Obsidian Entertainment’s Fallout: New Vegas launched on multiple platforms over a decade ago in 2010. The follow-up to Fallout 3, Obsidian’s foray into the post-nuclear wasteland of 2281 takes players to Arizona, California, and Nevada over 200 years after the bombs dropped during The Great War.
Requests, rumors, and supposed leaks about the development of Fallout: New Vegas 2 have abounded almost since the release of Fallout: New Vegas and, despite the game’s age, it retains an active community of fans and modders, many of whom maintain that Obsidian’s entry is the best in the series.
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It turns out that the game as released to the public was not entirely the one originally envisioned by the developers, and a modder going by the name of PushTheWinButton has set out to fix that. A new mod called “The Strip NPCs Uncut – Content Restoration” places a number of cut non-player characters back onto the New Vegas Strip, which has always seemed a bit barren and underpopulated in Fallout: New Vegas for a hub of the West.
According to PushTheWinButton, many functional NPCs had already been placed around the Strip and mostly implemented into the game scripts related to the area. Ultimately, they were removed before the launch of Fallout: New Vegas, likely for performance reasons. “The Strip NPCs Uncut” mod fully restores many of these characters to their rightful places.
In total, the mod recovers five gamblers, four travelers, one Military Police Trooper, one New California Republic Trooper, and one Securitron. While all of these NPCs were mostly implemented into the script, some were lacking placement markers and AI packages, and so PushTheWinButton assigned them generic AI.
In addition to the 12 restored NPCs, an additional four Securitrons and seven Troopers were also placed into the Strip but disabled. However, PushTheWinButton decided not to restore these NPCs to Fallout: New Vegas. It seems that the human characters were merely old placements for NPCs either already present in the game or restored via the mod, and script comments stated that the maximum number of Securitrons intended for the Strip was five.
The modder goes on to explain that there are also seven scripted scenes for the Strip that were never implemented for unclear reasons, and these events involved additional NPCs that would be enabled when required. The scripting for these scenes is extremely complex and, while PushTheWinButton hasn’t yet tried to unravel them, it is a project that may be attempted in the future to fully restore the Strip to the level of activity that was originally planned by the developers of Fallout: New Vegas.
Fallout: New Vegas is available on PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and Xbox Game Pass.
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Source: Nexus Mods