Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer has made, if you don't mind my saying so, some pretty cool videogames. New Vegas is a classic, the Pillars of Eternity games are some of my favourites ever, and Pentiment is a beautiful story about history and failure that also includes the line "A whole lot of inconceivable shit happens on this hell of an Earth." Which is true.

With all those under his belt, what's he got his eye on next? Well, the answer has less to do with the content of the game than with the people he makes it with. "I don't even know anymore," said Sawyer, when asked what his dream project is on a recent episode of the Human Can Opener Podcast.

"I got to make the games that I wanted to, that I really wanted to make. I wanted to make a D&D game—which I got to make immediately. I wanted to make a Fallout game, which took me another 10-ish years. And then I wanted to make a historical game, and I just got to do that."

So, no worlds left to conquer? Maybe a little, but it's more that the ideas Sawyer has are "not big. I feel like so much now is about working with the people that I like to work with. This is the thing: working even on a game that you're not that jazzed about, if you love the people that you work with, can be awesome." Conversely, "working on a dream game in an environment that sucks—it's never going to be fun. Your dreams are gonna be nightmares."

It means Sawyer says he doesn't "carry around this idea of like here's the one game" that he wants to make. But that doesn't mean there's nothing left that he'd like to try his hand at. "I do still think it would be cool to make some sort of spiritual successor to Darklands—it's a historical fantasy roleplaying game from the early '90s… I don't know if there's any market for it at all, but yeah, if someone just wanted to throw money at me to burn, I'd probably try to make something like that."

Speaking personally, I would devour a Sawyer take on Darklands, which is set in 15th-century Germany and has a big emphasis on (a version of) realism, like a kind of proto-Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Sawyer actually discussed it pretty recently himself, as an inspiration on how he thinks about armour design. I'd be very eager to see what his approach to a full Darklands(-esque) game would be.

Before there was Fallout 3 in 2008, there was Van Buren – the sadly canceled, Black Isle Studios-led third Fallout – and even though it never came to fruition in the end, it could've been one heck of an RPG.

Or, at least, it sounds like it might've been. Obsidian Entertainment's Joshua Eric "Josh" Sawyer, now best known for his work on genre gems like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, seems to think it was shaping up to be quite a game.
He explains as much in a new interview with The Examined Game on YouTube (below), first noting that he "wasn't the lead" on Van Buren, that role belonged to Chris Avellone. He was the lead system designer, however.

Things were complicated over time after the team was stripped and left with a "skeleton crew," though, as Sawyer puts it. Resources "got taken away to work on another project outside of Black Isle." Considering the work that had been done on Van Buren, it was disappointing.

"This is such a bummer because we made a cool demo," as Sawyer recalls. "It looks very dated now, but… it was like 2003 when this demo was finished."

He notes that you can find said demo online, and after a quick search myself, I'll admit it does look pretty dated… but also pretty dang solid. It certainly fits the vibe of the first Fallout games a bit more than Bethesda Game Studios' own Fallout 3 does.

As Sawyer says himself, "I thought it was a really cool demo, and it showed that we were doing some pretty neat things." But, of course, nothing ever came from it, unfortunately.

According to Sawyer, however, publisher Interplay eventually did see it. "They said, 'Well, if we had known that you had made this, maybe we wouldn't have canceled it.'"

It's a frustrating consideration for the Obsidian dev and his former coworkers, as they "repeatedly" asked for acknowledgement of Van Buren. "We invited you over and over and over again, and you never came," he recalls. Sadly, as Sawyer concludes, "they weren't interested in it."

This all lines up with what others have said in the past. Fallout co-creator Tim Cain stated that the original canceled Fallout 3 could've shipped and been "a really good game," for example.

It's upsetting to know Van Buren won't ever see the light of day properly, I suppose – but for the time being, we do have fan-led projects like the Nexus Mods version of Van Buren that are playable for free.

Fallout designer Tim Cain "fumbled" through his career and "didn't think about a sequel" to the first apocalyptic RPG or Arcanum while making them.