Strategy Informer: Speaking candidly for a minute - your last game, Alpha Protocol, wasn't received that well. Has that affected the development of New Vegas at all?

Josh Sawyer: Well whenever you put that much time and effort into something, and there's all that negative opinion on it, it's kind of sobering and we think "Ok, this isn't a fluke here, we made some mistakes that we want to learn from". Personally I felt all along that we want to make the gameplay experience feel good - I know that sounds like a very simple thing but in some cases I feel like designers sometimes kind of internalise their opinions about something, and don't think from the perspective of the players. Is the player going to enjoy shooting? Is the player going to enjoy doing this kind of thing in the game? Are these objectives clear to them?

They seem really basic but sometimes I think they can be really difficult to pull off, and I think with Alpha Protocol people criticised things that were really basic gameplay elements. For New Vegas I was like "ok, we don't want to reinvent the wheel here", what can we just improve upon? A lot of people liked Fallout 3, so shooting mechanics, VATS, stealth... don't just break the mould and start again, how can we take what's there and improve upon it? We want players who are coming into it to feel like this is similar to what they've seen, but better.​

Josh Sawyer: Oh it's done. We're actually getting ready to submit. The only thing we've been doing recently is fixing bugs, stabilising frame rates, certification at Sony and Microsoft and that's it! We're getting ready.​