonzalez was in a reflective mood on how some aspects of the 2010 game come across in 2025. This includes one of New Vegas' most memorable characters, Mr. House, a tech tycoon kept alive by a supercomputer who runs the post-nuke Vegas, and who'll have a major role in season 2 of the show.

"My own sense of Mr. House has changed as we've seen the rise of Silicon Valley would-be messiahs," says Gonzalez. "One of the things that now seems prescient is the fixation, the fascination they have with technological immortality.

"But Mr. House is unique in that he was able to calculate when the Great War was going to occur within a window of a few days⁠—he was just a couple of days short of getting the platinum chip. I don't think we're seeing that Elon Musk is able to calculate things to that degree of precision."

Briefly, the platinum chip is the macguffin that Mr. House is obsessed with obtaining: It was due to be delivered just before the nukes fell but, after House miscalculated the war's kickoff by a few hours, has spent the past 200 years lost in the wastes.

In the meantime, the cryogenically-preserved Mr. House has been forced to keep things running on an outdated and glitchy OS, which is obviously a source of some frustration, though at the same time he's managed it. It's basically the reverse situation to all of us being forced to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

The inspiration for the character was not from Silicon Valley, however, but one of the major American entrepreneurs of the early 20th century, who eventually became a legendary, oft-parodied recluse and in the last decade of his life used his fortune to transform Las Vegas into the casino and entertainment playground we know today.

But Mr. Hughes, though involved with the CIA, Mafia, and conservative politics, did not share House's obsession with human potential and development. Artificially prolonged life, an ironically myopic focus on longtermism over contemporary challenges, "Trust me, I'll get us to space," all sounds a bit familiar, don't it? And needless to say, there's already a New Vegas mod swapping out House for Musk.

"House was inspired by this early phase of research that I did when I was on the project, where we didn't have money for a research trip or anything like that, so I just dove into some books," says Gonzalez. "One of the fascinating stories of Vegas, of course, is the involvement of Howard Hughes. And then Howard Hughes kind of morphed into this more Fallout version of a tech magnate.

"He is genuinely brilliant. I think this kind of ethical paralysis that you describe is one of the very best things about the game. I remember being delighted that there were early conversations and forums about, 'Wait a minute, who are the good guys?' This is another thing I would just credit to Josh Sawyer. I think I was very simpatico with this, I didn't need to be convinced."

Hughes' history with Las Vegas is a book unto itself, but was in short transformational for the city and full of amusing asides: such as the fact that he first moved into the Desert Inn hotel and, rather than leave his room, just bought the hotel outright. He ended up owning huge swathes of Las Vegas, including some of its most iconic buildings, and by the time of his death was the single largest employer in the state of Nevada. In other words, and much like Mr. House, Hughes was probably the single most powerful and influential individual in Las Vegas.

"Mr. House, I think what's attractive about him is that he does seem to have a kind of preternatural intelligence," says Gonzalez. "Could he actually be somebody that, if you follow this guy in a century or two, we've got stations in orbit again? He seems to have this plan, and he does. He's not interested in totalitarian rule, he doesn't really care. He's very immoral. He doesn't care about people [on the] Strip, or there's prostitution, there's gambling, there's all this stuff. He doesn't care. He just cares about the bottom line fueling this technological vision he has."

The difference between Mr. House and some of the more contemporary parallels being, in Gonzalez's eyes, that he might've been able to change things.

"The question is does he actually have the chops to make it happen? And there's some indications that he does. The interesting thing to me is, people fall away from Mr. House on the basis of his ruthlessness. [For] a lot of them it's like, 'I think I can work out something with the Brotherhood.' And he's like, 'No, you cannot.'"