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."

Re:Depressing

[Cadallin]

And when I see "Bethesda" on the box, I think unrealized potential. I've played Bethesda games since Daggerfall (which I waited for years to see ship, and yes I keep going back, I'm a glutton for punishment) and they are always very impressive technically. Daggerfall was a technical demo that blew my mind. An entire expansive country that featured towns and cities and dungeons and thousands of NPCs. It was 3D (or what counted for 3D at the time, Doom style sprites with a 3d environment) They even released a patch so that enemies showed locational damage as you hit them with your weapons! It was incredible. Daggerfall was incredible it contained many more features than the sequels that followed, Morrowind and Oblivion.

However, in all of that, they neglected to make the game fun. The NPCs were completely bland. The cities were dull, lifeless, and all the same. The dungeons suffered from severe bugs in their generation routines such that they could be unexplorable (walls or stairs blocking doors). The Fallout Series, on the other hand, was a beautifully handcrafted world. There were fewer NPCs and the world was smaller, yes, but all of it was alive. Alive and interesing, unique.

Ultimately I see this union as a very poor match. The only thing I can imagine that would be worse is if it was announced that Wizards of the Coast had licensed Bethesda to make a "Planescape: Torment" sequel. (Thankfully, I think this is highly unlikely, not only was the game written to be very self contained, Wizards has all but retired the Planescape setting.)

Meh

[ZorbaTHut]

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.

Re:Farewell Fallout...

[CronoCloud]

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.

Of course they'l want to mass produce it, they want to sell lots of copies and make money! Of course they'll want it on all the consoles, they want to sell lots of copies and make money.

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.

Apparently the masses outnumber the rabid Fallout fans then. But I wouldn't call it niche, plenty of console RPG's are turn based.

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.

I have Fallout BOS for my PS2 and do you know what rating it has? M, for Blood and Gore, Strong Sexual Themes, Strong Language and Violence. One of the first characters you meet is a hooker.

As for Oblivion, doesn't it have an M rating, why yes, yes it does.

So going cross-platform won't prevent a Fallout game from having that M rating

Re:As long as they make fallout 3

[Razed By TV]

It's that second part that worries me. Let me direct you to a snippet of an interview with Peter Hines of Bethesda.

SPOnG: One of the things that crops up a lot in reviews and discussions of about Fallout is that a lot of the fans like the about Fallout humour. What does this mean to you?

Pete Hines: Well, Todd Howard (Executive Producer at Bethesda) has talked a little about this. We're not big fans of jokes... developers that try to tell jokes, it tends not to work very well. You know, the humour in Fallout 3 is that you can get a weapon and blow a guy to a bloody mess, then when you pull up your interface, you see a little smiling cartoon character holding his thumb up. Like that's funny... funny not in terms of jokes or winks at the camera and such...

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=10109516 &cid=&tid=&pid=&plid=&page=4 [spong.com]

Re:Meh

[Fallingcow]

Fallout II and Deus Ex are the two games that I re-play every couple of years, all the way through.