Fallout: New Vegas director on the “blessing” of working on the RPG: “I never thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again]”

gamesradar.com:

After the cancellation of the first Fallout game he worked on, Josh Sawyer was determined not to squander a second chance to work on the series when the opportunity to direct Fallout: New Vegas arose.

Over the last decade, Josh Sawyer has effectively cemented himself as a household name in the game industry, directing both Pillars of Eternity games and, more recently, 2022’s medieval art RPG Pentiment. But for many, his crowning achievement will likely always be 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas, a game Sawyer himself regards as a blessing.

While at Black Isle Studios, Sawyer worked as the lead systems designer for a later-cancelled Fallout 3 project codenamed Van Buren. Around five years later Sawyer was working for Obsidian Entertainment, and following the release of the Fallout 3 we all know and (mostly) love, Sawyer had the chance to work on the franchise again when Bethesda contracted the studio to develop New Vegas - one Sawyer was not going to pass up. “This is a blessing.” he said of the opportunity in Edge issue 404, “I never thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again].”

At the time, Obsidian had just come off the back of a cancelled Aliens RPG, near the end of which Sawyer had been promoted to director, and with only 18 months to develop New Vegas, he credits Bethesda’s tech with solving a lot of the studio’s prior issues. 

“We had put a lot of time and effort into the [Aliens] tech, but it took forever to make areas and basically we didn't have a game.” he began. “Then we got Bethesda's tech, [which] is extremely powerful for rapidly making content, more than any engine and toolset I've ever used. You can make content so quickly with their tools. So I said 'Hey, everybody, we do not want to disrupt our pipelines at all. We basically want to use what's there - add to it, don't change it, just add to it - and make great content."

With the process more streamlined, Sawyer had more time to focus on overseeing the design team but he insists that the designers