I still can't quite believe it's now been a decade since the release of Fallout: New Vegas, but yesterday Obsidian's much-beloved RPG turned 10, and Fallout fans (including ourselves) took a moment to look back and remember why the title was so great. One mod team decided to mark the occasion in particularly spectacular fashion by releasing a new trailer to show off progress so far. And I have to say, it really does look excellent.

Fallout 4: New Vegas, as the name may suggest, is a mod project seeking to remake Fallout: New Vegas in the Fallout 4 Creation Engine on PC. The team has been working on the mod for some time, having initially shared gameplay footage back in 2018, but the new trailer gives us a better idea of what the Mojave will look like when complete. There's also a lot of shooting. I think I spotted a bit of famous beginner area Quarry Junction in there - I can't wait to head in as soon as the mod becomes available.

Speaking of which, while it looks like significant progress has been made on the mod, there is still no set release date. "Progress is not linear, and we'd rather release the best possible F4NV, not a 'good enough' F4NV," the team explained in a FAQ section on Discord.

Read more

Fallout New Vegas is 10 years-old today, having been released on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on 19th October 2010 in North America (it came out on these shores a few days later).

Obsidian's wonderful entry in Bethesda's post-apocalyptic open-world role-playing series was critically-acclaimed for its writing, characters and freedom with which you could complete quests. While it suffered a raft of technical problems - as most of the games built on Bethesda's RPG engine did at the time - its reputation has only grown more positive over the last decade, and it is now considered one of, if not the best Fallout game.

Writing about Fallout New Vegas for Eurogamer's Games of the Decade series, reporter Emma Kent called it "a side-quester's dream". "... it felt like even the smallest story was carefully crafted to maintain interest and deliver a rewarding kicker. Looking at a run-down of the mission Come Fly With Me, it reads like a list of fetch quests, but the compelling story points, array of player choices and engaging dialogue disguised this so well I never really noticed at the time. And, at the end of the trail, you always knew there'd be an incredible payoff - like launching a cult of ghouls into space with Ride of the Valkyries playing in the background."

Read more

Ah, Nipton. It's a town no Fallout: New Vegas player can forget, namely because it's full of burning corpses... and much, much worse. All of which gives you a good excuse to go on a murder spree against the Legion, in an episode that feels rather Heart of Darkness. Maybe that was just me.

Anyway, it looks like you'll eventually be able to re-explore the wonders of Nipton through a remake mod in Fallout 4 on PC, as the mod team behind Fallout 4: New Vegas has released a new video showing the approach up to the town.

The mod project, which has been underway since August 2017, released a clip of some gameplay in September 2018 - but we hadn't seen much since then in terms of video footage, aside from a small preview of the Anti-Materiel Rifle and a very authentic bug involving Doc Mitchell's head. This time, the mod team has shared a preview of what the remake mod's dialogue will look like, along with the new voice acting - which quite accurately depicts the sort of euphoria you probably would experience from winning the Legion's lottery. Judging by the loading of that 10mm pistol, however, I wager Oliver Swanick did not live much longer after that.

Read more

Glitch speedruns can provide incredible insights into the way games are made - and more importantly, how they can be broken. Awesome Games Done Quick, the speedrunning charity event, is in full swing this week - and one of the most amusing runs I've seen so far is by the ever-entertaining speedrunner tomatoangus, best known for his Fallout anthology runs - including sex% speedruns. Yes, you read that correctly.

Having recently changed his name from tomatoanus to the more family-friendly tomatoangus ("the g is silent," he says), yesterday tomatoangus took the floor to show everyone his Fallout anthology speedrunning skills. Although he ran overtime, finishing at 2:16:21 instead of the 2:05:00 estimate (thanks in part to missing the Radaway right in front of him), the run was incredibly entertaining and informative - with tomatoangus sprinkling in fun facts to keep viewers engaged. This is a hole you'll want to go down.

One of the biggest revelations for me (aside from learning you can push Liam Neeson into dialogue triggers with a Nuka-Cola truck) was that Fallout New Vegas' end slides aren't actually a cutscene: instead, the player is placed in a small room facing a projector screen. After enabling player controls in the command console, tomatoangus walked behind this to display Ron the Narrator standing behind the slides, talking through the script. "You can kill him and drag him off, but then he just slides in from the other side - he doesn't want to leave," tomatoangus said. Now that is dedication to the job.

Read more

To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about the thinking behind it in an editor's blog.

There's something mournful about roaming the wilds of the Mojave, but maybe that's to be expected from a game that starts with you getting shot in the head. Like an irritated poltergeist, you're unleashed onto the wasteland to claim vengeance on those who wronged you. Or not, if you're like me - and make it your sole mission to find and save your would-be murderer Benny.

This is what Obsidian got so right about Fallout New Vegas. Somehow, the game's able to anticipate exactly the sort of decisions a player wants to make, often before they even know it themselves. I was constantly surprised at the options presented to me, which frequently veered into the ludicrous and naughty. Do I want to take Fisto for a spin before delivery? Yes, of course I do.

Read more

I visited Obsidian Entertainment a couple of weeks ago for the reveal of the studio's first game for new owner Microsoft. If you remember, The Outer Worlds was published by Private Division, Take-Two's label for partnering with independent studios (Obsidian was independent when the deal was made). This was, then, a significant moment.

The game itself was a bit of an anti-climax - Grounded, a small-team survival game with a Honey I Shrunk the Kids hook - but I still got an opportunity to nose around the studio and see what changed post-acquisition and since I visited in August 2017.

The answer, in a nutshell, is "not a lot", which is encouraging. Obsidian still resides in the same office block in the eerily perfect city of Irvine, California, and still occupies the same amount of office space. It's still a bit tatty, which I like, and the only real sign there's now Microsoft money behind the studio is a pile of boxes with computers and monitors in them.

Read more

After hours trekking across the wasteland, swatting away bloatflies and squashing hordes of ghouls, the end is in sight. Or at least Hoover Dam is. It's the intimidating final stage
of Fallout New Vegas, and no matter your path until this point, you'll have to pick a side and fight an explosive battle to irrevocably change the fate of the Mojave.

A fate that is reported, rather than told, through a series of end slides - before you're taken to a save from before the battle. Ah.

It's a slightly frustrating ending, particularly when post-game content is so often used in RPGs to display the impact of a player's decisions. Even in Red Dead Redemption 2 (not an RPG), you can still find special encounters in the epilogue depending on whether you helped certain people in the past. It's possible to leave a tangible mark on the world, and it shows your decisions went beyond the moment to have long-term repercussions.

Read more

Sex. Speedrunning. Not two things you expect to hear in the same sentence - and yet here I am, writing an article about it.

Speedrunner tomatoanus, who you may remember from his world record Fallout anthology speedrun (and his rather colourful username), has returned with yet another wacky video. Not content with whizzing through Fallout 1, 2, 3, New Vegas and 4 in under 90 minutes, tomatoanus' latest speedrun is all about sex. Specifically, getting it as fast as possible. Like a night out in Magaluf.

Similar to his other world record speedruns, tomatoanus played through the games considered by the community to be the "main" titles in the Fallout series, with the goal being to have sex in each game as quickly as possible. This apparently has its own unofficial category, called a "sex%" run, and has already been attempted by a number of speedrunners in Fallout 4 (check out these ones by Jinjenia and Duchys).

Read more…