Ring-a-ding-ding! A Fallout: New Vegas beta full of cut content has been unearthed

We Recovered Lost FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS Prototypes - YouTube

A brand new YouTube channel called Games' Past dedicated to unearthing prototypes and canceled videogames has kicked things off with a humdinger of a find. It's a pre-release build of Fallout: New Vegas from a month before it went on sale, one that's two gigabytes larger than the final version and jammed full of things that were ultimately cut or altered from the New Vegas that arrived on shelves in 2010.

This build, and a release build with debug features enabled as well as another drive with the DLC, were found on a pair of Xbox 360 dev kits in a second-hand store where they'd been sitting for a year. Some of the stuff that's been unearthed was already discovered in the PC version, but is present here in expanded form. For instance, it's long been known that Mr. House originally had a second securitron girlfriend named Marilyn—she's on one of the playing cards that came with the collector's edition, and there's a mod to restore her along with the single voice line left in the release version. But load up this build and you can have a whole conversation with Marilyn.

There's also an early version of Mr. House, with a face that looks a lot more Steve Buscemi than the suave character we know. He's got a bunch of cut dialogue too, presumably stuff you could trigger by playing a woman with a high Charisma, in which he pays the Courier to scan her body. The saucy devil.

There's plenty more to find, and the original video highlights an NPC called the Wasteland Adventurer who offers some advice and warns you about deathclaws when you leave the starter town of Goodspring, a very different-sounding voice for lottery winner Oliver Swanick, as well as a whole heap of locations with altered looks and bright green radioactive tumbleweeds blowing past.

The recovered files include PDBs, which modders have never had access to before, containing debug information that's invaluable in reverse-engineering efforts. The months ahead are going to be an exciting time for the New Vegas modding community.

TOPICS

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.

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.