Fallout: New Vegas stands alone as a full-fledged game, but was originally conceived as a massive expansion of Fallout 3. In a Fallout retrospective video published by Bethesda, Todd Howard, executive producer and director of Fallout 3 from Bethesda, explains how New Vegas came to be.
Fallout 3 came out and it’s really a really big hit for the company, and they’re saying, “Okay, what’s the follow up?” And I was like, ‘Okay, we’re working on Skyrim, so [then] It’s going to be Fallout 4, and there was a push like… “We should do a big expansion pack or something. Are there companies we can do that? And we knew the people on Obsidian, and there was kind of this right away.” [thought that] There is only one group that we really want to do. It really started out as a big expansion pack for Fallout 3, and I strongly felt it should be its own game.
Fallout fans will certainly be glad that the project has turned into a full-fledged game, as Fallout: New Vegas is one of the greatest open-world games of all time. Microsoft now owns New Vegas developer Obsidian, which makes possible follow-up possible. However, just last week, Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart said the studio is not working on Fallout at the moment, but “there’s no question” about doing so if the opportunity presents itself.
Instead, Obsidian is preparing to release Pentiment, a 16th-century puzzle game set in Bavaria. The game will be released on Xbox and PC on November 15. If you’re interested, you can check out our interview with Obsidian developer Josh Sawyer.