‘Fallout: New Vegas’ director Josh Sawyer has admitted the games’ weapon balancing was “mostly vibes-based”.
Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has admitted the games’ weapon balancing was 'mostly vibes-based'
The beloved 2010 role-playing-game, which was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, introduced several new firearms and melee items into the franchise, such as the Blood-Nap and the Blade of the East, and Josh revealed he balanced them simply by "playing around" with them to decide how powerful he felt they should be.
In a YouTube video, he explained: “I don't really believe in spending a huge amount of time prior to people playing the game in a sort of 'simulation land,' because it doesn't really matter.
“That's because ultimately, it's about the practical effect of it in the game.
“Once you actually have a framework, then I think most of that work should be done in-game. Depending on the volume of the abilities, the powers, et cetera that you have, maybe some sort of a heuristic [approach] or some sort of simulation would be a good way to get a general idea of where things land, but ultimately, I think you just play around with it.”
This comes as Todd Howard - Bethesda Softworks’ director and executive producer - gushed about the game, though admitted he didn’t think content from the title would make its way over to the Amazon Prime TV adaptation of the post-apocalyptic series because it would be “hard to canonise”.
Appearing on ‘The Kinda Funny Podcast’, he said: “First I'll say, [Obsidian] did an amazing job with ‘New Vegas’.
“‘New Vegas’ is a very, very important game to us, and our fans, we think they did an incredible job. “If anything, the show is leaning into the events [of ‘New Vegas’].
“Season two is going to be featuring some of ‘New Vegas’ and we're careful about maintaining the key events of that game and the great content in it.
“It is obviously difficult to deal with - when you're going back to an area where a game had multiple endings, we have some answers there but it's hard.
“Everybody realises it's hard to canonise or say, ‘this is exactly how that game ended’, and so whenever we can, I like to avoid it, like don't refute anything that happened, be careful when you're specific about what happened - we want that game, and [what] the players did, to be their reality and true.”