The original isometric Fallout 3 wouldn’t have been cancelled if execs had bothered to see it, New Vegas lead says

The original version of Fallout 3 would never have been cancelled if Interplay management had taken the time to actually see it, Josh Sawyer says.

Sawyer – who went on to be lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, as well as game and narrative director on Pentiment – originally joined Black Isle Studios to work on Dungeons & Dragons spin-off game Icewind Dale, which was published by Interplay.

After the release of Icewind Dale and its sequel, Sawyer became part of the team working on the first version of Fallout 3. This version, which was codenamed Van Buren, was going to have the same overhead, isometric viewpoint as the first two Fallout games, but with a shift from pixel graphics to polygonal 3D.

Van Buren was cancelled in 2003, and five years later an entirely different Fallout 3 was released, switching to the first-person and third-person action RPG style that the series has since continued to use.

In a new interview on The Examined Game, Sawyer claimed that executives at Interplay never took the time to see Van Buren while it was development, and that they later conceded the game wouldn’t have been cancelled if they had actually seen the tech demo in action.

“I wasn’t the lead on that, Chris Avellone was the lead on that,” Sawyer recalled. “I was the lead system designer, because I had done a ton of system design, and most of the other designers weren’t as interested in it, to be honest.

“And the real pressure happened after Avellone left, Chris Jones left, all the sort of senior people left to form Obsidian, and I still wanted to try to see if we could get Fallout done. And so there was a group of people that were still there, [and] bit by bit people started leaving for Obsidian or other companies, and it became clear that Interplay was not going to make it, really.

“And that was rough because when I came to Black Isle, my dream game – I mean, I wanted to work on a D&D game, that was incredible, that was aa great opportunity – but my dream was to work on Fallout 3, and so I was like ‘come on, please let me stay and finish this’. But it just wasn’t going to happen, and so I just saw it falling apart and eventually I had to leave as well.”

After the cancellation of Van Buren, Sawyer left Black Isle, and the studio was closed by Interplay two weeks later. In his interview with The Examined Game, Sawyer was asked if there was a specific moment when he realised the project wasn’t going to happen and he had to leave the company.

“There was one character artist that we had,” he replied. “We had been taken down to a skeleton crew, and that resource got taken away to work on another project outside of Black Isle, and I was like ‘oh, they don’t care what we’re working on’.

“And I heard… this is such a bummer, because we made a cool demo – it looks very dated now but you have to understand it was 2003 when this demo was finished, but you can go on YouTube and find the Van Buren demo – and I thought it was a really cool demo and it showed that we were doing some pretty neat things.

“I left, but Tom French the producer finally showed it to the Interplay people who remained, and what he told me was that they said: ‘Well, if we had known that you had made this, then maybe we wouldn’t have cancelled it’.

“It’s like, we asked you repeatedly to come see what we were working on, we asked you repeatedly to come look at our budgets and our schedule. We were quite literally upstairs from you, you could have just walked up the stairs and talked to us. We invited you over and over and over again, you never came.

“So they weren’t interested in it, and that was the point when I lost my last – I can’t remember if it was environment or character resource – but I was like ‘we can’t make a game, and if they’re just going to keep stripping resources from us they don’t care, they’re not going to support us’, so I had to leave.”

After a spell at Midway, Sawyer joined Obsidian in 2005, where he was lead designer for Neverwinter Nights 2 before leading design on Fallout: New Vegas.