Fallout: New Vegas lead writer 'loved writing' Yes Man, but thinks his questline may have been a mistake: 'It lets you get through the game without getting your hands dirty'

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!