Bethesda Softworks, the publishing arm of the company, has announced that it intends to publish Fallout: New Vegas early next year.

The title is set to be developed by Obsidian Entertainment and will be designed for the PC, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony. The choice of location is pretty good, considering that it allows the creators to render an urban area, decrepit and destroyed, surrounded by a big amount of radioactive desert.

The announcement was made by Pete Hines, who is the vice president in charge of communication at Bethesda, at an event in London. The details remain sketchy but the representative of Bethesda declared that New Vegas was not a direct sequel and not a spin off.

Hines stated that “It's not Fallout Tactics - it's not Brotherhood Of Steel. It's another Fallout game. It has no impact on what Todd Howard and his guys are planning.” So, we can expect to see Fallout: New Vegas coming early in 2010 from Obsidian and a proper Fallout 4 arrive later during the same year.

Obsidian is quite adept at taking videogames universes and crafting sequels set in them. It has created titles like Knights of the Old Republic 2 and the latest expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2. The development studio is made up, in part, of veterans from Black Isle, which worked directly on the Fallout franchise before Bethesda had the rights to it.

Fallout: New Vegas will probably use the same engine as Fallout 3, with a few improvements thrown here and there. The game structure is also expected to remain the same. But Obsidian has always had a knack of extracting new and interesting stuff from a given setting.

Details on the game are promised for the near future, which probably means that we will see something related to it at this year’s E3 trade show.