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MoBurma [[Special:Contributions/94.192.52.36|94.192.52.36]] 22:09, July 29, 2012 (UTC)
 
MoBurma [[Special:Contributions/94.192.52.36|94.192.52.36]] 22:09, July 29, 2012 (UTC)
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That was awesome! Thanks for posting, it was very interesting. Could you do one for Fallout 3? [[User:Mustached Plumber|Mustached Plumber]] ([[User talk:Mustached Plumber|talk]]) 19:06, April 4, 2013 (UTC)

Latest revision as of 19:06, 4 April 2013

Forums: Index > Fallout: New Vegas general discussion > Fallout: New Vegas Cut Content


Hello, I've done a lot of work on restoring cut things from Fallout: New Vegas, and some time ago started collating my findings. Some of this stuff is well known but much is not, so now they've reached a reasonable size I thought I'd share my notes. This is just pasted from a text file, so sorry for ugly text underlines etc. It also seems to mess up the wiki formatting here, so ignore the weird table of contents bit, it isn't intentional. I've tried to include editor references, but at times I simply forgot; they should be reasonably easy to find.

This isn't everything that's cut in the game, or even everything I know about as some things I simply forgot to write down, and I deliberately left out some of the more well known cut things as they're already explained in detail here and elsewhere.

A lot of this stuff has been implemented by me in my series of mods for the game at http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/users/3010984 , if you want to see certain partts of the below in action. A lot of them have original components to plaster over cracks in unfinished stuff, but the notes below only deal with how Obsidian left things. Enjoy.

New Vegas Cut Stuff

The intro

=

Originally the game was to have an in-engine introductory sequence. This would show the entire scene with Benny and the Great Khans Jessup and McMurphy that takes up the second half of the finished game's FMV sequence. At some point in development two things happened; firstly a press demo was created that commented out the intro and skipped straight to the character creation part of the game, and secondly the in-engine intro was completely scrapped and replaced with an FMV instead. When the latter happened they actually just used the temporary press demo code with an extra line to play the new FMV. This is what is used in the final game - the in engine intro stuff is all there and actually runs when you start a new game, but is immediately bypassed.

In the original in-engine intro the scene starts immediately with the player hooded and standing in the grave. The dialogue follows the same basic arc, but the actual words spoken are completely different (in particular Benny's "bad luck" line is much less pithy and polished than the one used in the FMV). This sequence also features Victor actually digging the player out of the grave, something that is only spoken of but never actually shown in the final game. The code that runs the intro sequence is a battleground of commented out contradictory lines where different iterations have introduced and then removed new effects and ideas. For example, One iteration uses the setscale command to make the player half the size to give the impression of kneeling (the player is actually standing bolt upright the whole time). This then breaks the later character generation sequence as it triggers a bug where the player is classified as a child. There is a later workaround to this where the player's age is reduced and then immediately increased with agerace -1 and then agerace 1. This doesn't seem to work right either (if you enter these commands by hand in the console they DO fix this bug, they just don't seem to work right called in a script) and usually still results in the player still being classified as a child despite having an adult body, breaking the Vigor tester sequence.

Even stranger, there is full dialogue for TWO different versions of this sequence. One is twice as long, with extra lines featuring the three characters bickering about how to get home again. There is also an extended version of the final scene with Victor digging up the player where he actually reaches out to help the player out of the grave (in the shorter version the player stands up of their own accord and promptly collapses again). There is an idle animation for this (NVVictorpickup), but it has no actual animation file so does nothing.

Finally, at the point in the intro where the player is shot and collapses into the grave, there is code to run an FMV file called FNVLogo2.bik. This is of course not present in the game, and would likely either simply be the game's logo, or possibly be the early teaser video shown of Victor digging up the player, as it would fit in perfectly with the next part of the sequence.

The digging/burying scene relies on using the blood spatter effect to slowly cover up the screen. It also uses a command that controls how long the spatter effect stays on screen to ensure it remains until wiped off by the script. However, this command is not implemented in the final game! Calling this command at any time instantly crashes the game.

There are also lots of AI Packages created for this scene that were eventually abandoned in favour of directly calling some of the actions from the quest script (e.g. Jessup pistol whipping the player). Speaking of which, Jessups is supposed to pistol whip the player, but in actuality he sort of punches them instead, he doesn't hold the gun even though he is supposed to.


The Kings

=

The King originally had a bodyguard who would screen entrance to him, and stop the player from going in to the stage area at certain times. The dialogue for this is still present in topics starting with VFSKingBodyguard (e.g. "VFSKingBodyguardKingOccupied01"). Only the topic names are present, no actual dialogue lines for the player or the bodyguard character. This character would almost certainly be placed exactly where Pacer is in the final game. I'd speculate the bodyguard would be the one to tell the player to go upstairs when the King is "entertaining" his ladies, before that part was abandoned. At some stage this character was cut, and Pacer took over some of his functionality, with repercussions outlined below.

Pacer has general dialogue that is impossible to access in the finished game. Going on other evidence, it's likely that when the Player would have first met him this dialogue would be accessible, and they could have asked him about Freeside etc (this includes some juicy stuff about him and Gloria Van Graff). Speaking to him in this state also lets you ask him about how to gain access to the Strip. This would likely have flagged up extra topics in the King's dialogue as explained further along. Instead, at some point how you meet Pacer was changed (likely to replace the bodyguard character outlined above), and he instead hangs around the doorway and forces the player to pay a toll to see the King. Once this change was made, all his Freeside exposition dialogue was cut.

If the player had found out about the ability for the King to get them into the Strip (almost certainly by talking to Pacer first as outlined above), they could ask him about this when he is first encountered. In the final game this dialogue is present but is impossible to trigger as no one provides the needed flag.

Once the player had exposed Orris, it was originally intended for the player to somehow be contacted by the King (presumably by a messenger, or more likely, the cut bodyguard) and told to come and see him up in his room to begin the second half of G I Blues. This would lead to a rather risqué scene where the King is laying on his bed with his two groupies, and on the player entering the room he would make a comment about his "little friend" having "just come". The dialogue triggers and scripts for this sequence are all in the game, but not placed on the map so it never plays. Instead he is just found downstairs in the stage area as normal.

There are two unused endings to King's Gambit. If the player gets the help of either Colonels Moore or Hsu, then Pacer will object and try to stage a coup. Dialogue was recorded for a further scene where the Player could try to reason with him, and either talk him down with a speech challenge, convince the Kings to shoot him (the only path that can happen on the Hsu route in the finished game), or tell the soldiers to open fire on everyone (essentially what happens on the Moore path). This was presumably cut to make the two different choices more distinct and less redundant. I.e. The player is told Moore will not tolerate any bullshit, so it makes sense that involving her men leads to unavoidable tragedy for the Kings.


Freeside

==

There are glimpses of different iterations of Freeside visible in the game's scripts. Initially Freeside was one single large worldspace. This bigger map would feature a lot more NPCs, and in particular a very neat touch where travellers would constantly enter at the North gate to head to the strip, explaining how all the people in the Strip got there (this code and its trigger is actually still in the final game and can be triggered, however a debug line deliberately makes the conditions for travellers to spawn impossible, and the trigger code is commented out. It also assumes Freeside is still one worldspace). However, this setup was too demanding for consoles and caused memory/performance problems. It seems the next iteration solved this by using triggers to activate/disable NPCs as the player approached/left an area. These scripts also give us an idea of what and where NPCs were originally placed, although this may have only been implemented once the area was split. In the initial iteration the Mormon Fort was also on the same map - this can be seen on the freesideworld map where the remaining LOD doors are shown completely open.

Eventually things must have reached a head and the original plan was abandoned, with the map now split into two halves and the Mormon Fort closed and made into a seperate worldspace. If they didn't exist before, the enable/disable NPC triggers existed in this iteration. However it's clear this still didn't solve the performance problems (or perhaps it simply caused too many bugs by itself - fleeing npcs would disappear if the player chased them past one of their triggers). In the end the majority of NPCs were simply removed, and things that relied on the area being one persistent worldspace were removed or dummied out as well. This includes the travellers and a further scene with Orris' favourite customer getting a new bodyguard once G.I. Blues is completed.

A huge amount of effort and expense was put into recording dialogue lines for locals, squatters, and other special NPCs in the area. This was unfortunately largely wasted effort as in the final game all squatters are removed save a handful in the NCR ruined store and even then their dialogue conditions are broken making them only able to say one single line of their lengthy dialogues. Most locals cannot say ANY of the dialogue as conditions don't allow it, and some potential local NPCs have the wrong voice type to say their lines anyway. In the final game there are only two local NPCs on the map. There were also lines recorded for Ghoul locals (both male and female), however ghouls are not included in the pool of NPCs that can be locals. There also lines for generic child locals other than the rat chasers. There are in fact two different sets of dialogues for locals, covering different topics. However, they clash somewhat, as in one set many of the locals sound sluggish and drunken, whereas the same characters in the other set sound sharp and alert. This may also be why this particular set was disabled (unlikely, they were just botched to be honest). There are also several drunk characters near the east gate. These are all disabled in the final freeside, and indeed none appear at all in the entire game. They have unique dialogue and make use of the many special idle markers for them nearby. Many of the NPCs in the drunk pool do not have the right voice type however, and so cannot say any lines. Finally there are several unique (disabled) bodyguards near the East gate, and a final one by the north gate who is deliberately disabled.

Incidentally, the squatters in the shop were supposed to queue up for the food according to the script notes, but it seems there wasn't enough time to implement it. I can sympathise; it took me the best part of a weekend to get something working in my Freeside Open mod, and even then it isn't very good!

There are also two more unused dialogue factions for Freeside locals - vFreesideLocalAngryDialogueFaction and vFreesideLocalDepressedDialogueFaction. These would presumably work the same as the similar factions/NPCs at the 188, and add extra lines for NPCs of the above dispositions. These dialogue factions are actually assigned to NPCs ingame, but no have no corresponding dialogue to go with them so do nothing. All of this combined with the above make it even more of a shame that the vanilla game only features TWO locals on the entire map - there was insane amount of effort and imagination but into the planning for them.

There are two more unused NPC types - Pickpockets and Beggars. There were to be two pickpockets on the map, charmingly nicknamed "Roger the codger" and "Bitter Bob" as visible in VFreeFormFreesidescript. A very basic script for pickpockets exists, and full dialogue exists in VfreeformFreeside2, but has no recorded voice lines. No actual NPCs exist, but a faction exists. Beggars are in the game code, and consist of 3 old men. They have no dialogue and are not placed on the map. They seem to have two conflicting behaviours; there is an idle marker called VFSBeggarMarker that would make them stand up and beseech people for caps, but there's also a sitting down AI package which is the default package they all have.

Strip gate rushers would randomly spawn instead of travellers. There were drawn from a random pool including ghouls. In the final game the traits of these characters are not inherited, so the one single rusher left in the game (the one that appears when Old Ben is first talked to) has a weird looking placeholder face/body.

On release there were three children chasing the rat. With subsequent patches this was reduced to just one.

Originally the Van Graff intro sequence in the Silver Rush was longer. The scene would start without the guy kneeling on the floor, and instead Gloria would tell Jean Baptiste to go and get him (he is locked in the bathroom, which explains that odd area), to the bewilderment of the customer. It would then be explained who he was - a former employee who was romantically involved with Gloria and cheated on her. He is then shot to show the customer not to mess with the Van Graffs. This was cut presumably due to a complete lack of bound hand animations.If restored, the "volunteer" will walk normally to his end place, where the bonds would magically appear on his hands as he sits down, and then disappear again (bonds are broken in the game generally, no one who is tied up is actually tied up at all if you look!). As this whole part of the sequence was cut, a hasty edit job removed other parts that would now be missing, including the final gag where Jean Baptiste congratulates Gloria on her great story about sleeping with the now dead guy (who he thought just stole some stuff from them). He then realises she wasn't joking and is appalled! There's also another part of this that was cut early. Originally the "volunteer" would stop at the stairs and be pushed down them onto his face by Jean Baptiste. There is a pusher object to achieve this and a trigger, but it is disabled and presumably cut very early on. Its script notes mention it will have to be spruced up on "polish week", but it seems it was just abandoned.

I'd speculate it was possible to get into the top of the Silver rush from outside at some point, as there are a number of idle furniture items in there that are impossible to see from the street - someone must have put them there on purpose. In the final game it is inaccessible.

Rotface was originally intended to have an entire unmarked quest dedicated to him where the player could influence what happened to him by way of dialogue. Once he began to make money from supplying tips to the player, he would bling up, and depending on what was said to him, either attract too much attention from local thugs and be killed and robbed, get too big for his boots and attempt to rob the player at gunpoint, decide to leave Freeside, or join the followers of the apocalypse. It seems they just plain ran out of time to implement this, as his script is only half finished despite all dialogue being present. Parts of his quest DO work in the vanilla game but are extremely hard to trigger. If the player buys exactly ten tips (not including the first "free" one he says which erroneously does not increase the counter even though it was clearly intended it should) and then leaves the area and returns, he will have bought his new hat, which is unique in the game, and embarrassingly still named "Eulogy's hat" as it's a leftover Fallout 3 item. See my Rotface to Riches mod for exactly how this was meant to play out.

There are unused placeholder "Bark" topics (i.e. things they randomly say to each other/the player) for the Followers and their guards listed as "VFSFollowersBarks". No actual dialogue exists, so possible this is just a leftover before the real dialogue was moved to its appropriate quest.

The sleeping "patients" in the Followers fort are drawn from the Gambler pool of NPCs. However, there are also three pre created NPcs with the same name that were presumably going to be used instead at one point. They are all elderly characters. VFSFollowersSleeper1-3. They're also set to respawn, whereas the ones used in the game are not.

There were supposed to be lots more Kings around. There are unused patrol routes for the Kings all over the area, and lots of unused King NPCs. In particular, at some stage there would be large groups of patrolling kings, the NPCs VFSKingsPatrol01Follower (etc) are set to follow the NPC VFSKingsPatrolLeader, but in the final game the leader is the only NPC used.

Interestingly there are lots of kings set up with the name "external", (e.g.VFSExteriorKing01). These are next to the NPC VFSExteriorGateKing which is used for the Kings outside the gate. Were these NPCs going to be Kings found OUTSIDE Freeside? The old enable/disable scripts also show there were originally several Kings members guarding the water pump, not just one.

There are three interesting disabled NPCs in Freeside and the surrounding area linked to a cut quest/follower. These are Betsy the Brahmin, Tom Dooley, and Kevin Hargrove. They are all part of an unnamed quest that would eventually net the player Betsy as a permanent follower. There is no dialogue for any of these characters (save a few lines for the player to say to Betsy), but script notes paint a reasonably clear picture of what would go on (if not the character's motivations). BetsyTheBrahminScript is pretty much the sole source of what would happen in this quest, but it's clear a) Betsy was located in a pen outside of Freeside's North gate (the wire "gate" on one side is named as such) b) the player could buy Betsy from Kevin Hargrove (who therefore must be nearby, almost certainly sitting at the nearby floor idle marker), and the player could also barter for a better price. Once this happened the player would own Betsy and she would presumably act like a normal companion. However, once the player slept anywhere, a check would run, and if the player had put more than 50 items in Betsy's inventory, she would run away back to Kevin. At this stage the items would be put in the shop inventory of another character called Tom Dooley (this name is clearly a reference to the folk song of the same name about a soldier who killed his lover) who would hang out near the North gate bodyguards in Freeside (I speculate therefore he would possibly be hawking his wares to the passing (cut) tourists. Once this happened Betsy's name would also be set to a generic "brahmin" name, which suggests this was all kept secret from the player. It's unknown what would happen next (save the player getting their stuff back), but there are variables for Betsy to "Hired for real, won't run away", so she presumably would have been a true follower character like Rex etc.


Atomic Wrangler

===

There is a blank dialogue topic entitled "VFSDealerBlackWidow". This would presumably let you charm the Wrangler's card dealers as a female character to perhaps rig the game in your favour?

Originally there were male and female generic prostitutes in the Atomic Wrangler (VFSAtomicWranglerEscort and VFSAtomicWranglerEscort3). It seems at some point it was decided it would be more interesting for the player to have to find the escorts to work in there, and they were removed in favour of those recruited in 'Wang Dang Atomic Tango'. VFSAtomicWranglerEscort3 has the beginnings of a very basic script to handle them "working", but nothing else happens. They also have no dialogue at all.


The Strip

=

As with Freeside this area was supposed to be one large worldspace. Again, problems with framerate and memory occurred as long open areas leave nowhere to hide NPCs and result in frame rate crippling draw distances. The original iteration can be seen in the E3 preview video, and most tantalisingly a slightly later iteration of the same version in the early play through presentation with J E Sawyer. It's also apparent from this that the area would have extended further sideways, probably with a second row of casinos etc. This was likely cut when it was clear that getting the content present in the final game running would be difficult enough. Vestiges of this iteration are visible in the final game; the Tops has a marker and trigger for the quest messengers (NCR embassy messenger, etc) outside an impossible to reach doorway outside of the strip in case the player left that way. In the final game the corresponding doorway inside the Tops is an elevator.

The E3 version shows considerable changes to the area; not only is it one coherent worldspace with no gates dividing it, but it's also wider. The far left Tops entrance door is fully accessible in this iteration, and the walls demarking the end of the strip extend further back behind the casinos on that side of the strip. The destroyed bridge near Vault 21 is notably absent in this version, and the plants outside the Ultraluxe seem slightly different. Interestingly the walls of the strip are also solid concrete walls, and at the end of the strip are a pair of concrete guard towers with snipers on as found at Camp McCarran. This design was for some reason changed to the junk wall design found in the final game, and is fully represented as such in the intro video (which however, does NOT show the ugly dividing gates, either as a necessary aesthetic compromise - the strip looks terrible with them in place and would break the fly by camera effect - or because they weren't there when the video was made). At this stage. The strip was split into eight notional areas for moving NPCs around, with triggers to move them to the intended position. It seems even at this stage that persistent Refs were used for the random gambler NPCs, which is interesting as the early Freeside used placeatme characters which results in greater variety of NPCs but seems to cause crashes. Thus perhaps suggests the strip code was written later/with this problem in mind. The split up strip worldspace was renamed TheStripWorldNew for the final game. The original TheStripWorld is not present in the game files. At some point this was abandoned in the same way Freeside was, and the checkpoint gates were installed. The strip is still one worldspace, but the gates hide the long view distance and reduce the number of NPCs that need to be present at one time as they're just teleported around.

Once Mr House has died it seems it was intended for a eulogy message to be played here, but it was never implemented. See Mr House for more.

Securitron dialogue is broken to a ridiculous degree. All regular action dialogue (entering combat, warning the player, etc) has not been randomised, so only the topmost out of the three responses for the many topics will ever be played - literally two thirds of their dialogue is never heard. Furthermore Strip based securitrons cannot play some crucial dialogue lines due to dialogue faction settings, so only lucky 38 securitrons can play these lines (which are to do with the strip!). There are also peculiar unused dialogue lines to warn the player about entering off limit areas and to "return to the surface"(!). Finally there are also alternate lines for the "girls gone wild" scene in the fountain that never actually play.

There are also some curious leftovers from early testing present in the game files. There are a number of disabled objects linked to markers that are named "streetgoof". These seem to be early ideas for what would later become the strip's scripted sequences (e.g. girls in fountain, graffiti, etc). One "goof" is a man chasing a woman around in much the way the children do in Freeside (tellingly the woman has no clothes on..). The others are stranger - one spawns some sun loungers and bottles of beer on top of the NCR Embassy, and a further one inexplicably spawns some cushions and a mattress propped up at a 45 degree angle on top of the Gomorrah casino (!?).

There is also a second unused brahmin that was obviously intended to be included in SS7 (brahmin loose on strip scene). It doesn't have its destination set like the other cow, however. Oddly the brahmin actually used in this sequence is identified as the second created brahmin NPC for this bit.

Commented out lines in gate movement scripts show originally there was more than one station vendor, and more than one Tops promoter.

The second Tops Promoter has DIFFERENT fully voiced dialogue (about the Lonesome Drifter and Bruce Isaac) compared to the promoter used in the game, but for some reason was never used. He also has the wrong voice type set in one of his base character traits, so he cannot say the dialogue recorded for him if that template is used. He also has further dialogue that is unfinished but shows it was also originally intended for the player to able to ask the Promoter about the Chairmen. Both Promoters have script variables to set on this matter, but only the second promoter has a dialogue topic relating to it - unfortunately it's only a placeholder one that was never finished. The second promoter also has a goodbye line that doesn't work due to checking for the wrong NPC ID - the player can tell him to "stop bugging" them and leave them alone, to which he replies he is only doing his job. This also suggests at some point both promoters would forcegreet the player much like Mr Holdout (You have to quite specifically seek them out to talk to them otherwise - why complain about being "bugged" by them?). It's likely this was changed when their dialogue was never finished properly, making them completely unresponsive/useless until the player has got at least one act for the quest talent pool.

The E3 video shows Mr Holdout running up to the player rather than calling them over once a trigger is tripped. This was likely just an early oversight/implementation rather than intentional.

There are also some interesting bits of stranded navmesh here. There are a couple of polygons out in the unused areas around the strip which don't mean much. What is more interesting is that there is some floating navmesh for what looks like the station platform of the monorail. Possibly this points to the contents of the monorail map originally residing here. In the final game it is its own separate world space presumably to keep performance up (otherwise the strip and its NPCs would have to be loaded as well, after all).

Nearly all quests relating to the strip are named TheStreet rather than TheStrip. God knows why this is.

A big jet of steam shoots out of the grating near the Lucky 38 if power is diverted from the El Dorado substation to the Lucky 38. There is a second jet near Vault 21 that is not linked to the correct enable marker however, so is always disabled, possibly on purpose.

VStripSS1 (girls in fountain scripted scene) has lots of unused dialogue. A lot of them are simply different takes of the same dialogue, while others are unique (such as one girl asking a securitron "where is your friend sexy Vic?"). They can't all have been intended to have been said in the short sequence, so possibly they were going to randomly assigned, which never happened. All dialogue in this scene is delivered via packages, and packages to speak all the unused dialogue lines exist e.g. VStripSS1SecDialPack02 etc. All dialogue for this scene exists in the quest vDialogueTheStrip.

Several of the dialogue lines used by the drunk troopers and MPs in the StripSS2 sequence are unused. Dialogue lines VDialogueTheStreetSS2DrunkHome11 and VDialogueTheStreetSS2EscortHome07 are completely unused. However, there are some MP lines that ARE used, but are tagged to markers that have been removed from the patrol route and dumped outside the level (VStripSS2Middle3MPAMarkerREF & VStripSS2EmbassyMPAMarkerREF, they're dumped behind Gomorrah). It seems that after the strip gates were added, the distance to the monorail was no longer far enough for all the waypoints to be needed.

There's early dialogue for a generic casino bouncer character in vDialogueTheStrip. These are just four topics: vDialogueTheStripVStreetCasinoGuardTopic000 - 4. They are fully voiced but not much use - there are two different lines for the player failing an attempt to smuggle in weapons, but not one for passing it. He also has greeting lines, including one where he gives the player back their weapons, which suggests at one stage this was not an automatic event on leaving the casino like it is in the full game (and good god would that have been annoying).

Mr House/Lucky 38

=====

There is an early test map for Mr House and the Lucky 38 in the game called Lucky38Penthouse. This contains a stripped down version of the full game penthouse with an early placeholder version of a human Mr House! He's in the game files as MrHouseoutdated. He has no dialogue if you talk to him, but in fact his placeholder dialogue IS in the game. It's just early versions of the proper dialogue, and mostly has no voiced replies, although some lines do. These lines are listed as MrhouseOUTDATED in Vdialoguemrhouse. At one stage he was actually used as the "real" Mr House, as the script Lucky38HouseComputerConsoleSCRIPT shows that the computer Mr House was just a talking activator relaying his lines. At some point the middle man was cut out (so to speak), and the computer terminal itself became the "real" Mr House in the game, saying its own lines.

It seems it was originally intended that the Lucky 38 doors would be closed every time the player entered the strip and would have to ask Victor to open them again. The code for this is in the game but commented out, likely as it's clumsy/stops the player from gaining entry if they kill Victor. Lucky38EntranceScript

Originally if the player started combat with the securitrons in the casino, rather than end the whole House Questline, Mr House would shut down the elevator for 24 hours until the player had cooled down. This would be handled by the Quest VMQHouseLockdown, but it's a real mess in the game and doesn't really do terribly much. The quest and the quest script work at cross purposes and don't set variables the other is expecting. The quest also contains a huge number of stages for every permutation of the main quest(s) that contradict what is outlined by the quest script and other variables to do with this event. The quest objectives suggest that the Lockdown is simply what normally happens if the player kicks off in the casino, only with Mr House telling them to leave (i.e. Victor no longer controls the elevator, the faction becomes an enemy, and the player can proceed to any level in order to ultimately kill Mr House). However, the quest SCRIPT suggests that what was intended was that the elevator would become completely unusable and the player would have to wait 24 hours in order to use it again. The dialogue for this event also relies on a variable that neither of these two set. vDialogueMrHouseElevatorAlert contains the dialogue for House. The quest implementation would have been impossible, as it relies in the ability to repeat both quest objectives and restarting an already completed quest, which cannot happen on the game engine. The quest script also records the quest stage of the quest Vlucky38elevator, even though it only has two stages (basically normal, and player as Lucky 38 enemy where victor no longer controls the elevator). Possibly this is evidence that this quest was more complex originally, or it could simply be forward planning for something that never happened (and again would be impossible to implement as you cannot repeat quests/objectives in the game).

Mr House has unused dialogue to greet the player on first entering the Lucky 38 Penthouse but not having spoken to him yet. In particular he tells the player that he "invited you here so we could talk, not so you can nose around".

Originally it was planned that Mr House could be seduced (presumably only by female characters). If successful in some sort of speech challenge, the player would be told to enter the secret area of his penthouse and enter some kind of "scanner" (to perve over the player's body - or more likely according to Raul - brain?). It's not clear what would happen next, but presumably the idea would be that it would let the player enter his secret area (fnar!) without setting off the alarm like usual. This is detailed in Mr House's dialogue script:

int seduction ;1 = House has expressed interest, 2 = invited to secret area, 3 = has been scanned

There are also blank placeholder dialogues for this scene, but they contain no actual dialogue ("Scannerafter", "Scannerbefore"). This likely ties in with Raul's dialogue if you ask him about Mr House. He says House used to "scan women's brains" and "make them dress up in different clothes" in lieu of actual err, sexual acts - this is probably exactly what would have happened in this sequence.

There's a real mess involving the Securitron next to the secret room terminal. There are about 3 different aborted ways in which this Securitron would be triggered to tell the Player to stay away from the Terminal using a special dialogue string. There's a talk dialogue package, a special trigger, and the trigger that is used in game to mark when the player has already done this part and got into the secret room (and the commented out code in here is a broken mess that wouldn't do anything). God knows what caused all this (signs point to someone who didn't know what they were doing!), but the dialogue topic that was going to be used is missing in the finished game.

Originally there were four ceiling gun turrets in the area. They were to be spawned once the player gained access to the secret room. They presumably can't all have been inside the relatively tiny secret room area, so some were likely to have appeared in the main area near Mr House. Early scripts have four turrets, but later scripts (particularly one that is used in the game to handle the player killing Mr House and resetting the Securitrons etc) only feature one single turret that is commented out. Presumably they just found the turrets unbalanced (it's hard enough getting in with just the Securitrons) and removed them one by one until the idea was abandoned altogether. The turret enemy is still in the game files as "L38TurretCeiling01". Code shows that originally all the NPCs in the secret room were disabled until the door was opened, presumably to reduce game overhead, or possibly to hide the fact there is a room with NPCs in there at all.

Once the Secret room area is broken into by the Player, a klaxon alarm sounds. However, originally it was intended for a second warning message to be read out in a stereotypical cold computer voice. This is all set up to run in the game, but the dialogue is missing. Only the blank topic "vDialogueMrHouseRoomBreach" remains. Hidden just behind the control room door is a disabled female NPC called "vLucky38AlarmWoman" and a talking activator that would have broadcast her message.

If the player were to betray Mr House (It's not clear how this would be, destroying the Fort Securitrons was originally NOT the trigger for this), Mr House was supposed to taunt the Player at each area of the Lucky 38. In the casino entrance he would taunt the player with the impossibility of fighting their way to the penthouse, in the penthouse he would tell the player to give up and that winning was "unlikely", and once the player entered his control chamber he would plead with the player to spare him. If the player didn't kill House at this point, somehow the variable 'vStoryEventMrHousePissed' would be incremented to 2, and new dialogue would be played for the latter two stages if the player returned ("you're really going to do this all again?"). In the final game the variable vStoryEventMrHousePissed is repurposed for the events of a) breaking into the secret room (vStoryEventMrHousePissed==1) and b) Destroying the Fort Securitrons (vStoryEventMrHousePissed==2). if vStoryEventMrHousePissed == 2 he is more defiant and angry, and once the player reaches the final chamber he tells them to "get it over with", whereas if the player has only entered the secret room he begs for his life. This dialogue is a mess - There is only dialogue in the casino for "vStoryEventMrHousePissed 1", which is the secret room entry state. Therefore the player would never be in a position to hear this unless they ran away from the penthouse while Mr House was still alive - which is impossible - and if the player has destroyed the Fort securitrons, the dialogue would not meet the criteria to play anyway (as the variable was only later repurposed to refer to this event). Furthermore, several scripts in the secret room area (such as the unavoidable one to open the door) reset the variable to vStoryEventMrHousePissed 1 in the game, so if the player was in the vStoryEventMrHousePissed 2 state (destroyed securitrons), this will be overwritten and the alternative defiant dialogue would not play. VStoryEventMrHousePissed 2 is oddly also set once Mr House is killed, even though I don't think anything checks it at this point.

Dialogue topics:

vDialogueMrHouseCasinoPissed, vDialogueMrHousePenthousePissed, vDialogueMrHouseControlPissed

This is all academic, however: there are no activators or npcs setup to actually play any of this dialogue to begin with! The dialogue is also spoken in Mr House's regular face to face voice rather than the echoing tannoy style voice that is used when the player is in the Basement, which may be a further reason why it was cut. The files are also in mono, so the game would only play them as regular dialogue audible only a few feet away from whatever is saying them, and they wouldn't be heard across an area, further limiting their usefulness.

It seems these dialogue lines and their associated variables were written before the game's plot/events were finalized and there was originally some other way to betray/annoy Mr House (or at least this was left open to be added later). It appears they were abandoned once they no longer quite tallied up with what would be happening (e.g. it's impossible to gain entry to House's secret room and then leave the Lucky 38 without killing him). This probably ties into the whole Lockdown idea.

Lucky38MrHouseTerminal02 (the terminal that controls access to the final Control Room where the real Mr House resides) offers a hint as to what the idea with the above may have been. There are two options on the terminal, the one used in the final game which has no conditions and will always unlock the elevator, and a second identical option that has impossible conditions, but also crucially seems to check for either a platinum chip or VIP Keycard. The significance of this is that it would be possible to hack the computer and enter the secret room without either the chip or a keycard, and then be unable to progress. This situation would be one in which the player might legitimately piss off House, be forced to leave and then return later, but it seems a real outside chance to build up so much content around. There's still the problem in the final game where the elevator doors are locked once he goes hostile, however.

There are a ridiculous number of attempts at creating the secret room opening script - at least 3 different variations (Lucky38MrHouseTerminal4 and 5, 4 being the final game one, and a crude button press version visible in Lucky38MrHouseTerminalSCRIPT). The different versions show all kinds of iterations, including a simple button choice to one that still uses the "alarmwoman". One of them

Once Mr House is dead there were supposed to be (presumably regular) broadcasts of this fact in the Strip. There are two randomised takes of this dialogue, and it would explain how people inexplicably know he is dead all of a sudden. (vDialogueMrHouseLastWillTestament)

There are vestiges of being able to convince Mr House to spare the Brotherhood of Steel (you ALWAYS have to eliminate them for House in the final game)

Originally the Player had three ways to gain access to the secret room - They had either to pass a hacking skill check, obtain the Platinum chip, or obtain a Lucky 38 VIP keycard. In the final game the latter was essentially removed and is no longer checked (although the items can still be found). There are also several unused quest stages for all the main quests where the player must obtain a lucky 38 VIP keycard that would be triggered by using the wall terminal without the platinum chip.

Originally the quest 'The Moon Comes Over the Tower' was vastly longer and would presumably supply the player with the information needed to solve the above problem. There were originally three further quest stages; two are deleted but their quest markers exist (one simply links to the terminal, the other to a waypoint in the casino ceiling). A further unused stage still exists, in which the player must "Disable the Lucky 38's network encryption from three executive consoles.". On accessing the terminal in the Lucky 38, a message would presumably alert the player the terminal could not be accessed. The player would then have to go to the House Tools Office, New Vegas Steel and Camp Golf to find computer consoles that would allow the Lucky 38 to finally be bugged. It's likely at this point that the data would reveal how to get into the secret room, and presumably reveal the existence and use of the VIP keycards, which are located nearby. In the final game the items are still there, but are not checked by the secret room terminal - only the platinum chip is.

There is no extra dialogue from Emily on the subjects above, but she does allude to possible problems with "network encryption". In the final game there are two versions of what was left; originally the player must have had a science skill of 50 as WELL as the bug to complete the objective. What was eventually used was a guaranteed win with no science check at all, making the quest pretty much redundant as it doesn't even have any meaningful outcome.

There are also a couple of unused markerheadings for this quest placed in seemingly random parts of the Lucky 38 casino. Possibly they were destination markers for stuff on other floors (i.e. the terminal in Mr House's room) before someone else fixed it up and just used conditional markers for the actual doors etc.

Emily Ortal also has lots of extra intended functionality that is never used. She was supposed to a) go into a "sandbox" mode and sleep in Vault 21 if the player turned down her request to bug the Lucky 38, and b) return to the Mormon Fort once her quest is complete. Once 'The Moon Comes Over the Tower' was finished she has a new greet line that lets you once again talk to her about her run in with Benny and her life with the Followers. This only kicks in once she is in the Mormon Fort Worldspace - as She merely stands around the Lucky 38 once the quest is finished, she can never say this line. She's also disabled for good once Mr House is dead as a way of cleaning up her quest if it was not started, which would also wrongly disable her if the quest was completed so the above could never occur. There's a marker named after her in the Mormon Fort where she'd presumably walk to, and there's also an odd patrol route in the Strip that leads to this marker at its end. It's strange as the patrol route starts outside the Strip station, somewhere she never normally goes.

Marilyn remains a mystery. According to J E Sawyer she was cut late on due to "problems with her dialogue". Both herself and Jane appear in the penthouse but are also present but disabled in the Lucky 38 suite as well (it's possible originally they would sell the suite upgrades). Looking at Jane's dialogue, it is attributed both to her AND Marilyn. Therefore it's very likely they were merely redundant copies of each other with different dialogue (but with the same outcomes, i.e. giving snowglobes etc). Perhaps they had some kind of "ping-pong" effect planned where dialogue would swap between them between lines (as in Old World Blues), and that is what didn't work?

The Lucky 38 basement was originally designed to be walked around by the player. Victor has unused elevator lines for this, the securitrons in the middle have scripting to forgive the player for shooting them during their demo, but more crucially still, the terminal on the back wall could originally be used. At some point this was abandoned and the forcefields put in to presumably stop problems with the demonstration, and hide the fact the back wall of the reactor area is (deliberately, to create an illusion of space?) unfinished. If you cheat your way through it is possible to re-enable the reactor here and witness a neat animation of all the pistons etc moving. This whole solution was seemingly abandoned in favour of the much more involved El Dorado substation quest that fulfils the same in game goal. The original terminal needed a science skill of 85 to fix (it really doesn't make sense that someone as smart as house couldn't have worked out how to do this, so perhaps this was also why it was removed?).

Once the above quest was abandoned, the player was prevented from ever entering the basement of their own volition. Originally the player could enter and explore at their leisure, with no forcefield blocking the room ( there is even code in case the player gets hit/hits the securitrons during their demonstration due to this). Victor would appear downstairs and still has the dialogue necessary to tell the player what level they were on. This is also why Mr House and Yes Man both urge the player to go back upstairs as soon as possible when in the final game they have no choice but to.

The original name for the basement was "facilities management". This was then changed to "physical plant", although this dialogue is not heard in the finished game as Victor is of course removed from the basement area.

There is dialogue for Victor to introduce the Cocktail Lounge floor in the Lucky 38. For some reason it was deliberately decided to not have him spawn there (perhaps to prevent combat oddness as it's the same worldspace as the penthouse?). Dialogue script comments even note he's deliberately not there and the dialogue is only provided in case someone changes their mind later in development.

Victor also has unused dialogue for moving between floors. He was intended to make extra comments such as "going up!" or "going down!" depending on where the player currently was, and where they asked to be taken too.

Victor was originally meant to confront the player on their next visit to the Lucky 38 (outside on the strip) if the player destroyed the fort securitrons/fulfilled the original nebulous vStoryEventMrHousePissed trigger. Dialogue remains but is unused.

El Dorado Substation

========

Once the substation was turned on, a further quest stage was intended to kick in where the player would follow a Securitron to a nearby mountain ridge and watch the lights turn on at the Lucky 38. It's not clear why this sequence was cut (possibly due to lack of time), as full dialogue was recorded. Unused dialogue from Yes Man says turning on the reactor makes the Lucky 38 (and the strip itself!) independent from Hoover dam, and the reason to conquer that area would then be mere dominance of the region and to sell the unneeded electricity back to the NCR. It's not clear if this is canonical or not, as it seems to rob that questline from some of its urgency.

One thing that is peculiar with the sequence above is that Victor's dialogue lines have the wrong options set. Yes Man's are set so that each line is said once, and the dialogue cascades down. In Victor's case none of the lines have say once checked, meaning the conversation will never progress past the first line, which would be repeated ad finitum. Even stranger, his later lines are all randomised despite them clearly being designed to be said in a specific order.

The Eldorado terminal still has all the original power on functions in the terminal itself, but a script overrides this so the player cannot actually use the terminal proper and instead shows a button prompt. This is especially strange as the message used in the final game is a lot vaguer and frankly somewhat confusing compared to the original terminal message that makes it clear you've now re-routed power to the Lucky 38's reactor, instead of the strange "power the substation" (the substation already is powered, surely?) message that is used instead. The message used also seems to be a repurposed message from the Lucky 38 Reactor itself from a stage (perhaps never implemented) when you could still access the reactor terminal and it used a button message/script to override the terminal on use. (The substation uses Lucky38ReactorActiveMsg when Lucky38ReactorInActiveMsg and Lucky38ReactorMsg all relate specifically to the actual L38 reactor).

Peculiarly a reference to this quest is also present in the quest vfreeformlucky38 (The Moon Comes Over the Tower). Stage 30 of that quest is inexplicably listed as "The Lucky 38 Reactor is being powered by the El Dorado substation", and points to an objective that no longer exists. VFreeformLucky38Note suggests originally the quest was perhaps planned as some kind of large scale reconnoitre of the Lucky 38 with the player possibly reporting back to the Followers on each aspect of the mysterious Lucky 38? It seems at some point the quests were separated, and then Moon Over Tower was cut to ribbons as well.


The Tops

==

Originally the player would be kicked out for doing something at the tops, most likely for breaking the bank on the gambling games, or possibly just to force the player to leave if they refuse to give up their guns, like in Gomorrah. There are two identical scripts/quests (VTopsKickedOutSide VTopsKickedOut) that handle this by forcing the Tops greeter to come after the player, but they are deliberately dismantled so never run. It's likely they found that banning the player completely from the Casino wasn't very fun, so just stopped the player from gambling anymore.

As explained previously there was also originally a further Tops exit that lead to what is, in the final game, outside the bounds of the strip map. In the final game the actual corresponding door inside is an elevator.

There seems to have been some kind of chase sequence with Benny planned once he fled the Tops. Inside his Hotel room is of course the secret back area with Yes Man, but also a further corridor area with a locked door at the end. This door cannot be opened, but there are exploits to get inside (as well as of course simply using the console to "unlock" the door). On entry the player can explore an area that segues from the Tops basement through to a rocky underground area full of explosives (which Benny has clearly used to blast through the walls) into the remains of part of Vault 21. The tunnels extend a ways in two directions here, with some loot to be found and some locked doors that can be opened. However, both directions eventually lead to empty void where the section was never finished and was just abandoned. Parts of the left hand tunnel and Vault 21 roughly align, so its extremely likely that at some point the two areas would be joined together. The sole marker header in this area is also called "vault21totops", further adding credence to the two areas being deliberately linked. There is a sizeable but unfinished part of Vault 21 behind an unopenable door that roughly leads to this area, so possibly at some point it was intended for the player to be able to open the door and enter the tunnel that way. The code that runs this sequence is confused - Benny's AI Package to escape unlocks the door to the area and locks it when he reaches it. This makes sense on the surface, but in the game he never actually goes through the door; his end target is the door itself. This enables an exploit where if the player gets ahead of Benny (perhaps crippling his legs) they can get inside the unfinished area. As he never goes inside it, unlocking it is completely unnecessary. In fact, inside to the far left (where the tunnel finally ends in void) there is a trigger that controls an unused stage of VMQTops that would tell the player to "search for Benny". Instead in the final game this is bypassed in favour of telling the player to search his Tops suite in order to find Yes Man.

According to J E Sawyer the area was intended to lead to an exit some ways outside of the Strip walls which Benny would use to get in and out of the Strip without Mr House noticing. Unused quest stages of VMQTops were originally to be used if Benny escaped, which include the line "Benny has disappeared. Go see Mr. House for information on his whereabouts.". Clearly Mr house would be aware of where Benny had gone, which could suggest he did indeed go through went through Vault 21 (so why didn't get his securitrons to shoot him?).The trigger script in the tunnel also calls Quest objective 45, which doesn't exist (but would have been the above "talk to Mr House" bit). The whole extra tunnel area also has no navmesh in the final game, so it's impossible for Benny (or any other NPC) to move about in there.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130209011941/www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/325276093445587111 http://web.archive.org/web/20130209011941/www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/325296073004313572

Gomorrah

==

Famously there's a cut extra floor for this location, full of rooms for customers and low level loot. There's no real point to it and no important NPCs, which is probably why it was cut.

There's also a Super Mutant called "Angel" who was clearly supposed to be in here somewhere (belongs to the Omerta faction).


Camp Forlorn Hope

=====

There seem to be several attempts at post 'We Are Legion' events in Forlorn Hope. In that quest the player is tasked with killing key officers in the camp, with the intention of destabilising the NCR forces there in order to break the stalemate and result in a Legion victory. In the vanilla game, completing the quest results in little change to the area. Any troops who weren't killed by the player first time round will still be about and enter combat if the player is still in poor standing with the NCR. However, disabled NPCs in the area tell another story. In the graveyard area there is what appears to be a mass grave - a huge pile of dead and dismembered NCR soldiers in uniform. This is enabled by the marker VCFHDeadBodiesMarker. It's never triggered in the game, but presumably after the camp was weakened it was intended for the Legion to take it from the NCR and massacre all the NCR troops there, before dumping their bodies here. To add further credence to this theory, is a further marker, called VCFHMassacredMarkerREF that ties to several disabled troops from the base "VForlornHopeNCRTrooperRefugee". These are never enabled, and have no extra lines of dialogue, but presumably they would be enabled after the massacre event had happened, and have something to say about their comrades being murdered. In the final game they are completely indistinguishable from regular Forlorn Hope troops, with no extra dialogue relating to the event. A final part of this puzzle is the marker VCFHCrittersMarkerREF and the Cazadores linked to it. Enabling this causes the camp to be invaded by cazadores. Presumably what was intended was that the Legion were to massacre the camp, but be unable to occupy it themselves due to lack of men, and so it becomes overrun by cazadores. This seems to clash with the refugees idea, although perhaps they were simply then meant to be killed by the invading insects. Possibly the Cazadores where only supposed to spawn if both locations were wiped out by the player?

Peculiarly there is also a marker (vForlornHopeSleepersMarker) that enables lots of sleeping troops in various tents in the camp. This is never activated so is somewhat strange. Perhaps it was forgotten or simply used to cut unneeded NPCs? It's also noteworthy that many of the miscellaneous NPCs in CFH are persistent refs. This is completely unnecessary, and likely done either by accident/someone who didn't know what they were doing, or more likely done deliberately so those NPCs can be manipulated by a script - likely so they can be disabled for the massacre event outlined above (to hide their bodies apart from the pre-placed ones in the graveyard).

There were also supposed to be sniffer dogs in the camp to detect Legion spies, but there are all disabled in the final game, probably for balance reasons.

In the retail game files there were horrifically maimed NCR troopers situated in the no-man's land between FH and Nelson. These were disabled by an early patch. In fact, they were more than disabled - they were actually completely deleted from the game files! There were also random battles that would happen here where a random platoon of either NCR or Legion troops (or sometimes both!) would spawn and attempt to assault the other side's base. These were dummied out around the time of Dead Money due to problems with console memory use.

Nelson

==

As with Forlorn Hope, there are odd things cut here. Firstly there are several markers around the central campfire as with Forlorn Hope. These again control the enabling/disabling of various groups of NPCs. Of particular interest is VNelsonDeadTroopersMarker, which enables lots of dead NCR troops in the area (most of which are placed on top of land mines). This is unused in the final game and the dead troops are never seen (despite the Legion boasting of recently massacring them). There's also a second marker called VNelsonExtraNPCMarker that enables a whole load of extra Legion NPCs. It's again unclear why these were left disabled, other than either to improve frame rate/fix memory problems on consoles, or to make the area easier. Looking at the game's code, these NPCs are supposed to be disabled after talking to Dead Sea in certain situations. His dialogue script individually disables some of the NPCs tied to these markers. However, this doesn't actually work, as NPCs with enable states tied to other objects can ONLY be enabled/disabled if the parent object is itself enabled/disabled.


Black Mountain

==

For some reason about 50% of the enemies here are disabled. There were supposed to be several Nightkin ambushes (as referenced in a cut note) on the way up, as well as patrols of Super Mutants with Centaurs in a guard dog role. These were all disabled, possibly for balance reasons.

There are also several Black Mountain Radio topics that are blank. In particular, RadioBMPrisonLocked is scripted to be played if the player used the terminal inside the BM prison. However this line is commented out, making the script it is in pointless, so possibly it was some hint as to what the password was for the door.

Vault 03

==

There is a cut Wild Wasteland Encounter where Motorrunner's dogs would have their names changed to 'Donnie' and 'Marie' (as in Osmond).

There is a half finished dialogue topic for the Jailer character where the player can say to him they are lost. In the final game this is just turned into a non-interactive greeting topic where the jailer TELLS the player they are lost.


Great Khans

=

Originally there was a quest with the internal name VMS48 that would let the player undergo the Khan initiation ritual and presumably become a Great Khan.

Topics: VMS48VRRCRitemasterTopic000 to VMS48VRRCRitemasterTopic011

Presumably the cut character would be the "Rite Master", whether he would have a proper name outside of this designation is unknown. Only the player's side of the conversation is written, there is no reply dialogue, whether it be voiced or even just text.

There are also a markerheading and a locker to do with the above quest. The locker is visible in the game and named VRRCInitiationLockerREF. It is owned by the Player, and would be where all the player's items were stored during the fight (it's a fist fight, you can't just shoot them all!). The marker "VRRCPostInitiationMarkerREF" would presumably be where the player would be moved once the fight has finished.

There also lots of Khans fighting training dummies in the central ring arena that are all disabled in the game. Their enable state is set to that of the first one of their number, who is always disabled. Presumably these characters were not only there for background ambience, but were also the Khans that player would have to fight during the initiation.

The Great Khans were clearly originally intended to have a dedicated reward character for having good standing with them like other factions. Somewhere along the line this was changed, and this functionality was rather clumsily dumped onto any Khan you talk to. A large number of voice actors (including Papa Khan himself!) recorded these lines but you have to actually speak to random Khans to trigger them. Bizarrely, these lines are included in the dialogue topic VDialogueTheStreetSS1Fem01Wooo, part of the Strip scripted sequence that features the female NCR troopers in the fountain! The topic text is even listed as "WoooooOOOOOOoooooo", as this is what the female NCR trooper is supposed to be drunkenly yelling. There's actually a topic created especially for handling this dialogue (GreatKhansRepConsequences) in the quest vGenericReputationQuest that is unused, which makes this error even more Incredibly weird. There are also further script variables in vGenericReputationQuestScript that relate to a Freeside style rep explanation system that was never implemented.

There's a drunk vomit marker on one of the tents near Papa Khan's house that is never/can never be used by anyone as there are no drunks here. It suggests that at one point there would indeed be drunk Khans wandering around (which fits with their drink/drugs/fighting image).

Unused map - "GreatKhanCave". A big cave with nothing in it, that links to nowhere in the game. Could be another of the Khan Supply Caves, but it has a very different design. It leads to a large open area that seems like it would be a good place for NPCs/some kind of "town" style setting. Perhaps it was originally going to be a part of Red Rock Canyon?

The Fort

==

There are the remnants of a cut subplot involving Siri. It seems she would originally be located near the Brahmin pen (or at least near a brahmin somewhere). The player could ask her about a dead brahmin, which seems to have died of some disease. You can then ask her about it, and convince her to give you the meat. Once the meat had been obtained, it was then possible to poison the Legion's stew to kill them, as visible in the leftover messages FortPotMsg and FortDogBowlMsg. Weirdly the "infected brahmin meat" item was later moved to the ultraluxe. The quest still cannot be completed, however, as there are no items to put the meat in. The script for adding the poison to the food also does nothing, the outcome part was never finished. It seems the story event VStoryEventLegionDogsKilled is possibly referring to the player poisoning the dogs here (and presumably this somehow carrying on to elsewhere?). There is full dialogue for the aftermath of this event in the game, but seemingly no way to trigger it. The Nightkin dialogue for the event is perhaps most revealing: "Head voices wonder... why bull doggies die?" Although the nightkin are of course insane, it still suggests there is some kind of mystery to the event, and perhaps it is caused by a disease spread from dog to dog by the player's actions (siri's cut dialogue suggests that there is indeed something "infectious" about the meat/disease).

There was also supposed to be a second slave girl serving food here, lots of minor disabled Legionaries, some crucified people, and Dale Barton was supposed to have a brahmin with him. All are present but disabled. The dialogue conditions for slaves are also (deliberately?) broken, so you can't hear all the things they have to say, they just say they can't talk now.

It seems likely that originally it was planned for the area outside the fort gate (with the rows of tents) to be explorable. The slaves follow markers that lead to end markers called "to secondary camp". that run outside the gate. The idea is they would move back and forth unloading things from the main camp to Caesar's area. In the final game they merely teleport in and out of the fence. To add credence to this claim is the fact there is a small amount of deliberate handmade navmeshing between the tents outside - someone clearly started making this area navigatable by NPCs. It was likely abandoned very early on due to the amount of work needed. Possibly it was only so the slaves would "really" walk down to this area and the come back again, and not for the player to go there - the aborted navmesh forms a very deliberate corridor shape that would be impractical if the whole area were to be accessible.

CottonWood Cove

===

There seems to have been some kind of bunker building originally intended to be found at or near CottonWood Cove. Inside would be found the cut NVCCBunkerRadroach enemies. There is also an early script called NVCCBunkerLogBookSCRIPT that seems to have been for some kind of quest item; however the item itself does not exist, and the script does nothing. There is also the object NVCCBunkerEmergencyLightWarm that would presumably have been found inside, but in the final game is only used in the NCRCF prison. It can be assumed that the bunker would have been heavily irradiated, going by the radioactive cockroaches found inside. Possibly this was where the Securitron bunker was originally going to be?


Hoover Dam/Endgame Fight

=============

Hoover Dam originally had a hugely impressive looking pair of water exhaust jets that shoot a vast amount of water down into the river below. They're probably the most impressive visual effects in a game that graphically speaking, frankly only a mother could love, yet while these are present in the final game they have for some reason been disabled.

Between the Legate's camp and Hoover dam is a long winding road. This area is filled with legionaries to fight. However, it is NOT navmeshed, and in fact the area is filled with two big triggers that teleport anything that gets stuck in here to either side of the big gates. The area was basically used as a staging ground for reinforcement enemies during other parts of the dam fight, but their script is commented out, so they don't seem to actually be used at all? There's a clever conga line system used to send one set of them in to fight, but this seems to be disabled. There is actually a trigger behind the gate that enables some enemies here, but it is impossible to ever get to in the vanilla game. This suggests however, that at some stage the player WAS supposed to fight their way up here to the Legate's camp. The trigger that enables the pair of enemies that were supposed to fight the player is disabled so never triggers even if the player did somehow get inside. Further up there are also crucifixion telegraph poles lining the road lending further credence to this being a genuine route for the player at some stage (it's impossible to ever see them otherwise). Interestingly some of them are hidden behind parts of the cliff that show how the area was redesigned over time. This whole section was probably cut/left unused due to lack of time.

There were supposed to be Followers medics helping injured NCR soldiers during the endgame fight (presumably only if the player convinces Julia Farkas to help the NCR). The NPC exists as VFSFollowersDamDoctor, and his dialogue exists in VdialogueHooverDam.

There's an unused/deleted empty map called "Arizona Spillway Tunnel" (HooverDamIntArizonaSpillway). The Arizona Spillway is a real part of Hoover Dam, and at one end features a long cylindrical tunnel that drains off excess water. Presumably at one point you would have to go in there to fight the Legion (who are said to be gaining entrance to the damn through drainage tunnels).

Ranger Station Foxtrot

==========

There was clearly going to be something far bigger here than what ended up in the finished game. Behind the main tent there is in fact a hatch that leads to a small underground base. This is present in the finished game, but disabled so the player can never go in there, or even see it was there to begin with. Inside the fairly sizeable base is just a series of dorm rooms for the soldiers, and low level loot such as ammo, etc. While nothing terribly exciting is present here, it is clear quite some effort has been put into making it look lived in and believable.

10C1FA - Form ID for hatch. Enable to enter. It's behind the tent and in between that and the outhouse.

There's also a trigger in the underground base's ceiling that doesn't do terribly much, but talks about being a test trigger for the quest here. Looking at the leftovers in RSFoxtrotQuestSCRIPT this seems to have been part of the original implementation of the quest 'Return To Sender'. Its dummied code suggests the original implementation was a colossal mess with separate quests used to mark the progress made at each Ranger station which would then update the main quest once they were all completed. There's also a similarly named quest called "RSFoxtrotQuestTestSCRIPT" that simply resets/starts the Return to Sender quest so the next stage can be tested inside this area. Presumably then, the computer terminal that had to be reached was originally located in here (there is indeed one in the right hand side of the building).

There are three cut characters here, Private Biggs, Private Harcourt and Ranger Chauncey. There are only player lines left to talk to the first two of these characters that are not part of any quest (but do indicate they were originally part of a deleted quest named VFreeformRSFoxtrot) Biggs thinks Harcourt is a jinx and will give the player something (caps?) to kill her in order to hopefully make the rest of the squad safer. Private Harcourt appears to be female as she can be flirted with via the line "I think a man would be very lucky indeed to catch you." (or it could just be a gay courier, I guess). This is also somewhat interesting if this is indeed the case, as the final game's characters at this location are indeed all female.

VFreeformRSFoxtrotPrivateBiggsTopic000 to VFreeformRSFoxtrotPrivateBiggsTopic012 VFreeformRSFoxtrotPrivateHarcourtTopic000 to VFreeformRSFoxtrotPrivateHarcourtTopic013

Chauncey is a unique super mutant Ranger who was seemingly cut early on and has no dialogue at all. According to J Sawyer he was present due to the proximity to Jacobstown (perhaps he came from there?) and was meant to have a comically undersized human helmet on his giant mutant head. Interestingly neither Harcourt nor Biggs have actual models in game, yet Chauncey actually does (FoxtrotSuperMutantRanger). However, Chauncey has no dialogue and is, to all intents and purposes, just another super mutant.

VMSRSFoxtrotLogNote is a cut note that was originally intended to end the Foxtrot part of the quest 'Return to Sender'. In the final game you simply talk to Ranger Kudrow. The note also suggests there WAS a major incident where NCR soldiers died due to a skirmish with the Great Khans, but of course no deathclaws were involved! It does however suggest the Khans used dogs, so possibly this is why the message was cut - in the final game there's zero evidence they use any animals in their dealings.

Vault 22

==

There are two cut fully voiced NPCs here. It seems the ghoul scientist Keely brought two robots with her, Koch and Bohr (both named after real world scientists). Protectotron Bohr is not even placed in the game world, but would presumably be located at one of the upper levels of the vault where there are no enemies and where Keely has scientific equipment set up. Bohr (V22Bohr) simply tells the player Keely has gone on below and does not know where she is and has no other use. The sentry bot Koch (V22Koch) is found further down, in the areas where the spore creatures first appear. He (in fact Koch's scripts refer to the robot as both male AND female) is present in the final game, but disabled. When the player encounters him he is broken, and can be fixed with a repair skill check. Koch's a real mess; the value used for the skill check to repair him is inconsistent between what is told to the player (repair 40) in the messages displayed when examining him, and the actual checked number in the script (repair 60). Once the player gets him working again, further bugs appear. He is "dead" on first being discovered, and when resurrected the following command is used: 'V22KochREF.resurrect 1'. This resurrects a dead actor and makes them use an animation to get up again. This argument (the number 1 at the end) is useless on sentry bots as they have no "get up" animation. This would be fine but for the fact that it also causes a weird as hell bug - Koch will literally fall apart randomly once revived this way. A strange animation bug kicks in and his model's parts collapse into a heap on the floor, only to leap back into place again. Instead V22KochREF.resurrect 0 should have been used. Even then this results in him weirdly falling out of the sky on revival due to how the game engine works. Once revived the player is then told Koch cannot move due to being damaged. This makes him completely useless, as combat is his only function and up here there are no enemies. Furthermore he is part of the generic "robotfaction" which is actually allied to the spore creatures, and will attack the player if they are in combat with the spore creatures in his presence!

Combine the above with the fact that Keely doesn't even acknowledge either character and it's not hard to see why they were cut. They also diminish the tense, lonely atmosphere by their presence.


Helios One

==

At some stage it was intended for the Brotherhood to retake Helios One. In the final game Caesar's Legion will take the facility if the player arms the Archimedes system and kills the NCR troops, and there is no way to have the Brotherhood take it instead. Indeed it's likely the Legion troops were chosen as the ones to take back the place instead of the Brotherhood. There are unused NPCs for a brotherhood take over (LvlBrotherhoodOfSteelHELIOSGun) as well as a dialogue faction for them (VDialogueBrotherhoodHELIOSFaction) and also several lines of greetings dialogue in VMS03. There are actually more lines for Brotherhood members than there are for Caesar's Legion taking the place, oddly enough. Possibly this is all post-endgame content, as several of the endings have the BOS taking back Helios One while the NCR is occupied at the dam.


Powder Gangers/NCRCF

========

Lots more quests would originally have took place here. There are cut dialogue lines to do with the player "being useful" around the facility and doing mini quests for each prisoner character. None of them have actual recorded dialogue, sadly. For example, Carter asks the player to crack a safe he cannot get into. Dawes wants the player to repair a generator. Eddie wants the player to scout out the NCR (there is only one outcome for this, the player can lie to him that a whole battalion of NCR troops is coming to take back the prison). Hannigan would have had a quest where the player had to find him some medical books, likely to help him get over the fact he only has basic medical training - VFreeformNCRCFHanniganNote. Chavez was originally an inmate in the Prison. The unused note VFreeformNCRCFChavezNote says that he needs the player to pick the lock to his cell to get him out.

The Topics for all of the above begin with NCRCF, e.g. NCRCFCarterLockpick.

There's an unused interior map called NCRPrisonBlockC that's completely finished, but contains nothing other than some very low level loot, and no NPCs. Probably wasn't used as there's simply no room for it in the main NCRCF map.

Nipton

==

There are unused NPC models for the mayor and the two nipton prostitutes (NiptonDeadRoseCF, NiptonDeadSylviaCF) that are only alluded to in notes in the final game. There's also a cut note from the mayor that seems to have been the original source of the location of the secret cache that contains the radiation suits used in the quest 'Wheel of Fortune'. It seems at some point the receipt of this information was moved to the character Boxcars instead.

Vulpes Enculta has a fair bit of unused dialogue due to botched condition checks. In particular the variable vnipton.knowvulpes is used to check whether the player can see a lot of lines, yet it is immediately set on starting a conversation with him, meaning those lines are cut off forever no matter what (including, most glaringly, being able to ask him who he is!). Vulpes also has his lines duplicated for Gabban, who takes his place if the player kills Vulpes without going to Nipton yet, but Gabban has different conditions for these identical lines, relying instead on the player's standing with the legion to determine whether they can be heard or not, which seems a lot more sensible. There are also other lines that are supposed to check the player's standing with the legion that fail as New Vegas sorts through its dialogue topics top down until it finds one that validates, and the first options here have no checks, so cannot be failed by the game resulting in the game always choosing this option even if the second option would have been the correct one.

Camp Searchlight

====

A huge number of enemies have been disabled in this area, as well as lots of the turrets in the town. On the outskirts there are also abandoned farmsteads full of decaying Bighorners. Every single one of these is disabled in the final game.


Primm

=

As everyone and his dog knows, Primm has full reputation stuff (i.e. Pipboy image, etc) like other towns in the game, it just isn't used. This was likely cut out as there's pretty much nothing to actually DO in Primm.

There is unused dialogue to suggest that at one stage it was possible to install one sheriff in the town, kill them, and then install another one. There's also dialogue for a cut scene involving Meyers giving a pep talk to the powder gangers he rallies as deputies for the town.

The Vicky and Vance NCR Deserters have early Player only dialogue which is mostly identical to their finished lines, but with a new choice for the player to promise to speak to nearby NCR troops to get them to let the deserters rejoin the NCR army without punishment.

The Thorn

=

Originally it was intended that the player could set the animals in cages free, bringing The Thorn and its clientele to a bloody end. The quest was only ever half finished and abandoned due to lack of time, but many remnants of it remain in the game. Most obviously Red lucy's computer has absolutely no use at all in the finished game, lacking even any emails or notes to read. Its real purpose is to disable power to the creature gates and free the animals, but this option is set to be impossible to ever see. The quest VMS38b ("The Thorn Mayhem") handles the creatures escaping, but all they do is appear inside the thorn main area and then head to a waypoint (while doing this they naturally get into combat with the Thorn's staff and customers). Script variables suggest there was originally going to be more to this sequence than that - the line bCreaturesAtWestside suggests they would originally escape the confines of the Thorn and attack Westside as well. There is still full dialogue that is supposed to be played during the event itself, and NPCs throughout the gameworld can comment on it happening after the fact as well. There are also keys to the actual cage and to Red Lucy's room present in the game files that are unused. Jorge's script notes for the quest say the following: "Cut, not enough time to implement as polished as it should be."

Red Lucy's death is supposed to be commented on by many NPCs, but the variable for this that is supposed to be set when she dies never is, so this cannot happen in the vanilla game.

Westside

==

There are NPCs cut from the quest 'The Whitewash' here. Originally a bunch of local thugs were supposed to ambush the player after catching Hector in the act of stealing water from the pump. Their sequence is complete in the game code and they have full dialogue, so it's unclear why they were cut.

Pretty Sarah has empty dialogue topics for other things the player could ask her at one stage; most interestingly propositioning her for sex (perhaps with spiteful intent considering she is deformed), and working for her as a whore!


Anywhere I Wander/Techatticup Mine

======================

Legionary Alexus has a fair number of blank dialogue topics where the player would talk to him about freeing the hostages/letting the player kill one of them. He has the rare honour of not only having 10 charisma but also being present on one of the playing cards in the collector's edition of the game. It's clear he was considered an important character at one stage, so it's bizarre that in the final game he has no unique dialogue at all and is in fact completely useless.

Reynolds has more blank dialogue that is unused, but mostly seems to be duplicate stuff. There also seems to be some line about the player being unarmed, whereupon the player can boast about their biceps!

There's also a cut character called Betters, another NCR soldier. He seems to have been another survivor of the Legion attack, and would have gotten the player to save his squad mates. Possibly he was just another early version of Reynolds. He has no actual NPC set up for him in game, he exists only in the blank dialogue topics VTechatticupVTechatticupNCRBettersTopic000 - 05.

Quarry Junction

===

It seems there was originally going to be a fair amount more stuff going on here. Firstly there is the Powder Ganger Hawkins, who it seems had quite a bit of work put into him, including all kinds of scripting and blank dialogue topics. It seems there would be a mini quest to help him escape from the Quarry where he is trapped and being menaced by a deathclaw. In the final game he is dead and has no dialogue if revived. There also seems to be more to the Great Khans on the ridge; there is an early version of Papa Khan who it seems would have gone up here with them (he shares their AI packages), who has unique armour. God only knows what he'd be doing here.


Ranger Milo

=

Lots of early/unfinished dialogue topics. Most seem to have been rewritten as the lines used in the final game, but interestingly the player can suggest that he simply snipes all the Nipton captives as a mercy killing. There are no reply lines, just the player's dialogue.


Sen Lin and Xa Mo

=====

A very intriguing pair - they are the only non-generic civilian asian characters in the entire game. They also have overtly Chinese names, which suggests they were probably somehow related to/members of the Shi people from San Francisco shown in Fallout 2. They have no dialogue, factions, or anything to give away their purpose. Sen Lin has some blank dialogue topics that relate to some kind of eggs - "VSenLinNoEggs" and "VSenLinHaveEggs". Wild speculation might suggest they were the original owners of the Thorn (perhaps adhering to a rather unflattering stereotype of them running some kind of underground cockfights?).Their form ids show they were added to the game roughly around the point that Vaults 3 and 22 were being worked on, which might be a mere coincidence, or might indeed support the above statements - Vault 22 is of course the location where the player must recover mantis eggs from for the Thorn. Xa Mo also wears Eulogy Jones' pimp style coat (otherwise unused in the game apart from Rotface's cut quest), presumably as it's the closest thing to a classy piece of traditional Chinese clothing in the game.

Veronica's Cut Quest

========

Veronica has a fully voiced cut dialogue to do with the player chasing after a pair of ghouls called Abraham and Monte... Or does she? It seems this was actually an incredibly clever ruse to stop people nosing around in the game files from working out the plot to Dead Money! It seems what really happened was that all the dialogue for Veronica's reaction to the player meeting Elijah was recorded during her initial game dialogue sessions, but was then camouflaged by a cock and bull story to do with these two ghouls. Once Dead Money is installed its ESM overrides the player's dialogue in these topics to be about finding Elijah etc - these are the lines that are used once Dead Money is completed. This is especially likely as Elijah is both alluded to and mentioned by name before Dead Money - it's unlikely the extremely similar ghoul characters were retconned into Elijah, as he already existed at this point in development.

Companions

==

Pretty much all the companions have lots of blank dialogue topics for them to comment on important game events/areas. In particular, Cass has a huge number of blank dialogue topics. It seems that she would (for example) have had nearly double the comments to say to Freeside people in particular, and also a massive amount of other lines to chip in during during game events such as meeting important NPCs.

Prospectors

=

Not cut at all, but people probably don't realise Some interesting and ambitious stuff was intended for these generic characters. Looking through their scripting (e.g. VProspectorScript50 - the number at the end is the percentage chance this Prospector will spawn - the idea was to ape chanced spawns like in Oblivion), they were intended to be found all over the Wasteland doing all kinds of autonomous stuff. Essentially the intention was for them to behave like other player characters would in an MMORPG, wandering the landscape, getting into fights with enemies, and raiding dungeons for loot. They actually do carry out most of this behaviour, but they're also fairly rare in the actual game, and mostly just wander around a few uninteresting locations. Their code was started by Jorge "Oscuro" Saldano and continues on from some of his sterling work on OOO for Oblivion.

Wasteland Adventurer

========

A fully realised but cut NPC. I don't think he was really ever going to be in the game; he reeks of "my first npc". He's not placed in the game, but a combination of his dialogue lines and the names of the markers his packages would use suggest he would almost certainly be found in front of the sign leading to Primm (which indeed the player can ask him about). He also has quite a lot of interesting/complex behaviours, but he really does just seem to be a test character. One of his goodbye dialogue lines has commented out code to make him perform an idle that would make him flip the player the bird (which further suggests he was a joke/learning the Geck character). Peculiarly he also sleeps in the same wrecked caravan as the "gecko man" character the player can meet early in the game.

Pre-mutant Lilly and her Grandkids

======================

These are NOT cut. They're used to deliver lines in Lilly's hallucination sequence.

Misc

==

VChipHistory - This is a quest from a point in development where it seems it was possible to give the chip to a faction and then steal it back. The companion script (VChipProvenance) would keep track of what had been done to whom.

VDialogueTEST - This is a debug reference quest that simply collates every StoryEvent global variable in one place with an explanation of what they actually mean (because global variables don't belong to scripts so can't have comments set next to them to explain what they do). Check the topics in this quest to see an explanation of a variable, and check the conditions for that topic to see what actual variable must be set for the event to be marked as done.

Legion Explorer Aura Token - The legion explorer enemies were meant to provide combat bonuses to other nearby legion troops (the idea seems to be they use their scouting ability to let other troops know where you are "better"). This item makes that happen. Doesn't seem to have actually been used apart from weirdly being found in the inventory of Crandon (on whom it has no affect - only legion faction NPCs get the effect). It boosts the perception of nearby Legion troops by 2. The code seems sound, but I'm not sure it actually works properly in game.

Doctor Rotson was originally called 'Doctor Canton' and has basic placeholder lines for the player to ask for medical help (with no replies) in place in vDialogueSL. Rotson also has ownership of the original Doctor Canton inventory container.

While there are a lot of leftover scripts etc from Fallout 3, there are few more concrete remains. However, the cells for two Girdershade resident's houses remain intact: GirderShadeRonaldHouse and GirderShadeSierraHouse. There's also the complete Fallout 3 random encounters cell, including a ridiculous amount of unused stuff.

Originally the "secret network drive" on a terminal in House Tools had some kind of a (science) skill check on it. There are success and failure messages (HouseToolsJournalFail and HouseToolsJournalSucceed) for this that are unused.

VMS101EWrenchTopic009 - "I've got the whiskey." Unused(?) line from the Whitewash quest.

The "Doggie Treat" item. This is a completely useless item. However, there is also a script called SleepytimeDogTreatBaseEffectScript that was presumably created for this item, but is unused. It casts a fatigue effect on any creatures who eat it, knocking them out. It was therefore intended at one stage for the player to be able to give/leave this for dogs to make them unconscious and sneak past. It's not even clear if it's possible for dogs to eat food in the final game.

There was originally another character involved with the Sunset Sasparilla location/start quest. All that is left is a container called SSHQFeliciaContainer. Presumably Felicia would have had a similar role to Malcolm Holmes, and therefore would probably be another random character who is also after the special star bottle caps. Her container contains a load of junk like Malcolm's, but surprisingly also has lots of energy weapon related stuff.

A large number of generic NPCs and enemies have been removed from the game since release. They were generally removed to improve performance/memory problems on games consoles. I've mentioned most glaring examples above, but there are far too many removed overall to count all of them.

MoBurma 94.192.52.36 22:09, July 29, 2012 (UTC)

That was awesome! Thanks for posting, it was very interesting. Could you do one for Fallout 3? Mustached Plumber (talk) 19:06, April 4, 2013 (UTC)