The total conversion mod remaking the lost Fallout 3 in Fallout: New Vegas got its first trailer and a new name

Fallout: The New West Reveal Teaser - YouTube

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.

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.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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