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In a new video on his YouTube channel, Obsidian studio design director and Fallout: New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer described the company’s largely vibes-based approach to which quests make it to its RPGs’ signature “where are they now” ending slide shows. Along the way, he dove into the decisionmaking around a fairly minor New Vegas quest that got the treatment.
“When deciding what does or doesn’t get an ending slide,” asked a viewer named Lorena, “Is that up to the individual writer/designer working on the related questline, or is it more the creative director assigning what’s important enough to get an ending slide?” According to Sawyer, “it’s mostly arbitrary,” with a given game’s director making the call. In his experience, designers would hardly ever “lobby for their quest to be in ending slides.”
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“Usually, there’s stuff we kind of take for granted and assume are going to go in,” he explained. “For example: Major choices at the end of the game, faction alliances … companions usually have their own sets of endings.
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“It’s largely just based off of stuff that we think is gonna be interesting and entertaining to the player. It’s not necessarily about how big or important the quest is.”
On the subject of entertainment over importance, Sawyer turned to Flags of Our Foul-Ups, a New Vegas quest by former Obsidian designer Travis Stout (now at Massive Entertainment). “There’s a bunch of NCR soldiers who suck,” was Sawyer’s topline summary. “They’re just huge screw-ups, and they’re in trouble because they’re doing so bad.”
In classic Obsidian fashion, you can pass any number of skill checks to help them out: Speech to convince them to put ego aside and work together, Science to falsify records and make them look better, combat skills to train them, etc. You can also just give them drugs—the fictional combat stimulant, “Psycho,” to be specific—and the consequences of that particular choice are what really got the gears turning.
“I think it was that choice specifically that made us wonder: During the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, what would actually happen to these guys,” recalled Sawyer. “It was the drug one where we were like, they’d probably become war criminals. They’d just go berserk and start killing all sorts of people that weren’t even involved in the conflict. We decided, ‘Let’s do end slides for that.'”
“Driven into a frenzy by their use of Psycho, The Misfits inflicted heavy casualties on the Legion during the defense of Camp Golf,” reads the Psycho ending for the quest. “At first they were commended for their valor, but eventually, desperate for more of the chem, they turned on travelers in Outer Vegas. For their dishonorable conduct, the NCR court-martialed and executed them by firing squad.” Yeeesh.
Back to ending slides writ large, Sawyer reiterated that the team has to hit “the major beats” like main story, factions, and companions, with anything after being discretionary.
“There are time limits,” he said. “We have to illustrate all the ending slides. We have to write them. We have to record them. While that might not seem like a lot of work individually, it kinda adds up, all the different permutations. For example, some companions will have [up to seven] different ending states.”
