Reported lead of Obsidian's new Fallout game wants you to feel a "sense of agony" when playing an RPG, rather than being an all

Obsidian's Josh Sawyer wants you to feel "a sense of agony" the next time you're faced with an RPG choice. Not the kind of agony that makes you alt-F4 and uninstall, but the kind that forces you to sit with an imperfect outcome and actually live with it.

"Players are very conditioned by a lot of RPGs to expect, 'Yeah, but my character's built different,'" Sawyer said during an interview with The Examined Game. He was talking about Eothas, the god from Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire—a being you cannot defeat, no matter how optimized your build is.

This matters because both Obsidian and Bethesda are reportedly cooking up new Fallout games. And their design philosophies are about as compatible as a hyper-optimized stealth archer and a speech check you can't pass.

The Agony vs. The Power Fantasy

Sawyer's approach is about presenting circumstances the player simply cannot overcome. You can "ameliorate damage" and make hugely impactful decisions, but you cannot erase certain outcomes from existence.

"You can help sort of ameliorate damage and you can make a bunch of very important decisions that have truly huge impacts, but you can't stop him."

That's a direct contrast to Bethesda's stated philosophy under Todd Howard, who told BAFTA in 2024: "What we like to do as much as possible is say 'Yes' to the player." Howard framed this as rewarding curiosity—letting players see a hill and wonder what's over it, then letting them go there.

These are the same creative tensions that defined Fallout 3 versus Fallout: New Vegas back in 2010. Fallout 3 gave you a clear good-versus-evil choice between the Brotherhood and the Enclave, with power armor as the obvious draw. New Vegas made you navigate a web of factions where no outcome felt clean.

But It's Not That Simple

Bethesda has actually pulled off the "agonizing" thing before. Oblivion positions the Hero of Kvatch as a powerful helper to the person who actually saves the day, then leaves the Empire in a state of creeping collapse with no fix available. The god gets defeated, but the victory feels hollow and foreboding.

The catch? Oblivion doesn't give you alternative choices that could meaningfully change that outcome. You're on a rail through a tragic story, not agonizing over imperfect options. That's a different flavor of limitation entirely.

There's also the question of whether a "sense of agony" lands at all if the consequences of your imperfect choices aren't fully revealed within the same game. It's easy to shrug off ambiguity when the credits roll before your decisions really start to bite.

Two Fallouts, Two Visions

With both studios now reportedly ordered to make new Fallout games following Microsoft's acquisitions and subsequent layoffs, we're about to see these philosophies clash again in the same franchise. And honestly? That might be the one silver lining in an otherwise grim industry moment.

Would New Vegas hit as hard if it wasn't a deliberate counterpoint to Fallout 3's more straightforward power fantasy? Would I yearn for that agonizing choice if I hadn't spent plenty of time feeling painlessly invincible in Skyrim? I don't know.

But I think I'd like a bit of both in my Fallout.