Videogamer.com's Wesley Yin-Poole has a pretty solid interview with Obsidian's Chris Avellone.<blockquote>Q: You were working on a Fallout 3 that didn't happen, called Project Van Buren. Are there any ideas or mechanics you had in place for that game that we'll see in Fallout: New Vegas?
CA: We thought we would but actually it ended up not being the case. If you ever read any of the Van Buren documents you might recognise certain titles for groups, like Caesar's Legion. But what they actually became in New Vegas was far divorced from anything they were planned for in Van Buren. So it's actually taken kind of an interesting spin. That five year break, I think you just end up having new design ideas. You're like, well you know actually it would be more interesting if they went this way. So I mean Van Buren was a good testing ground for some of that stuff, but New Vegas is basically a brand new game.
Q: Why New Vegas? Why that part of the world?
CA: We were given the parameters for like, just do something on the Western side of the world, go off and do your own thing. We were like, okay. So then we were like, what's a signature city that's comparable to Washington DC but in the west? We asked people independently and Vegas just kept coming up all the time. We were like, okay well you know that is a cool signature city. But at the same time, it turns out people in different departments got excited about it for different reasons. An example would be the artists got really excited about it because that's one city where you can play around with the architecture within almost every city block and go, hey here's a theme for this casino and we can go fucking crazy with it because it's Vegas. Like, here's a signage we can use. Here are the different colours we can use. Here are the lighting schemes we can use. When you walk down the strip in Vegas in real life, all those signature casinos like the Luxor have these really cool themes. And the artists were like, oh this would be fun to do. And we were like, okay let's just take that energy and momentum and just make a fun location.</blockquote>Of less interest, MCV talked with Pete Hines on sales expectations for New Vegas.<blockquote>Fallout 3 debuted at No.1 in the ELSPA/GfK Chart-Track All Formats charts and managed to shift 4.7m copies worldwide in its first week.
It also outsold the combined sales of all previous Fallout games in just two days.
“Based on what we’re seeing so far from the response at retail and from gamers, we expect New Vegas to do even better than Fallout 3,” said Bethesda’s global VP of PR and marketing Pete Hines.</blockquote>
CA: We thought we would but actually it ended up not being the case. If you ever read any of the Van Buren documents you might recognise certain titles for groups, like Caesar's Legion. But what they actually became in New Vegas was far divorced from anything they were planned for in Van Buren. So it's actually taken kind of an interesting spin. That five year break, I think you just end up having new design ideas. You're like, well you know actually it would be more interesting if they went this way. So I mean Van Buren was a good testing ground for some of that stuff, but New Vegas is basically a brand new game.
Q: Why New Vegas? Why that part of the world?
CA: We were given the parameters for like, just do something on the Western side of the world, go off and do your own thing. We were like, okay. So then we were like, what's a signature city that's comparable to Washington DC but in the west? We asked people independently and Vegas just kept coming up all the time. We were like, okay well you know that is a cool signature city. But at the same time, it turns out people in different departments got excited about it for different reasons. An example would be the artists got really excited about it because that's one city where you can play around with the architecture within almost every city block and go, hey here's a theme for this casino and we can go fucking crazy with it because it's Vegas. Like, here's a signage we can use. Here are the different colours we can use. Here are the lighting schemes we can use. When you walk down the strip in Vegas in real life, all those signature casinos like the Luxor have these really cool themes. And the artists were like, oh this would be fun to do. And we were like, okay let's just take that energy and momentum and just make a fun location.</blockquote>Of less interest, MCV talked with Pete Hines on sales expectations for New Vegas.<blockquote>Fallout 3 debuted at No.1 in the ELSPA/GfK Chart-Track All Formats charts and managed to shift 4.7m copies worldwide in its first week.
It also outsold the combined sales of all previous Fallout games in just two days.
“Based on what we’re seeing so far from the response at retail and from gamers, we expect New Vegas to do even better than Fallout 3,” said Bethesda’s global VP of PR and marketing Pete Hines.</blockquote>
