Bethesda developers open up comparisons between Fallout 3 and New Vegas

As the years passed, the Fallout community generally held the opinion that Fallout: New Vegas was the best entry in the series. While there are plenty of Fallout 3 lovers as well as those who swear by the classics, New Vegas is often considered the pinnacle of the series, with plenty of love for Obsidian's take on the wasteland.

In turn, this leads to an “Obsidian vs. Bethesda” narrative in the community, with the two studios often pitted against each other. On the outside, we have no way of knowing how deep these feelings go, if they exist at all. But thanks to a new interview, we know how a few Bethesda developers feel about New Vegas as a game.

Fallout 3 and 4 Developers Discuss New Vegas

As reported by GamesRadar+, several Bethesda developers shared their thoughts on the Kiwi Talkz podcast, arguing that the discourse ignores Bethesda's contributions to New Vegas.

First, they are asked if there is any truth to the claim that Todd Howard and Bethesda executives didn't like New Vegas.

“I get the impression they're just busy and don't want to be all handsy,” explains Nate Purkeypile, world artist for Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas. “It was mostly hands off except for a few important things out of sight. And I know individual developers didn't talk to them and stuff because we were very busy.”

Jonah Lobe, the character artist on Fallout 3 and 4, then admits that he felt “a little touchy” about the praise New Vegas received. “I was like, well, we've done 90 percent of the art. We've built the engine. We've done all that stuff. We've done it in a very limited time period and we've put in all this effort and they just had to work on the stories.”

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While he says he initially felt the comparison between Fallout 3 and New Vegas was “unfair” because of this, those feelings diminished over time. “Honestly, Obsidian killed it. I think they did a beautiful job,” Lobe continues. “I was a little sad that our design team couldn't imagine it […] the same scale of really ambitious things with a big arc with more options.”

Lobe and Purkeypile then touch on how Obsidian was “very pressed for time”, with Lobe saying it was an “unfair” deadline to ship the RPG. In fact, it was developed in about 18 months, which would be difficult for any game, even if it uses Bethesda's engine and some assets from Fallout 3.

This short development cycle meant that there was a lot of cut content, some of which was restored with mods. It was also infamously buggy as hell, so much so that Obsidian's Josh Sawyer feels it took players years to warm to the game. However, no one can deny its popularity now.