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Bethesda Licenses Fallout Franchise, To Make Fallout 3
An anonymous reader writes "According to an official press release, Bethesda will now develop and publish a brand-new version of Fallout 3, after the company 'licensed the rights to the Fallout [videogame] franchise from Interplay... with the option to develop and publish additional sequels.' Interplay, who is presumably licensing out its IP due to recent financial difficulties, is keeping the rights to its theoretical Fallout MMO concept, however, and this new attempt at Fallout 3 from the Morrowind developers doesn't look to be using code/assets from the previously half-completed Black Isle version."
Heh, that is cool. It would be nice to see what exactly they are going to do with Fallout, considering what a good job they did with morrowind.
I'd have rather seen Obsidian Entertainment pick it up, but Bethesda should do a good job with it.
Rob
I really wanted to see someboyd like Obsidian get their hands on Fallout III, since they already had a lot of the talent from Black Isles. I'm not going to get too excited with Bethesda behind the wheel. They've never disappointed me (in fact, they've uusally exceeded my expectations) in the Elderscrolls series, but I don't know how well they can shift from that to Fallout. Morrowind had great story behind it, and the open-endedness was above and beyond either of the Fallout games. I hope they can keep that level of depth, but fit it into the coarser feel of Fallout. Then the gameplay... When Black Isle had talked about making Fallout 3 real-time, a lot of people on the messageboards were upset, and wanted them to keep a system simmilar to the first two Fallout games. Especially after Brotherhood of Steel, I don't see many fans -myself included- of the series being very open to a shift to first-person like Morrowind. Especially with the sort of weapons that Fallout is based on, it'd be a very fine line between RPG and FPS.
You knew you were in for a treat when you fired up Fallout: the kitschy black and white TV airing 50's style media slowly zoomed back and back and back, all to an optimistic tune, revealing finally a desolate cityscape devestated by nuclear war.
The game certainly took a number of popular concepts in the bleak future of a post-nuclear holocaust, but it did it with such style that you could ignore many of the familiar sci-fi memes. It was just a heck of a lot of fun to play, to discover what actions would lead to widescale changes in what were the remnants of California.
Although by the time Fallout 2 came out there were vast advances in graphics and sound, the game didn't take advantage of them, re-using the same engine from before. And that was OK, actually, because while others pushed for so much in 3D goroud shaded volumetric fullbrights with translucent starbright shadows and supercharged texels, the folks at Interplay concentrated on story. (OK, they threw in some excellent voice talent, too.) And it, too, was a damn good game.
I wonder what directions Bethesda will take with the franchise.
I hope it's not as buggy as Fallout and Fallout 2. I really liked the concept behind those games, but I couldn't get myself to finish them because every time I tried, I got too angry at the BIG OBVIOUS HONKIN' BUGS they had, and abandoned.
Does anyone have any idea if they're planning Linux support?
What is it with you 2d vs 3d fanatics? A good game is a good game regardless of the perspective. And please describe the "fallout feeling". Fallout was good because it was a Black Isle game and because the designers were superb. The only problem with true 3D is the art is just not there yet. The 3D creatures just don't look as realistic or interesting. Still if anyone could pull it off it would be Bethesda.
And you can bet that it will be 3D and that it won't be a Doom clone or fps because of it. I just hope Bethesda doesn't forget about having a story as they have done all to often.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Wow, some one played the game that the Fallout series is based from!!
play wastland all the way though, its worth it.
I did, even though i had to cheat to do it.
course, i was 11 at the time!
Piracy is Adam Smiths invisble hand fisting you in the ass, Mr. Gates. - MightyMartian (840721)
RPGs need more variety. The first Fallout was great. It had great gameplay, an interesting story, and most importantly, didn't involve elves, rangers, swords and spells.
It's not that I have anything against Dungeons and Dragons. I just think that a pen and paper RPG doesn't necessarily make a good computer RPG, and that it's great to shake things up a little.
Far too many modern RPGs still have annoyances that just don't need to be there. Why must I play inventory tetris instead of playing the game? Why are my classes always "Fighter", "Paladin", "Ranger", "Wizard" instead of "Inventor", "Lawyer", "Cop"? Why are the races the typical "Elf", "Human", "Barbarian" rather than "Elemental", "Ape-man" or "Grey Alien"?
Fallout 3 may not be a great game. The Fallout franchise has become worse and worse since the first game came out. But, even if it isn't a great game, I'll be really happy to see it come out, because it means variety in a genre that desperately needs it.
I'm not a huge fan of Morrowind because of the rubbery graphics. Fallout 2 has a lower-end graphics setting that lets you imagine what things might look like, without painting too much of it for you. The snarky storyline was what made the game fun, not to mention the evil side of things. Like they had really funny cards that showed what your character was like. The funny cards didn't save Fallout Tactics from ruin, but maybe with a rich storyline in Fallout 3, we may see some improvements to the Fallout franchise. I only hope that they don't use the Morrowind engine for Fallout 3, because Fallout fans are very picky. They should use graphics like Temple of Elemental Evil, and that would be nice enough (sans bugs).
But I'm guessing Fallout 3 will use graphics much like Morrowind. Too bad.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
most of it was interesting with the right frame of mind.
you know, if you followed any of the plots.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm just happy someone else than Interplay is picking up Fallout, it's a truly great series. But Interplay really is something, they have (had) several strong franchises and golden opportunities that they've completely squandered time and time again.
Let's see, I can't even remember how many there's been... Descent and the excellent Descent: Freespace licenses come to mind. Ran those into the ground pretty spectacularly. Then there's Fallout of course. Interplay published the first Baldur's Gate, then botched that up completely, can't blame Bioware for not wanting to have anything to do with these guys anymore. Black Isle, now that was an innovative game house. Brought us Fallout and one of the greatest CRPG ever, Planescape: Torment. What does Interplay do? Shut the lot down. Well, at least we got Obsidian and Troika out of that wreckage. Didn't they have the Lord of the Rings license back in the day too? Now that's a license to print money, but somehow they managed to mess that up too.
At the moment they're just hogging licenses, they should sell the lot on Ebay and maybe we could get some respectable game companies like Obsidian or Bioware to give us some decent games.
It's like deja vu all over again.
Half-Life is a little too far down the scale of pure twitchiness and reflexes vs. strategic thinking and planning.
But people should NOT bash the first-person perspective at all. Done right, it really allows for more impressive graphics, and it doesn't all have to be about how fast you can click.
I've been playing City of Heroes lately, which takes place in a very futuristic city with incredibly nice graphics. The best part is by scrolling the mouse wheel you can move the camera back away from your character into a wide 3rd-person view, or all the way in to a 1st-person. You get to control it. I'd have no problem with something like that.
As to the combat system, City of Heroes is real-time, but every weapon has a limiting recharge time, so no matter how fast you click you have to wait X amount of time for those brass knuckles to cycle, or X+5 for your Red Ryder BB gun. It's first (or 3rd) person, but not a shooter. It's an RPG.
I'd love to play a Fallout game in a system like that. Hopefully they'll do a good job!
I also remember seeing and getting to play a Japanese Dreamcast there, since they hadn't come out in the US yet, and the developers were debating whether they should develop for it (I believe they released a bowling game).
And the CEO showed us the basement, where they shrank-wrap the boxes (looking back, it seems weird that they packaged the games there. I doubt they still do), and the shrink-wrapper almost chopped his hand off, before giving us free copies of Redguard and XCar (I think) right out of a box.
My friend that I went with also shattered the glass table in their lobby while we were waiting.
I'll pick that one up. I once wrote in my journal the following:
:-)
"Elder Scrolls3: Morrowind made a shot at a humongous world. They did manage to get that right. But they went astray. There was no Garriot. No Lord British. There was no atmosphere. It was just an endless [beautiful] world of immensely over-recycled content, unbalanced gameplay, flat-as-a-plank characters and utterly boring [and endless] fed-ex quests that required spending too much of the game time on travel. The company who made it just wasn't Origin, it lacked a guide. And the game was a flop."
The parent post pretty much pointed the same way. The vastness aspect was wonderful, but if you compare the uniqueness and style of Fallout 2 or Baldur's Gate quests to those of Morrowind, Morrowind has no soul. Not the towns, not the characters, not the quests. It's all somehow "flat and lifeless".
The second bad thing about morrowind is balance. Once you have a weapon that can paralyze, you're through the game. Even with difficulty cranked up to the full 200%. About 60% through the game ther e is practically no item in the known Morrowind universe that can outperform what you already have. Treasures become meaningless.
Unbalanced with easily-achieved godhood is the magic ingredient for a shitty game, for the simple reason it stops being fun to play.
The third bad thing about morrowind is the immense amount of recycled graphics.
You find a pirate cave. Cool. Then you find a Skeleton/Undead cave. Cool. Then you find a mine. Cool.
Then you find roughly 100 more of each of the above 3, that feature NO uniqueness, NO carefully hidden goodies or easter eggs, No unique artwork, and basically differn only insofar as mildly different interior decoration and "micro-level design". (i.e. same rooms but put together in a slightly different way).
To make this even more annoying, you need to manually keep track of which you cleared and which you haven't.
To sum up, I think they need more than "polish" to make FO3 a good game. I think they need to overcome some very untrivial hurdles in game design. Having however seen them make something of the Morrowind caliber, I do believe they're fully capable of it.
So it does in the end amount to whether they'll go with what they already did or try and take that step forward.
Go Bethesda!
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