There are no squeaky-clean factions in Fallout: New Vegas. Caesar's Legion is outright authoritarian and psychopathic, Mr. House's ruthlessness and egomania make him hard to trust, and while the New California Republic is comparatively easier to live with, it's far from heroic.

As lead writer John Gonzales told PC Gamer in an interview with associate editor Ted Litchfield, that's all by design: "I remember when we were just kicking off the project, [New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer] coming into a conference room and saying, 'Okay, so we're not doing any good or evil, black and white stuff. We're doing everything in shades of gray. It's going to be moral ambiguity and complexity.'"

But another mandate from Sawyer required that the player also have utmost agency: "The player has to be able to get through this game killing everyone they meet the moment they meet them, and also killing absolutely nothing at all," Gonzales recalled. That's where Yes Man came in.

If you haven't played New Vegas, Yes Man is a robot sporting a goofy grin and an inability to decline any command or truly be disposed of. If the player kills him, he simply transfers to another metal body elsewhere. Yes Man was designed as the perfect consigliere to assist in a takeover of New Vegas, outmaneuvering all the other factions, and the player can take over his original owner's plan without missing a beat.

Gonzalez explained he was created to give the player an out if they managed to make enemies of the entire wasteland: "What if the player just torches every single [faction]? What if you kill House, you blow up the NCR on the strip, you assassinate Caesar? What the eff is going to happen? I was cogitating on that, and I had this thought: Well, what if you just had a main quest giver who you effectively couldn't kill?"

Fortuitously, the idea made for a pretty entertaining character, as well. "It is this sycophant who engages in the ultimate unhealthy relationship with you," Gonzales said. "You blow it apart, and it comes back and says, 'I'm so sorry. It was me, not you.' Of course, [voice actor] Dave Foley milked that for all it was worth, he was a great choice."

It also gave the player a viable critical path through the game should they off everyone else. It makes New Vegas admirably reactive where other RPGs are not. Games like Morrowind and Oblivion, for example, mark certain NPCs as essential—in the former, killing an essential NPC "dooms" a save, rendering the main quest impossible to finish, and in the latter, essential NPCs can't be killed at all. Fallout 3 and every Fallout game after New Vegas make extensive use of unkillable essential NPCs.

Gonzalez has come to believe that the narrative consequence of the Yes Man approach is that the player is never forced through some of New Vegas' hard choices. He reckons that, by considering the choice between Caesar's Legion and the NCR, players come to understand both better.

"[The NCR] immediately read as, Oh, they're familiar. I understand who they are. They're kind of a nation state. They're kind of like the United States. They must be the good guys," explained Gonzalez. "But of course this is 2006 when we're writing this. And the United States is embroiled in Iraq and the NCR is embroiled in the Mojave wasteland, basically doing a land grab and there's a lot of corruption.

"Maybe you would look at that and you go, 'Well, they're corrupt, but they're better than the other options.' And then you've got Caesar, and he's just terrifying, but he also seems like, 'Well, okay, maybe it's this environment? Maybe that's why it's like this?' … When he's talking about the NCR, there are some moments where you're like, huh, okay, that's interesting. His argument that the NCR was never actually a republic, but was actually a kind of ancestral dynasty. Okay, that's interesting."

Gonzales said that Yes Man offers a way around all that to a "rebellious, individualistic" playstyle that says, "'I'm going to do this on my own, with the help of Yes Man.' And I think that releases some of the moral pressure from the game." While it's "really entertaining stuff," Gonzales said "I think that questline may have been a mistake, because it lets you get through the game without getting your hands dirty."

That said, he concedes that it's been a while since he's reviewed the quests in detail, adding that "it seems like it worked for people, so that's cool." Whatever Yes Man's impact on the game was, he's certainly a memorable lightning rod for the game's humor.

"I love, for example, the moment where he starts to kind of gloat about how he arranged for this courier to be assassinated, and all the clever things he did for Benny. And then you tell him, like, 'oh, that's me,'" Gonzales laughed. "He's like, 'Oh, I guess maybe I should be happy about that. Whenever you're getting counsel or advice from him about how to handle the different tribes, the wasteland, everything, he always wants you to just kill everybody, basically. He always thinks that's the best option."

You can read more about New Vegas, as well as all sorts of insights from various Fallout developers, in the latest issue of PC Gamer's print magazine. It's a super way to support print journalism, and I'm not just saying that because I have to!

Tim Cain, designer and lead programmer on the original Fallout, hears a particular sort of question a lot these days—why not make a new, original RPG? Better yet, why not return to Fallout or make a sequel to one of his other classic games like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura or Temple of Elemental Evil? The full answer is complicated, and Cain took to his YouTube channel Friday to clear the air.

Granted, Cain has been prolific since the '90s. While the development studio he co-founded, Troika, stopped making games after Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, Cain went on to work on games like now-defunct MMO Wildstar and multiple Obsidian RPGs, including The Outer Worlds which he co-directed.

However, Cain said in his videos that fans are ever eager to know when he might helm a new RPG in his classic style. "I love making games, so it really confuses people when they're like, 'Why are you not making games, new IPs?'" he said in the video. "Other people have made way more money off of IPs I've created than I've ever made. It's not by a little. It's by a lot … the IPs that I made years ago, people who just work on them in a team make more money than I got to even create the IP."

Cain reckons that, while it might be fun to revisit a game like Arcanum in some form, there's not much in it for him; and even if there were, he doesn't have the rights or resources to produce a new CRPG out of thin air. He explains in the video that he doesn't feel "bitter," just "exasperated with the question": "You have to imagine what it must be like to be asked this question over and over."

In the video, Cain lays things out in metaphor: it's as if he were a painter that, at one point, was just happy to be making art professionally. Soon enough, his paintings are sold for outsized amounts of money of which he sees a pittance. While he'd like to just sell them himself, it's unsustainably expensive to do alone, and with help, "it turns out that the guy who's making the frames is making more money than me. I guess I can't sell paintings."

While he conceded there might be a way to thread the needle financially, he added "I'm not good at that. I'm a good painter." Moreover, he's satisfied with the work he's doing—"fun little doodles," as characterized in the painting metaphor—and has "moved on," reasoning in the video that anyone who wants to play his old CRPGs can do so pretty inexpensively these days.

"If you really care about what I want, I'm still making toys and I love them and they make me happy. I'm over making people really wealthy with my own creations," Cain said in the video. "Could you give me a reason other than a very selfish reason—like you want something new, or those other people want to make more money—that I should just not keep painting whatever I feel like?"

As for what might reignite his interest, he ended the video by saying he'd like to see the industry split the pie up a bit more: "When a painting sells, everybody makes money."

Cain posits the movie industry has done this "for decades," and while there are all sorts of labor rights issues in every corner of the entertainment industry, it's no secret that a huge number of game developers are working thankless jobs for studios that chew them up and spit them out.

And it's not like Cain isn't still working on games either: He recently rejoined Obsidian full-time after working as an external consultant on The Outer Worlds 2. It just sounds like whatever role he occupies now, the legendary developer is not in the driver's seat.

In addition to non-lead design roles on The Outer Worlds 2 and Pillars of Eternity, Cain is credited as a rank and file programmer on a number of Obsidian games, including South Park: The Stick of Truth, Tyranny, and the first Pillars of Eternity game (he pulled double duty there). Cain's statements in the video perhaps point to him returning to that sort of role.

Valve's publicly voted Steam Awards are announced early in the New Year, which is the most sensible time to announce annual awards while also guaranteeing hardly anybody actually cares about them. If you're not sick of hearing about how much other people like Clair Obscur by January, you must have the patience of a saint.

Fortunately, Clair Obscur didn't win Game of the Year in the Steam Awards, though it did take the Best Soundtrack Award. Overall Game of the Year went to Hollow Knight: Silksong, which also won the Best Game You Suck At Award. (Games can be nominated in multiple categories now, and also you no longer need to own a game on Steam to vote for it.)

Hades 2 took the Best Game on Steam Deck Award and Dispatch won the Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award. Though Larian was quite surprised to see Baldur's Gate 3 nominated for the Labor of Love Award, the 2013 CRPG won it anyway.

You can see all the finalists who were robbed at Steam's official Steam Awards page, but here are the winners in each category, all of which are currently discounted as part of the Winter Sale.

• Game of the Year: Hollow Knight: Silksong
• VR Game of the Year: The Midnight Walk
• Labor of Love: Baldur's Gate 3
• Best Game on Steam Deck: Hades 2
• Better With Friends: Peak
• Outstanding Visual Style: Silent Hill F
• Most Innovative Gameplay: Arc Raiders
• Best Game You Suck At: Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Best Soundtrack: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Outstanding Story-Rich Game: Dispatch
• Sit Back and Relax: RV There Yet?