Joshua Robertson is a News Editor for TheGamer. When not writing about breaking news, community stories, or covering industry events, you can find him begging FromSoftware for a Bloodborne remaster.
Fallout: New Vegas’ development and how rushed it was has been widely documented over the years, as Bethesda gave developer Obsidian Entertainment an 18-month deadline to get the game finished, a development cycle that is nigh unfathomable in today’s gaming industry. It’s a phrase that’s uttered a lot in game development, but it’s an actual miracle that the game turned out as well as it did.
However, as a result of its rushed development cycle, the state of Fallout: New Vegas understandably changed quite dramatically during development, which makes looking at older prototypes of the game a lot more interesting than your standard video game. For example, there was a version of the game that let you seduce Mr. House, and gave him a “special assistant” called Marilyn.
A YouTuber by the name of Games’ Past was the first one to share the prototype of Fallout: New Vegas, but they’re now back with various prototypes for the four New Vegas DLC expansions — Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. While there aren’t as many interesting differences between the prototypes and the base game, there are a few that are worth a look.
Fallout: New Vegas DLC Prototypes Have Been Uncovered
For example, the Old World Blues DLC prototype has an interesting difference, which is that the VR room in the X-13 research facility (which is heavily damaged in the release version) is actually fully functional. By interacting with a monitor, you’re taken to a stealth trial, in which you have to remain undetected while trying to find three dead bodies and collect the data from them.
If you’re detected, you’re sent back to the start of the trial to try again. If you actually succeed and manage to sneak past everything, your grand prize is for the game to crash, most likely due to the fact there is no win state in the prototype version uncovered by Games’ Past.
That’s pretty much the only fascinating thing that was uncovered, besides some pretty drastic environmental changes, but one of the more goofier discoveries was found in a prototype build of Lonesome Road seven months away from its official release, and involved the expansion’s main antagonist, Ulysses.
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You should all know that the expansion’s finale involves a discussion with Ulysses, but it goes very differently in the prototype. When confronting Ulysses, he simply says “Hello. I am the antagonist”. You’re then given a choice to call him a “cheese weasel” and fight him, or tell him to stop his plans and “hug it out”. Choose the latter, and Ulysses will tell you “I only act out because I want attention”, before urging you to stop the missiles he’s about to fire. Now that’s a mood.
M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Drugs
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