Fallout: New Vegas would have been a better game if it was PC-only, according to the game’s lead world builder. Scott Everts says that the restrictions of the game engine brought about by the game’s console release forced his team to strip away a lot of their initial ideas.
Making Fallout: New Vegas was a battle against time for Obsidian.
In an interview with Everts, he told PCGamesN “[the game] would have been a lot different if it was PC only. We had a lot of plans early on. Like, ‘Here’s where the water is stored, here’s where the farms are, here’s where the government is centralised’. We had it all planned out - it wasn’t just a bunch of random stuff.”
Some of that content still made its way into the game, but Everts says “we could have gone further with that. We had to simplify, so we had less stuff that would bog down the game engine,” and seems to blame some of the game’s performance issues on its console development: “We would have had fewer performance issues. We did break it up a bit, but from my point of view it was a performance-related game and we had to fix things.”
Everts also says that the Mojave Wasteland itself would have looked different if the game had been PC-only, saying “it would have been more separate zones I think, put a big wall around the whole thing and you just see the big tower and it’s a bunch of little zones.”