Fallout: New Vegas dev says it could’ve been set in New Orleans because ‘the vibe was so cool, the flavor was cool, [it would’ve been] so sweet’

Fallout: New Vegas writer and former Obsidian creative officer, Chris Avellone, has given a new interview to Fallout content creator TKs-Mantis, and it’s a hefty one. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising assertion is that Bethesda doesn’t have the source code for New Vegas (I’ve asked Bethesda about this, and haven’t had a response yet), but there’s plenty more: including one particular road not travelled for the series, alongside a healthy crank on the specul-a-tron about where Fallout might go next.

When being asked about the early stages of Fallout: New Vegas’ production, the host mentions the potential of a setting like New Orleans. “Holy shit,” says Avellone, “Yeah so one of the designers / producers on one of our other projects suggested New Orleans’s location, and I was so stoked for that.

“It’s going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise that was started by this author-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel. And a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic. There was one that was written in New Orleans, it was called Four Devils, One Hell.”

I haven’t read this, so I looked up a plot summary, and it involves a PI investigating the murder of a chef while four Grendels manifest their own visions of hell in New Orleans. One “is insane and believes himself to be a knight in the service of Charlemagne” and likes to fight vampires, one’s trying to mess with the PI, one’s an English curator on the hunt for some mysterious treasure, and the last is a gentlemanly gambler. I can kinda see where some of that might map onto Fallout’s own brand of post-apocalypse.

“It’s a fantastic story but as soon as I read it, which is while I was doing Fallout research ironically enough, I’m like, man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad,” says Avellone. “‘Cos the vibe was so cool. The flavor was cool. And like it’s still Fallout, but in a different area that felt different. There’s a lot of potential there. [It would’ve been] so sweet.”

Elsewhere in the interview, another location pops up: though not in relation to New Vegas. Avellone offers up some thoughts about what the Fallout TV show has done well and not-so-well, before ending with “the show’s laying all the groundwork for whatever I guess Fallout 5 is going to be as far as I understand it.”

He’s asked about the fact that Bethesda supposedly said ‘don’t do San Francisco’ when pitching, and confirms with a simple “yeah.” Bethesda also later asked for the removal of a line of dialogue in New Vegas that said San Francisco was nuked. Asked whether he thinks this means Fallout 5 is heading to San Francisco, Avellone says “it’s quite possible.”

Avellone left Obsidian in 2015, citing creative and business disputes with management. He has since written for several notable RPGs, including Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and is currently collaborating with Red Info, the studio founded by Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz, on a future title. As for New Vegas, the hopium continues to waft around a mooted remaster, the most recent rumours landing last month.