Fallout: New Vegas director reveals that game balance is 'mostly vibes based', says he only used a weapons spreadsheet 'for maybe a couple of months'

GamesRPGFalloutFallout: New VegasFallout: New Vegas director reveals that game balance is ‘mostly vibes based’, says he only used a weapons spreadsheet ‘for maybe a couple of months’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment)

Fallout New Vegas key art

This uncomfortable reminder was delivered via a recent YouTube video on thedeveloper’s channel(thanks,GamesRadar). Responding to a question he’d received on Tumblr, Sawyer gave a big shrug, stating that he doesn’t “really believe in spending a huge amount of time, prior to people playing the game, in ‘simulation land’. Because it doesn’t really matter.”

(Image credit: Joshua Sawyer on YouTube.)

A video screenshot of Joshua Sawyer’s latest video on weapons balancing.

“Ultimately, it’s about the practical effect of it in the game,” Sawyer argues. “You just play around with it.” While he doesn’t completely scrap the idea of making dedicated test levels to rinse the numbers, “most of what I did I would do within [actual] game levels. I would run around in the area around Vault 3, and then go into Vault 3 and test the weapons against the enemies in that area.

“To me that’s really the important thing, to see how those things feel in practice.”

This isn’t exactly new wisdom. Earlier this year, Doom (2016)’s creative director Hugo Martin responded to a question about how the dev team balanced the destructive BFG.Simply put, they didn’t: “it’s a great gun, iconic to the franchise, but it is the ‘kill everything button’.”

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As Sawyer notes, “once you get player feedback, you have to listen to the player feedback”, though he rightly points out that doesn’t “necessarily mean acting on it.”

Despite scrapping the spreadsheet eventually, Sawyer still sees it as a valuable part of the process: “Most of it is really about taking your best shot at a spreadsheet, laying it out, and then trying things out within the levels and seeing how it feels.”

Now in fairness—Fallout: New Vegas is a singleplayer RPG, where the balance between various options matters less than making sure everything’s viable at a baseline. If a player never stumbles into a broken combo then they’re less likely to get mad because, as the old adage says, what you don’t know can’t hurt ya.

Weapons mouthfeel is still of vital importance in multiplayer games, but it’ll more often fall to the wayside in favour of an even playing field. Finding out the level said field should be at, though, can be very difficult, like when a change to one of Destiny 2’s gunsproved controversial in 2022because it was nerfed for raid reasons—though just as balancing itself is susceptible to vibes, so were the community’s knee-jerk reactions. Sawyer’s probably right, it’s vibes all the way down.

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