Hardwood timber
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Earlier this week, Fallout: New Vegas fans thought they’d stumbled on lost design notes that featured revealed plans for a sequel to Obsidian’s RPG. Unfortunately, those plans turned out to be little more than meeting notes – as well as director Josh Sawyer’s takeout burrito order.
On Wednesday, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer tweeted a picture of his old notebooks. Right at the top of that box of books was a cover featuring Vault Boy taped in place. And next to Vault Boy, Sawyer had written ‘FNV1’.
One look at the quotes on that tweet, and it’s clear that an entire legion of New Vegas fans thought Sawyer had revealed some great secret. Obsidian’s take on Fallout remains one of the best Fallout games out there, but no follow-up ever came about. The series has never returned to the Mojave, and Obsidian has never returned to the nuclear apocalypse, eventually creating The Outer Worlds as something of its own answer to Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG. So a notebook from the director, potentially differentiating New Vegas 1 notes from New Vegas 2 notes? This could be monumental.
Unfortunately, it was not. The obvious alternative to ‘FNV1’ implying any ideas around a second New Vegas game is this: in the development of a full-fledged RPG, its director required more than one small notebook to keep track of things, and wanted to differentiate his first book from his second and third books.
A quick flip-book approach, provided by Sawyer in a follow-up tweet, does reveal a few interesting insights; which developers worked on which areas of the map; which characters or story beats needed touching up; balance figures around certain consumables and weapons. It also, however, reveals some of the mundanity attached to game development – for the majority of the process, making a game is just like any office job.
Sometimes, that means a boss calling out for lunch, and that’s why one of the clearest sections of the FNV2 notebook is a Mexican takeout order. Back in the late ’00s, Mike, Matt, and Charlie were chowing down on some burritos and fajitas. Sadly, I can’t work out exactly who this enigmatic trio is, but as a massive burrito fan myself, I can only assume that getting their lunch orders in was more exciting even than the prospect of developing a New Vegas sequel.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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