Courier's Journal: Week One
From the diary of Robert Edwin House, 10/25/2281:
Three rockets just set off from the REPCONN test site. The courier was there, of course. The courier is always there. This morning he seemed to be back on Benny's trail again after the delay in Nipton, but then after speaking with some of the townsfolk, he left for the facility and disappeared for several hours. He briefly returned much later in the evening, but only long enough to buy a local merchant's entire supply of toy rockets (?) before carting them away again. Then, hours later, I received the alert about the launch.
Two of the rockets escaped my radar within minutes; I have no idea what happened to them, and I hope to God this doesn't have any greater consequences. The third, somewhat more fortunately, I was able to keep track of, because it crashed almost immediately. I have eyes on the El Dorado substation at all times, so I had a good view of the flaming wreckage as it landed in the nearby dry lake. I also had disturbingly clear audio of the feral ghouls who came crawling out of it, screaming in agony as they burned to death, at least until the NCR troopers came along to put them out of their misery. I very much could've done without seeing that today.
This was a very harrowing incident, and not just because of the ghouls; if that rocket had landed even slightly further north, it would have wiped out the substation, and along with it any hope of reactivating the Lucky 38's reactor in time for the upcoming battle for Hoover Dam. I'm not sure what the courier's intentions were in the REPCONN facility, but if he was responsible for this, then he has no idea how close he just came to dooming mankind. I respect what he is capable of, but this man is an agent of chaos, and I'm beginning to wonder just what I've unleashed upon the world.
For goodness' sake, it's only been a week.
Author's notes:
So this is different. You may notice that this isn't actually a thing which occurs in the game. And some of the more eagle-eyed among you may also have noticed that this isn't the first instance of such. The wasteland adventurer outside of Goodsprings was new too, right? Whaaaaaaat's going oooonnnnn?
Well, short answer, it's cut content. Long answer? New Vegas, as released, was not a finished game. Because of its eighteen month development cycle and Obsidian's unfamiliarity with the Gamebryo engine, there was a lot of content in the game that the developers simply weren't able to finish in time, and even some content which they did finish but then later had to patch out for console performance. The final game version does not fully reflect the developers' vision or intent.
So for this story, I'm including a lot of the ideas and content which Obsidian wanted to include, but simply weren't able to, such as having the misfired rocket land in the wasteland somewhere to be found by the player.
Of course, I'm not including every cut idea. Mostly just stuff that was cut late in development for obviously technical reasons, and which is already fully formed enough to fit well into the rest of the world. The wasteland adventurer, for instance, is a fully voiced NPC who makes sense being where he is, and there are even mods which fully restore him already, so he's fine. But I'm probably not gonna have the Courier visit the cut Legion settlements east of the river or anything. Not unless I have a really good idea for them.
If you're interested in the cut content and behind the scenes development of New Vegas, I highly recommend TriangleCity's channel on YouTube. His Cutting Room Floor series extensively documents the cut content of New Vegas, and even includes interviews with several of the developers. It's pretty neat.