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Fallout IP Sold to Bethesda Softworks
In what I can only see as good news, the Fallout IP has been sold to Bethesda Softworks. A long, long time ago simoniker posted that Bethesda was licensing the IP from Interplay; as of earlier this month, they now own it lock, stock, and barrel. Gamasutra reports: "According to the filing, first spotted by Fallout fansite No Mutants Allowed, the purchase of the Fallout license and accompanying IP was settled on April 9th of this year, with final payment installments expected to be delivered by the third quarter of this year ... In an interesting twist, as part of the agreement Interplay now acts as a licensee of the IP as it continues to ramp up production on its own Fallout-themed massively multiplayer game, first announced in 2004 alongside Bethesda's sequel, and shown via internal documents as recently as December to have a projected $75 million dollar budget and launch date of 2010."
A fantastic IP ending up in the hands of such a crappy developer. I'm certain Pipboy is crying his eyes out right now.
Given Bethesda's miserable track record, any new Fallout games will now:
* Be mostly focused on the usual crap pc developers seem to live for, water effects and shiny metal armor on things
* Be obscenely buggy
* Run like crap - too busy making thing shiny and tweaking the water reflections to be bothered with all that messy and tedious rendering optimization stuff
* Use crappy middleware like Gamebryo because no one of any competence works at Bethesda
* Really,really long. And really,really boring
Farewell Fallout. You will be missed.
This is basically the death certificate for Fallout. We'll never see a Fallout 3 which the fans have been screaming for. Bethesda has a wonderful track record when it comes to their own Elder Scrolls game. They have a horrible track record for everything else. Their games are now (and will probably remain as such) X-Box 360 Games which are poorly ported to the PC. They have shown no desire for turn-based strategy games. They have so far refused to say whether or not Fallout 3 will be turn based or not, or whether or not it will use the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system that Fallout fans have grown to love. Star Trek: Legacy was a pathetic failure. They did a great job getting the voice-acting together, but then they threw half of the plot out the window. Just read some of the blogs of the writers for that game, and they've clearly said as much. The gameplay, the actual GAME that Star Trek fans had such high hopes for... was awful. Bethesda is going to give us Fallout 3... but it won't be the same game that we know and love. They'll convert it and change the gameplay so that they can mass produce it. They'll want to have it on the PC and all the consoles. They'll make it for the X-Box 360, and then do a terrible port of it to make a PC version. They won't make combat turn-based, because in spite of legions of screaming fans, turn based combat is too "niche" and won't appeal to the masses enough. Gone will be Fallout's mature content. Drugs, hookers, swearing? Gone. We'll get a watered down Fallout universe which is nice and PG-13 friendly. Remember, this was the company that took all the blood out of their own game, Oblivion, because they didn't want an M rating. Bethesda is going to give us a game. MAYBE it will be a good game. But it won't be Fallout 3. Unless they come out and say that they are making a turn-based combat role-playing game, it won't be Fallout 3. At best, it will be a bad spin-off, like the other forgotten Fallout titles that have emerged since Fallout 2. Actually, I thought that Fallout: Tactics was a pretty good game. If they drop the ball on this, they fully have the capacity to KILL the Fallout franchise once and for all. I'm still praying though. I really really really am. I hope everything I just said is completely false (Except for what I said about Star Trek Legacy, and Bethesda's habit of making awful PC ports. That's all true.)
I have a great deal of misgivings on this. I really don't think Bethesda should be in the business of making RPG's. Their games have been [in my eyes] a downward slide since Daggerfall. Morrowind had fantastic atmosphere, but the combat and most importantly the Quests and NPC's, were incredibly boring and dull. Oblivion vastly improved the graphics and combat, but the NPC's actually got worse: They retained their wiki-like dialogue from Morrowind, except with fewer things to talk about. What they could talk about was vastly reduced in length, to keep voice-overs from getting too large, and each race only had one or two voice actors, so you get things like a beggar talking like a nobleman and then going back to talking like a beggar.
Furthermore, the atmosphere and setting took a nosedive. Lore was completely thrown out; what made Morrowind so exotic and alien was gone. Instead they went with a classical fairytale look. [Cyrodiil is supposed to be a jungle.] But by far the worst thing they did with Oblivion was the level scaling. One of the biggest draws of Morrowind was to go exploring in dungeons for valuables, there's absolutely no point to this in Oblivion. Everything is scaled to your level. It doesn't matter where you go or what you do; any treasure you find is scaled to your level, almost all the monsters are scaled to your level. There's no challenge, no mystery, no reward. You might break into a rich nobleman's house, but it doesn't matter if you pick the level 90 lock on his treasure chest, because all you're going to get are a couple gold coins and maybe a rusty dagger.
If this continues, Fallout 3 isn't even going to be an RPG. Oh, they're going to call it one, for sure. But I think the game, like Morrowind did from Daggerfall, and Oblivion from Morrowind, will slip so far away from the RPG genre, that you'll barely even be able to call it an RPG. [Unless of course, you consider and RPG as just 'playing a role'.] I really get the feeling it'll be something like Diablo, but with guns.
Oblivion was "re-rated" M retroactively because you could mod the game to include topless females. It wasn't because of the violence.
You make fun of me and call me an "idiotic Fallout cultist" because I love the game mechanics, and then tell me that I shouldn't be in love with them.
I'm sorry, but the game mechanics are part of the reason that the Fallout games were so excellent. It's wrong of me to love it for that reason? My desire to see the game mechanics I love continued in sequels is somehow wrong? If Bethesda re-made "Street Fighter 2" and turned it into a Final Fantasy type game, I would be equally upset, and I would say the same thing. "This is not a sequel to a Street Fighter game. It is a Street Fighter spin-off game."
You say "co-developing" Oblivion for the PC and for consoles. I say that when you look at the PC version of Oblivion, it is obvious that they designed the game for the console, plain and simple, and did very little to scale the game upwards to the PC. The simple fact that you cannot map any keyboard commands beyond what a game controller can handle makes this self-evident. I love Oblivion, but only after I've installed 3 mods that "fix" the PC version. I am glad they made a PC version of the game. However, they did a poor job of it.
You'd think that Bethesda had raped everyone's dog the way people are reacting to this news. I would have thought Slashdot to be a little more open minded and thoughtful than NMA.
Just because you didn't like Elder Scrolls doesn't mean Fallout will be bad.
Just because they made Elder Scrolls doesn't mean Fallout will be LIKE Elder Scrolls.
If you don't want Bethesday to make it - who the hell DO you want? Should the IP just sit unused until everyone forgets about it? Should we let the next generation of gamer's only impresssions of it be the Interplay MMO? At least wait until you play a demo or something before you start screaming bloody murder.
I realize some people love Oblivion but I think Oblivion epitomizes what's wrong with PC gaming. It's a fabulous tech demo but otherwise lacking real substance and style. Bethesda seemed to be so obsessed with creating a photo-realistic world that they've sucked the life and art out of the game. I have to admit that those landscapes look phenomenal. But then you walk up to any NPC and they look goofy. Monsters look like claymation and humans look like second-rate actors from some crappy fantasy movie.
I haven't seen a single NPC from Oblivion or any of the expansions that doesn't look goofy. They don't look like people who would inhabit a true fantasy world. They don't have battle-hardened bodies, some even have a chin fat like they've eaten one too many pop tarts. Many look like they probably Bethesda employees complete with the look of amusement at the fact that they're going to be featured in a game.
The tech demo feel never leaves me, what with the obsessive use of texture mapping. Almost everything in Oblivion has this lumpy wet look. It feels like it's there to impress the viewer as opposed to actually adding substance to the game.
Then there's the ridiculous gameplay mechanic of enemies scaling to the player's level. Doesn't that defeat the whole point of leveling up in an RPG? It seems like an ill-conceived solution to the leveling problems encountered in Morrowind. I'm inevitably left with the impression that the developers didn't spend much time thinking about gameplay.
Then there's the performance aspect. Oblivion is one of those games that can make a 1 to 2 year old machine feel obsolete. Buy a console and performance isn't even an issue. There's comfort in knowing that not only will the system handle any game designed for it but the games will almost certainly improve throughout that system's lifespan. Not so with PCs. I can't help but think this alienates many PC gamers. It alienates me and I much prefer PC gaming over console gaming.
But Bethesda like other PC developers are obsessed with pushing the limits of hardware. So gamers get stuck with the same old genres with not much to look for but increasingly realistic graphics with little style. World of Warcraft doesn't have anywhere near the graphical sophistication of Oblivion, but I think it's far more entertaining to look it because it has such a strong sense of character. I'd argue that a single screenshot of the most recent Final Fantasy game has more creative style than all of Oblivion, even if Oblivion is more impressive technically. But I just don't feel like there's a real sense of creativity.
I didn't really intend on getting on that sort of rant about Oblivion. But I think it illustrates what I expect from any new Fallout game. I expect Bethesda to apply the Oblivion approach to Fallout. It's going to be another lifeless tech demo that wont run well on anything but the latest hardware.
1. Game balance: PLEASE, oh PRETTY PLEASE, make the game (monsters, items) not level up with the game.
/additional/ items the player gets given require him to do.
/informed/ consideration to the types of bonuses given by leveling, just picking stuff at random like someone who doesn't understand all those long technical words. It's not fun to those of us who ARE trying to achieve their best using your game mechanics (i.e. attempt to obtain the best "numbers" that the game mechanics allow us to). It's our way to try and get ahead, win. Your system encourages game mediocrity, and throws us to hell.
I realize it's a seriously cheaper solution than paying a group of people play the game many times to find the fine line between laughably easy (and thus not fun) and impossibly hard (frustrating and thus not fun), with properly controlling player's access to powerful items and monsters in an open-ended world. It's the ultimate challenge for someone who makes an RPG. Your choice in Oblivion did not sidestep the issue. It FAILED the issue. The game may have been fun to people who play it with a side-quest tick-list, not really caring what comes between tick and tick, but your core crowd, both oblivion-side and fallout-side, will be the people who diligently explore every nook and cranny of the virtual world, expecting to be rewarded by some meaningful (read: NOT scaled and otherwise easily-attainable) item that was scaled to their level anyway and could have thus been found in any easily-accessible container. You have done this in some places in Oblivion, you need to do it MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE. I've reached numerous hard location, and found nothing but items my level would have gotten out of any other, usually easier to come across, chest.
2. Random Treasure - NOT IN HARD-TO-REACH locations. Well-protected or Hard-to-get-to chests, whether in dungeons, some hard-to-find sunken ship, some well-locked-up merchant's house etc should NOT EVER be random. They should have unique and helpful items, to reward diligence in getting to the hard-to-reach location.
3. Your game system, XP (as in experience points, not the OS) and SPECIAL.
XP is a WONDERFUL concept. It is the utterly best coin by which you can reward a player. Better than gold, better than items. There is NEVER enough XP (and if there is, bump your level cap). XP should buy levels, and levels should buy abilities that COMPLEMENT those given by items, not require you to displace old items like
Oblivion had no XP system. (as a side-note, XP and levels were a bit on the uninfluential side, considering you didn't get any edge over anything by leveling up, if anything, even after all the new items that magically appeared around the world, you could still barely keep up with the monsters).
It had a leveling system that screamed macroing. If you'd stand in one place and jump 5000 times, you got more bonuses when you leveled up. It was geared towards semi-exploitation, i.e. do something the game allows to get more powerful, but spend a lot of boring game time doing it. So you choose between either boring yourself to death, or throwing powergaming out the window. BAD choice to impose on your clients. powergaming SHOULD NOT be made boring.
Further, if you accidentally level up (by practicing your chosen skills - this might be by running enough for example) before you practiced the skills that would give you the correct attribute bonuses, you MISS OUT on the bonuses. To anyone who is informed of his char sheet and future development plans, Leveling in Oblivion is an annoying minefield to be meticulously planned from day 1 and very carefully treaded throughout the game, instead of the satisfying gameplay perk it should be. I realize you can just play the game and ignore leveling bonuses, but that's no better than playing any RPG without proper
Enter SPECIAL, fallout's levelup/skill system. Like Oblivion, albeit in a very different way, it is classless (as compared to, say, classic AD&D). But it isn't jus
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