Fallout: New Vegas Was “Constrained” Because Of Consoles Ports

What was it like making Fallout: New Vegas? Did they have troubles with the console and PC versions?

It’s a well known fact that developing for PC and developing for consoles are two very different things. Both have constraints and needs that need to be addressed, and because of that, some prefer to make one or the other, and never both.

For the team behind Fallout: New Vegas, they admitted that if they had their way, the game would’ve been much more grand from the start, for they had to limit some things because of the console versions:

“One of the things about that game is it would have been a lot different if it was PC only,” world builder Scott Everts noted to PCGamesN. “We had a lot of plans early on. Like, ‘Here’s where the water is stored, here’s where the farms are, here’s where the government is centralised’. We had it all planned out – it wasn’t just a bunch of random stuff. Then we had the whole thing of how the factions interact with each other. Even ‘How does the water get here?’ Because that’s important – those are the things a lot of people don’t think about.

“We could have gone further with that. We had to simplify, so we had less stuff that would bog down the game engine. I was more happy with the DLC because by that time we knew what would work and what wouldn’t. It was also focused, laser sharp, so we could spend more time on it. The wasteland, I would have laid it out differently – it would have been more separate zones I think, put a big wall around the whole thing and you just see the big tower and it’s a bunch of little zones. We would have had fewer performance issues. We did break it up a bit, but from my point of view it was a performance-related game and we had to fix things.”

Fallout: New Vegas was a hit in every way, but you have to wonder what it would’ve been like if they had gotten their way from the beginning.