Fallout: New Vegas has always been one of the more beloved games from the iconic franchise, with many fans wishing that Bethesda had chosen to bring the dev studio back to make another game. For better or worse this never happened, and instead we’re getting The Outer Worlds. While many think fondly upon their time exploring the wastelands of New Vegas, one glaring disappointment pokes out from the rest of the game: the ending. Once your character’s choices are locked in, you are in essence taken on a slideshow tour that breaks down how things played out, after which the credits roll and you’re done. No more playing the game, no more running around after the events at the Hoover Dam, nothing. This wasn’t what the developer had originally planned, though.

According to Chris Avellone, one of the writers for the game, the original plan was to actually provide post-game content for the title. Avellone recently sat down with the folks over at Eurogamer to discuss the game’s abrupt ending, revealing that the developer originally had a few things planned for after the credits had rolled. According to Avellone, the main goal of the post-credits content was to give the players the ability to “keep wandering the wasteland, explore ‘dungeons’ and fight random encounters,” with only a sparse few extra dialogue lines planned for the surviving NPCs. Unfortunately, Obsidian as a whole didn’t have proper planning in place to implement the content.

“Designing post-game content is not hard to do if you’re keeping it in mind with each NPC and quest as you’re designing it (like doing a Karma check, faction check, or just another global reactivity check, which we had to do anyway)—sometimes all it needs is a post-endgame line,” Avellone said. But if you haven’t planned for it throughout your design process for your areas and characters, it can be a lot of work to go back and add later on.”

And while some designers had planned for it—for example, our lead writer had lines for Mr. House in place for post-game reactivity and Strip Securitrons—not all areas had post-game design work.”

The other issue is that Fallout: New Vegas also launched with some rough bug issues, so fixing them ate up a decent amount of the studio’s post-release resources that could have instead been used for, say, post-release content. At that point there was also worry that enabling post-game play would open up the risk of more bugs. “We did examine all the logistic impacts of doing post-game content with limited resources. But it was clear we’d be putting the already shaky game stability at risk … by creating [a] post-Hoover Dam option, even in a minimal fashion. The most we could manage was level-scaling for key enemies (like the Legate) with the introduction of the new level caps in the DLCs, since the additional levels made the previous boss fights too easy for the player,” Avellone said.

That said, we did look at potential minor additions where we could, including a reserved save game slot before Hoover Dam (which we were able to do), and looking into adding Ulysses as a companion you could take back into the main game from the DLC. But an evaluation of that revealed that it would likely break a number of scripts (companion weapon removal, teleportation scripts), and even scripts for the other DLCs that automatically removed companions from your party.”

Avellone also revealed that he offered to pay for one of the development milestones out of his own pocket in order to allow for more time to work on the core game, though the offer was declined in order to keep Fallout: New Vegas’ DLC schedule on track. Unfortunately there won’t be an ideal post-game scenario for the title without the use of mods, but hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. Who’s up for seeing Thomas the Tank Engine in New Vegas?

So, thoughts on the ‘why’ behind Fallout: New Vegas’ lack of post-game content? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!