AP wasn't received that well, so did it affect the New Vegas team? It was "kind of sobering" he said, and feels they maybe 'internalised' too much.
Obsidian knows RPG, they are made up of ex-Black Isle veterans after all who have pedigree from Fallout, and so did Alpha Protocol's lack of awesome in sales and reception among critics and fans impact their development of New Vegas at all?
"Well whenever you put that much time and effort into something, and there's all that negative opinion on it, it's kind of sobering and we think "Ok, this isn't a fluke here, we made some mistakes that we want to learn from"," said Fallout: New Vegas' project director and lead designer, Josh Sawyer, speaking with us in our interview.
"Personally I felt all along that we want to make the gameplay experience feel good - I know that sounds like a very simple thing but in some cases I feel like designers sometimes kind of internalise their opinions about something, and don't think from the perspective of the players." Criticism stemmed from features feeling 'incomplete'.
"Is the player going to enjoy shooting? Is the player going to enjoy doing this kind of thing in the game? Are these objectives clear to them?"
"They seem really basic but sometimes I think they can be really difficult to pull off, and I think with Alpha Protocol people criticised things that were really basic gameplay elements. For New Vegas I was like "ok, we don't want to reinvent the wheel here", what can we just improve upon?" If it's not broke...
"A lot of people liked Fallout 3, so shooting mechanics, VATS, stealth... don't just break the mould and start again, how can we take what's there and improve upon it? We want players who are coming into it to feel like this is similar to what they've seen, but better."
Fallout: New Vegas isn't a full sequel to Fallout 3, it's the "'Vice City' of the Fallout franchise," comments Sawyer. "We'd love to keep making Fallout games, it's a really unique setting. Some people might take it for granted but you can do a lot of interesting things with it."
Has Bethesda given the nod to Obsidian to keep working on Fallout? "No nothing so far. I hope Bethesda will want to keep working with us on stuff. But so far they've been really easy to work with, the tools have allowed us to create a lot of great content, so it's been a really great experience over all," he replied.
So how far along is New Vegas? "Oh it's done. We're actually getting ready to submit. The only thing we've been doing recently is fixing bugs, stabilising frame rates, certification at Sony and Microsoft and that's it! We're getting ready."
Fallout: New Vegas releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC October 19th in the US, and on the 22nd in Europe. See the latest trailer below, and check out our full interview.
