The Conspiracy That Todd Howard Hates Fallout: New Vegas Is Absurd

Recently, the topic of 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas and Bethesda creative director Todd Howard came up during a New Year’s Eve party I attended. During the conversation, a few people, myself included, joked about how Howard doesn’t like New Vegas, a Fallout game developed not by Bethesda but by Obsidian. Look around online, and you’ll see plenty of others joking and suggesting the same thing. Howard hates New Vegas. Or is at least annoyed by its success.

Here’s the thing: There’s no evidence this is true, and in fact, Bethesda’s famed creative director has stated multiple times publicly that he thinks New Vegas is great. And yet, this myth is so persistent that even I have to remind myself that it ain’t true.

So what’s up with that? Why is this rumor so popular and so widely believed, to various degrees, by so many Fallout fans and gamers? And exactly how and when did it start?

The history of the Todd Howard hates New Vegas rumor

Looking around online, it doesn’t seem like this was a topic until a few years after Fallout: New Vegas arrived. Specifically, after the launch of Fallout 4 in 2015, you started to see discussion of this topic pop up online.

Here’s a November 2015 GameFAQs thread in which someone asks if Howard hates New Vegas, because he doesn’t talk about it much, and people complaining about Fallout 4 being worse than Obsidian’s spin-off. And I think this is a key part of this myth. A lot of people were disappointed by Fallout 4 for feeling less like an RPG and more like an open-world shooter. And at this point, enough time had passed that 2010’s New Vegas was more fondly remembered as a cool RPG and not a buggy mess.

Over time, this opinion that New Vegas was good and Fallout 4 was bad has solidified online and helped convince many that Bethesda and Howard must surely be mad or jealous over the perception that their latest big installment in the franchise pales in comparison to Obsidian’s rushed-out spin-off. This belief even helped fuel the idea that season one of the TV show was removing New Vegas from the canon. (It wasn’t.) And now it’s easy to find people claiming Howard hates New Vegas online.

But if you look back over the last 15 years, there’s zero evidence that Howard and co. hate New Vegas.  You can, however,  find plenty of evidence that Howard doesn’t hate New Vegas. 

All the evidence that Howard likes New Vegas 

All the way back in 2010, in a Game Informer preview of the then-upcoming Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart and game director Josh Sawyer were speaking pretty positively about working with Howard. Here’s what Urquhart told the outlet:

“Todd [Howard] was awesome. I would say sometimes I was more resistant to some of the things [Josh] wanted to do than Todd was. Todd has a great way of looking at games. It’s all about the player. If we had ideas that we could all see would make it a lot more fun for the player, he was like, ‘Go kill that sacred cow—I don’t care.’”

In 2011, while answering fan questions about Fallout: New Vegas, Sawyer once again mentioned that Howard was a “great guy.” Then, in 2013, Howard told RPS that he thought New Vegas was great and he was open to doing more with Obsidian.

In 2018, a small moment from NoClip’s excellent Bethesda documentary likely helped add more fuel to all this. The doc takes a small detour to talk about Fallout: New Vegas and categorizes it as a corporate-mandated decision, says there aren’t many New Vegas posters around the Bethesda offices, and seems to imply that the studio was mostly hands-off on the project.

But also, in that same year, while speaking to The Guardian about Fallout: New Vegas and whether Bethesda would ever let another studio make a Fallout game, Howard said this:

“I wouldn’t say never. [But] now that our company is so big, it’s always better to keep stuff internal…it becomes less likely, but I could never say never. I thought the Obsidian guys did a fabulous job.”

In 2019, Howard reiterated in an interview with IGN that it was unlikely an outside studio would ever get to make Fallout again, but once more praised New Vegas and clarified that the only studio they trusted to make the game was Obsidian.

Jump forward a bit to 2024. During an appearance on Kinda Funny, Howard was jokingly asked by host Greg Miller about how much he allegedly hates New Vegas and how Bethesda was removing it from the franchise’s canon via the show. Howard rolled his eyes and then said this:

“First, I’ll say, they did an amazing job with New Vegas. We see some of that, and I’ll say to everybody, that’s a game that we published, right? I will say Feargus, who runs Obsidian, is absolutely one of my favorite people in the video game industry…New Vegas is a very, very important game to us and our fans. We think [Obsidian] did an incredible job.”

In December 2025, ahead of Fallout season two on Amazon Prime, Howard told PC Gamer that he had invited the Obsidian devs onto the New Vegas set to let them see it in person. He added:

“When we went to do [New Vegas], we were coming off of Fallout 3. We knew we were going to do Skyrim. We know the folks at Obsidian well, love their work, and so we reached out to them and said, ‘Hey, would you like to do this? We see something else coming off of Fallout 3.‘ This is what we asked them to do, right? And they just did an incredible job on New Vegas.”

And most recently, in January of 2026, Howard reiterated that Obsidian was “the only choice” for New Vegas. It was also revealed that the only mandate Bethesda put on the game was that it needed to include factions.

Even after reading through all of this, I imagine there will still be people who will keep believing that Howard and Bethesda despise New Vegas or are jealous of its success.

The thing is, I get why so many people will keep repeating this rumor. It is a very compelling story. Bethesda works really hard on Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, spending years and years on each entry, but it’s Obsidian’s scrappy New Vegas, made in just 18 months, that has gone on to be the fan favorite. There is something almost David and Goliath about it. But just like that story, the idea that Howard hates New Vegas is a myth.