The Day-One Bug that Changed Fallout New Vegas Canon 

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Initially, I thought that half of the chairmen were supposed to wear white suits, while the other half black. That way, Benny's white-and-black checkered suit would indicate his high status among the chairmen.

in Fallout 1, Dogmeat's AI would cause him to reliably run into electric force fields and die. This eventually became his canon fate in Fallout 2.

This reminds me of how you can find "strange meat" pies in the Sloan cafeteria, presumably because an environment designer didn't look too closely at the ID of the object they were placing. At least, I don't think Obsidian intended for an entire settlement to be casually consuming human flesh with no way for the player to comment on it.

I have 3000 hours in New Vegas and had zero clue that this was a thing

I played New Vegas on Xbox 360 so my main enemy on the strip was the 5 minute long loading screens every 3 seconds

In Borderlands 2, Tiny Tina has a bug, where her left eye, will lose focus and wander. Developers later opted to make it canon, rather than fix the bug, stating that she has a lazy eye.

Knowing that Daniel in Honest Hearts was supposed to be the Asian race model but released as Caucasian, it doesn't surprise me that this was missed. One (or a few) of the many writers or designers created this interesting detail, but those who were in the know weren't paying enough attention to realize the mistake. There are other New Vegas bugs where patching it for the hardware at the time was nigh impossible and just had to be left in. It's quite possible that this is the symptom of a larger bug.

imo the white fits the chairmen better and it makes them match Benney's suit. If anything they should have had the Omertas wear the all black suits since it fits their mobster aesthetic. Just look at 3:53 and tell me that they don't look like some guys going to "disappear" someone who didn't pay their protection money that month.

Not fallout but in Skyrim, remember how giants can launch you into the sky? Yeah, that's not an added effect, it's actually a bug that was left in because devs found it hilarious.

I feel like the omertas should be the ones wearing the grimy suits as I feel like the darker outfit suits them a lot more since they have darker plans and have a more grimy casino while the chairman are a lot more light hearted so the lighter suit suits them more

The game is incredibly detailed and nuanced. But it was also incredibly rushed.

Here's another theory: Maybe they thought the black suit looked too "business", or corporate, and thus went for the more fun looking striped suit (which also goes along with Benny's suit). So they made a last minute change.

I remember hearing that the devs never really did patches to address issues like this, similarly to the reason they never implemented DLC content and characters back into the base game, was the fact that users would be forced to re-download the entire games BSM files just to change 1 or 2 things in the base game

I can assure you, it wouldn’t take a crazy convoluted series of events for no one on the team to notice. What often gets underestimated is how isolated teams are in game dev, you work on your section and you often find out what significant chunks of things look like at the same time as the consumers do. That suit was probably written to be black by a designer, and that design document was used by the third party teams who made the comics and playing cards, then another internal team was implementing the suits and either overruled it to use an existing asset or simply missed that detail. Unless the designer who wrote the original document was paying extremely close attention and brought it up, it’s quite possible they were the only person on the dev team who even knew the suits were supposed to be black.

I think it's a sign that Obsidian did a great job that all we've got left are nitpicks. I think it's charming.

It always bothered me because I knew that there was a grimy and dirty suit which looked exactly the same but I never actually knew which faction was supposed to have which suit. Personally I think since the game is set in Vegas they should’ve maybe made just even 1 or 2 more suits for the different factions and Gamblers to make it feel more varied and give the chairman and ormetas a more distinct look and feel

Tbh, the chairmen should have white outfits, and the omertas should have the black ones. Black just has more of a mobster vibe. If they do an NV sequel or anything like that, they should change the color of one group and have an npc mention they changed to distinguish themselves.

During software development, we prioritize all bugs due to time constraint and limited resources. The bug you mentioned is highly likely to be ticketed, but just put at the lowest of all priority as, 1. It's not game breaking 2. It's not easy to notice and the most important reason, it's so easy to fix that everyone would say "Well I'll come back to it" and never actually get fixed.

8:21 That's why you need to make this a series, show us all lore breaking or just game breaking bugs that never got fixed. The bugs both subtle enough to be missed but influential enough to complain about

I’ve noticed this too. I like the Grimy suit in 3. I think at this point they can’t fix it because the white suits are now synonymous with the faction and fixing it would bring the fact it was a “mistake” right to people’s attention.

See, what’s fascinating to me is- i got the special edition at midnight on launch night, and literally never noticed the suit thing! And when i see the mod you use to make the suits black, it looks so incorrect! Great vid man thank you

I always wanted the black suits because they look way more mafioso, but I like the way the white pinstripe kinda look similar to Benny's Checkered suit. It makes them look like Benny's Grunts.

i actually do remember being a little disappointed the omertas just dressed like "chairmen with hats" who would've thought actually the chairmen were stealing their look due to a bug the whole time

Todd said theres something hidden in a terminal in fallout 4......... Its your bug report lol

Hi, thought I'd add in a small addendum: I'm aware that development time for FNV was stunted and that there were some inter-company dynamics at play that likely added further bureaucracy to patching, and also console constraints to consider, but given how there were other small bugs patched out with the addition of certain dlc, I found it interesting the bug remained. That's it really, it's an interesting bug to think about, less so for its inclusion and more so for its impact. I mean, the fallout wiki doesn't even cite it as a bug despite all signs that it is. Second, I just wanted to very quickly say that this isn't a call-out of the devs (or hbomberguy). My intent was mostly to document the bug's existence and point out how it changed people's perceptions.

Fun fact the burned corpses can glitch back to life and attack you lol

I still laugh when I think about that bug with Doc Mitchell that caused him to float and have his head spin

I am non-native English speaker and I played through Fallout New Vega fully in English. Now that I think about it, it never occurred to me that the Chairman were different faction. They just seemed as some guys who run New Vegas for Mr. House, but it makes sens to make them more aesthetically distinguished with their own unique uniform. That being said, it is a cool video that gave me a new perspective, I surely subscribe to you in pursuit of more videos!

Huh. I never really realized that the Chairmen and the Omertas wore the same suits. Their personalities differ so vastly that I didn't even recognize that they wore the same outfit, except one has hats on. I feel like that's a testament to New Vegas's writing, to be honest.

Yours is the channel on RU-vid that most shares my niche-as-hell specific combination of interests/politics, and I cherish you for that.

There’s a mod that makes the chairmen suits have variety and resemble the suits from the 1960 Ocean’s 11 movie that looks absolutely great and completes their vibe

You know, at first it did seem pedantic, but imagine if the ordinators in vivec we're just wearing bonemold armor. These things are important to the World building, the narrative, and the player experience itself. It also highlights some issues on the development side, several people in the chain had to take a "good enough" attitude towards a factions whole aesthetic, even after it is pointed out to them. This might be just a small detail, but it pulls a thread that runs through the heart of the game.

As someone who develops hardware (and sometimes software) for a living, maybe i can give an opinion as to why it was never fixed. Usually programmers are under a lot of pressure to fix EVERYTHING or under pressure to fix just the important stuff, so they can work on the next big thing. The color of a suit is a bug that may not have even reached them in a bug report, being labeled "insignificant" lower down the chain. Also Bethesda games are known for mods that fix small bugs like that. I can just imagine a manager who is under pressure to go "well the fans will fix it, we have 0 time for the 10000 very small bugs". I'm speculating based on my personal experience. There are many past projects that i'd love to go back and finish, fix or add functionality to, but that would not add a lot of perceived value to a product and at the end of the day, that is what a business needs to get more sales.

I just thought they had white suits.🤷 Hardly seems like a "Lore-breaking bug".

While the fact that you can tell most NPC's opinion on the Legion by how they pronounce Caesar's name, it kind of falls apart since Karl's voice actor uses both pronunciations in his dialog when we know he is part of the Legion.

So what was the the lore implication? My main take away was that this is a significant detail, but I didn't catch why.

The obvious answer is priority, working on a finished game costs money so devs have to justify to the producers that a fix is worth the cost. I doubt Bethesda/Zenimax was willing to pay obsidian to change the colour of a suit especially since there are a shit ton of other small bugs & even some serious ones that never got fixed as well.

It's just time allocation. They could have taken the time and fixed this, but that would have required prioritising a minor visual bug over the game breaking ones and stability related ones. By the time the game launched most of the team had already moved on to Dead Money and the early stages of Honest Hearts. Only a small portion of the team was allocated to bug fixes. Triangle City has some really interesting videos on the topic

Welp. Thats ten minutes I'll never get back.

I can't believe Obsidian would destroy their lore like this 😢 smh

I find it funny that you focused so much on those suits, but not the fact that Vulpes Inculta's card shows a man with long blonde hair and blue eyes, while his character model has short brown hair and blackish eyes. It's safe to assume that whoever was in charge of making those promotional cards and marketing wasn't part of the development team, Bethesda probably outsourced it, which would explain these inconsistencies.

I was just wondering that. It was often mentioned by fans how the concept art showed a different color and was originally meant to be a different color. I had no idea it would have differentiated the factions, which would be nice so all three families are distinct. The Omertas and the Chairmen look practically the same except for Benny’s suit. Small detail though.

Obsidian apparently did not have a proper system for logging bugs for a good chunk of development. Instead, they mostly used post-it notes to mark down bugs. Honestly, it's a miracle they even managed to ship a game that works on consoles, considering Kotor 2 is near unplayable still.

Honestly, this opens up a fascinating discussion into the intent in media creation. Is a mistake which enriches a story good? And what does that mean about mistakes which don’t enrich, or even harm a story? How much of New Vegas is player abstraction from mistakes and gaps? There is discussion in some circles the Legion is unfinished due to the shortened dev time of the game; is this shortcoming which is against the original vision of the game different substantially from this texture bug? Sure one is a textural bug and one is cut content, but at is core wouldn’t both be fixed by more time? How does time relate to creative vision? Either way, good discussion starter!

Ugh, seeing all the cards and the All Roads panels brings me real pain. Had a box containing my NV Ultimate Edition get stolen out of our garage while moving several years ago now. Lost quite a few extremely sentimental items in that theft, but that NV set is the thing I constantly pine for. I would sit and shuffle the cards during long loading screens, of which there were many on the 360 version of the game, and loved seeing the concept art on them. 😢

My guess is that during the early days of the games launch it was seen as a minor texture bug the devs could get back to, but later on the devs realized it was too late, as the average player would now just assume the chairmen were meant to have white suits.

Just in case anyone was curious and didn't want to check their game, the fix is included in YUP as well.

I often get sad when I think how good NV would have been with another year or so of Dev time

Uh excuse me it's a CREAM colored suit, NOT white.

Bomberguy been real quiet since this dropped

I actually do remember thinking the suit choice was odd back in the day when i first played. The idea of the door guys wearing a shockingly similar *but not the same* white suits always felt kind of off somehow. Now I know why- and it really corroborates what you're saying here that I'd picked up on it

I actually noticed that their outfits were the same when I played and that the hat was the difference... thanks for the explanation as to how that happened.

I think that by far the thing that makes this bug hurt the most is actually the attention to detail on everything else. We notice things that stand out from the pattern far more and, in cases like this, we find them far more jarring than if mistakes like this were everywhere. Also, Bethesda kinda screwed Obsidian over New Vegas, I can see things like this going unpatched because of Obsidian devs feeling scammed and burned out after making a game like this in less than 2 years.

i think the white suits are a little jazzier personally, i get the omertas also wear them but they still feel distinct and fit the chairmens vibe pretty well

In comparison with Fallout 3 "feature" where NPCs always wearing best armor in their inventory this is a meme. BoS members immediately putting Envlave armor was much worse.

RIP Matthew Perry Benny was definitely one of the greatest voice acting performances ever

7:40 I think ppl might, key word might not care because, well, Chairman got kinda robbed in the game. Sure the main antagonist of first half of the game is a chairman but all the other chairman are kinda insignificant. Gameplay vise they get one unique side quest(I'm not counting main quest), and that side quest is a fetch quest but with humans. Sure Ultra Lux also gets one side quest, but man what a side quest it is! Probably best in the entire series! So I think that quest alone carries Ultra Lux aka White Gloves Society. And the Gomorrah has I think 2 side quests, or 1 side quest and 1 main quest, but the point is that they get more then 1 quest to flesh em out(plus you can get pimp boy 3 billion if you follow the guide on YT) but chairman, despite their cool attitude, get nothing special ;_;

I can imagine this being, not a bug, but a last-minute decision by some producer/executive who thought Benny's suit didn't match the black uniform of his faction.

I honestly live for youtube videos about tiny petty video game things like this

This goes on the list of pettiest shit I've ever seen

I think the most likely of scenarios is that the bug was a combination of being extremely low priority (Like you mentioned, they *had* suits. just technically the wrong ones) and that it'd end up being such a minor thing admittedly most people don't notice or care about. The actual clothing item is the correct one, it's not like the Grimy was misplaced as the Dirty suit in so far as the level/character designers made a mistake, it was an error on whoever had set the texture in the GECK for the suit. It very well could of been, in a pile of bug reports and someone had meant to get to it, but issues like the BOS bunker and the save corruption bug were so much more important. I think an even more offensive bug was the armored V21 suit being accidentally cut, was obviously cut and then never placed back into the game world even with DLC. Considering the DLC, if we use that as a marker of "why was this not fixed" several of the team had changed to other projects or just left at the time. It's very well possible the person responsible for working on the Tops (or just bug fixing) had moved on to other things at the time. I think the fact that this video exists is a monument to just how good New Vegas was, that despite it's troubled development and millions of problems: something as small as a suit texture matters to people.

To be fair to Obsidian, a lot of the problems and bugs can be attributed to not being given enough time and support, first in the initial development and then in the pressure to create DLC and finally in the almost childish way Obsidian was not allowed to keep patching the game when Bethesda got upset that people started criticizing Fallout 3 when compared to New Vegas. You have to remember the timeline, they had 18 months to make the game it was released oct 2010, by Sept 2011 they had 6 DLCs released and rumors that Bethesda had decided not to allow Obsidian to continue to support or patch the game months prior to the final DLC. That is only 2 and a half years from the start of the project to when all official support ended. Them not getting to a purely cosmetic bug that 99.9% of people didn't notice is understandable.

If it's something as simple as the texture set for the suit being swapped, then it's something which could easily pop up later in development when it _was_ as intended to start with, and when it was reported internally, it was very low on the queue despite the ease of fixing it.

They didn't get a chance to fix the bug, as well as many other visual bugs, as was detailed in one of the developer interviews. They only had 18 months to complete this game.

This is some major nitpicking LOL

I don't think I've ever seen a chairman with a black suit.

Never had a clue about that one. Which is probably why it never got fixed in the first place. Because when developing games, they always consider how many people will be effected or notice a bug. And because this one was consistent enough they likely thought that most people won't notice or be bothered, so they gave it like pretty much lowest to no priority and those bugs often are left unfixed, because there are usually, especially in buggy game, a lot of bugs that are more noticeable or will effect higher number of people. And with New Vegas, I think they put in the amount of work they were going to put in based on deals and stuff, do bare in mind that they did miss their target score metric by a little, which effected how much they were paid, plus I do think they never had chance to properly take time to fix things, before they had to move to doing DLC. Which meant that plenty of bugs were left on the side. And sure you could say they could fix it in between, if schedule is tight, they likely already were doing overtime and that is doing extra volunteer overtime... to fix bug that probably like 10 people will notice to be bug. So they had to prioritize things. Maybe if they got paid bonus for hitting review score, that would give them more resources to work with, namely money, but time is money, so it would help. Plus with complexity of the game, it is quite possible that a lot of stuff like that were put on to do list somewhere and list got lost. Shame, I do wish they had time to do more or if NV would go way of Baldur's Gate 3 and release in early access, granting them more money so they could continue development... but this is something even modern games miss, like Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man's Sky... though in those cases, they did get enough to actually fix their games.

Regarding not fixing bugs, many features in the earliest FPS such as Bunny Hopping and Air Strafing were in fact physics bugs which were later transformed into features.

grimycels seething over dirtychad superiority

If nothing else, you've made me a black suit truther, and I will be adding that little fix to my mod setup from now on. Thank you, I never knew, or more precisely noticed it, despite having seen the playing cards and read the comic.

So random I got this in my recommended; I started a new playthrough & thought it odd the Topps' chairmen were wearing all black, rather than the all white I was familiar with. Days later, I get this video, lol

On the one hand, yes it a bug that breaks the lore of what they have been established to wear in the comic and physical merchandise. On the other, as you said your self, most people won´t even know it exists in the first place, me included before this video, and no matter how much Obsidian loves their games and the world building in them, its a case of what is more useful for the studio, fix a tiny bug most people don´t even know exists, or try to fix many of the ones people do notice and get annoyed by. Companies will make decisions on a different priority style than private developers, that's why New Vegas is still this buggy even in the current day.

Tbh I think part of the reason why they didn't fix it is because it'd be jarring on repeat playthroughs to realize. Also probably some console issues to get it as a patch for people playing mid game, could cause save bloat issues. Maybe not but the hassle of getting it approved probably wasn't worth it to the devs. Another thing is that it actually seems to 'fit' the faction more to have white suits especially with Benny who has his checkered suit. He stands out a lot more with the black suits vs seeming to blend in with the rest of the Tops.

Considering they only had 18 months, I think it's a success they have a functional game. They fact that it's iconic is a bonus

The comic was sooo good. There's a scene where one of the Khans deduces that Benny is much more rough than his checkered suit suggests because he's the one setting the pace of the group. It paints Benny as much more of a badass than the game gives him credit for.

This reminds me of something that happened with the Halo CE remaster, when Gearbox ported CE to PC it butchered it's graphics, broke many things like lights, transparent objects, reflections, and many other things, the thing is that since that port had netplay added and worked on PC, the remaster was based around that port instead of using the OG xbox version as a reference, as a result the remaster took many mistakes gearbox made (such as Cortana not changing colors based on her mood, Gearbox broke that, or Keyes model being different from the actual model it had in the OG version due to gearbox taking an older and worse looking model for the port than the one the xbox version used) as the way the original game looked, a bug made by gearbox changed the whole vision of the game and probably the canon too (Cortana doesnt change colors after Halo CE).

When fallout new vegas is so good the only gripe about it is a whit suit supposed to be black. I love that game so much

The reason it wasn't patched it likely because of practices at the time. This was the first generation where online patches were a common thing on consoles, and the process wasn't as streamlined and simple as it is now. EVERY single patch had to be resubmitted to both Sony and Microsoft for approval before it could be released, and you had to pay them a fee in order for them to retest it. I've heard horror stories where developers would be told that their patch was not approved, but given no reason why, and not issued a refund. For this reason, patches were almost NEVER done unless it was literally game breaking, and a lot of the time even then it wasn't worth the effort for games that didn't sell much to begin with. This is also why Josh Sawyer ended up just making his own mod for the PC version that makes simple fixes they weren't able to do.

3:45 well there is your issue. You sent your bug report to Bethesda!

They just wear white suits on Tuesdays

Most weirdest thing to complain about... *When will you make more of it?* I need to see more videos like that, it's interesting and cool

Huh, I never knew that was a bug. I always assumed they were supposed to be wearing gray as a nod to being Benny's underlings. Benny wears a black and white checkered suit, and the chairmen beneath him wear a mix of the 2 colors in gray suits.

It's honestly impressive you manage to make a 10 minute video out of this.

I wanted to rib you for this one but i had the same gripe about this bug as a kid too

I have like 300 hours in FNV and I'd never heard of this bug! Very interesting!

3:25 A pedantic dork You know, like Hbomberguy

hey thanks for highlighting the suit mod, coming from FO3 so long ago and not having a black suit in Vegas always confused me the same way you noticed when playing NV at first. Also I never would've known the tops were supposed to be dressed in black either. I did find it odd that nearly every suit was a white striped suit apart from formal wear

This is honestly the definition of a nitpick

This is a great video, but sadly 8:06 destroyes it's entire foundation.

I like the white suits far more than the black suits. Works better with the light theme of the casino. The black suit imo would just be more generic.

Ambassador Crocker was originally meant to be white (which is also reflected on his playing card), but there was a "recording mix-up" where he was assigned a Black VA, so they just made him Black in-game

This has massive implications for the lore of the New Vegas, specially the part when all of them start NewVegaing all over the place.

Will never get that 10 minutes back. GG bro

I thought they were wearing grey suits. Benny's wearing a black and white suit, so... it's like a combination lol

Of all the little tidbits and "Did You Knows" for New Vegas, I had no idea this is how the Chairmen were supposed to look. And I have the Special Edition and all! So thanks for the video Rosencreutz, real informative!

The word "skyrim" is not capitalized in the description of the video unlike "Fallout New Vegas" 3/10 video

This is so incredibly petty lmao

i'll just play the 18 months excuse and say they didn't have time, had too much on their plate and this is just one of the many bugs that have been overlooked, a shame but oh well, that won't stop me from robbing their casino

Counterpoint: Palworld patch notes admit they accidentally fixed a bug they didn't intend to that was popular with players and apologized deeply while showing intend to return the bug's effect to the game as a feature.