Fallout: New Vegas – Chris Avellone on Post-game Content

The editors over at Eurogamer have recently stumbled onto the Functional Post Game Ending mod for Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout: New Vegas and this prompted them to reach out to Chris Avellone and talk to him about Obsidian’s original plans for New Vegas’ post-game content. The resulting article lets us know why said post-game content had to be scrapped, what it was supposed to be, and so on. A few sample paragraphs:

Back in the Beta stage of Fallout New Vegas’s development cycle, the project was, in Avellone’s words, “showing a lot of bugs and optimisation problems”. Adding further complexity wasn’t going to help matters, and despite plans being in place for post-game additions, not much work had actually gone into making the content. In some areas, in fact, no work had been done at all. It was at this point the decision was made to cut the post-game in its entirety.

“Designing post-game content is not hard to do if you’re keeping it in mind with each NPC and quest as you’re designing it (like doing a Karma check, faction check, or just another global reactivity check, which we had to do anyway) – sometimes all it needs is a post-endgame line,” Avellone explained.

“But if you haven’t planned for it throughout your design process for your areas and characters, it can be a lot of work to go back and add later on. And while some designers had planned for it – for example, our lead writer had lines for Mr. House in place for post-game reactivity and Strip Securitrons – not all areas had post-game design work.”

Surprisingly, the additions planned for the post-game were actually fairly minor, with “minimal reactivity to the events of Hoover Dam”. Some characters were to get special lines, and a few NPCs would spawn with specific post-game dialogue – but Avellone said the main intention was to allow “players [to] keep wandering the wasteland, explore the ‘dungeons’ and fight random encounters”.