If I remember correctly, one of the bigger complaints against Fallout 4 on release was that it wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian’s spin-off is seen by many as the series’ last stab at proper, old-school RPG’ing before Bethesda turned the post-apocalypse into a playful sandbox. Naturally, a group of modders have been hard at work bringing New Vegas’ guns ‘n’ graphics up to date with a total recreation inside Fallout 4, showing off their spit-shined spurs in a new progress trailer this week.
F4NV has been in production since at least 2017 – and while they’ve been posting work-in-progress tidbits for some time now, this week the collected mod-makers behind F4NV released a major “showcase” trailer for the ambitious mod, just in time for the Obsidian spin-off’s tenth anniversary. Good grief, has it been that long already?
Sure enough, it does very much look like Fallout: New Vegas rendered in the more up-to-date stylings of Bethesda’s Fallout 4. And while it may seem petty, the sheer jank of New Vegas’s foundations were a barrier to me getting invested in what I’m told is an extremely good wasteland RPG, actually. Granted, Fallout 4’s technical base has its own share of problems, leading the mod team towards some spine-breaking problems with combining the two games.
Fallout 4 does undoubtedly have better rootin’, tootin’ and shootin’ than the Fallout 3 era games, mind. That’s something the trailer is keenly aware of, flaunting a whole lot more exploding heads and first-person blasting than it does any sort of ethical dialogue dilemma. Of course, the folks who are excited for a mod like F4NV are probably the sort of folks who could recite their favourite New Vegas questlines from memory.
That’s if you even consider New Vegas a classic, mind. Scrolling all the way back in the RPS archives reveals this absolute scorcher of a Fallout: New Vegas review from Quintin Smith.
“It’s just that this is absolutely not the classic that Fallout 1 and 2 unquestionably were, and it’s also not the bold, bright reinvention that Fallout 3 was. It’s just… here, offering more Fallout. Do you want some more Fallout? If so, New Vegas can provide, so long as you don’t mind your every hour with it being laced with some small amount of disappointment. That is, unless you haven’t played a Fallout game before, but in that case you’re better off with the Game of the Year edition of Fallout 3.”
Brutal, Quinns. Absolutely brutal.
It’s all moot now, anyway. For better or worse, Fallout 76 has defined what Bethesda consider a modern Fallout game looks like, while Obsidian are off doing their own thing with The Outer Wilds, Grounded and the recently-announced Avowed. Funnily enough, they’re now both doing so under the umbrella of tech monolith Microsoft.
Fallout 4: New Vegas still seems a good ways away from completion. But if you want to keep track of progress, the team are posting regular screenshots and clips over on their Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Disclosure: Turns out one of my old Uni pals (Thomas “Otellino” Mitchell) is a contributing level designer on this thing? Small world, huh.
