A total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that aims to recreate the cancelled Fallout 3 codename Van Buren now goes by The New West and has released its first teaser trailer.
Van Buren was the codename for the early 2000s project that would have been a sequel to Fallout 2. The source project was shut down in 2003 and Bethesda later produced a very different game under the Fallout name. Fans and modders have tried to reconstruct those lost ideas in various ways, and The New West is one such effort that places Van Buren’s concepts inside the New Vegas engine and world.
The team previously called the project Revelation Blues and released a playable demo last year under that name. The new teaser leans into classic Fallout motifs and outlines the opening scenario: the player starts by escaping a prison run by an artificial intelligence named Odysseus, while a New Plague threatens the wasteland beyond.
The trailer pairs the visuals with Johnny Cash’s “Wayfaring Stranger” for much of the soundtrack. The teaser is short, but it sketches the project’s tone and the core setup for the mod’s version of Van Buren.
Because several Van Buren ideas were later reused in Fallout: New Vegas, including Caesar’s Legion, the Big MT, and Joshua Graham—modders say there are natural advantages to rebuilding those concepts as a New Vegas conversion rather than creating a standalone game from scratch.
Interest in New Vegas has surged partly due to recent media attention for the franchise, and even a Steam store glitch earlier this year briefly convinced some fans remasters were coming. The Steam glitch story is one example of that renewed attention.
Players can watch the teaser on YouTube and see the same video via the canonical link below.
Follow development and download the earlier demo on the project’s site and Nexus Mods: the official project site is falloutthenewwest.com, and the Revelation Blues demo remains available at Nexus Mods.
Share thoughts on Odysseus or the demo’s design in the comments below, and feel free to follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram.
Fallout 3
Developed by Bethesda Game Studios
Fallout 3 from the creators of the award-winning Oblivion, featuring one of the most realized game worlds ever created. Create any kind of character you want and explore the open wastes of post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. Every minute is a fight for survival as you encounter Super Mutants, Ghouls, Raiders and other dangers of the Wasteland. Prepare for the future.
The third game in the Fallout series, Fallout 3 is a singleplayer action role-playing game (RPG) set in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC. Combining the horrific insanity of the Cold War era theory of mutually assured destruction gone terribly wrong, with the kitschy naivety of American 1950s nuclear propaganda, Fallout 3 will satisfy both players familiar with the popular first two games in its series as well as those coming to the franchise for the first time.
- Genre: Shooter, Role-playing (RPG)
- Platforms: PlayStation 3, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox 360
- Modes: Single player
- Release: 2008-10-28
- Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
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Age Rating:
CLASS_IND 18 / ESRB M / PEGI 18 / GRAC 19+ / ACB MA 15+ / CERO Z
- IGDB Rating: 83.5/100
