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Hindsight and the nostalgia it brings are both a heck of a thing. If you listen to the Fallout community today, you’d think that Fallout: New Vegas was always a beloved part of the franchise, worthy of becoming the inspiration for the recent Fallout Season 2. However, some of the developers at Obsidian and Bethesda tell a very different story about how fans reacted to New Vegas, admitting that the now-classic game was hated for being buggy and repetitive.

There is no denying that Fallout: New Vegas is a beloved part of the Fallout franchise today, but that wasn’t the case when it was first released. According to an oral history of the franchise, it took several years before fans came around to what developer Bethesda was doing. “It’s interesting, because New Vegas was not particularly well-received when it launched,” lead designer and project director Josh Sawyer said. “It was quite buggy and both players and critics commented on how much we had reused from Fallout 3. It took about five years for the community to come around on the game and maybe a few years more for us to start considering that players actually liked the design choices we had made.”

The fact that New Vegas started life as a DLC for Fallout 3 before eventually becoming a standalone title explains the reuse of assets, while, as revealed in the same interview, the game was made in just 18 months explains the plentiful bugs. The thing that seems to have sold the game to fans is the amount of choice they have in playing the game. According to John Gonzalez, the creative design lead and lead writer for Fallout: New Vegas, said, “It’s all about allowing the player to have tremendous amounts of narrative impact, narrative control. And so, I think that for someone, if that’s your jam, then you’re going to think that New Vegas is the best of the bunch.”

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