Fallout: New Vegas has aged into a beloved RPG, but when it first launched it faced widespread complaints about performance, and specifically its choppy frame rates. To this day, it's generally recommended that you download stability mods if you're playing on PC, as the game was developed on the notoriously buggy, and even by 2010 standards, outdated, Gamebryo engine. According to a new anecdote shared by original Fallout: New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone, there were some folks at publisher Bethesda that had an inkling the game wasn't going to run at a steady frame rate even before it launched.
"I had done an interview about the Gamebryo engine, and someone had asked me, 'hey, is New Vegas gonna run 30 frames per second?'" says Avellone during an interview with TKs-Mantis. "In my mind, it's inexcusable that a game would not run 30 frames per second, so I said, 'yes, it will.' And to my surprise, I'm in this Bethesda meeting, this tech director starts lecturing me about 'you shouldn't have said that.'
