The best feature of Fallout: New Vegas came from Bethesda's original pitch

Bethesda initially proposed that Obsidian focus on factions when developing Fallout: New Vegas, which became the game's defining feature. The ability to choose between different groups is what makes the title so replayable – players can help the NCR, the Followers of the Apocalypse, or collect scalps for Caesar.

In an interview with Game Informer, designer Emil Pagliarulo recalled that factions didn't play a significant role in Fallout 3.

There are no factions. You can't join the factions, right? You join the Brotherhood of Steel, but that's the main quest. I remember at one point, our lead animator at the time, Hugh Riley, he made a comment in a meeting that said, 'We have the opposite of feature creep. We have feature seep,' meaning that we were cutting things.

Knowing that after Fallout 3 the studio would be working on Skyrim and wouldn't return to the series anytime soon, Bethesda approached Obsidian with a proposal to fill that gap. Game director Todd Howard shared:

We went to [Obsidian Entertainment] and said, 'Hey, would you like to do something?' And all we gave them was, like, 'We want you to do something and use factions.' We didn't do a lot of faction gameplay [in Fallout 3].

Given the task of implementing what Bethesda couldn't, Obsidian knocked it out of the park. The main choice in New Vegas is whether to side with the NCR, Caesar's Legion, Mr. House, or go fully independent, but along the way players make numerous decisions about who to help and who to complete side quests for. Every town tracks its own reputation with the player, and by the end of the playthrough, the Mojave map becomes a reflection of your choices – some settlements thrive while others fall into decay.

Fallout: New Vegas is available on PC and consoles. We hope that someday the game will receive a proper remaster.