Fallout Fallout is 20 years old today!

[Multidirectional]

That's some deep shit.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Did these two threads really need merging?

Show me a thread that doesn't need merging and I'll show you a thread that Infinitron hasn't read yet.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I beat Fallout last year and enjoyed it. Tried it two or three times over the past 4 years or so, but kept droppoing for whatever reason. It's a very small RPG, but the available options and the way it presents itself makes you feel like you've played something twice as big. Also the soundtrack is very good, still listen to it once in a while.

Then I played Fallout 2 and dropped it halfway through. Will give it another try later.

why?

Fallout 2 is basically fallout 2 with less coherent theme, and it is more theme park-y, but still fun to play and way more content

Frequent crashes, less interesting content, high expectations after Fallout 1.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/fallout/fallout-first-person

Fallout nearly went first-person back in 1997

When Fallout 3 made the switch to first-person, it was a point of contention for RPG fans. The Fallouts that had come before had been isometric, and that perspective had become a defining part of their nostalgia; when Wasteland 2 was Kickstarted, it too was isometric. As it turns out, however, Fallout could have been first-person from the very beginning - a decade before Bethesda took over the series.

“There were a lot of isometric games at the time,” Fallout 1 art director Leonard Boyarksy tells us in our retrospective on Fallout. “If you weren’t trying to go first-person, it’s like everything was isometric. I remember while we were working on Fallout we saw the first stuff from Tomb Raider, and that was pretty much the first third-person action game.”

As development began on Fallout, the team at Interplay - yet to be christened Black Isle Studios - had just finished work on Stonekeep. Stonekeep had been a first-person RPG in the style of Eye of the Beholder: “And we thought about first-person [for Fallout],” map layout designer Scott Everts says. “But it was all sprites.”

Boyarsky soon decided that the limited first-person of the period wouldn’t allow the level of detail he wanted for Fallout’s wasteland.

“Even before we talked about whether we could do it with the mechanics of what we wanted the gameplay to be, I was like, ‘We’re not gonna do it,’” he says. “You just couldn’t make a game look as good as I wanted to make it look in first-person 3D. If you think about the first Tomb Raider, it had a great action feel to it but in terms of detail, I wanted a lot more intricacy in our art.”

For more on the unlikely development of an RPG classic, read our feature on how Fallout 1 ever got made. It’s part of a week-long 20th anniversary celebration of Fallout on PCGamesN, which takes in Fallout 2's weird wasteland and the all-but-forgotten Fallout: Tactics.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/fallout/new-fallout-game-secret

There's a whole Fallout game planned out that you'll probably never play

Tim Cain says he’s been secretly harbouring a concept for a new Fallout game for 20 years. In an interview with Cain, who was lead programmer on the original game, he says he first had the idea for his game before development started on Fallout 2.

In our interview, Cain told PCGamesN “I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1.” But despite having nurtured the idea for around two decades, Cain has never told anyone about his idea. Nor does he have any faith that it’ll ever actually be made.

Cain says the game is “completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it's sat there for 20 years.”

Unfortunately though, it’s not likely the mystery game will ever see the light of day. The reason for that seems to lie more in Cain’s own high standards than anything else, however, as he says “I don't think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what's in my head. But it's up there.”

Debate around where a new Fallout game could be said is almost constantly raging. So far all the games have been set in the continental United States, but Europe and China are also potential settings.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/fallout-2/fallout-2-car-trunk-companion

Fallout 2 nearly gave players a car trunk for a companion

Fallout 2 is rightly celebrated as a classic of computer role-playing games, but there’s no denying that things got a little weird for the post-apocalyptic sequel. Treasure-hunting dwarves, a chess-playing Radscorpion, and far more weirdness helped to define the game’s manic tone. That’s largely the result of hurried development cycle, and the same rush almost netted us a car trunk that would follow the player character around the world.

Unlike the rest of the ridiculous stuff in Fallout 2, though, this bit was unintentional. More reasonably, Black Isle wanted to give players a car which featured a usable trunk for storage. “The way we implemented that was to basically categorise the trunk as a companion,” programmer Dan Spitzley tells us. “But that meant sometimes the trunk would disconnect from the car and kind of ‘walk around’ behind the player. You'd be on the third floor of a Vault or something, and the trunk would suddenly turn up next to you. It turned out to be a huge issue.”

As wild as Fallout 2 ended up being, justifying a sentient trunk might’ve been a step too far. Yet publisher pressure meant the game suffered all sorts of technical issues in addition to its often silly references, and it’s a testament to the core quality of the game that it’s still considered a classic despite those problems.

These details come courtesy of our interview with the team behind Fallout 2, which is full of all sorts of insight on the game’s rocky development. That feature is just a small part of our week-long celebration of Fallout’s 20th anniversary, and we’ve got similar insight on the original game’s development. And we’re ready to tell you why the time is right for a Fallout: Tactics sequel.

 

[Infinitron]

Onward to the Bethesda age: https://www.pcgamesn.com/fallout-3/fallout-3-washington-dc

How Fallout 3's Washington, D.C. reinvented the dungeon

This article is part of our week-long celebration of Fallout's 20th anniversary. Make sure you check back throughout the week for more features.

Sometimes, when you load into a dungeon in Skyrim, you can see the exit. There is no glowing green sign; you are not supposed to notice it. But occasionally you will see a high passageway that opens into a cavern entrance, at such a height that entry is impossible from below. Lo and behold, once you have navigated those underground passageways - perhaps fought a lich and recovered an ancient weapon - you will find yourself tumbling a short distance from that passageway to the point at which you started. In a satisfying moment of recognition, the loop closes.

This is expert level design in action: a way of funneling you through an adventure before you have even noticed it happening. But it is also traditionalist in the extreme. This loop is part of a larger one, in which you delve into a dungeon, do a spot of looting, and return to the hamlet from whence you came. There you will sell your trinkets, treat your wounds, and set out to find the next dungeon with an even shinier sword.

It is perhaps the oldest paradigm in PC gaming. In fact, it predates PC gaming, beginning on the tabletop and becoming codified in computer RPGs during the ‘80s and ‘90s. Bethesda, who are hardly newcomers to the genre, played their part in defining it with The Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall. But with Fallout 3 they specifically set out to blur the lines.

“We knew early on that one of our big concepts for the game was to challenge the traditional RPG divisions between towns, wilderness, and dungeon,” Bethesda level designer Joel Burgess explains in a post-release blog.

Blessed with a dedicated level design team from day one - for the first time in the studio’s history - Bethesda were in the mood to experiment. And nowhere is that experimentation more apparent than in Fallout 3’s rendering of Washington, D.C. Or perhaps that should be ‘rending’. The idea is that the city - America’s capital, after all - had been the target of a direct atomic pounding. By the time we get there, D.C. is a tortured grey mass of steel beams and debris, like the inside of a crushed-car cube. Travelling overland is consequently near-impossible, and fraught with Super Mutant encounters, driving players into the metro tunnels: Bethesda’s biggest, most ambitious dungeon.

This dungeon broke all the rules. Mainly through size: these tunnels are not a self-contained loop you can easily get your head around, but a sprawling network of ancient stations, collapsed basements, and natural caves. They are overwhelming, by design.

“Players are not expected to ‘complete’ D.C. in the sense that one completes a traditional game level,” Burgess says.

The whole area is secreted with little cues intended to point out that fact, gently breaking down those expectations learned from decades of dungeon-delving. NPCs you meet in D.C. will tell you in no uncertain terms that the place is huge. Major areas are given unique names to suggest they are full-length experiences in and of themselves. And, perhaps most significantly, Bethesda broke up their dungeon into discrete map markers. These tiny squares encourage players to mentally compartmentalise the capital’s challenges and - as any Bethesda game player knows - double as fast travel points.

Soon enough, that familiar dungeon loop emerges in a newly organic fashion. There is a natural end point to a D.C. adventure you will probably recognise, and that is right around the moment you find yourself battling weight restrictions to keep your best loot. From there you can travel back to town, sell your trinkets, treat your wounds, and then return to the most recent checkpoint you uncovered in the capital’s ruins. There is always something else worth seeing: Bethesda gave themselves a mandate to make every train tunnel unique in some way.

“This is in response to one of our own criticisms of Oblivion, echoed by many fans of that game, which was the amount of repetition in dungeons,” Burgess explains. “Though we must re-use art assets out of necessity when creating such a large game, we made time for every space to be built and iterated upon by hand, by both level designers and artists.”

Part of Fallout 3’s legacy lies in setting the concept of a videogame dungeon free. Bethesda’s D.C. allows you to approach its dangers from different directions, in different orders, and still find a satisfying loop you can recognise as dungeon-spelunking. It is a far more open experience than the linear descent of the traditional dungeon, and you can still see variations on it today in Fallout 4’s Boston. There, Bethesda lift the dungeon high into the air, to become a network of meandering pathways between the creaking, yawning husks of skyscrapers. The liches might be called ghouls now, but make no mistake: the studio that helped define the RPG dungeon has taken great pleasure in pulling it apart.

 

[Sykar]

Sure, there's that other thread about how it's free on Steam through today, but it mentions nothing about this very important occasion.

When Fallout was released, 20 year old games included the first version of Zork and Space Wars, the first arcade game with vector graphics. Feeling old yet?

I bought Fallout years after release in a bundle, so I won't be able to reminisce about how it was in the good old days. In 1997 I was playing Quake and Diablo like some casual PC gamer.

I played these and Fallout 1 alongside XCom 2. Am I cool or what?

 

[Paul_cz]

Fallout nearly went first-person back in 1997

I mean, the intro of Fallout 1, when you walk out of the vault is in first person. Even back then I imagined how cool it would be to explore the world from that close-up perspective.
Which is why I was quite positive about Bethesda doing it, but I didn't know they would fuck up writing and design yet. But at least it led to New Vegas.

 

[Infinitron]

New Vegas: https://www.pcgamesn.com/fallout-new-vegas/making-of-fallout-new-vegas-josh-sawyer

Making Fallout: New Vegas was a battle against time and impolite NPCs

This article is part of our week-long celebration of Fallout's 20th anniversary. Make sure you check back throughout the week for more features.

One of the most memorable quests in Fallout: New Vegas is called Come Fly With Me, where you launch a rocket from the REPCONN test site. Once you have gathered the supplies needed to fix the missile, you are treated to a cutscene of the rocket blasting towards the sky, backed by Richard Wagner's rousing classical song, Ride of the Valkyries. Obsidian put extra effort into making this sequence look, sound, and feel as good as possible. Lead designer Josh Sawyer wanted to see how it looked for himself once it was finished. But, unfortunately, his viewing was rudely interrupted by a tap on the shoulder - an NPC really wanted to talk to him about bottlecaps.

The NPC, Malcolm Holmes, had trekked across the Mojave desert for this chinwag, like some die-hard post-apocalyptic pilgrim. “Bethesda’s engine allows you to mark a character as persistent, which means they can be active no matter where in the world the player is,” Sawyer tells me. “So you can have bounty hunters tracking you, you can have guys obsessed with bottlecaps following you, you can do all sorts of stuff like that. Bethesda's tech allowed us to do a lot of stuff we haven’t been able to before.”

When Malcom showed up, Sawyer was completely taken by surprise, it being one of the unexpected consequences that comes with leveraging Bethesda’s engine. “It was like ‘Holy shit, dude, how did you get in here?’,” he says.

In an attempt to cut down on the times where these emergent moments turn from funny anecdotes into annoying interruptions, Obsidian crafted some rules. One of these rules stopped NPCs from following you into New Vegas proper, making the bright lights of the irradiated gambler's paradise feel like a safer haven. In a simulated world like New Vegas’s, though, even a seemingly simple rule like that can have unforeseen results.

“I had these Legion assassins after me for a long time, and I was just never in a part of the map where they could get to me,” Sawyer recalls. “So they were just hovering on the east side of the map. Late in the game, you have to go to the Eldorado Substation for something, and I went to the 188 [trading post] and rested. All of the mattresses are down below, so I rest there, and I wake up and hear all hell breaking loose - people are dying, body parts are falling over the side of the bridge. I go up and find these Legion assassins have caught up to me.

“Because this is late-game, there are NCR heavy troopers out there with machineguns and power armour, and all the people that are there are NCR allied, so they’re fighting alongside the NCR troopers. So I was like this sleepyhead late riser. Everyone was dead except one Legion assassin. I killed him and looked around - it was just carnage. Vendors were dead, all the NPCs were dead, and I was just like ‘Well, gotta get going’.”

It is likely that you have similar memories of Fallout: New Vegas. Games built in Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine are often criticised for their roughness - the bugs, the disappearing NPCs, and the others who unceremoniously die when you are not around - but it is that rawness that makes the games created in it so memorable. One of my personal favourite moments from Skyrim was when I robbed a shopkeeper blind - literally, because I placed a bucket over his head so he could not see me pocketing his wares. These worlds are built on top of a simulation that sometimes feels barely stitched together and yet, somehow, it is even more entertaining when it unwinds, because the stories created by that mayhem are unique to you.

Of course, Fallout 3 had already acted as an incredible anecdote generator not long before New Vegas launched, so Obsidian had the terrifying task of taking that template, harnessing the carnage of a simulated world, and layering on new systems, all in 18 months. “At the time, it was daunting,” Sawyer admits. “For a long time we didn’t really know the technology very well. Because we weren’t going to a new renderer or anything, it was basically like ‘Well, this is Fallout 3, but not as good’ - that was my fear, that people were going to say it was Fallout 3, but nothing was better about it. The whole team put a lot of effort into thinking through how the factions behave, how they interact, and how the world looks, the reasons for why things are laid out the way that they are. I think, when the game launched, people just didn’t notice a lot of that stuff.

“That was a little frustrating at first, because if you’re just playing the game for five to ten hours you’re just like ‘Oh, it’s like Fallout 3, whatever’. One of the things that does make me happy is, over the years, people are starting to notice a lot of the details that the world builders put in, the writers put in, the quest designers put in, creating reactivity. It’s stuff you might not even notice in a single playthrough, but on multiple playthroughs - and there are people who have over 1,000 hours on Steam - they start to see, like, wow, there really is a tonne of stuff you can do in this world that is meaningful in a reactive sense.”

The team had a monumental workload in that short development time. They had to get to grips with new development tools, write 65,000 lines of branching dialogue, design quests, create characters, improve the mechanics - for example, adding an aim-down-sights mode for guns, creating a faction system, disguises, and more - and even build the world.

Speaking of which, it was a trip to Vegas itself that kicked off the creation of Fallout’s casino wonderland. “John Gonzalez was our creative lead and was really interested in classic Vegas,” Sawyer says. “I was more interested in the Mojave Desert, so I rode my motorcycle around Mojave and went out to Red Rock, and went around a lot of the old towns that ended up being in the game, like Goodsprings. That was just to get a feel of the desert.”

The trip generated a bunch of reference photos so the team could try to capture the feeling of Vegas and the surrounding area; all arid, desolate, and expansive. The trick was to mimic that while creating a play space that is around 1/60th of the scale. “We got real satellite data off the internet and were able to import it into the game and reduce it down,” lead world builder Scott Everts explains. “The problem was, as I reduced it, its height variance was huge, so we had to squash it down both ways, flatten down a lot of it. Then we had to add some noise to undulate it a bit. There was a lot of fussing. I was working on it for weeks and weeks.”

“The Colorado River was pretty funny, because we scaled it down and everything seemed to feel pretty good in terms of traversal, then you go to the Colorado River and you could jump across it,” Sawyer adds with a laugh. “The scale was reduced down so much, so Scott had to do some surgery and kind of expand the Colorado River and Lake Mead so it wasn’t just this puddle.”

To evoke the feeling of a place in a simulacrum a fraction of its size was no easy job, but Obsidian found it helped to imbue the game world with the personality of the real location - the decadence of Vegas as well as the quaintness of some of the surrounding area. “I don’t know if this is true any more but, for a long time, Nipton was where everyone from Vegas went when they wanted to buy a lottery ticket,” Sawyer remembers. “So we had someone working on the team, Fryda Wolff, who’s now a voice actor - her dad went to Vegas and every week he would drive down to Nipton to get lottery tickets. In the game, the way we represented that was you come up to Nipton and Oliver Swanick runs out and he’s like ‘Yeah! I won the lottery!’”

Obsidian are some of the best in the business at this stuff - making a place feel alive, that it has a history. Every person and location in that world feels lived in, despite the fact that almost everything there died in nuclear fire. Every house tells a story. That environmental storytelling works with the emergent stories to sear New Vegas into your mind as a series of memories. Take Malcolm Holmes, that bottlecap-obsessed resident of Obsidian’s post-apocalyptic wasteland - when you meet him, he tells you he has retired from the bottlecap collecting business. Yet, if you react to him tapping you on the shoulder by taking him out (you brute!), you will find six star bottlecaps on his corpse. He was lying to you, but you’d never know it if you didn’t kill him or pick his pocket. That knowledge doesn’t change anything - it simply adds flavour to the story of one minor character. Little things like that make NPCs feel like they have a past, that they harbour secrets, and that their sole purpose isn’t to sprint across a map in order to ruin your cutscene. In turn, it helps to sell the idea that the world is not reliant on you, that life continues when you are not around.

“One of the things about that game is it would have been a lot different if it was PC only,” Everts recalls of the world design. “We had a lot of plans early on. Like, ‘Here’s where the water is stored, here’s where the farms are, here’s where the government is centralised’. We had it all planned out - it wasn’t just a bunch of random stuff. Then we had the whole thing of how the factions interact with each other. Even ‘How does the water get here?’ Because that’s important - those are the things a lot of people don’t think about.

“We could have gone further with that. We had to simplify, so we had less stuff that would bog down the game engine. I was more happy with the DLC because by that time we knew what would work and what wouldn’t. It was also focused, laser sharp, so we could spend more time on it. The wasteland, I would have laid it out differently - it would have been more separate zones I think, put a big wall around the whole thing and you just see the big tower and it’s a bunch of little zones. We would have had fewer performance issues. We did break it up a bit, but from my point of view it was a performance-related game and we had to fix things.”

In fact, it was in making sure the game worked on console that led to Freeside and the suburbs around Vegas being broken up into its own zone. It just would not have run otherwise. Unfortunately, it is simply a fact of modern game creation that: developers go into a project with hundreds of ideas in their head, but have to scale things back in order to make it, you know, work. Additionally, some things might sound like a good idea, only to turn out awful when implemented. These typical design problems were exacerbated for New Vegas’s team because of the tight 18-month window they had to ship the game.

“If you choose to make one aspect of the game more complicated, then it helps to roll back on other stuff,” Sawyer explains. “For example, one thing that would’ve been smart of me to cut are disguises in New Vegas. Faction outfits, which were cool but very time consuming. In retrospect, they’re really cool, I really like them, but they’re buggy as hell and they took a long time. Any developer who is like ‘Hey, we’re going to do this thing in the game that’s very complicated and reactive’, the best way of managing the risk for that would be to look at other things that are potentially complicated and reduce the complexity of them. It’s triage.”

There is an old game developer saying that goes ‘a game is never finished, it just ships’, and that was certainly the case for New Vegas. So much so that Sawyer felt compelled to carry on working on it after the launch, using his personal time to build one of the game’s most popular mods, JSawyer's mod. Sawyer says the desire to build the mod, which adds a host of balance tweaks and cut content, came from personal taste. He played the first Fallout in college and ended up working at Black Isle just after Fallout 2 shipped, in the hope of creating a traditional sequel, hardcore difficulty and all. Of course, that never happened, and he did not get to touch the series until Bethesda approached Obsidian for New Vegas.

“We had enough to do during the project that I wasn’t wanting to make the team indulge my whims for personal taste,” Sawyer laughs. “There were also certain things technically, from a patching perspective, that were either technically impossible for us to do - due to how the DLCs and the base game interacted - or they were just prohibitively expensive, because patching on consoles was a costly process. So after everything was wrapped up and everything was done, I was like ‘Ah, you know what?’ I downloaded the game at home to see how it actually plays and just kind of tuned it the way I wanted to tune it, then there were some bugs we couldn’t fix for technical reasons. So I fixed them, cleaned things up, then fell into a bunch of other stuff, like there’s a bunch of unused, unique armour, so I started filling that stuff out. Tuning is a never-ending process, but in New Vegas there was a particular disconnect [with the] style of game overall because I had come into Black Isle wanting to make Fallout 3, which in my mind would have been a much more difficult game.”

Speaking to a room full of Obsidian developers, you can tell there is more to it than that, though. While the development process was brutal, New Vegas was clearly a special project for them all, just as it is for the game’s many fans. Listening to them talk and laugh amongst themselves as they recall moments during the game’s development, it is clear that they are proud of what they achieved in such a relatively short period of time. In many ways, the passage of time was like Obsidian’s own impolite NPC, slowly trekking towards them like a relentless machine as they tried to get ready for the launch.

 

[HoboForEternity]

This still going on? Its really getting old

 

[undecaf]

I'm still failing to see where all the Fallout stuff is going. I find it hard to believe that it'd all be about the 20th anniversary, and also, that there's been so much of it it's hard to believe people just felt like doing some Fallout retrospectives, coverings and interviews all over the place... And then there's MCA and his pictures with suggestive themes...

 

[free999enigma]

To celebrate 20 Years of Fallout we've made some shows !



And 5 Gaming Historys

Gaming History: Fallout 3 „Rebirth or catastrophe? A bit of both” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1TYt6_Bpw
Gaming History: Fallout 3 – Van Buren “The dream that never was” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nYTT-1qkyY
Gaming History: Fallout Tactics Brotherhood of Steel “Shoot first and never ask questions” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amMyPd54D1g
Gaming History: Fallout 2 “When more was better” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEFTKX9z9to
Gaming History: Fallout 1 “20 Years of Post-Nuclear Greatness” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1smbgtWjBEw

 

[Lgrayman]

I love Fallout and had a blast on my first playthrough, but I can't enjoy replaying it at all. Am I alone in this? There are no real surprises left even after a single playthrough and there isn't much room for significantly different builds due to so many skills being bad and Big Guns/Energy Weapons not being usable for ages. I always find myself getting the urge to replay it, excitedly launching it up and making a character and then getting to Shady Sands and going "You know what? Forget it."

The same thing happens with Fallout 2 even though it has more replayability, namely because of the temple of trials and how awful the tribal setting/forced characterisation is.

 

[Farewell into the night]

I played the game today and it's pretty good. I'm actually amazed that I didn't liked it earlier.

 

[Tigranes]

I love Fallout and had a blast on my first playthrough, but I can't enjoy replaying it at all. Am I alone in this? There are no real surprises left even after a single playthrough and there isn't much room for significantly different builds due to so many skills being bad and Big Guns/Energy Weapons not being usable for ages. I always find myself getting the urge to replay it, excitedly launching it up and making a character and then getting to Shady Sands and going "You know what? Forget it."

The same thing happens with Fallout 2 even though it has more replayability, namely because of the temple of trials and how awful the tribal setting/forced characterisation is.

Because FO1 is so parsimonious in its design, the irony is that it's not as replayable in a mechanical, theme-park romp sense; whereas you could replay BG2 with all sorts of different parties long after you're reduced to skipping all the dialogue you've memorised by this point, even with the pretty robust classless system FO1 is superlative on its first run then loses a lot of that special aura afterwards.

TT can be skipped in 10 minutes unless you decide to torture yourself doing all the little quests for negligible medium term benefit. Beyond that I'd say its combat encounters, itemisation, etc. lends itself to powergaming replays.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The Fallout 80-year retrospective in 2077 will be more entertaining.

 

[Infinitron]

PCGamesN published some Fallout 4 articles, but they're all pointless opinion pieces because Bethesda refuse to do interviews for plebs.

Seriously though, do they not care that Obsidian's guys are out there every single week, scoring points with the Fallout fanbase with each interview and establishing ownership over the Fallout legacy totally uncontested? Someday Obsidian is going to release a game branded as a Fallout: New Vegas spiritual successor and eat into Bethesda's market share, and Pete Hines will feel like an idiot for not letting some of his developers go out there and answer questions. It's crazy how before Fallout 4 was released, there were sites running interviews with Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer because nobody at Bethesda would talk to them. WTF?

 

[LESS T_T]

While founding the Montreal studio, they seem to snatched many developers from Behaviour Interactive (also based in Montreal) who worked on Fallout 4 and Fallout Shelter. I thought they would make a spin-off with the Montreal devs that are already familiarized with the engine and the IP, but voila, Fallout 4 VR.

 

[Quillon]

Beth may be thinking Obs' doing positive publicity for their franchise when they have nothing to release about it atm or in the near future and they maybe right :D

Someday they're going to release a game branded as a Fallout: New Vegas spiritual successor and eat into Bethesda's market share and Pete Hines will feel like an idiot for not letting some of his developers go out there and talk.

They don't have to brand it "spiritual successor", they just have to make a third action AAA RPG which should at least resemble fallout/post apoc.(I wonder if they are doing anything like this? ) and NV fans will do the branding and the rest.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Obsidian.... eat into Bethesda's market share

A NV spiritual successor from Obsidian will be seen as "what? a spiritual successor to that Bethesda game that I didn't like that much? k, let me get on with this Elder Scrolls 6/Fallout 5 instead"

and NV fans will do the branding and the rest.

 

[Infinitron]

They don't have to brand it "spiritual successor", they just have to make a third action AAA RPG which should at least resemble fallout/post apoc.(I wonder if they are doing anything like this? ) and NV fans will do the branding and the rest.

Yeah sure, but Obsidian haven't been shy of claiming that even Pillars of Eternity is "made by the developers of Fallout: New Vegas", so imagine what they might say when they actually make a first person action-RPG that's similar to Fallout: New Vegas.

 

[Quillon]

Yeah sure, but Obsidian haven't been shy of claiming that even Pillars of Eternity is "made by the developers of Fallout: New Vegas", so imagine what they might say when they actually make a first person action-RPG that's similar to Fallout: New Vegas.

Well its the truth, they also used South Park in that context. Tho if they say it for this new game too it might not be the truth, since the the team mostly consists of post NV/SP devs. In the end they'd of course use NV's rep but I don't think they'd go too far to brand it as such or do anything that could legally upset Beth.

 

[Roguey]

A NV spiritual successor from Obsidian will be seen as "what? a spiritual successor to that Bethesda game that I didn't like that much? k, let me get on with this Elder Scrolls 6/Fallout 5 instead"

Score rank: 89% Userscore: 94% Old userscore: 95% Metascore: 84%
Owners: 5,125,234 ± 65,719

Likely add an extra ~10 million for console sales.

 

[pippin]

A NV spiritual successor from Obsidian will be seen as "what? a spiritual successor to that Bethesda game that I didn't like that much? k, let me get on with this Elder Scrolls 6/Fallout 5 instead"

It is now canon even among Bethestards that Bethesda should allow Obsidian to make a New Vegas 2, even though they don't realize that probably Josh is the only guy still there from the development team for that game.

 

[Roguey]

Oscuro's still there.

 

[FeelTheRads]

A NV spiritual successor from Obsidian will be seen as "what? a spiritual successor to that Bethesda game that I didn't like that much? k, let me get on with this Elder Scrolls 6/Fallout 5 instead"

Score rank: 89% Userscore: 94% Old userscore: 95% Metascore: 84%
Owners: 5,125,234 ± 65,719

Likely add an extra ~10 million for console sales.

And? How many of those sales are because it was backed by Bethesda and because most people thought and still think it was developed by them as well?

I'm sure Bethesda is trembling in fear of Obsidian stealing their millions, when Bethesda's market share has more to do with their brand than with whatever garbage they shit out.