'Fallout: New California' Team Reveals What Went Wrong and What Went Incredibly Right

With Fallout: New California, New York, Miami, and the incredible Fallout 4: New Vegas projects all sharing incredible updates it's not hard to see why there is so much interest in seeing these ambitious mods and watching the creative teams flourish. These ambitious fan projects continue to make headway to completion and into the hands of gamers, but one project's creative team is asking for some additional input.

For Fallout: New California, this project is ready to rock and roll this October, but that doesn't mean that the hard work is over - far from it, in fact. The team is working hard on polishing off what's done and wrapping up any loose ends. That being said, there were a lot of missteps, creative sacrifices, and a lot of decisions they weren't sure would pay off. The latest developer update gives fans an inside look at what went wrong and what went amazingly right.

This fan project's creator opened up by saying, "Been playing FNC to test out changes, and it is very very close to done. At this point it's all superficial changes. The architecture is there, it's solid, it's all working -- the flaws and the highlights -- and after the next build or two I think we're release ready."

In an effort to be "retrospective on what we did during development to get us here," the creator mentioned exactly how tumultuous the road was to get to this very point, the point of release.

"The flaws are exactly what I said would happen if we never got any more modders on the project -- places where the Main Quest NEEDED to be supported by side quest content -- feel like a linear, on a rail, "go here and do this," bullshit. To me that feels just as frustrating as a Far Cry title, where there are clearly obvious intentions for other options to be there, but the devs were dying for time and reduced to just 1 option to save their sanity."

He added, "We also have some "for the sake of simplicity" changes to the design of certain dialogue conversations where two parallel options were supposed to be coded side by side, ending in a menu, and instead those options are in one linear track, which makes less sense and feels less free -- and we just don't have the time to fix that because this engine makes that a MASSIVE unintuitive, non-visual pain in the ass (they're all scripted in text, not a node based structure or a menu.)"

He also spoke about how frustrating some of these cuts were, how "lame" those decisions felt when looking back on content that didn't need to be cut but were at the time due to coding limitations.

There were parts initially that felt sloggish, that didn't feel exciting or matched up with their initial promise to fans. It was at this time that they realised the narrative needed a change. It was "exactly what you don't want in the middle of your game."

But they kept going, "The fixes we applied with un-cutting Dr. Marius and Vayger the Gatekeeper helped tremendously. Adding in Bert who is also getting uncut will help a lot again, as well as our Patriot missile launcher. That's all NCR side characters that make the "go here and fight" quest either more meaningful or they allow you a non-violent means of achieving the same outcome without having to sacrifice much, or actually getting more reward for it."

He also spoke a little bit about the battles:

"The battles, if you like the battles, are fun as hell. 10x better than the best combat in New Vegas. For your Warrior player character branch, that's the meat & potatoes, which is held up by strong and meaningful characters that really make you think, really give you a good reason to fight, and make that combat matter in a way that it wouldn't if it wasn't an RPG, and the choices you can make are very organic -- not all of them are obvious."

"In hindsight, we could have shrunk the map by 2x and just had the mod take place a stone's throw from each objective, and have the map in quadrants. Those quadrants contain each Main Quest field so all objectives are right next door -- not walking across a vast desert carrying water (if you can't use science and repair to fix the water lines) or restoring power at the relay by combat (if you can't use science to mock up your own solution) and walking between those two places for half an hour to fifteen minutes."

From environmental changes, to character overhauls - the road was rocky. But it paid off, "So we have some truly outstanding successes to write home about. We have some deep flaws right down the middle that I think for many player who had a rough time in Vault 18 and Pinehaven (they got confused and lost in the complex web of options and tried to rush) will be where they rage quit and tap out in frustration."

To read the entire tale of development, you can see the full post right here! As for the mod itself, it goes live this October before it's locked in for good in December!