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Fallout: New Vegas may have been released 14 years ago, but much of what’s contained in its tattered vision of America seems eternally impressive. The New Vegas Strip, home to just a few bright lights and lonely casinos, is not necessarily one of those things. But when director Josh Sawyer saw an early version of the Strip, he worried it was too impressive to exist.

While working on New Vegas, Sawyer explains to Edge Magazine in issue #404 that his team at Obsidian was overwhelmed. In 2007, the Fallout franchise officially left Interplay for Bethesda. Sawyer says the latter developer has been “very helpful” in relaying information about the RPG games he’s recently become an expert on, but “there’s still a lot that’s considered institutional knowledge that the team behind them use would never think of I’ll tell you.”

Some of these include how to make a Fallout game on console. Sawyer specifically recalls that “once we started testing the Strip on the console hardware, we were like, ‘Oh my God, this isn’t going to work.’

The remedy for this is at least partly responsible for why so many modern Fallout fans find the Strip “disappointing: “We had to split up the Strip,” Sawyer says, “and a lot of content got cut.”

“We had three programmers with us on the project,” he continues, “and many of them were just doing basic maintenance and upkeep, (or) integrating a new version of Havok physics, for example, which blew up the game for several years.” some time.” In the end, Obsidian got everything under control and left the explosion to the gnarly atomic bombs.

The Fallout: New Vegas director on the ‘blessing’ of working on the RPG: “I never thought I’d get the chance to work on Fallout (again). »