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Interplay Pitches Fallout MMO, Despite Dearth Of Cash
Thanks to Yahoo! for reprinting an Interplay press release discussing Interplay's latest financial results, ruminating on possibilities for the embattled publisher. Although "the Company reported a net loss of $.9 million" for the quarter, a relatively small amount, Interplay's detailed financial statement reveals: "We currently have no cash reserves and are unable to pay current liabilities. The Company cannot continue in its current form without at this time obtaining additional financing." However, CEO Herve Caen is bullish about prospects, explaining: "We are now pursuing several options to fund our entry into Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming with titles including Fallout", a positive step, according to "...initial feedback from our investment bank and ongoing dialogue with others in the gaming sector." We've previously covered Interplay's recent financial woes.
And not only is the MMOG market so saturated that MMORPGs have been getting cancelled left and right, but its one of the most expensive and time consuming genre to develop for. Not an ideal undertaking for a company that is narrowly avoiding bankruptcy. The Fallout games were great and I'd love to see more of them, but I don't think they'd be able to pull off an MMORPG right now.
A console RPG might work out well for them. Fallout seems like it could work really well for XBox or XBox 2, and the XBox could really use some more good RPGs in its lineup. A well done console Fallout title could be very successful, and it wouldn't take nearly as much time and money as an MMORPG, or face such stiff competition.
Look, folks. The real success behind Fallout was the story, the aesthetic, the locations, and the fact they put it together with some pretty good attention to the important things like gameplay. Remember that the original plan for Fallout was simply as a GURPS-based game that got re-worked near the end of development into the SPECIAL system that -did- work very well.
The real problem with this kind of development would be if they went and tried to make it turn-based-MMORPG. Then we'd just have to kill them all.
If they do something similar to a City of Heroes environment, without the mind-numbing quest for items and other crap like you have in more traditional MMORPG places, it'd go over quite well.
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That doesn't totally suck and has the magic storylines of the original series. I love turn based games, but frankly, they are going the way of the dodo and I want Fallout 3 to succeed in the mss market so it can stay alive. A Fallout MMO would be hard to do. Key to the whole Fallout feeling is being the Chosen One and wandering the wilderness alone, ala Mad Max. I don't want to play a fallout game with folks spamming "selling power armour, 100k caps!" in the center of every town. Fallout was all about the mystery of discovering a wonderfully crafted, funny, post apocalyptic world, alone. Bring the magic back one more time folks.