Fans of Obsidian Entertainment’s 2010 hit Fallout: New Vegas — often lauded as one of the best RPGs of all time — will likely be happy to learn that John Gonzalez, the game’s lead writer and lead creative designer, has returned to the Xbox Game Studios developer after 14 years.
The news comes from Gonzalez’s LinkedIn profile, which recently revealed that he’s back with Obsidian to serve as a creative director. Gonzalez commented that he’s come back “for exciting times,” though he hasn’t mentioned anything that he’s working on specifically.
A natural assumption to make is that he’s probably working on a Fallout sequel to New Vegas, but Gonzalez actually got out ahead of things and confirmed this isn’t the case, directly stating that “No, it’s not FNV2.” With that said, it is likely he’s contributing on an upcoming single player RPG from Obsidian, as the developer is known for these and Gonzalez has worked on several of these before.
In addition to being “the lead story guy” on Fallout: New Vegas, Gonzalez was also the lead narrative designer on Monolith Productions’ 2014 ARPG Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and the narrative director for Guerilla Games’ open-world Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West titles. He also contributed to Outrage Entertainment’s 2003 adventure title Alter Echo, its cancelled Rubu Tribe action game, Ubisoft’s 2008 strategy game Tom Clancy’s EndWar, and the team at Fantastic Pixel Castle.
Obsidian itself has had several excellent years recently, with the studio releasing the critically acclaimed sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds in 2019, the unique and creative survival game Grounded in 2022, and the historical 16th Century investigation game Pentiment later that same year. The developer is also set to have quite a big 2025, with the sandbox-driven Pillars of Eternity RPG Avowed scheduled to release on February 18 and The Outer Worlds 2 coming at some point in 2025 as well.
Depending on how far away The Outer Worlds 2 is, Gonzalez may or may not contribute to that project. Again, though, it’s most likely that he’s working on a new Obsidian RPG, and what that could be is anyone’s guess. It might be an entirely new experience set in the Pillars of Eternity universe, for example, or it could be another Fallout spinoff entirely separate from New Vegas (after all, Fallout 5 is a long, long way away). There’s also a chance that it’s an entirely brand new IP, too.
Whatever the project is, Xbox and PC players can look forward to it — like all of Obsidian’s other recent games — being included on Xbox Game Pass on day one. The service has unfortunately gotten more expensive than it used to be, though thanks to a sweet deal, you can get three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for just $29.99 at CDKeys.
