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:Two games?

[DrMrLordX]

It had much-improved combat and character development (with respect to stats, perks, and skills) than Fallout 1, but I think they really messed up the setting in Fallout 2. New Reno was pretty stupid except maybe for the Bishops and their role in the Vault City/NCR conflict. San Francisco was totally underdeveloped and obviously one of the most rushed parts of the game. The Hubologists were, overall, moronic. No matter how much fun it was to wax that lot, it's pretty obvious that they were sort of a joke "bad guy" faction thrown in as a foil to the Shi, when they completely glossed over internal strife within the Shi themselves by allowing you to settle the LoPan/Dragon dispute in a lame martial arts contest. The Enclave itself delved into biased political rhetoric mostly absent from Fallout 1.

Many of the endings are screwed up even after the 1.2 patch, and there are still some game-breaking bugs with delayed time-based effects and changing areas; setting dynamite and plastic explosive charges and then switching areas can cause the game to crash when the explosives finally detonate. Sometimes. Maybe.

Overall, the setting suffered under Urquhart's direction. Fallout 2 was much longer, which was nice, but it just didn't feel right in a lot of spots, and the entire design team chickened out when they decided to disallow playing Fallout 2 with Fallout characters. In fact, the entire plot behind Fallout 2 was influenced by that decision. They had to come up with a plausible reason why the original Vault Dweller couldn't be the main character (or even a companion) in Fallout 2, hence the need for Arroyo.

As good as Fallout 2 was in some areas, all I ever really wanted was the ability to play more Fallout. Fallout 2 only gave me some of that. I have no real reason to believe that Fallout 3 will be any worse, though there is a serious risk that it may wind up being distinctly humorless and wind up being a Mad Max clone of some kind. If we're lucky, the devs will go back to Wasteland and work from that perspective.

Online Fallout will never happen

[mackil]

I'm kind of struck by the fact that Interplay actually sold the rights to Fallout, when they had already sold the license a couple years ago. This kind of sounds like they don't have the funds to work on their Massive online version. Could this be a desperate move for some quick cash? I doubt that we will ever see that Fallout Online version. More than likely, Interplay will fold like a deck of cards. Shame really...