Its a question whichFallout: New Vegasproject director Josh Sawyer is uniquely qualified to answer.
And if youre new to it, thankfully, those plot elements are fairly straightforward.
Im certainly interested to see where theyre going in the second season.
Everything that happened in the previous games, including New Vegas, happened, Todd Howardtold IGN.
Were very careful about that.
By the time we speak, Sawyer has seen the finale of the Fallout show.
I understood why there was maybe some confusion or ambiguity, he says.
I dont think I necessarily would have jumped to the conclusions that other people did.
But I could see why some people might be aggravated or annoyed.
This might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I dont care, he says.
It was never mine.
And the thing that I made is what I made.
Sawyer remains very proud of the New Vegas teams work and believes the game stands on its own.
But its not my space, it was never my thing.
I was a guest working in it.
So I take a stab at keep a level of distance between myself and the setting.
For Sawyer, a longtime admirer of the original Fallouts open-ended design, it was an extraordinary opportunity.
But the development of Van Buren became apocalyptic in itself, as Black Isle owner Interplay slowly disintegrated.
Sawyer resigned, believing hed lost his one shot to work on a Fallout game.
It was a dream of mine, he says.
This organisational dysfunction was typical of the environment in which Sawyer began his career.
Even after Sawyer landed at Obsidian, the cancellations kept on coming.
So I cant really despair.
As a result of all this pain and upheaval, Sawyer has embraced a utilitarian attitude to his craft.
And it focused my mind very heavily on the production process.
It was a very lean and bang-for-buck approach to development.
That thinking served Sawyer well when Obsidian was given 18 months to make Fallout: New Vegas.
So we focused almost entirely on content.
When it came out, it was criticised for playing very, very similarly to Fallout 3.
Over time, however, fans have come to appreciate where Obsidian did put its time and energy.
Fallout 1 was foundational for me in understanding how role-playing games should be made.
And they remember how the factions work and how flexible that is, he says.
I think thats what has lasted, Sawyer says.
The initial impact where people said the gameplay feels very close to Fallout 3 is totally fair.
Its very rare that a big-budget game is made in 18 months these days.
In fact, many take half a decade.
I have to be responsible with peoples time.
Recently, Sawyer tweeted thatburnout had replaced crunchas the primary hazard of the game industry.
And you eventually just start to tune out and feel very demoralised.
Burned out developers not only feel awful, Sawyer says, but do bad work and make irrational decisions.
He speaks from personal experience.
And they didnt want to do that.
It was that feeling of accelerating towards a brick wall, Sawyer says.
I and a lot of other people on the team became really harsh, and were snapping at people.
I was pushing people in a way I had never done on a game before.
Every day I come in, I leave feeling worse than before, he wrote.
I feel like Im making the game worse every day.
I just cant do it.
The studio owners relented, and when Pillars Of Eternity II released, it reviewed well.
But it didnt sell well, and that was very demoralising, Sawyer says.
I was like, Damn, I was this huge, awful asshole to this team.
And it felt like a big waste.
It took him a year afterwards to recover.
That turned out to bePentiment, a narrative-driven murder mystery set in the Holy Roman Empire.
It gave Sawyer a chance to heal.
Pentiment was a really great experience, the exact opposite, he says.
A lot of people dont come out of burnout, they have to limp through a lot more development.
Im in a very privileged position.
There are a lot of games that sound like theyd be fun to make, he says.
I just want to make good things, and treat people well on those teams.
And for them to feel like they grow and come out better than they went in.
