Following the success of Fallout 3, developer Bethesda handed the sequel reins over to Obsidian with hopes they could bring the series back to its roots. What came to be an otherwise decent game was overshadowed by a minefield of day-one glitches.

In 2008, Bethesda Softworks were on top after the critical and commercial success of Fallout 3 and were definitely itching for a follow-up. Since another project was already occupying their time, the developer approached Obsidian Entertainment to work on the sequel to the post-apocalyptic game. Obsidian seemed perfect for the job due to many of their staff having worked on the Fallout series in previous years.

In Obsidian’s pitch to Bethesda, the game would take place in the west coast city of Las Vegas and start with the main character being shot in the head and left for dead. This intriguing premise excited Bethesda and the project was greenlit with a release date of 2010.

After a relatively short 18-month development cycle, Fallout: New Vegas was released to the gaming masses on October 19, 2010. The new adventure was praised for its improvements on Fallout 3’s gameplay and including a much more expansive story. Though New Vegas earn plenty of much-deserved praise, the game was also criticized for its abundance of glitches. These bugs would range from bizarre NPC behavior to game-breaking crashes.

“It was a timeline we agreed to—I think we bit off a little more than we could chew, and then it was a little hard to recover… We learned some lessons about trying to make too big a game.”

Though Obsidian released several patches to fix the bugs, it did little to repair their reputation as a buggy developer. It would take future acclaimed projects such as Dungeon Siege III and South Park: The Stick of Truth for gamers to truly appreciate Obsidian Entertainment.

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