Design Journals - Analysis of the DVD, "The Making of Fallout: New Vegas"

Below is a design journal I wrote for one of my freshman design classes while attending DigiPen!

For this week’s log into my Design Journal, I’ve chosen to use Game Design Article Analysis as my format. The game article I’ll be going over this week is a DVD disc that I recently received for my birthday that is titled, “The Making of Fallout: New Vegas”. This DVD does well…exactly what it’s titled as and goes over the development and production of the hit game, Fallout: New Vegas, with a series of interviews with the higherups at Obsidian Entertainment like Feargus Urquhart, the president at Obsidian, or  John Gonzalez, the lead creative designer. The DVD does this by putting specific designs or parts that make the game what it is into sections of the video and elaborating them into detail by somewhat explaining to the audience what their design pillars were when tackling the development of Fallout: New Vegas.

            A notable section they went over for the development of the game was the story. The project director, Josh Sawyer, elaborates on how he considers New Vegas to be a “side story” to the main story of Fallout franchise. I found this statement to be quite understandable because I believe that while New Vegas does call back to the original games, Fallout and Fallout 2, it’s still its own unique creation of a story that doesn’t impact the events of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 going forward (Now we could argue that its because Bethesda doesn’t do a good job at making stories that feel impactful or meaningful but LET’S NOT). They also go over the different themes they wanted to set for Fallout: New Vegas which one of them was the reoccurring theme that hasn’t changed over the course of every Fallout game; “War, War Never Changes”. I believe that the developers consider this theme to be a design pillar of New Vegas, but also every other Fallout game because for starters, (besides crappy 76) every Fallout game begins with that monologue but also that no matter what Fallout game you play, there will be conflict and that even after nukes, humanity still has an unending appetite for killing each other. Another design pillar that I believe that I identified was that they talked about how when they started development, they set the goal that the player starts in one place and then ends the game with some big conflict climax moment. I believe this to be a design pillar because they set a goal for the game and throughout the development, likely had to keep referring to that goal and making sure that the result matched with that goal which it did.

Another notable section they went over for the development of the game was the game mechanics. The developers explicitly say that they did not want to “reinvent the wheel” of the game mechanics of Fallout: New Vegas. This is prevalent when playing the game because the while combat does feel like that of its predecessor, Fallout 3, it still feels unique or new in its own way because the developers expanded upon what was already established by adding new mechanics like mods for your weapons or unique moves for every melee weapon in the game that is unlocked depending on melee weapon stats. Another mechanic that I noticed is that the developers used the rule of threes as a mechanic for players to use to solve each quest they partake in. I liked learning this part of the video because I didn’t realize till then that quests in New Vegas were basically set up that way; its either setup based on what you say where you’ll get three or more options to how to react to NPCs dialogue and its also setup based on how to take on scenarios whether that’s killing everyone on sight or being charismatic and solving problems peacefully.

            What was great about this DVD was that I didn’t even scratch the iceberg of what can be found in this video, and I feel that it really shows how passionate the developers at Obsidian Entertainment were towards making Fallout: New Vegas and how they did a good job setting goals that they most definitely succeeded to accomplish through development (cough cough, Bethesda, I’m looking at you). I also feel that this DVD helped me open my perspective on the game as a whole and even games in general because of how video games are constantly being worked on by hundreds or thousands of people who have a passion towards this sort of thing and I just hope that I’ll be one of those people someday.