The following text is a transcript of Spare Us the Cutter an article penned by moburma, a modder responsible for reimplementing much of Fallout: New Vegas cut content back into the game in his series of mods New Vegas Uncut.
moburma has graciously given permission to The Vault to rehost his extensive guide to cut content, to benefit from our wiki architecture.
|
The following is the original document or a transcript thereof. |
Article[]
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 an engine 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. I was actually told a rumour once that this was so the game could have the extended intro if the player had bought the collectors edition (that contains the comic book filling in the backstory of Jessup et al). Take this totally with a grain of salt (if you weren't taking the information contained within that way already!) as I've seen no corroborating evidence of this, although it would make sense.
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 (and of course the inevitable "war never changes part"), 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, Jessup 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 exist for either 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 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 of 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.
There is orphaned dialogue to suggest that originally Julia Farkas would go and see the King during G I Blues. She has an AI package that makes her sit down somewhere called VFSJulieFarkasMeetWithKingPackage, and then VFSJulieFarkasKingSuiteGreeting seems to suggest the King is introducing her to the player, to which she can then respond that you have already met or not. The next piece of dialogue seems to suggest that she doesn't know who is causing the violence, and for the player to find out. In the final game she of course says to speak to her friend giving out food.
There are various triggers in the Kings stage area that do nothing (e.g. VFSKingStageApproachTrigger). It's not clear what these were going to be for, probably some kind of automated system to have different Kings walk in and perform onstage.
Pacer originally had two thugs with him when he encounters the player working as a door guard for the Van Graffs. These are in the final game but are never enabled - it's not clear if this is deliberate or an oversight. He also alludes to them if the player is rude to him and starts a fight - "get him boys!".
There's a peculiar dead body in the alleyway near Genaro down the side of the Mormon Fort. There's nothing obviously interesting about it - it's just a generic npc with some clothes and food. what's slightly more interesting is its name VFSAlleyCorpse01 and designation as "Dead Squatter" ingame. This corpse is always disabled and to be honest I get the feeling that it seems like it might have been part of some abandoned quest. Even more peculiarly the official strategy guide deliberately draws attention to it (page 335) and advises you to loot it!
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 are 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.
The drunks here actually have a specific script that cripples their legs to make them move stumble about. Clearly this means they were made before the specific drunk animation was created.
The squatters in the ruined 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. The undercover NCR troopers oddly have a dedicated idle marker for sitting on the curb on the opposite side of the road to where the ruined shop is. They never actually use this marker and it doesn't make much sense for them to - the only time they appear in the game is to guard the ruined shop once you know about their actitivies in town, not lounge around in the road. Interestingly the marker used for this is in the original FreesideWorld map, in an area that is inaccessible in the final game (that part of the level was split off into the FreesideNorthWorld map). In That area there are also disabled dead members of Pacer's gang here that are also clearly leftovers from an earlier incarnation of this sequence. There are also two dedicated dead off NCR duty troops presumably to be used during the shoot out with Pacer's men that are unused. In the final game all the NCR troops are alive when you get there.
Peculiarly there is a buried minefield at the very edge of the map near the guard tower where the NCR/Pacer face-off takes place. It seems the mines here were just dumped against the fence when it was decided they were no longer going to be used. They are both disabled but also hidden under the ground so cannot be triggered. These mines are actually present on all the Freeside maps were they were copy and pasted over once the map was split but it seems they went unnoticed when things were then cleaned up. Even stranger there is only one of these buried mines in use properly in the entire game, a single one located near Cook Cook in Fiend territory.
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 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 clearly an insane amount of effort and imagination put 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. These were to be 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.
Originally there were three children chasing the rat. The retail release reduced this to two, and a subsequent patch left just one child.
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 execution spot, where the bonds would magically appear on his hands as he sits down and then disappear again (bond graphics 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 not make sense, 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.
There's a further unfinished part of the above scene. There's a line in VFSVanGraffLaughter for all the thugs in the Silver Rush to laugh at the events that just happened. However, no voice files were ever recorded.
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. You can also get him in his suit if you buy exactly 20 tips and return. 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 possibly 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 "exterior", (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 be "Hired for real, won't run away", so she presumably would have been a true follower character like Rex etc.
I'm pretty sure Rotface's tip about a guy selling stuff of dubious origins is actually a hint about the above quest. In the official strategy guide it's claimed it's related to Mister Holdout, but this doesn't make any sense. There's nothing significant about him selling weapons nor does the game ever bring into question where he gets them from - he's quite open about what he has for sale. Tom Dooley however is selling some very interesting "second hand adventurering gear" - it's the player's! Rotface also claims the character in question can be found on "the main drag", and while this could be a reference to the strip, Dooley can also be found on the main road in Freeside leading up to the Strip. Finally there's the fact none of Rotface's tips directly relate to anything in the Strip itself (has he ever even been there?). Why would this one be any different?
The rat chasing children originally had much more complex behaviour. VMS49GunplaySCRIPT shows how they would sneak up on a rat as well as get tired chasing them. There is an unused ai package that would also make the children display the same "tired" behaviour as the script originally contained, but this is unused, it seems the idea was just abandoned. Looking at the original script it seems the intention was to have more than one rat as well.
Dixon the drug dealer originally had two extra bodyguards with him. They are present but disabled in the final game. Their inventories also reveal something else interesting - despite being armed with varmint rifles, they carry .22LR ammo. This is almost certainly due to that weapon originally using this ammo, and later being rechambered to 5.56mm for balance reasons. Dixon also has two unused AI packages that would make him travel to both Jacob Hoff and Bill Ronte during the quest to get them off drugs. These were presumably removed once Freeside became two worldspaces.
The lights here only turn on from 8pm till 11:30pm. This is clearly to emphasise that Freeside is poor and cannot afford to have the lights on all the time. You can of course route power here during 'That Lucky Old Sun', and it's likely this was supposed to make the lights stay on all night. This doesn't happen in the game, and there is no code in order to do so.
There are a LOT of unused headingmarkers in the little detour area Orris takes the player around. They are marked with names such as VFSRandom6aSP4. Presumably the "SP" part stands for Spawn Point, and these would be spawns for some kind of random characters - likely some of the random NPCs designed to wander the area before they were removed. In the final game none of these spawn points are used by anything at all.
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.
Caleb McCaffrey has unused ai packages for behaviour before he gets in trouble with the Garrets. In particular he would sleep in the player's room at the Atomic Wrangler.
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 area where the doorway would be is now a wall (it's the area Benny eventually stands in front of if you don't immediately walk up to him in the Tops). An early video clearly shows this door in place internally, and interestingly has no kind of doorman or anything, which suggests maybe it was removed once this idea (bouncers frisking customers) came into play.
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 [n.b. NOT physically split up] 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. This 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.
Two new pieces of media related to the Strip have been drawn to my attention: a video and a screenshot. The screenshot is mostly the same place as seen in the early videos of the strip, but interestingy the monorail has a completely different appearance, with large letters spelling out "LVB STATION" all around the top edges of the structure, and no cover over the stairs/doorway. Otherwise it is largely identical to the extended early found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpIBRiQaio4&feature=youtu.be In this video you can clearly see large tracts of the Strip in its original form. Interestingly the video shows TWO special sequences being played at once (drunks and girls in fountain), and it's also of note that in this video the drunks START at the monorail rather than moving towards it (this might have just been staged this way for the video; I THINK this may be the legendary press demo in action). The video clearly shows the structural changes that occured, including the old style walls that stretch far back from the final area's sides, and the plants near the monorail being found in the circular style planters rather than the final game's rectangular ones. The video also clearly shows the aforementioned second exit from the Tops. Interestingly also this video entirely contains placeholder dialogue recorded by the development team! All the dialogue is the same as that used in the final game, but the actual voice acting is completely different and obviously amateur performances.
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 limits 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 Mister 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 first Tops Promoter also has full dialogue about Billy Knight, but this can never play as the lines check the variable TopsP01Performer1, when every other talent related line (including the one for Hadrian!) check their relevant XXXXRecruited variable in VMSTopsTalentPoolScript. In fact this variable is set once he's talked about Hadrian - but once he's done that you still can't hear the Billy lines as Hadrian's come first so take priority. Even then these lines are botched - the way Hadrian's lines work is that you hear them once, and then the promoter won't tell you about them again (they're a say once), and he will just give you a shorter "go see him!" sayto line. Billy's main line however, is set to never stop being said, so you can never hear the short line. TopsP01Performer1 and similar variables in VFreeformTheStreet02 seem to be vestigal parts of a randomisation system for these lines (they can't just be set to random, as these NPCs are part of other dialogue factions and will just say all that stuff as well, instead of only talk to the player about the acts) that was never finished. When one line plays, it sets up conditions so that the other can play (assuming the lines had the conditions set as Billy's do in the finished game, but they do not).
The E3 video shows Mister Holdout running up to the player rather than calling them over once a trigger is tripped. Looking in the game code this seems to have been a genuine problem at one time - there is a trigger specifically to stop him following you into the Tops Casino, and the trigger that initially makes him talk to you actually boosts his speed stat so you can't outrun him! This sequence appears to have caused all kinds of trouble until someone worked out that just increasing the Activate distance of his AI package was enough to make his message unmissable.
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).
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 be 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 the player would have to specifically ask for their guns back (and good god would that have been annoying).
Walter and Ethel Phebus have unused AI packages. Walter was originally supposed to be found pacing around the area he is located in in the final game, and his wife was meant to follow behind him. Apparently this was removed by the game's last patch, to stop them from bumping into other NPCs. The station vendor also lost her sandbox package for this reason.
Unused maps 2EOCasHiHotelLobby01 and 2EOCasloHotelLobby01. Their area prefix (2E0) places them at the end of the strip, on the same side as Vault 21 and Michael Angelo's Workshop are located. They're clearly layouts for a casino, but none of the final game casinos use this layout at all. They're completely unfinished, and 2EOCasHiHotelLobby01 seems to have at some point repurposed for all kinds of behind the scenes stuff (the marker VTestMark, for example is used by loads of things as a general dumping ground for no longer needed NPCs). The fact there is a vault in the bottom of the casino suggests this was possibly an early iteration of Vault 21.
A lot of cut stuff is located in this map. In particular it houses a huge number of NPCs that were presumably going to be used as part of random encounters at Boulder City. There is a random encounter merchant at that location, and there are eight possible merchants the game could use here. However, in the final code only one of them is ever used.
There are also Mojave civilians and NCR troopers stored here who were supposed to have a confrontation around Camp Golf as the civilians try and steal water from the troops only to be chased away.
There are also several enemies called "vspawntest" that were an early test for "Oblivion" style chanced spawns. They work by placing several Coyotes, but also some unfinished enemies that would randomly despawn themselves. The end result would be the player could meet anything from a pair of enemies to a large group.
2EOCasLoHotelLobby01 is the same map only with different floor textures used, and nothing in it. Interestingly, both maps have a vault door at the back of them.
The Strip is sometimes internally referenced as "the street". This is also the case in Cass' location barks. Specifically by "The street" the game means Las Vegas Boulevard. It seems that originally this designation would be used to seperate the strip from the casinos or possibly some other planned part of the area, but at some point the two names became interchangable. Cass' dialogue is interesting as there are lines both for the "Street" (which she even specifically refers to by name) as well as the "strip" which in the end are merged into the same trigger code to take place in the same area. It seems there was some kind of distinction between these two places at some stage of development, even if the Street was just an earlier name for the strip.
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. (N.B. This seems to have confused some people - at no point was Mr House ever going to actually be a normal healthy human, he was just implemented this way for some time during development to get around problems with him being a living character and yet being quite literally part of the furniture. They got round this in the end, but I thought it was quite ironic considering the Wizard of Oz style undertones of the character that at one stage he was LITERALLY a man standing behind a curtain speaking for a machine).
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 (confusingly the way the Geck works means each quest can have a script assigned to it, but it also has a seperate area where more limited scripts can also be set up to run at certain stages of the quest) 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 on 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".
After these entries he has a few blank topics all to do with the Securitron bunker (e.g. vDialogueMrHouseBunkerUpgrade) - it seems originally he would have broadcast these messages (whatever they were) as the player carried out his will (or betrayed him) in the bunker.
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 topics 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 is also a cut VR pod called L38PlayerPod that contains seduction stuff. The "seduction" variable above is set to 3 by this object, so presumably the player would have gotten into a VR pod to be scanned by House.
Possible seduction dialogue: "Was it just me, or were there signs of attraction earlier?" (VDialogueMrHouseMrHouseTopic087), "Would you like to scan me again?" (VDialogueMrHouseMrHouseTopic211)
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. In the final game the player is never given any warning to stay away from the terminal.
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 (so it doesn't appear in the final game and is dummied out), 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".
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). One of the lines also informs people to take an obituary leaflet from a Securitron, which makes a lot more sense than what happens in the final game where the player simply has one dumped on them while standing in House's control room.
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). All that's left is an unused quest objective to convince him to spare them. No dialogue or scripting exists to achieve this objective, however. Josh Sawyer recently confirmed this was a deliberate design choice to really make the player agonise about whether or not to help Mr House or rebel against him.
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 questlines 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?
Marilyn has two remaining lines of dialogue. They are both player only topics with the replies cut: "What kind of upgrades?" (VDialogueLucky38PenthouseLucky38MarilynTopic002) and "I'd like to talk about something else." (VDialogueLucky38PenthouseLucky38MarilynTopic003).
There are two cut lines the player can ask Mr House about Marilyn: "Are Marilyn and Jane your... girlfriends?" (VDialogueMrHouseMrHouseTopic122), and "Don't you get lonely here, with no one but Marilyn and Jane to keep you company?" (VDialogueMrHouseMrHouseTopic209). Mr House's answer lines have been removed.
Marilyn must have been removed quite late on, as her NPC is still manipulated by all the Lucky 38 scripting to automatically disable her if House is dead etc.
Jane has an unused line of dialogue to confront the player if they piss off Mr House, much like Victor does.
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 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 you have no choice but to do so.
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. Voiced dialogue exists for both names.
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 to. It seems this is actually a leftover from an earlier attempt at his elevator man functionality that would be done with regular dialogue rather than the message box that is used in the final game. All the outcomes have a dialogue topic, but only the penthouse has actual (recorded) dialogue for moving between floors - the rest are blank.
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.
It seems it was originally planned that the fort Securitrons being destroyed would somehow result in Mr House passing sovereignty of the Strip to the NCR (presumably once his plans are ruined he just gives up). There is a cut note that details house's intentions (vConcessionMrHouse), and leftover dialogue lines for pretty much every single faction. Securitrons: "Be advised, when Mr. House transfers sovereignty over the Vegas Strip to the NCR, he will remain its sole proprietor. Have a nice day." Westside residents: "{Securitrons at Fort Destroyed}I never imagined Mr. House would concede to the NCR. I wonder what convinced him..." These lines can erroneously be played in the vanilla game.
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, possibly as the actual graphical effect of the Lucky 38 is quite feeble compared to the script description: "the tower of the Lucky 38 lights up brilliantly in the distance" ), 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 infinitum. 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 - I'm pretty sure the "side" one is for the long abandoned Tops side entrance) 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 any more.
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 wall inside just has some deorations there and no door (It's exactly where Benny stands in the final game if you avoid him on your first visit to the Tops).
vCasinoCompsTheTops has an unused quest objective ("Visit your private Suite on the 13th floor of the Tops.") that suggests originally the player would be given the Tops suite as a gift for winning lots of money in the gambling games.
There seems to have been some kind of extended 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 it's 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 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://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/325276093445587111
http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/325296073004313572
There is a second Tops door greeter defined who is unused. Some Greeter dialogue refers to both NPCs, so presumably it was intended for both to be used at one time, possibly with one greeting one side of the room, the other. The second greeter has no GREETING dialogue set up however, making it impossible for him to say what lines he does have. He can only say the lines that occur after the player's weapons have been given up.
The far left entrance door was disabled once the design of the strip was changed and the gates added. It still has its frisking trigger in front of it anyway. There is also a further frisking trigger dumped next to it, suggesting at one stage there was a further subsequent door to the left of even this one.
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 (or indeed any NPCs at all), which is probably why it was cut. There's full code to go here in the elevator script, but the variable that is checked to let you go there is deliberately altered to be impossible. According to J Sawyer this area was cut as it just made the already confusing area even more vast and harder to navigate.
There's also a Super Mutant called "Angel" who was clearly supposed to be in here somewhere (belongs to the Omerta faction).
There's an unfinished map that would presumably be part of the casino. It's called GomorrahPlaceholder ("Gomorrah top floor"). It's interesting as it's completely unlike any other part of the final casino. It was probably just for testing before the rest of the casino existed, as its name suggests.
Joana has a lot of early cut dialogue that was mostly rewritten, as well as debug topics to complete her quest.
Gomorrah is misspelt as "Gamorrah" throughout the game's scripts and objects.
Camp McCarran
=============
There was originally a one of a kind Sentry bot here (McCarranFieldSentryBot). It is actually pictured in the Official strategy guide, so must have been removed late on. Its patrol routes are still in place on the map, but it seems the bot was deleted rather than simply disabled - it's not present anywhere in the game. It has an ai package that makes it patrol in a loop around the outer edge of the camp.
In the retail release of the game there were two recruits and a drill instructor on the obstacle course. These were removed at some stage of the game's patching process.
There are also several push up idle markers in a pyramid shape near one of the aircraft here. It's likely there was supposed to be some other kind of scene of recruits training with a drill sergeant that was never implemented. Speculating further, it's likely the emplacement at the back of the area was going to be for some kind of further training scenes as well.
It's been pointed out that the back area of the camp where Private Crenshaw patrols has some interesting differences when comparing between the internal and external models for the camp. If you check the external main Mojave worldspace version of the camp there is an interesting area where two guard towers are placed close together. The way they are positioned suggests there would be something important between them, such as an entrance. Of course Pvt Crenshaw mentions he is guarding the South Enetrance even though there seems to be no such thing. Indeed on the internal version of the McCarran map there is only one guard tower in this position and no evidence of any door. Further adding credence to the theory of the gate being replaced with just a regular wall outside is the fact that what would be the entrance in this case is flanked by 4 NCR troopers (2 a side) as if they were guarding an entrance. In the final game it is difficult to see this as when the player enters the area they are usually fighting Fiends.
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?
It's highly likely these outcomes would be post-endgame events.
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).
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.
Camp Forlorn Hope also has special guard NPCs at each entrance consisting of patrolling soldiers with linked sniffer dogs who have unique dialogue lines (DialogueNCRSniffer) to detect disguised players. These seem to have been disabled on purpose probably to make the game easier. A guard and his dog can be seen around the 2:40 mark in this early video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpIBRiQaio4&feature=youtu.be
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 the cut note BMNCRTrooperNote) 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. Of particular note, the big pile of barrels all stacked up found halfway up was for a neat effect where a cloaked Nightkin would burst out of them and attack the player. In the final game this never happens.
There are also several Black Mountain Radio topics that are blank. These are leftovers from the original plotline for Black Mountain, as detailed below. All the radio dialogue here was prototyped using message boxes (presumably as it hadn't been recorded yet, and radio transmissions don't have subtitles). As such the existing in game dialogue can be seen in these messages, as well as lots of cut lines. The complete original radio script is included in these messages, and is mostly completely different to what was used in the final game. BMRadioSegmentxxx is the complete script.
Message boxes and commented out script elements show that originally there was a sequence where if the player tried to use the terminal to open Raul's cell and failed to do so, Tabitha would taunt them over the radio. She'd tell the player the door had a code they'd never guess (BMPrisonLockedMsg), and then Raul would chime in to say that there was only a "1 in 739452466138 chance of guessing it" (BMGivePasswordMsg). The joke here being that this number in fact IS the password, which an astounded Tabitha would then mention (BMNotDumbMsg). This would allow the player to get inside if they failed the hacking check. At some point this was abandoned. Interestingly, Tabitha is identified as "Leader" in these messages, suggesting her name hadn't been finalised at this point in development. BMPrisonTerminalScript has commented out code to play these messages over the radio. The script actually has no meaningful use in the final game as despite being lengthy, none of it runs. The original radio dialogue topics exist, but are blank. Possibly RadioBMGetRightOnIt would come after this sequence as well (it's just Raul sighing).
Originally it seems the radio equipment in the wrecked hut that the player can use to talk to Tabitha had a different purpose. There is a full script and message boxes to let the player use the radio to send false orders to the Super Mutants to make them move to different parts of the area, to let the player sneak past the large crowd of them at the summit. The script in the final game still has comments at the top that describe this entire process, when the actual code below it has been rewritten and merely lets the player talk to Tabitha. This distraction idea was then repurposed to Neil, who in the final game cab be told to distract the nightkin/super mutants to make them move on somewhere else in the exact same way.
A cut pipboy note (BMRaulNote), suggests at some point in development the player would explicitly be told to go and save Raul after hearing him speak on Black Mountain Radio. I'd imagine this was cut as it's impossible to know if the player is listening to a radio station or not, so the note would have been given even if the player wasn't listening to the station but the talking activator played those lines. A similar oversight happens in the final game where the player can hear the sting for the wild wasteland lines on emergency radio during the NCR endgame even if they don't have the radio on.
Interestingly, there are prototype dialogue messages for a situation where Tabitha can confront the player (possibly for messing with the otherwise useless dish alignment controls?) over the radio system, in which she threatens to blow up the entire base to stop the player tampering with her equipment. BMRadioBMStation1Msg - 4 and BMRadioBMDish1Msg - 4. Even more interestingly, one of the radar dishes is indeed rigged to explode! If triggered (which cannot happen in the vanilla game), the dish would completely shear off and embed itself in the ground just in front of Black Rock Cave. This effects sequence was been abandoned at some point - the dish that falls has actually been moved straight down under ground to hide it, and it has been replaced by a different static object that is not used by the explosion script. Therefore if the explosion script is somehow triggered (which again, is impossible in the vanilla game), the dish remains in place, and an additional one just appears below. The original dialogue topics for this sequence exist in the game files, but are unfortunately blank. It's rumoured that originally there was going to be some kind of main quest stage where Black Mountain's radar dishes would need to be wrestled from Tabitha's clutches (the NCR apparently wanting it to expand their radio range, the Legion to use it to jam the NCR) so possibly this is a leftover of that idea.
There are a large number of markers arranged in a semi circle outside the room you find Rhonda in. It seems originally Tabitha would ambush you flanked with a huge number of nightkin after repairing Rhonda, but this was altered to it just being Tabitha alone in the final game.
There is code in VERT3CentaurBMCodeHolder to make the Centaurs in the radioactive pit respawn after 14 days, but this is dummied out.
There's also a bit of terrain that has clearly been altered at one point. There is a pile of debris including a dead brahmin in a location that has since had a cliff face stuck on top of it.
There's a practically blank unused note called BMMarcusNote that was obviously going to be a message from Marcus about Black Mountain.
There are other dead NCR troopers who were clearly supposed to be here (as mentioned in the dead NCR trooper's cut note). However, oddly their npcs are repurposed for random dead NCR troopers elsewhere, most notably in the Legate's tent in the endgame. (BMNCRTrooper1Dead)
Goodsprings
===========
There is code and references to deleted quest objectives in VMS16b (run goodsprings run) that refer to freeing the bighorners in town. The bighorners also have an unused AI package for this event. It's unclear why you would have to do this (presumably they would then cause chaos and/or attack the people of Goodsprings?).
Vault 3
========
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.
There are a huge number of email notes cut from here that form a whole backstory for the unfortunate original occupants of the vault (e.g. V03GeorgeEmail1 etc).
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 survives, there is no reply dialogue, whether it be voiced or even just text. He also has an unused idle package called VRRCRitemasterIdle.
There are also a markerheading and a locker to do with the above quest. The locker is visible in the final 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 could convince her to give you the meat. Once the meat had been obtained, it was then possible to poison the Legion's stew, 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 objects 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).
Killing the dogs seems to have effects in a few other parts of the game. Cass' cut dialogue topic VCassCoreLegateNoHounds suggests originally Legate Lanius would have hounds with him (or perhaps just the ones found in cages at the end game), and Cass would have dialogue to comment if the player's actions with the meat caused them to have perished. One of Lanius' dialogue lines specifically mentions hounds: "[FAILED] No, I shall make it a contest - whether I can kill you *before* my hounds tear you apart." Possibly he originally meant this in a literal sense as he would be backed by his hounds.
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.
Benny was originally supposed to be locked in a cage once captured at the Fort. Several scripts note this, and so does some of his dialogue. He also has unused dialogue for a final confrontation with the Courier some time after being freed from the camp. He was supposed to sneak up on the player using a stealthboy, and then confront them before opening fire. You cannot talk him down, only kill him. The end result of this sequence would be that there was no way for Benny to survive Fallout New Vegas, so the sequence was probably cut to be vague and allow the character to potentially return in a future game. His cut dialogue for this sequence also references him being locked in a cage - however the actual voiceover says "thanks for getting me out of there", whereas the written text says "thanks for getting me out of that cage", which suggests it was deliberately re-written late on. There are also several variables in the The Fort script to keep track of Benny's fate that aren't actually used (probably for the aforementioned Benny's revenge sequence that was cut)
There are some unused NPCs set up for sparring. While there are sparring Legionaries here in the final game, they only use the original template NPC for this character, so can only be African American. There are two unused varieties of this NPC FortLegionarySparringCM and FortLegionarySparringHM (Caucasian and Hispanic).
The unused message FortShellsCreated suggests at some point you could forge phosphorous shells of some description here - likely for the howitzer.
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?
There are actually a LOT more crucified people set up in the game files around the entrance to this area, but most are disabled in the final game.
Malpais Legion Camp
===================
This is a cut location that roughly corresponds to one shown on the New Vegas development map by Chris Avellone during his Rezzed 2013 presentation. It can be found roughly due East of Camp Forlorn hope. The only remnants of this location are an unused marker called VTopsTEMPBennyLegionMarker that is used by a test package for Benny. It seems he would have originally been taken to this location after escaping from the player. The cell this marker is contained in is actually called "MalpaisLeigionCamp". It seems this would likely be the place Cpl. Sterling was tortured at - the fact it is parallel to Forlorn Hope also suggests this would be the case (Sterling notes Rangers across the river saw him escaping). It does raise the question of where Malpais itself is. As far as I can tell there is no actual place for miles in reality with such a name (there is Casa Malpais way off East in Arizona). Malpais is actually the name given to a type of landscape formed from volcanic rocks, but the way Sterling talks about the camp indicates it was near an actual place (perhaps a town or city) called Malpais, it wasn't just a camp named after the surrounding terrain.
The Joshua Graham was of course known as the Malpais Legate , so perhaps there would be some link to the character here.
On the Rezzed map it seems to have a slightly different name. Coupled with the fact the test marker for Benny at the Fort puts him here, was this possibly where the Legate's camp was originally going to be in the final game before being moved north for some reason?
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. The problem with this effect is they cannot be seen at extreme range due to lacking LOD models meaning the suddenly teleport in out of thin air as you approach. Looking at the game's intro sequence, these water jets are prominantly displayed on shots of the dam, which sugests they are indeed supposed to be on all the time. They were probably removed due to the above LOD issues (you can't have animated LOD objects).
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). This is probably the large tunnel underneath the bridge to the Legion camp (much easier to see if you clip there BEFORE the endgame fight where it is covered over). The spillway is specifically indicated in the official strategy guide. It is indeed the big pipe/ditch area which has a bridge over it by the endgame. If you look under the bridge there is a large grating, as well as a small hatch, either of which may have lead to the deleted map. Possibly this was where the player would have originally emerged from after pushing the Legion out of the inside of the dam? It's also where the game lore says the NCR were pushed back off the East side of the dam before shoring up the defences on the dam proper leading to the stalemate at the start of the game. It was clearly an important location at one point (see also Cass' cut dialogue relating to it), but for whatever reason it seems it was excised fairly early on in development.
Originally there would be gun turrets at Hoover dam. There are full scripts and messages (vHDLVLTurretScript, vHDTurretMessageNCR01, vHDTurretMessageNCR01b, etc) that show they would be initially disabled in the conflict, and the player could then repair them to help fight against the legion. In the final game there are no gun turrets anywhere near Hoover dam.
There's a LOT of reworked/redundant code involved with the endgame fight. It's extremely difficult to unpick it all as there are several iterations/implementations of things like the reinforcement code as it was clearly realized having so many enemies in the area at once would kill console performance. It's difficult to separate what was abandoned from what actually works, but I'd guess there is unused stuff here.
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 an underground base. This is present in the finished game, but disabled so the player can never go in there, nor 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. It seems originally the player had to access computers at each location, when in the final game you have to talk to the comm officers at each camp. Presumably the computer terminal that had to be reached for the quest 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 (presumably 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.
Quest Stage 10 of VMSRSGlobalCommBreakdown shows the original messy way this quest was handled, with each station having its own separate quest that would feedback to the main quest.
Jacobstown
==========
There are three markers in the Brahmin pen that enable certain NPCs. They aren't actually used in the final game, and were seemingly just there as a possible way to quickly ease NPC numbers (between them they enable most of the npcs in the area). Oddly there is one called JacobstownMoreNightkinParentMarker that does just what it suggests - enables four more Nightkin outside the house that is always disabled in the game (along with those NPCs). I'm not sure if this was disabled to keep down NPC numbers or as a continuity measure (or even part of the Nightkin coup plotline?) as we are told the nightkin don't like going outside much as they can't bear to be seen. The only nightkin outside in the farm area of Jacobstown in the final game is Lily so that the player can clearly see her.
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). Protectron 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 value checked 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.
Powder Gangers/NCRCF
====================
Lots more quests would originally have taken 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 in the code, 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.
NCRPrisonTerminal suggests at one point there were gun turrets here the player could turn on to kill everyone.
VNCRCFHolotapeMale/Female - Unused note that presumably Eddie would give you to show to Cooke to vouch you were on their side.
NCRCFWaterValve - An activator that does nothing. Suggests there was something planned for the water tap here.
The "water merchant" you're supposed to investigate during 'I Fought the Law' was originally supposed to be joined by two bodyguards. Interestingly they are both still in place at Goodsprings Source, which suggests originally the water merchant would have been found at this location.
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 Inculta 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. However, 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 falsified by the game resulting in it always choosing this option even if the second option would have been the correct one.
Peculiarly the cell that Nipton Rest Stop can be found in has the name "MayorSteyn" in the GECK. Would the character have been found dead here at one stage?
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.
Lots of stuff cut here. This area is very messy with a lot of repeatedly revised content - and unusually - all of the crossings out still visible in the Geck.
The whole sheriff quest ('My Kind of Town') has had huge amounts of stuff cut out. Originally the player had two objectives they had to fulfill to get the NCR to help out - firstly they had to eliminate Eddie at the NCRCF, and secondly they had to petition all the citizens of Primm to get them to agree to be occupied by the NCR. Vestiges of this remain in the final game dialogue - Hayes warns the player that people must pay the new NCR taxes, and says the NCR cannot protect the town due to the powder gangers to the north. Originally these concerns would be the major obstacles for the player to overcome in this area, but this was changed in the final game to easily be solved by simply talking to Major Knight. Possibly this was due to the NCR branch being much longer and more complex than the other two (indeed the way the cut content works I doubt the other outcomes had even been thought of at this point, I speculate when it was decided to have other outcomes for the town the NCR branch was drastically cut short to match up with the new ones). There are still full quest objectives, huge amounts of scripting (in PrimmResidentScript for example), and the actual petition notes (PrimmSheriffPetition0 - 5) for all this, but only Johnson Nash has a line to say about it. Bizarrely the topic for this is 188ClayThoughtsHow, a topic intended for the weird kid at the 188 trading post!
There is a conversation between Hayes and McGee regarding taking over the town that is cut (and appears to be missing the first line in the game - a variable is not set that would presumably set by this line, the first line present has a "link from" set which only works if there is a line before it, and McGee's first line seems to be in answer to Hayes calling his name). Once McGee is installed for the NCR, 4 'Deputy' NCR troopers are supposed to be enabled, who then start patrolling the area. This is all set up in the game's scripts, but oddly is deliberately commented out.
There are also three disabled NCR troopers called PrimmNCRPatrolMcGee with AI packages to follow Sgt McGee. Presumably they would at one stage have patrolled around the town with him, either before or after he is made Sheriff. However, in the final game he mostly stays in the NCR base area, and never leaves the Sheriff's house once he is sheriff, which is probably why they were cut.
There are lots of patrol paths here that circle around the main Primm town area. In the final game no one uses them at all, and even the cut deputies do NOT use them! They seem to almost certainly be intended for the deputies, yet the deputies have peculiar patrol routes - very intricate ones that make them patrol the road between the town and the NCR base. I speculate this may have even been done to get round a plot hole - once the town is guarded by the deputies a gang of Ex-NCR soldiers hold the Vicky and Vance hostage, and claim to not even know the town was now defended. How could they not know if soldiers are patrolling right outside? Major Knight can also be persuaded to send soldiers due to the road being weakly defended, and the presence of more troops having knock on effects other than to Primm. Perhaps their pathways were to show this? Even so, the ex-powder ganger deputies ALSO use this patrol route, which makes zero sense - they're extremely unlikely to want to help defend an NCR base after being incarcerated by them for years! This may have been why the whole deputies idea was abandoned.
Primm's townsfolk are initially trapped inside the casino. Once the town is safe, they're then equally confined to their homes, and then never leave. However, there are a number of carefully crafted sandbox packages for them to populate the town once more that are never used (PrimmResident1Sandbox - 8). The markers these refer to are also oddly parts of the patrol routes mentioned above. Perhaps this was just clever reuse of existing markers, however.
There are also dead resident NPCs set up (PrimmResidentFemale5DEAD) that would presumably have been used to litter the streets (there are several inexplicable blood stains after all) like the murdered courier. There's also a marker called vvCorpseDisabler inside the Vicky Vance that changes the state of some things once Primm gets back on track, including removing some blood stains (which don't actually show up anyway). It doesn't actually remove any corpses, however - perhaps these are the ones it was supposed to get rid of?
There's dialogue for a cut scene involving Meyers giving a pep talk to the powder gangers he rallies as deputies for the town. It's unused in the final game, and has a bizarre snaking patrol package that takes him to a position by the Emergency Railway station by an absurdly circuitous and dangerous route (it passes through the NCRCF, presumably where he would then pick up his deputies). It's unclear if his rally really was going to take place here or was merely dumped here as a temporary measure, as it's extremely out of the way, and doesn't even use the area in any kind of sensible way (the disused train platform would make a great raised speaking platform, but instead the marker is just chucked by the side somewhere, and a seemingly corresponding marker presumably for his audience is bunged directly in front of it).
The generic reaction dialogues relating to the outcomes of 'My Kind of Town' are a real mess. There are two variables set once this quest is completed: VStoryEventPrimm which has two functions, to show if the player has got the town a sheriff, and secondly if the player put the NCR in charge, and VStoryEventPrimmSheriff, which keeps track of WHO became the sheriff. Now you might notice you've got a redundant case here. If the NCR take over you have two ways to check this is the case. So you've got some dialogue checking one variable, others checking the other. Messy, but not a problem. Apart from someone got confused as to which variable meant what. VStoryEventPrimm == 2 means NCR takeover. VStoryEventPrimmSheriff == 1 also means NCR takeover. However, someone put in loads of dialogue that checks VStoryEventPrimmSheriff == 2 when it relates to an NCR takeover - they've clearly confused the two variables. This means people go on about the NCR taking over when it is not the case. Just to make things even more confusing, VStoryEventPrimm == 2 is never set as a pro NCR event, and actually the variable is only set to 1 when you complete the quest in favour of the NCR. Further muddying the waters, at some point VStoryEventPrimm == 2 was repurposed to mean the player slaughtered everyone in the town and is checked as such during the end slides. Unfortunately, because of the mistakes above, killing everyone also amusingly results in people talking about how the town caved in to the NCR rather than how they died horribly. Basically, these two variables are a disaster of miscommunication.
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. There are also other variables in VDialogueVickyVanceScript to support the extra stages of their quest (the player going off to get them back into the NCR, successfully achieving this, etc). This outcome was dropped in the final game.
There is a variable and some dialogue (from J Nash) in place to recognise one Sheriff being put into power, being killed, and then replaced with another. This wouldn't work in practice, as quests cannot be restarted once they are completed, and dialogue in a quest cannot be used once a quest has finished.
It seems originally the idea was for the vicky and Vance casino to be littered with the dead bodies of people killed by the convicts. The place is clearly in a state of disarray that seems to not tally up with the townsfolk being safely holed up in there. There are also bloodstain decals on the ground that don't (probably deliberately) actually work correctly that suggest people were killed there. There are also a series of NPCs called "VVCorpse" that appear to be the dead bodies that would be found in this area, including a dead bartender who is never replaced, even when the casino is reopened and restaffed. These NPCs are extremely generic, and are actually just cloned from generic raiders, even keeping their faction standings etc (the Bartender is even called "Raider" still). They would presumably be disabled by the marker vvCorpseDisabler, which in the final game doesn't actually remove any corpses at all.
Hypothesis for what was originally going to happen in Primm: From cut dialogue (e.g. VDialogueVickyVanceVickyVanceExNCR1Topic008), it seems that originally the townspeople of Primm were going to be slaughtered in the Vicky and Vance by the Ex NCR soldiers. Possibly they were the original raiders who killed everyone in the town before it became the powder gangers. This is why the casino is in such disarray. The vvcorpse NPCs would litter the place, and the deliberately invisible bloodstains would also be apparent. The player would bump into the soldiers and ask them about this, e.g. the lines: "By extorting money from the locals? What happened here?" "It looks like these people got more than just hurt". The big goal of the town would then be to get rid of the NCR raiders, either by killing them or getting them back into the main NCR army. This was then abandoned, and the actual final game quest of stopping the powder gangers, and getting a new Sheriff became the goal, and the Vicky and Vance then became a safehaven for the people, rather than a mass grave. The Ex-NCR soldiers were simply reused later on in the game, with all their redemption plot gone to make their quest a lot shorter and simpler.
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 variable 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 ("beasts got free!"), 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, presumably at one point the beasts could be freed this way.. 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.
There is an alternative earlier version of the quest 'The WhiteWash'. VMS10 is repurposed as a variables holder in the final game, but its original quest stages and objectives reveal a very different and much more simplistic quest rather than the final 'Chinatown' inspired one.
There is a cut NPC called 'Wrench' who would be used extensively in this quest. References to him exist in VMS10QuestScript:
short bWrenchRepair ; 1 = Player knows Wrench can repair stuff.
short bWrenchWaterShortage ; 1 = Wrench mentioned he knows something about the water shortage.
He also has the following single dialogue line, which is unused:
VMS101EWrenchTopic009 - "I've got the whiskey." (the player is saying this line)
It's interesting that this is topic 9 - he must have had a lot more dialogue originally.
According to the quest objectives, the player would have to investigate the East Pump station to find evidence of a water shortage. In the final game this area was repurposed for a different quest instead (Hard Luck Blues). From here the player would have to talk to Wrench who it seems would either be located in the Sharecroppers farm, or more likely in Westside. It can be assumed from what little remains that he was some kind of down on his luck type - he firstly wants the player to give him whiskey (as seen above), but also seems to have sold his "super tool kit" (really?) to Angelo's Pawn Shop in Westside, which the player must buy back. It's not clear if Wrench actually fixes anything or not, but perhaps his input merely reveals the fact someone is stealing the water, as you must next catch someone doing so as in the final game quest. Finally, Anderson is confronted as in the eventual version of this quest.
The above early quest objectives show that the Miguel's pawn shop was originally called Angelo's pawn shop, and would presumably be run by a cut NPC called Angelo. His Merchant container still exists as VendorContainerAngelo. Checking Miguel's dialogue reveals that he is literally the same NPC, just renamed, e.g. VDialogueDoldrums1EAngeloTopic001 which is a Miguel line. Interestingly these lines also have the area name listed as "Doldrums" rather than Westside - presumably this is what the area was originally called! It seems Angelo was still used as the name for Miguel past the point where Doldrums was renamed to Westside - there is a dialogue topic for him with both the name Angelo and also the Westside distinguisher (vDialogueWestside1EAngeloTopic000).
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 mutilated), and working for her.
It's very likely Westside was originally an "open" settlement; that is to say all of its buildings, NPCs etc were located as part of the main wastelandNV worldspace. Even the ground still has correct textures painted for this.
There's a cut character here with full player dialogue and the generic name of "Water Seller". VDialogueVegasWest1EWaterSellerTopic010 - His/her dialogue was later recycled for the character Lupe - her dialogue is literally identical with the same topics, only they've been moved into the grub n gulp quest.
There are two other cut characters possibly from this area: Pablo Miller and Billy Bettis. 1E is used as a code for several areas (some Fiend territory, the share cropper farms, Westside, and a few others). There's little to give away what they were for - they have no dialogue, factions or AI packages, but both seem to be fighter types, armed with decent armour and a shotgun/laser rifle. Billy Bettis is part of the Vendordrinks class, so possibly he was going to be some kind of tough bartender/water seller? Possibly he was the original Doldrums/Westside "Water Seller"?
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. The official strategy guide was written at a point before Alexus' dialogue was removed and claims erroneous stuff like being able to try and "reason with him" with regards to the prisoners. One line of Alexus' cut dialogue is visible on his playing card from the Collectors edition of the game.
Renolds has more blank dialogue that is unused, but mostly seems to be duplicate stuff. There also seems to be a remark from him that the player wouldn't be able to handle themselves in combat due to 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. He seems to have been involved in the Powder Ganger attack on the town and possibly the Great Khan drug deal.In the final game he is dead and has no dialogue if revived. His AI packages show what would have happened: He would be trapped in place by a deathclaw by the crane. Once the player killed the deathclaw a flag would be set and he'd run back to the town where the player could then talk to him. It seems he'd demand some kind of money before clearing off for good.
According to an article on NMA, Hawkins would originally be found trapped up on one of the conveyer machines. Once the deathclaw that was stalking him was killed, he would try and con the player into giving him money to return home, unless the player had found out about the earlier Powder Ganger raid (and therefore realise he was one of them). Apparently he was cut as his quest was more low level fodder yet would need end game tier abilities for the player to actually complete.
There's an unused variable for part of 'Don't Make a Beggar of Me':
short bChompsTaggingAlong ; 1 = Player is letting Chomps tag along.
There is also the blank dialogue topic QJMelissaAcceptableTrade ("QJMelissaNewDeal"). Together these suggest the quest was longer, and probably had some kind of negotiating for a better deal from Tyrone. It seems at one stage Chomps would come with the player, probably to see Tyrone?
There's also early blank dialogue for Tyrone (e.g. PrimmTyroneBarter) That just seems to follow the same arc as the final dialogue. There is also a topic about buying chems that suggest he may have worked as a vendor at some point?
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.
There is a cut quest here involving a character called "Jack Wilson", see Boulder City for more.
Boulder City
============
There is an unused Boulder City Worker here with an equally unused unique dialogue line. There are also lots of unused ai packages for the workers, including an odd one that makes one of them walk to a stool at the 188 diner. Possibly he was supposed to be there killing time until Boulder City opened for work again?
It seems there is a cut quest involving a character called "Jack Wilson". A cut note (JackWilsonNote) lays bare what would likely happen in this quest; Jack Wilson is a contractor in charge of the rebuilding of Boulder City. It seems that he also operates the quarry, and what can be inferred from the note is that he is essentially getting paid to move the stone from the quarry to the city ruins. However, the existing rubble could be used instead to save money. It seems the NCR have veteod this as they consider the materials "unusable" (whether they are or not, or whether this is some kind of scam or simply NCR bureaucracy wasting money isn't clear). The quest concerns finding Wilson at Gomorrah, and then convincing him to do something - probably to use the rubble to speed up/save money on the rebuilding costs. It's unclear who would ask you to do this, but the information is said to be told to the player by the big Horn bartender Ike.
The quest may have even been an alternative to clearing the quarry of deathclaws. The building work is held up by the workers at Sloan being unable to mine new stone due to the creatures, so perhaps this quest was to get them to use the existing rubble instead to get around this problem.
Victor has a cut line for when the player can meet up with him here in the early game (when he stalks you before getting to the Strip). If the player asks him about having seen Benny he has a line with deliberately impossible conditions where he suggests he's never heard of Benny before and didn't know that was the name of the man you are following. This seems to have been deliberately cut, it doesn't make sense for both lines to be in the game.
188 Trading Post
================
A strange and somewhat messy area. To look at it in the GECK you'd perhaps be forgiven for thinking it was a location created very late on in the game - it's somewhat rushed and confused with many npcs added and then disabled, and lots of half finished/abandoned ideas. There are also lots of oversights/bugs here like the idle markers that make NPCs lean back through the walls. In fact formids show this was one of the earliest game locations - it seems it was just neglected in favour of working on more important areas.
The Gunrunner Alexander has only one bodyguard in the final game. In fact he was supposed to have at least one more, and their ai packages would cause them to alternate guarding and sleeping so that he has a bodyguard at all times. One works the day shift, the other the night. There are actually TWO such bodyguards set up for both eventualities (for a total of four altogether), but only one of each kind is actually used in the game (and in the final game the night shift guard is disabled). Possibly these were supposed to be used as a random pool but never were.
Similarly there are also lots more civilians that were intended to be used here. There are three different NPCs for both "civilianHopeful" and "CivilianUnhappy" dispositions. The different kinds of civilians have different dialogue topics where they either praise or disparage the NCR and Vegas. In the final game there are only one of each present on the game map at the 188. They are both disabled and can never be seen.
The unhappy civilians have a lot of dialogue, including an interesting topic where they have the ability to beg the player for caps. This dialogue fork has a lot of different options, but it has a tiny chance of ever being seen - it's a random topic like the rest of their dialogue. It's possible these lines were intended for dedicated beggar characters, but this was never finished properly if so.
The merchants here were supposed to have a water brahmin. For some reason this was placed on the map but disabled.
There are two of each kind of NCR trooper (regular or power armour depending on the game's story progression) placed here, but in the final game only one of each kind is enabled.
There are also several out of work mercenary characters killing time here. In the final game they are disabled.
Ranger Station Delta
====================
There's something peculiar here involving Ranger Pason and an oddly positioned robobrain overlooking Hoover Dam. Pason never mentions the robot, but it has the name CrRobobrainRangerGBRM2kX and has an ai package called DeltaPasonGBRM2KXPatrol that clearly links it to Pason. In the robot's inventory is an object called 'GBRM2KX Memory Chip,' which due to its attached script can actually satisfy the requirement of having "eyewitness" proof of there being no super mutants in the area for the 'Return to Sender' quest. This is all well and good, but there is no supplied reason WHY this is the case in the game. People have noted it allows you to complete the quest if Pason is dead, but so does just picking up the note he has from his corpse - why bother duplicating an extremely easy objective in the first place, especially in such an obscure manner? It seems to me there was originally going to be some kind of quest that linked Pason and the robot together that was cut. Looking at Pason's dialogue lines this also seems the case - although his final lines are a mish mash of early and later added dialogue from two quests squashed together, they only fill up topics 0, 2, 7, and 9 of whatever was once was there/was planned. That's a whopping amount of dialogue to get the axe, so perhaps it was dialogue relating to some kind of quest to recover the memory chip from a dangerous robobrain gone rogue?
Interestingly the memory chip item was originally just another clipboard item like the ones found at the other ranger stations - its editor id is actually VMSRSDeltaClipboard and it appears as a clipboard in the player's inventory! It looks like someone changed their mind on having just another boring fetch quest to get an item and started working on something involving the robot but then changed their minds again (probably due to lack of time) and just ended up leaving a load of things relating to it in the game.
Sunset Sarsaparilla HQ
======================
There was originally another character involved with the Sunset Sarsaparilla location/star quest called Felicia. All that is left is a container called SSHQFeliciaContainer, and a space for her relevant variables in VFreeformSSHQScript. Unfortunately this area is blank giving no clues to her purpose. 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.
According to an article posted at NMA, Felicia was a vendor character who would swap star bottle caps for items including stealthboys and mini nukes. She apparently got cut as it caused confusion/delayed the player on the Festus quest.
There is an unused terminal here called SSHQFestusTerminal. It's description is "Festus Control Terminal" but it is otherwise blank. Perhaps this was a debug terminal, or at one stage it was possible to hack Festus to get his quest reward early?
There's another unused terminal called "SSHQTechGuyMailTerminal" that would presumably have used an equally unused email about Festus (SSHQTechGuyMailMessage1Terminal).
There is also an unused creature SSHQEyebot, which is a fully working Eyebot that even has voiced dialogue. Possibly it was removed as the eyebots seem to be an exclusively Enclave creation. One of the emails on the computers here in the final game alludes to some kind of secret "new toy" robot from Robco and whether they could obtain more (suggesting there is only one at SSHQ), so possibly this is what it refers to.
There is a levelled items list for Sunset Star Caps (LootSSStarCap75). This is completely unused in the final game, but suggests at one point the idea of the player randomly finding star caps was on the cards. In the final game the only ways to get them is either by finding the hand placed ones, or by random luck opening a bottle of Sunset Sarsaparilla.
Monte Carlo Suites
==================
There are traces of something interesting cut here. Much like the Boulder City quest that exists only in the tantalising form of a single cut note, there was clearly some kind of quest planned for the Scorpions, the gang infesting the Suites. There are two named Scorpions, Roller and Yvette. Neither of them have any dialogue. Most significantly there is an unused note called ScorpionsGangNoteNV which lays bare what would have happened here:
"Yvette, the leader of the Scorpions on the Westside of New Vegas, wants you to set up a steady supply of ammunition from the NCR quartermaster at Camp McCarran. Her gang recently acquired new firearms but lack the ammunition to put them to use."
It's almost certain that the quartermaster in question would have been the clearly dubious as hell Sgt. Contreras, but he has no dialogue relating to the quest.
Looking inside the Suites and NPC placements, Roller seems to be in charge of actually manufacturing ammo/fixing weapons, so he's likely to be the person Yvette would have you talk to about the quest after she gives you the order of what to do. Of course this is all mere conjecture - there is NOTHING left of this quest in the game save these two npcs and the cut note. Neither of the two unique Scorpion characters have ANY unique dialogue at all, and indeed the player can't even talk to them as they're always enemies. It seems this quest was probably just cut due to lack of time.
Aerotech Office Park
====================
Horowitz (the leader of the vault dwellers you can optionally save from Vault 34), has several cut lines of dialogue. He actually has 16 topics, a large number of which are oddly the same duplicated player only lines repeated over and over. More interestingly he also has an inaccessible PEG greeting line for the Legion winning at Hoover dam in which he expresses his disgust at the world and how he wishes you'd left him in the vault. In the final game he promises you a "vault trinket" if you ask for a reward for saving him, but there's nothing in the code, so nothing happens. There are rumours it would have been the food sanitiser item from Fallout 3, but I don't think there's any proof of this (and the item doesn't work properly as-is in FNv - although that could be exactly why it was cut). There are also several unused traders with Brahmin here that are disabled.
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.
There's also another cut character from the same area/time of development, Grigorsky. All that is left is a single blank dialogue topic called VGrigorskyAgree.
Hidden Valley
=============
At some point it seems it was planned for the player to be able to use the VR pods here, probably to play some kind of Operation Anchorage style VR game where the player must defend Hidden Valley from Enclave intruders. There is a VR pod called HVPlayerPodREF and a message called HVGameScoreMessage that tracks a variable to display the number of kills in the VR game.There are also cut notes relating to Melissa that show she is playing the VR sim at a deliberately lower difficulty level, possibly implying some kind of cheating/favouritism towards her by the tutors (she is considered a gifted pupil and is of course Veronica's rival, so possibly there would be some quest for Veronica/the player to expose her?). There is also an unused computer terminal called HVPodSimSelectionTerminal that seems to relate to the above.
According to HVRangerRadioScript, it was possible to fix the snooping NCR Ranger's radio at some point. It's unclear what purpose this would achieve, but the script even notes this outcome was cut from the game. There are also cut dialogue topics for this e.g. VDialogueHiddenValleyHVRangerTopic005 ("You might want to know that I fixed your radio earlier."), but the reply dialogue has been removed. There's also a cut topic where you can tell him about the BOS base that was later rewritten as a new topic.
There are unused AI packages for NPCs of both sexes to use the relevant bathrooms here!
Underpass
=========
A cut settlement situated at the far north of the map, just south of Nellis. Carlisle St Clair is a resident of this town, and the player can even note he "doesn't fit in here". Everything else seems to have been scrapped. There is a basic quest for the area (VFreeformUnderpass), in which the player would have to fix a water purifier for the town, and a working script and message boxes exist for it (UnderpassWaterRepairedMsg etc). The actual water purifier object seems to not exist however. Possibly it was intended to be in the small shack, or was one of the large water towers? There are also lots of generic NPCs for the town (UnderpassCitizen01 - 6) and a faction for them. Most interestingly there is also a character called Meg Reynolds with a editor id of "UnderpassMayor". She has some very early dialogue, including a voiced greeting line, and several player only lines (VFreeformUnderpassUnderpassMayorTopic000 - 6). She also has a very pasty face, that suggests she was only a placeholder character. Her model is also used as a template for a few other generic/dummy characters. There are ai packages created for the generic characters to wander around and to sleep - they sleep in the sleeping bags outside the house. Underpass citizens are oddly mentioned in the official strategy guide bestiary.
The strange ranch house full of maize and stills for brewing alcohol seems to be a leftover from this incarnation of the town. All the objects inside are owned by the Underpass Faction, and entering here when the original NPCs were present would cause them to turn hostile.
It seems in the final game the mad brahmin were simply added here as a means to fill up some of the now empty space, it's unlikely they'd be there when the town was originally conceived.
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.
Fiends
======
There is an unused script called FiendTestArmorScript that makes the Fiends friendly if the player wears a certain piece of armour (almost certainly fiend armour). This is interesting, as the Fiend mini bosses (Driver Nephi etc) all have friendly dialogue to talk to the player which can never be heard as the Fiends are of course always hostile (save for when the player enters Vault 3 as a Great Khan). Altogether this suggests it was originally possible to disguise as a Fiend to be safe from them (and in danger from everyone else).
According to an article at NMA, this was originally part of a planned outcome of collaborating with the Fiends to double cross the NCR and let them take over Camp McCarran as can happen in one of the endings.
Boomers/Nellis
==============
An unused Message (FactionReminderBoomer) shows that at one stage the player could disguise as a Boomer by wearing their clothes like other factions.
There are cut player only dialogue topics to ask the Crimson Caravan guards about the redhead girl from Jack's quest (e.g. VDialogueCrimsonCaravan1ECrimsonCaravanGuardAAM2Topic000 - "Do you know any redheads in these parts").
There is also a cut message box called NellisCCJanet. It is blank but has the title of "Janet". This might not seem significant, but this is part of how you can change the name of an existing NPC - for example to hide their real name until the player has discovered some information about them. Coupled with the above it suggests there maybe have originally been some kind of actual detective work needed by the player to find Janet for Jack?
Famously Jack also has cut dialogue if the player is an asshole and gets Janet blown up on her way past the artillery range.
Cut Locations
=============
When Chris Avellone delivered a talk at Rezzed 2013, his presentation contained an image of an early FNV game map. It's interesting as it shows several locations not only absent from the finished game, but many that also don't even get a mentioned from any characters in the final game (and considering there is substantial world building with many Van Buren locations getting name dropped, that is interesting). Many of them are based on real life locations which aided in identifying them (the picture is rather hard to read). A number of them seem to simply have been cut when they moved the northmost boundary of the game map south leaving Nellis as the most northerly place so likely had zero actual development put into them. The map is also interesting as the zone numbering is the same as was used in the final game (e.g. 2E, 1C, etc), and shows us EXACTLY where these zones are defined.
As an aside, it seems this numbering system was abandoned early on - at least as an editor guide for where people were going to be found. Only NPCs from certain time periods use this system, most notably some parts of the strip, and westside. At some point naming conventions shifted to simply being NVwhatever with the name just being a literal description of whatever or whoever it was rather than including where they were found in the game. The map further indicates that Pablo Miller and Billy Bettis are almost certainly originally Westside or North Vegas residents, which was pretty obvious before anyway.
The locations are:
Something's Legionaries Camp - This is where the Malpais Legion Camp is found in the Geck in the final game. It can be assumed this is the same location as on the early map, although it looks to me as if the first word is a name as it has a possessive apostrophe. I can't make it out from the picture.
Camp Willow - Located south and slightly east of The Fort. Presumably this would be a conquered NCR station. It is located at the real life Willow Beach Marina. Interestingly this location is named as the site of one of the deciding battles of the first Hoover Dam campaign in the official strategy guide, yet is not actually mentioned by anyone in the final game. videos of the real location on youtube show the area is very flat and just above river level (naturally - it is a beach!) compared to the high cliffs that keep the player out of this side of the river in the final game.
Corn Creek Dunes - A location found roughly where the real life town of Corn Creek can be found.
Floyd Lamb State Park - Again another real life location found to the north west of Vegas.
Valley of Fire - Real life highway to the north east.
Sandy Valley - This is actually a real town comprised of what were once five smaller mining communities, of which one is Ripley, another ingame location.
Ripley - Location east of Sandy Valley. See above. Interesting that it would have been considered a seperate entity to Sandy Valley in the game.
Las Vegas Dunes - Found Just north-east of Vault 34, this is a real life "recreation area" which consists of little more than a series of bleak hills and vehicle tracks. Probably would have been an enemy encounter area in the game.
Devil Peak - A real life mountain south of Goodsprings.
Mummy Mountain - Another real life mountain North-east of Jacobstown. So named as it apparently kind of has the shape of an Egyptian mummy's sarcophagus.
Elephant Hill - Located across the Colorado river opposite Blue Paradise Vacation Rentals. A real but seemingly largely uninteresting hill overlooking the Colorado. Perhaps another Legion camp location?
Garnet - Located dead north of the Gypsum Trainyard. Another tiny real life town.
Cacida? - A location to the South west of Primm (in actuality it's kind of due west of where Primm is in real life). Not sure if this is a real place, but there are small towns in that area. Unsure on what the name says, but it begins with a C. Based on the above it probably is a real place.
Companions
==========
Pretty much all the companions have lots of blank dialogue topics for them to comment on important game events/areas that were either cut or not finished in time. 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.
Arcade
Arcade has several more lines about ED-E that are unused. He has two lines that are clearly supposed to trigger once ED-E's first log is played that further reinforce his dislike of ED-E due to recognising his Enclave origins. The line he says is meant to change depending on the player knowing his background or not. Speaking of which, a variable is checked to know whether the player knows Arcade's background. This is never actually set, so several lines of dialogue never play, most notably rehiring Arcade with ED-E in your party which will cause him to express concern, but never the Enclave specific version of this line.
He also has a snarky line to say to (or more likely comment behind her back - there is no reply line from Emily herself, and Arcade seems too passive aggressive to say it to her face!) Emily Ortal if the player accepts the quest to bug the Lucky 38 that is unused. There's not even the needed delivery method (special "blank" topic and AI package) needed for this line to work, so it seems to have been entirely forgotten.
Arcade also has a line to say after meeting Caesar. It suggests that originally Arcade (and probably other companions) could be present in Caesar's tent, so this was presumably abandoned after this was no longer possible.
Rex
---
As the King says, Rex was supposed to hate rats, and go mad attacking them if one was on the current map. The code for this is all in the game, but is deliberately dummied out in VDialogueRexScript. It seems to be quite early code, and doesn't actually work properly if enabled. An earlier attempt at this effect can be seen in the ai package FollowersRexHuntRatsPackage but this doesn't really work either (it just makes Rex randomly search around for a rat rather than running straight to one and attacking). There's also a specific dialogue (!) topic for this - VRexSmellsARat. It seems the ways that were devised to handle this functionality just didn't work so it was abandoned.
I believe this effect was meant to be in the game, but was abandoned due to it not working. The reason why is a simple game engine limitation - it's actually not possible to arbitrarily make two characters start combat with each other at long distance due to a lack of a detection event. Basically if two characters can't see each other they can't start fighting.
Cass
Cass was intended to have an even greater amount of incidental dialogue than the insane amount she already has. She has a LOT of cut blank dialogue topics relating to the Hoover Dam battle events that comprise around FOURTY cut lines relating to each endgame outcome (e.g. fighting for House, independent, NCR, Legion). She has lines to comment on various areas of the dam, as well as meeting certain important NPCs (e.g. Oliver, Lanius, etc). Interestingly she also has lines that presumably relate to the cut Arizona spillway map (e.g. VCassEventHDHouseSpillway). This suggests these lines were cut early on.
Cass also has a set of reactivity dialogue lines for commenting on all kinds of player choices. It's not clear what the criteria of these would have been (from the spectrum of comments, presumably for completing quests in certain ways),
but she has a large number of positive and negative comments to go from being impressed by the player's action to being disgusted. There are four topics, which are VCassReallyLike, VCassReactLike, VCassReactBad, VCassReallyBadReact (good example: "{Commenting on player's behavior}Set an example, others will follow." bad example: "{Commenting on player's behavior}That was fucked up". She also has unused dialogue that was supposed to play when the player drank whiskey while she was a companion, as part of her Whiskey Rose perk ("{Shot of whiskey}Now all I need is some shame to wash it down with."). The reactivity comments and whisky lines are all fully voice acted.
There is an early test version of her dialogue located in VFollowerDialogueRose. It just contains a few test lines to advance parts of her questline.
Jason Bergman posted on the game's official forums about how Fallout: New Vegas was going to have romancing options for companions, which were abandoned due to lack of time. The endgame of Cass' romance plotline would involve the player waking up drunk and finding themselves married to Cass (by the King!). This was never even started, and there is nothing regarding it in the final game.
ED-E
ED-E's companion quest has several unused takes on the dialogue. While they are ultimately the same, there are two different takes of Senior Knight Lorenzo's dialogue, and three different versions of april Martimer's dialogue. One Lorenzo line actually has one of its last lines missing, and instead still uses a voice file of one of the developers delivering the line!
for the Followers lines, there is a version that is designed to play immediately after the Brotherhood line, as if April had cut off his transmission. There are are a further two deliveries of these lines with minimal differences.
Ulysses
Ulysses seems to have been cut early on - there is barely a single trace of him in the game files. However, in all foreign language versions of the game Wolfhorn Ranch is called 'Ulysses' ranch' - so this would obviously be where the player would meet him. Outside by a camp fire is a sit marker called VUlyssesPointSitRef - this is where he would start in the game. The official strategy guide cheekily sez: "What was once a profitable Bighorner ranch has recently been abandoned, and its ownera man named Ulyssesis nowhere to be found."
His weapon seems to have been the cut Eagle Flag Pole weapon.
Further evidence that this is what the ranch was really called - the nearby troops who spawn to ambush the caravan are called VSpawnSpecialLegionRecruit03Ulysess (SIC).
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 Lily and her Grandkids
==================================
These are NOT cut. They're used to deliver lines in Lily's recorded message sequence.
Post-Endgame Content
=====================
(PEG for short from now on)
Originally the game would continue after the ending, with the player's choices massively affecting many locations. A while into development this functionality was abandoned as it was clear it would be too much work and need too much new dialogue, but a significant amount of content (mostly dialogue as this was generally recorded fairly early on development) still exists in the game files.
The biggest casualty seems to be Operation Racket, the Omerta's attempt at staging a coup and taking over the Strip from Mr House. This event features prominently in debug scripts etc, yet is largely inconsequential in the final game.
There is dialogue for many military NCR locations such as Camp McCarran and Bitter Springs to cover events that happen during the endgame/ending.
There are NPCs and dialogue for Brotherhood Troops to occupy Helios One as per certain endings.
There are unused Securitrons designated as being part of Freeside (seperate from the ones used on the gates) that presumably would be occupying forces in House victory games. They don't have any extra dialogue for this, however.
Strip Securitrons have dialogue for all endgame eventualities, including the NCR annexing the Strip, and Caesar conquering it.
The quest VEndingBinks is an early version of the game's ending when it would use Bink video files for each scene, rather than the slides and voice narration that is used in the final game. What is more significant is that the script that runs this was written when the post endgame was still in. The script advances the date to be one month in the future, at 7:40 AM, and puts the player Right in front of the Boulder City memorial at a marker called VPostGameStartMarker.
VMQ06 ('Viva Las Vegas') appears to be a post-endgame quest. It has different stages set up for each dam victory outcome, but nothing else to betray what it would do.
Mr New Vegas has special lines to play depending on who exactly won at the dam. The conditions on these lines aren't set up so they won't work properly, but all outcomes are accounted for. RNVDamOuttro, RNVDamStory.
Endgame Dialogue Analysis
It's hard to tell from the leftover post-endgame dialogue to tell exactly what state the game world would be in. The VEndingBink quest shows that the post-endgame would take place a month in the future, but it's still not certain if at this point e.g. the Legion have actually invaded all game locations or not or if this has yet to happen. The leftover dialogue is interesting as it shows some often surprising choices of what would happen in certain game areas. For example, Securitrons have dialogue for ALL faction outcomes. This means that e.g. Caesar's Legion would keep them around after a Legion victory, although possibly this was just covering all bases as the PEG dialogue that was recorded was done so fairly early on in development as after a certain point the idea was scrapped and no more dialogue was recorded towards it.
Securitron dialogue
Legion Victory: "True to {KAI-zar}Caesar."
NCR Victory: "Welcome to Vegas, capital of the sixth state of the New California Republic!"
House Victory: "Welcome to New Vegas, where a new day is dawning!"
Indie victory: "Welcome to Vegas. Don't make trouble."
It's clear Freeside would have Securitrons patrolling it after a House victory and if the Kings didn't kick out the NCR from Freeside (as mentioned above there are seperate Securitrons designated for Freeside, and also the following line for Freeside Locals: "Can't say I like all the tin cans shuffling around, but this new Securitron Army shouldn't have much trouble keeping things safer around here."). I don't think there is anything to distinguish this in the PEG dialogue though, so likely the outcome of the Kings being allowed to stay was introduced later on in development.
It's perhaps most unclear as to what would happen after a Legion victory. As mentioned above the Strip would still seemingly have its Securitons perhaps instead of/as well as Legionaries. Peculiarly however there is still dialogue for NCR characters in the area such as Jake Erwin who despairs about the defeat, suggesting the Legion haven't taken the area yet. Mick (of Mick and Ralph's) also says "{Wary}With Caesar's Legion in control of the dam, I think things are going to get much more difficult around here." Note the future tense of "going to get" and the fact he only mentions the Legion taking the Dam, and not Freeside or the Strip itself. Perhaps the Legion simply haven't taken Vegas proper yet? Sergeant Reyes' line "{Legion victory}{fear}I've been trying to sort out the rumors from the facts, but with the Legion coming, I guess it doesn't matter. The news is all bad" similarly suggests the Legion haven't actually taken any territory yet, and his further line for an independent victory suggests almost no time has passed at all since the battle: "{Other victory}{puzzled}Lots of confusion over the radio. Somehow the NCR lost the Dam, but the Legion didn't get it, either?"
In particular Mr New Vegas' radio story seems to suggest that the PEG would be taking place almost immediately after the battle of Hoover Dam, with little or no time having passed. This reading would consistent with much of the above dialogue that the game world wouldn't be much different, and the Legion likely would not have progressed far past the dam, with the NCR troops merely awaiting the inevitable in their bases (assuming the Fiends didn't kill them).
Misc
====
A large percentage of the Faction combat barks (i.e. things NPCs say while in combat) cannot ever be heard. Every combat dialogue event (being attacked, throwing a grenade, seeing someone get killed, etc) is comprised of three different dialogue strings. How these are supposed to be implemented is via the "random" flag, which means each time one of these events happens, one of the lines is chosen randomly. If the random flag is not set, only the topmost line of dialogue can ever be said. This heavily affects Securitrons, as explained previously, and literally means that they can only say 1/3rd of their dialogue in this situation. However, there is another error that affects most other factions that causes a similar situation. Random lists also have an option to set a "random end" flag, which tells the game that even if there are other random dialogue lines after the flagged one, to never choose from them when playing a line. Nearly all the rest of the factions in the game have the FIRST line of each combat event dialogue line set to Random End. This means the game will never use another line past this, meaning again 2/3rds of the lines are never heard. The Legion, NCR, Fiends, Boomers, and probably other NPCs are affected by this. I've mulled over this a lot and think this was actually a deliberate decision - I'd imagine that these random barks put more pressure on the engine as it either has to cache them in memory, or access the disk to load them on the fly (I don't know enough about how the game works to confirm this). As such this was almost certainly a memory saving trick. With the Fort slaves it seems giving them only one line of dialogue was probably an editorial decision (they're slaves living under threat of death, would they really be stopping to chat with an outsider?).
The above problem extends to the DLCs as well - Ulysses from Lonesome Road does not have his combat barks randomised so again you can only hear 1/3rd of them.
Worldspace changes - It seems Westside, Crimson Caravan, Boulder City, and North Vegas were all "open" locations and part of the main wastelandNV worldspace. They would have no gates etc to pass through to get into them. They were changed to have their own seperate worldspaces in order to get round the usual problems with performance and memory issues. You can most clearly see this in Westside where the defensive positions simply make no sense with the extra gates sealing off the town. It's likely the Thorn Mayhem quest also relied on this. Westside and the Crimson Caravan compound have hand drawn terrain detail in the main weastelandnv map that is different from that of the mini (final game) versions, showing that the buildings etc were definitely originally part of the main map. Vault 3 and Aerotech (for example), do not have these tell tale signs, so were probably started as non-"open" areas.
Music - Credits list Hank Thompson's song 'Hangover Heart' as being played on Black Mountain Radio when it's not in the game at all. There are also directories set up for each area in the game that contain the music to be used in that area. In fact many of these directories contain entirely different music to that played in the respective area in the actual game, and some have music not used at all in the game (e.g. Freeside's night time theme). It's also obvious that originally Elvis Presley music would have been played in the Kings school were it not for the apparently gigantic licencing costs for even a single one of the King's songs.
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. I think like Rex's rat radar it was just abandoned after it didn't work.
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.
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. I'm not even sure if it's possible for dogs and animals in general to eat food in the final game.
The Child at Heart perk was removed when it was realised there were relatively few dialogue choices that used it (after they rightly realised how irritating invincible children in a game are and minimised their number) and thus it became a pretty feeble perk to have in the game. The original CAH dialogue that was written is still in the game files but is inaccessible in an unmodded game.
VConversationRestarter - An unused quest designed to get around problems with the player saving their game in the middle of certain scripted conversations. The code doesn't actually do anything, so it seems the idea was abandoned (not actually needed?).
Josh Sawyer confirmed a long time ago that Gojira was a joke npc created to terrorise Camp McCarran. He was never supposed to be in the game proper (http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/336739083114006103 and http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/342487070251434890)
The Sentry Bot Toy is quite mysterious and going by the fact it is located in the largely unused random encounters cell? was probably at least considered for being included in the game at some point. The fact it has no inventory icon and a few bugs/oversights (putting it in a container and removing it will duplicate it) suggest it was at the very least not finished when the game shipped, and was probably just abandoned for more important things. Like Gojira it may have just been a fun joke item.
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.
The contents of PreorderMessageSuite suggests that originally all the pre-order items would be put into the Lucky 38's suite rather than given to the player on game start. Probably changed due to them being almost useless by the time the player got that far into the game.
"Void" creatures - these are an odd leftover from an attempt at adding an Oblivion style spawn system where random numbers of creatures can spawn when the player enters an area. There are two npcs, NVCrVoid and CRVoid. They are both tiny little black pyramids seemingly just used as placeholders to test the system. OblivionSpawnTestScript explains more of the workings, as do the VProspectorScriptxx scripts. Specifically it seems that a random number of enemies would be culled from a large group when a player entered an area and sent to the cell VDONOTDELETE (this is reused as a holder for Lily and her grandchildren's talking activators in the final game). I'm not sure if there was any way for this system to allow groups to spawn at a larger size after initially being set, but the prospectors script suggests that it was finally abandoned as it was simply far too much work - every enemy that would use this system would need to have a complex script attached that would inevitably get in the way of any other functionality for that enemy as well substantially increase the cpu load of the game - already a problem on console systems. This script based work around was needed as the core engine functionality for this feature was seemingly removed when the Elder Scrolls engine was upgraded for use in Fallout 3, for whatever reason.
From VProspectorScript30:
"This generic script governs some features of our Mojave Prospectors (adventurers). It governs the chance of the NPC appearing in the world - since we don't have Oblivion-style chanced NPC spawns anymore. The trick with which our creatures have a chance to not spawn is too cumbersome to add for NPCs, given how Leveled Character Lists currently work."
DLC CUT CONTENT
Honest Hearts Cut Stuff
=======================
There are messages (NVDLC02BrokenWalkieTalkieMsg, NVDLC02BrokenWalkieTalkiePartsMsg) that suggest originally the player would have to repair the walkie talkies needed for one quest.
There are models of both a young Caesar (NVDLC02CaesarYounger) and Joshua Graham (NVDLC02JoshuaYoung) that are unused. Perhaps these were for an in-engine intro sequence, or more likely just used for the intro slide models? The "young" Caesar seems to be almost identical to the one used in the main game, but perversely seems to be going bald (in fact Caesar is apparently supposed to be bald in the final game, but looks like has a buzz cut so I guess this makes sense)? "Young" Graham has no bandages etc, of course. Interestingly his alignment is set to evil rather then the "real" Graham's good alignment.
There is an unused map of the area, complete with Pipboy picture (NVDLC02GrandStaircaseMapNote). It would have been downloaded from a cut Ranger station terminal, NVDLC02RangerTerminal. Taking this map would also complete the objective NVDLC02MQ02 - "Optional: Speak to Follows-Chalk about taking him as a guide". This suggests at one point you could get the map instead of having Follows-Chalk as your guide.
There was some kind of cut medkit item. All that remains is the message NVDLC02MQ02MedKitRepairMessage that tells the player they can take it to a workbench to repair it.
There is an oddly unused static object called NVDLC02Scripture which is exactly what the name suggests - an open book of scripture. It has a different model and texture to the item the player can later get, so it's strange they didn't use it to decorate e.g. Joshua Graham's desk.
There's also an unused "transparent" model to show the player where to place the C4 (NVDLC02C4Alpha).
Old World Blues
===============
There is a cut item called Ulysses' Map which on activation by the player would provide them with map markers for certain locations on their minimap. It's likely it would be found at Ulysees' camp site Ulysees' Point. Incidentally, this is the original name of the place where Ulysees would have been found in the main game before he was cut (near to what ended up as Wolfhorn Ranch).
Dead Money
==========
There is a cut line for Elijah in NVDLC01RadioElijah - Topic NVDLC01RadioElijahDetonateCollar. Originally it was designed that if the player start combat against a companion, Elijah would say this line ("{Player attacked a companion}I warned you to cooperate. Now I'll have to begin again.") and then the collar would countdown and explode. The code for this is in the game but commented out, and script notes show it was removed as the player could leave a location once the countdown began causing their autosave to be overwritten and thus potentially forever ruin their entire game (as there are no doubt clever people out there who never manually save their game and would be stuck with an autosave where they perpetually explode). In the final game the player simply instantly explodes if you shoot any of the companions when they are not in your party before you reach the villa.
There is an NPC called NVDLC01WAHDDead - "White Arrow Heart Dude". This would presumably be the corpse (the NPC starts dead with zero health) of the guy who leaves the helpful caches marked with the graffiti of hearts shot through by a white arrow across the villa. He is specifically mentioned by a note on a well hidden corpse in the ruins of the Switching station, where it seems WAHD met his end as a result of his altruism making him easy to track. It's clear this model would have been his corpse, but it is unused and contains no special items such as a storyline note, loot, etc - he's just a generic wastelander.
There's a large area of the game repurposed for testing stealth gameplay in a map called NVDLC01stealthTest. There are several other debug maps left in, but the rest aren't as interesting as this one, such as the map NVDLC01ToxicCloudTest - literally just a rectangular room with some poison gas in the middle.
There's a LOT of unused dialogue for Elijah hidden in his "bark" quests. These quests contain the code to make Elijah say things while you are exploring the villa, but if you look in the quest objectives tab you can see this was used as an early storage area for dialogue. These lines can be found in NVDLC01ElijahBarkTown and NVDLC01ElijahBarkCasino, the other "bark" topics contain no dialogue stored in this way. What's interesting is that the Casino barks are very similar - sometimes verbatim - to the final dialogue, but with more exposition that was cut (for example Elijah giving a lot more specific info on how to solve the casino jumping puzzle where you have to use the rafters to get behind a hologram). The town file however, has completely different dialogue, including some extremely juicy titbits of information. There are interesting things such as Elijah identifying Doc Mitchell as the original owner of the player's Pipboy and accusing the player of being a thief - which is "exactly what I need". Most tantalisingly the cut dialogue also hints that Veronica was actually Elijah's foster daughter, which explains her relationship with him: "You're resourceful. Had a daughter, foster daughter, like you." "She was willful, stubborn. But clever. She's gone now. Lost to me." Elijah is also far more pushy in this dialogue, threatening the player that he will detonate their collar if they try to sleep (in the final game you CAN sleep, just not in many locations), and the gala event is a lot more pressurised as Elijah repeatedly warns the player the doors are about to close and to not stop running else they be shut outside (in the final game you just have to avoid the roving ghost people).
There's an unused dialogue line for Christine's claustrophobia reactions. She has two lines that play in these situations, but only one of them can actually play as they are not randomised.