It’s not just fans who have taken to modding. Josh Sawyer, project director and lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas at Obsidian, offered a small mod post-release called the
Jsawyer Mod that tweaks the game more in line with his original plan for the difficulty. The mod was conceived after the game was completed. “I started to realise that with our development cycles for the DLCs, and due to some technical issues with how the DLCs and main game interact, there were quite a few issues that we wouldn’t be able to officially address.”
Intent on addressing these issues, Sawyer was also keen to balance the game’s difficulty more towards his original vision. “I held back on the base difficulty of Fallout: New Vegas because Fallout 3’s base difficulty was low and I didn’t think it was reasonable to spike up the challenge too much. I wanted to create a more challenging experience in the mod.”
His list of tweaks might seem minor but they make for a vastly different experience when put into practice, and for the curious, represents a chance to play a kind of ‘Director’s Cut’ of the game.
“Most of the changes were easy to make,” Sawyer elaborates. “Bethesda’s tools are terrific for making and editing content. My workflow at home was very similar to what it was as work. The reason the mod is called JSawyer is because our naming convention for local files at work was first initial and last name. So the mod is really just named that way because my work environment at home was the same as at Obsidian. I just wasn’t connected to any source control.”
Sawyer continues, “There were a few things I had difficulty changing and I made a bunch of ‘dirty’ edits in the process. Dirty edits (changes made as a shortcut to get a mod working that may in turn cause problems or conflict with other mods) aren’t really a thing that we had to worry about when working on Fallout: New Vegas through source control, so I wasn’t sure how to deal with them. A talented modder [Xporc] helped me clean up the dirty edits and make the changes I was having difficulty with.”
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What about the developers who worked on these games, how do they feel about the restoring of cut content? Josh Sawyer seems pretty laid back about it all. Speaking on Fallout: New Vegas, he says “I don’t think there’s anything special about the content that was cut. I don’t mind people restoring/extending it, but I also don’t think there’s anything more interesting about what we cut compared to new content that modders could develop.”
On the community surrounding these demanding projects, Sawyer has more complex feelings. “Participating directly in the modding community also helped confirm that the communities also pressure modders heavily to overextend their scope by accommodating feature requests over time,” he explains. “I suspected this was a problem, which is why I made no concessions to making versions supporting just the base game, supporting various combinations of DLCs, or making changes to my mod to support compatibility with other mods. It’s also why the only official hosting location for my mod is on my website. I can’t control what people do with it once it’s out there, but I can state, ‘This is the only official place to find my mod and if you find it somewhere else, I disavow it.’”
