Bethesda Sues Interplay Over Fallout License, MMO Plans 43
Bethesda Softworks has filed a complaint with the District Court of Maryland to forbid Interplay from selling older Fallout titles. The complaint alleges that Interplay failed to hold up its end of an agreement that required it to submit marketing and packaging details to Bethesda for approval. In addition to that, Interplay was supposed to initiate full-scale development of a Fallout MMO by April, 2009, gathering at least $30 million in funding to work on the game. "If Bethesda prevails, Interplay would lose the rights to develop the Fallout MMO. There is little to show for the progress of the Fallout MMO in public venues, although many speculate that a mysterious title called Project V13 is in fact the Fallout MMO."
This is some truly shocking news... (Score:4, Funny)
Interplay still exist?!
Sure it does! (Score:5, Funny)
And it is crunch time! [penny-arcade.com]
It's just not *right* (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, I'm sure the lawyers don't see it that way. Interplay should be careful what they sign.
Re:It's just not *right* (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's just not *right* (Score:5, Insightful)
TFS says they still retained their right to sell the games they do not own any rights to anymore, as long as they get marketing and packaging approved bei Bethesda. So they can still make money with their old games as long as it doesn't interfere with Bethesda's new titles and gets their approval - that is a pretty good deal for a game studio that probably would have closed down if it weren't for Bethesda, don't you think?
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Black Isle was Interplay's internal RPG developer division. They were never a third party.
Dude! Come on! Give it SOME credit. (Score:4, Funny)
DtU featured "legendary Flame Sword of Lolth".
Also, "With the power of this sword, an infinite army will be at your command".
It foreshadowed the coming of the Anonymous!
How is that not worth all those bugs, and more?
Gog.com (Score:4, Interesting)
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With Fallout 3 if you run the launcher it performs the disk check before running the game. If you directly run fallout3.exe it will directly start the game without the launch which would require you to select that yes you do actually want to run the game, and you won't have a disk check either.
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Leaving aside that I already have both on discs anyway there's the Fallout Trilogy (includes Tactics, not 3) in stores and I doubt it has remote DRM either.
Shame on Bethesda (Score:2, Interesting)
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Honestly, this is frustrating on both sides... (Score:1, Interesting)
That Bethesda would ask Interplay to sign such a stupid agreement (re: packaging and marketing for the older games) and that Interplay would sign it.
First of all, what marketing and packaging? The marketing basically produces itself: Many people who played Fallout 3 are naturally curious about the first two games in the series, especially when they find out that Fallout 2 came out about a decade prior to Fallout 3. You don't need to "market" it - those who are interested in playing a 10 year old game are
Descent Community screwed again... (Score:2)
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Interplay holds all rights.
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Volition (one of the two branches Parallax split into IIRC) is still healthy so they could make a game like Descent even if they don't have the name or story rights. Of course they could also make an awesome 3d space combat game like Freespace which noone's doing at the time* but instead they're busy making open world games on the consoles (Saints Row 2 and Red Faction Guerrilla were their last games, not saying they're bad because they're awesome but they're no Freespace).
*=All people seem to make these da
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on the plus side (Score:1)
There is a Fallout MMO (Score:2)
There already is a Fallout MMO game. It's still in beta, but it's fun to see how far fans can go when they really want something that the creators of a game won't give them.
FOnline [blogspot.com] - Come join the grief fest.
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holy! I'm a huge fan of the series (the first 2 even more so). Definitely going to check this out.
"Trilogy" (Score:4, Insightful)
I think bethesda was pretty much ignoring them until fallout 1/2/tactics started being sold with labeling of "trilogy"
That implies it includes FO3, which it doesn't. The reason beth put that part into the contract was they didn't want interplay screwing up beth's marketing for FO3, and it looks like interplay just ignored that part of the contract and tried to screw them anyway.
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Yeah, this confused me too when I saw that they were selling a Fallout trilogy. I thought it would include FO3 as well, and for a considerably low price. Read the description, and realized it didn't. I ended up buying it a few months later anyhow, as the original series runs great on my netbook.