'yeah, That Didn't Suck. That Was Good': Fallout: New Vegas Lead

The Survivalist's diary entries were one of the few writing contributions John Gonzalez made to New Vegas' Honest Hearts DLC before leaving Obsidian.

One of the most beloved NPCs in Fallout's history is a pile of bones in the sand. The story of the Survivalist, Randall Clark, is not the biggest nor the flashiest told in the Fallout series, but it's remembered as one of the most moving and tragic. It maybe also doesn't hurt that getting to know this guy post-mortem can get you kitted out with his sick armor and custom rifle⁠—Bethesda even made a limited run of statues of the character.

Scattered throughout New Vegas' Honest Hearts expansion, Clark's journals are an autobiographical account of the bombs falling and his experiences (and eventual death) in the world that followed. It includes the loss of his family, his adventures as a solo survivalist, and run-ins with various others, like a group of children that he becomes caretaker for in his old age, unwittingly laying the groundwork for a new tribal culture you meet in the present day, the Sorrows.

For New Vegas lead writer John Gonzalez, it was one of the only things he wrote for the RPG's lauded series of DLCs before leaving Obsidian in March 2011 to work on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. As he recently told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield, he regards it among the best stuff he's written, period. "It's one of my favorite bits of content that I've written in a game," he said.

New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer assigned the character to him with a rough outline: "This was somebody who was trained, had military training, and so was able to survive in these arduous circumstances," Gonzalez recalled. "I don't remember if the brief had more than that. It may have. I think that, as I recall, I sort of worked out the story as I went."

Holotapes and journal entries are the rare opportunity in the dialog-heavy, choice-driven RPG genre "to write something in prose," Gonzalez said. While characters like Yes Man were created specifically to account for the player, the story of Randall Clark could be told in a vacuum, where nothing the player did could affect the outcome. "It was an opportunity to, at a small scale, do traditional storytelling," he said.

"I just found it to be a very affecting, kind of tragic story," Gonzalez said. "It hits certain notes of adventure that are entertaining and fun, but the underlying guilt that he carries, and the loss of his family, and the attempts to start again, and how t

Source: PC Gamer