Fallout: New Vegas "Would have had Fewer Performance Issues" if it Had Been Developed for PC Only

There are instances where the decision to put a game on multiple platforms hinders its development. Fallout: New Vegas suffered this too when, according to a new interview with Obsidian, console development ultimately forced the team to scale back some of the ambitious designs for Fallout: New Vegas. Apparently going multi-platform might have even created more performance issues than necessary.

"[Fallout: New Vegas] would have been a lot different if it was PC only," explained lead world builder Scott Everts in an interview with 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."

Even existing areas like the Mojave Wasteland would have looked differently on a PC-only version of the game. More separated by little zones than what it ultimately became, according to Evert.

Everts also told PCGamesN that while some of the original content ideas did make it into the final version of the game, a lot of it was pared down so that it wouldn't hamper the game engine. "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."

We recently sat down with Obsidian to talk about the legacy of Fallout: New Vegas, which seems to have only grown since its initial release. While we may never know what a PC-only version of New Vegas could look like outside of Everts' scant examples, we know that at the very least New Vegas' ambition impressed fans of Fallout, new and old.