Warm beignets and cold Nuka-Cola – these simple pleasures could be yours if Fallout 5 rumors are true and the upcoming Bethesda game is set in swamp city New Orleans. Or, they could be yours if you go back in time and kiss Todd Howard's feet 900 times, convincing him to release the Fallout game Obsidian veteran Chris Avellone hoped to set in the Louisiana wasteland.
Avellone, who served as a senior designer on New Vegas in 2010, reminisced to YouTuber TKs-Mantis in a chunky new interview about the time "we still thought we'd be able to do New Vegas 2, or whatever the title would be" at Obsidian, along with vague plans for a Fallout New Orleans. Avellone now says, with a little bitterness, that those thoughts about New Vegas 2 "quickly evaporated," and he doubts Obsidian would return to the project any time "in the next six years, at least – if ever." But he still has hope for New Orleans.
"One of the designers-slash-producers on our other projects suggested New Orleans as a location, and I was so stoked for that. It's going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise started by this author-slash-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel, and a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic," says Avellone about a noir series first published in 1983, whose antihero explores his vengefulness in stories often painted in only black, white, and red. It shares a cyanide sense of humor with the Fallout series in how it discusses power and those who wield it, so I'm not surprised Avellone found it magnetic.
"There was one that was written in New Orleans. It was called, like, 'Four Devils, One Hell,' and it's a fantastic story," he continues to say about the 1993 Grendel Tales run whose first issue synopsis could easily be mistaken for a Fallout TV show episode logline: "Montovani is hired by Batiaque to find his brother's murderer and tangles with a Dulac. Batiaque is also murdered. Bixby kills vampires, thinking himself a king's knight, but he is really Grendel's accountant. Gloria preserves art in England and goes on treasure hunt."
"As soon as I read it – while I was doing Fallout research, ironically enough – I'm like, 'Man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad,'" Avellone says.
He continues, "The vibe was so cool. The flavor was so cool, and it's still Fallout, but it's in a different area that felt different. Yeah, there's still a lot of potential there." Avellone isn't alone in dreaming about Louisiana's heat meeting Fallout's fire – plenty of people are enthusiastic about Fallout 5 in New Orleans, including Fallout 76 lead artist and ex-Bethesda dev Nate Purkeypile, who said earlier this year, "Fallout 5 in New Orleans? I mean, that would get my vote for sure." I just wonder what Todd Howard thinks about crawfish.
