

When Malcom showed up, Sawyer was completely taken by surprise, it being one of the unexpected consequences that comes with leveraging Bethesda’s engine. Bethesda’s tech allowed us to do a lot of stuff we haven’t been able to before.” “So you can have bounty hunters tracking you, you can have guys obsessed with bottlecaps following you, you can do all sorts of stuff like that. “Bethesda’s engine allows you to mark a character as persistent, which means they can be active no matter where in the world the player is,” Sawyer tells me. The NPC, Malcolm Holmes, had trekked across the Mojave desert for this chinwag, like some die-hard post-apocalyptic pilgrim. But, unfortunately, his viewing was rudely interrupted by a tap on the shoulder – an NPC really wanted to talk to him about bottlecaps. Lead designer Josh Sawyer wanted to see how it looked for himself once it was finished. Obsidian put extra effort into making this sequence look, sound, and feel as good as possible. Once you have gathered the supplies needed to fix the missile, you are treated to a cutscene of the rocket blasting towards the sky, backed by Richard Wagner’s rousing classical song, Ride of the Valkyries.

One of the most memorable quests in Fallout: New Vegas is called Come Fly With Me, where you launch a rocket from the REPCONN test site.
