The total conversion mod remaking the lost Fallout 3 in Fallout: New Vegas got its first trailer and a new name

The sequel to Fallout 2 being developed by Black Isle Studios in the early 2000s was codenamed Van Buren, and when it was shut down in 2003—after which Bethesda picked up the ball, but made a completely different game—it became a kind of lost relic for Fallout tragics.

Van Buren's the mythic could-have-been that almost-was, a Fallout RPG that would have had everything we loved about the first two games in it and none of the stuff we didn't love about the Fallout 3 we eventually got. Because it never got made it can stay perfect in our imaginations, never having to live up to reality.

That doesn't stop modders from wanting to make it real in their own ways, though. There's a mod to recreate Van Buren in Fallout 2's engine called Fallout Yesterday, and a project that's supposedly remaking the whole game as it would have been. However, since a bunch of ideas from Van Buren were eventually re-used in Fallout: New Vegas—like Caesar's Legion, the Big MT, and Joshua Graham—you can see why there would be an advantage in remaking Van Buren as a mod for the game that already has some of the relevant assets.

If this sounds familiar you may remember when the project was called Revelation Blues, the name under which it released a demo last year. It's now been renamed The New West, and the teaser trailer above released conveniently after the climax of Fallout Season 2, when interest in New Vegas is the highest it's been in years. Not that you'd know it from Bethesda's silence on the remaster front.

The trailer feels like classic Fallout and sets up the plot of Van Buren—there's a prison run by an AI called Odysseus, which you're set to escape from in the opening, and a New Plague out there in the wasteland. Half of this is soundtracked by Johnny Cash singing Wayfaring Stranger, which would make a great nickname for The New West's equivalent of The Lone Wanderer.

You can keep up with the progress of Fallout: The New West on its website, and the demo from back when it was called Revelation Blues is still up on Nexus Mods.