The Day-One Bug that Changed Fallout New Vegas Canon

Use the independent fallout wiki for all your search needs. (Fandom/wikia does not deserve your views and it's a terrible experience anyway) fallout.wiki/wiki/Fallout_Wiki

Initially, I thought that half of the chairmen were supposed to wear white suits, while the other half black. That way, Benny's white-and-black checkered suit would indicate his high status among the chairmen.

in Fallout 1, Dogmeat's AI would cause him to reliably run into electric force fields and die. This eventually became his canon fate in Fallout 2.

In Borderlands 2, Tiny Tina has a bug, where her left eye, will lose focus and wander. Developers later opted to make it canon, rather than fix the bug, stating that she has a lazy eye.

I feel like the omertas should be the ones wearing the grimy suits as I feel like the darker outfit suits them a lot more since they have darker plans and have a more grimy casino while the chairman are a lot more light hearted so the lighter suit suits them more

This reminds me of how you can find "strange meat" pies in the Sloan cafeteria, presumably because an environment designer didn't look too closely at the ID of the object they were placing. At least, I don't think Obsidian intended for an entire settlement to be casually consuming human flesh with no way for the player to comment on it.

I have 3000 hours in New Vegas and had zero clue that this was a thing

imo the white fits the chairmen better and it makes them match Benney's suit. If anything they should have had the Omertas wear the all black suits since it fits their mobster aesthetic. Just look at 3:53 and tell me that they don't look like some guys going to "disappear" someone who didn't pay their protection money that month.

Not fallout but in Skyrim, remember how giants can launch you into the sky? Yeah, that's not an added effect, it's actually a bug that was left in because devs found it hilarious.

I played New Vegas on Xbox 360 so my main enemy on the strip was the 5 minute long loading screens every 3 seconds

Knowing that Daniel in Honest Hearts was supposed to be the Asian race model but released as Caucasian, it doesn't surprise me that this was missed. One (or a few) of the many writers or designers created this interesting detail, but those who were in the know weren't paying enough attention to realize the mistake. There are other New Vegas bugs where patching it for the hardware at the time was nigh impossible and just had to be left in. It's quite possible that this is the symptom of a larger bug.

The game is incredibly detailed and nuanced. But it was also incredibly rushed.

I can assure you, it wouldn’t take a crazy convoluted series of events for no one on the team to notice. What often gets underestimated is how isolated teams are in game dev, you work on your section and you often find out what significant chunks of things look like at the same time as the consumers do. That suit was probably written to be black by a designer, and that design document was used by the third party teams who made the comics and playing cards, then another internal team was implementing the suits and either overruled it to use an existing asset or simply missed that detail. Unless the designer who wrote the original document was paying extremely close attention and brought it up, it’s quite possible they were the only person on the dev team who even knew the suits were supposed to be black.

I remember hearing that the devs never really did patches to address issues like this, similarly to the reason they never implemented DLC content and characters back into the base game, was the fact that users would be forced to re-download the entire games BSM files just to change 1 or 2 things in the base game

Here's another theory: Maybe they thought the black suit looked too "business", or corporate, and thus went for the more fun looking striped suit (which also goes along with Benny's suit). So they made a last minute change.

During software development, we prioritize all bugs due to time constraint and limited resources. The bug you mentioned is highly likely to be ticketed, but just put at the lowest of all priority as, 1. It's not game breaking 2. It's not easy to notice and the most important reason, it's so easy to fix that everyone would say "Well I'll come back to it" and never actually get fixed.

I’ve noticed this too. I like the Grimy suit in 3. I think at this point they can’t fix it because the white suits are now synonymous with the faction and fixing it would bring the fact it was a “mistake” right to people’s attention.

Huh. I never really realized that the Chairmen and the Omertas wore the same suits. Their personalities differ so vastly that I didn't even recognize that they wore the same outfit, except one has hats on. I feel like that's a testament to New Vegas's writing, to be honest.

It always bothered me because I knew that there was a grimy and dirty suit which looked exactly the same but I never actually knew which faction was supposed to have which suit. Personally I think since the game is set in Vegas they should’ve maybe made just even 1 or 2 more suits for the different factions and Gamblers to make it feel more varied and give the chairman and ormetas a more distinct look and feel

Todd said theres something hidden in a terminal in fallout 4......... Its your bug report lol