The Day-One Bug that Changed Fallout New Vegas Canon

Fallout New Vegas is very good! Which is why I'm kinda surprised that this bug, small as it seems, never got fixed. Then again we live in the world where skyrim still has some day one bugs in it despite like 11 releases.

Thank you for giving me the space to air a near 13 year long personal frustration.
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My Links:
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Thanks to @hbomberguy for some of the inspiration (and justification)

Here's the mod I use, though there are a few you can shop around with. I've heard the unofficial patch might work too, and I think Tale of Two Wastelands settles the issue (or maybe makes it worse tbh)

I think the distinction in the mods is between how they interact with other features or try and clean up more texture issues, etc.
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Time
00:00 intro
04:05 This stupid bug matters
09:34 outro

[Rosencreutzzz]

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

[reycore]

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.

[InvisibleYogurt]

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.

[mileator]

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.

[akumu]

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.

[TheDrp]

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.

[OfficerRay]

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

[Kujo]

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.

[zoltar]

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

[BrigitteEmpire]

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

[memyselfishness]

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.

[CharmyTTS]

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

[Slush_]

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.

[sinbysin]

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.

[mixererunio]

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

[wasd]

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.

[owendubs]

I think it's a sign that Obsidian did a great job that all we've got left are nitpicks. I think it's charming.

[TheLateLordKardok]

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.

[danielsurvivor]

8:21 That's why you need to make this a series, show us all lore breaking or just game breaking bugs that never got fixed. The bugs both subtle enough to be missed but influential enough to complain about

[maboilaurence]

I find it funny that you focused so much on those suits, but not the fact that Vulpes Inculta's card shows a man with long blonde hair and blue eyes, while his character model has short brown hair and blackish eyes.

It's safe to assume that whoever was in charge of making those promotional cards and marketing wasn't part of the development team, Bethesda probably outsourced it, which would explain these inconsistencies.