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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."
So we get Fallout 3 *and* a Fallout MMORPG?
Should I file for that divorce now or later?
I see this as terrible news, myself.
I realize that Oblivion is a very popular game that a lot of people like. But I just can't get into it. If anything, it's too open-ended - it feels like someone sat down, made a universe, took a week to throw a plotline into it, and then spent a year or two making side quests. I never feel like I'm having a real impact in the world, and I feel like most of the world is in stasis waiting for me to walk by and solve their problems.
I wouldn't even mind all of that, except that Bethesda appears to have no sense of which features are important and which are not. Sure, you can become a vampire. That's great and all. But why is my inventory so hard to navigate? I could do without becoming a vampire if they'd just make the interface not suck. (Yes, I realize there are now third-party mods for this. A game shouldn't need to be modded to be playable.) At least they're getting better - some of the bugs and glitches in Morrowind were hilarious. It's like nobody ever bothered to sit down and play the game, they just decided to put every awesome feature possible in it without any thought to polish.
I think that, fundamentally, Bethesda needs to sit down and make an MMORPG. Their design style is practically ideally suited for it, and once they see what horrible problems their "game balancing" creates, they might learn how to balance a damn game for once. But I have to say that I'm not excited in the least about what Bethesda does anymore, and I'm deeply saddened that they now own the Fallout series.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The humor of Fallout is far more than just "a little smiling cartoon" telling you that you did a-okay with that SMG. It involves sarcasm, irony, coincidence, dark humor, and Monty Python references. Hines's answer suggests that they are going to stray far from the established norm, and not in a good way.
Just for the record, that part of the interview can be found here:
http://spong.com/detail/editorial.jsp?eid=1010951
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.
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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I have never seen such a pitiful bunch of whining elitist crybabies as I've seen in this thread. I'm thinking of applying to Bethesda just so I can work on Fallout 3, make it rubbish, and watch with glee as you fling yourselves off the nearest cliff, mewling with self-pity all the way down to the welcoming waves.
P.