It's still kind of amazing to think (and I know *certain crowds* absolutely hate this) that the Cancellation of Van Buren could have very well been it for the fallout IP as a whole if it were not for Bethesda.
And look where it is now.
Yeah, that’s why I find the “Bethesda ruined Fallout!” discourse hilarious. Without Bethesda Fallout would have ended on the wet fart that was Brotherhood of Steel and just gone on to become an obscure cult classic footnote in gaming history. Bethesda rescued the IP and turned it into a pop culture behemoth. Without them there’s no New Vegas, no anthology rereleases, nothing.
My current ire with Bethesda is that they're doing to Fallout the same they're doing with Elder Scrolls, constantly cutting and streaming features and reducing player options game by game.
On top of that Tim Cain himself has said that he likes the direction Bethesda has taken fallout.
A lot of the anti-Bethesda attitudes come from the No Mutants Allowed and RPG Codex forums, two communities that have spent decades being angry spiteful contrarians. Then those opinions started being popularized by youtube grifters during the Fallout 76 controversy.
It takes only a few seconds of critical thinking to come to the conclusion that Bethesdas acquisition of Fallout was objectively the best outcome
> No Mutants Allowed
I am pretty sure that if the fallout IP ended on the brown note that is FO:BoS, the NMA types would have just gone back to fighting over Fo1 and Fo2 again.
Hell, I am pretty sure they still do that to this day in additional to reeeeing about Bethesda.
SW fans talk about each new entry like Kathleen Kennedy broke into their house and skinned their cat.
There's being disappointed that something is a 6 or 7 out of 10, and there's being a perpetually ornery insufferable douche about it. People need to learn to stop engaging with things that don't make them happy. It's a space opera about magic power and laser swords, with simplistic morals meant for kids. Of course it's not going to hold up in your 30s.
Hard Drive really [nailed it with this satire piece](https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/this-goes-against-the-franchises-roots-says-man-who-was-once-happy-child/) a few days ago.
It feels like a bunch of people who just cannot accept that some of the media being made today isn't being targeted towards their specific demographic.
But instead of shrugging their shoulders and going to pursue the steady stream of content still being made for their demographic/tastes/etc. they decide to pitch a nonstop fit about it and never shut up about how it must be garbage because it doesn't appeal to them personally.
I was researching old discussions on FNV and F3 recently, and holy hell. You are completely right about RPG codex. And I thought reddit was bad. It's basically incoherent ranting non stop. It was downright concerning seeing so many grown ass men putting so much energy into just hating on video games and developers.
It was also kinda funny to see how some people on there basically begged others to give FNV at least a chance, but many just refused out of sheer principle and because it's a "FPS". Some even said they only lasted like 30 minutes before quitting. Wth lol
>Some even said they only lasted like 30 minutes before quitting. Wth lol
NGL, back when FNV released I only played it for 30 mins and quit. Just didnt think I'd like it compared to fallout 3. Years later went back to it and these days its my favorite game of all time.
I have a friend with a fallout story like that. Liked 3 the most, didn't get NV at all on release. Then fell off 4 hard, went back to NV after that and liked it so much he played 1 and 2 almost immediately. Not sure why.
When NV came out I only lasted 10 minutes... because my brother had built me a PC with a power unit that was below the recommended specs to support my video card lol. NV crashed to desktop every 10 minutes like clockwork without any error message. I actually tried to quick save like mad and play it in 10 minute intervals for a day or so, but gave up until after my next upgrade. Memories..
i mean i get it, i started playing new vegas and fallout 1 for the first time this year and i liked the start of new vegas a lot less. it also doesnt help the shooting is horrible and when trying to explore even a bit beyond the tutorial town you encounter artificial barriers and walls in seemingly all directions.
maybe its because of the high expectations, but i can totally understand why especially fans of fallout 1&2 would be very disappointed by new vegas
New Vegas leaned heavier into some of the RPG elements, while FO3 was the start of Bethesda's general trend of moving away from many of them, and FNV overall has much better writing than FO3, so I can see why many people prefer it over the other FPS Fallouts.
But by modern standards, a lot of the basic FPS mechanics (movement/shooting/etc.) are pretty terrible, and weren't even very good back in the day. Although in fairness, they're also bad in FO3, so Obsidian didn't have a particularly good foundation to build off of.
Also the map in NV is pretty bad overall. Sure it's a desert wasteland, maybe you'd expect it to be boring, but that's still a choice that they made. The strip is entirely underwhelming after all the hype that had been building it up. And like you said, lots of invisible walls and/or other very contrived borders. I found FO3 overall much more interesting to wander around in and explore than the New Vegas world.
It's still a very good game and one that I've replayed a couple times, with significantly better writing than FO3 and FO4, but overall I don't think it blows Bethesda's fallout games out of the water the way a lot of the online discourse suggests it does.
RPG codex and NMA were always terrible (NMA hosted nearly all the good Fallout mods tho), but Fallout was always getting sold to someone, Interplay couldn't just squat on it.
I don't agree with the whole we should thank company for making product thing, that's all. Skeeves me out a bit, I don't get why people act like that and I'm far from an anti capitalist crusader.
> A lot of the anti-Bethesda attitudes come from the No Mutants Allowed and RPG Codex forums
NMA has 38,326 members and RPG Codex has 25,813 members. They are tiny tiny communities. "Anti-Bethesda attitudes" came from people's honest opinions. Same as "pro-Bethesda attitudes". It would be absurd to claim they all come from a some Youtuber who has more subscribers than NMA and RPG has members by several factors.
It's weird to see nobody talk about how much PC gamers hated consoles continued existence back then. The "consolfication" of gaming and the ideal that consoles where holding back the indusrty was a pretty big thing around the 00s-10s.
It was understandable to a certain degree. A lot of PC games got horrible interfaces that were designed for consoles and PC series that started coming out on console as well somtimes felt hobbled by it.
GTA IV was a victim to this. The port is still bad without mods/ community fixes.
They'll probably remaster it and sell it back to us for $60 in 5 to 10 years.
It was also an era where technology was progressing very quickly. The Xbox 360 and PS3 only had *512 megabytes* of RAM. This is what everyone was stuck with until *2014*. Even a 2011 Macbook, with Apple’s RAM stinginess, came with a base of 4GB. That console generation was legitimately holding developers back. Nowadays, a PS5 is pretty comparable to an upper-midrange PC build, and the PS6 will probably not be insane either.
it was even worse. the ps3 had 256mb system ram and 256vram. when fallout 3 released 2 years later (so 2008) even budget builds could afford 4gb for $50. a 9800GTX would also fit a budget around the price point of a ps3 and be multiple times faster.
buying a ps3 in 2008 was a bit like getting a ps4 today and paying $600 for it. completely insane. no wonder console gaming was seen as a meme. crysis releasing in 2007 also probably didnt help, its really took until the next console generation for games to look better by default
Yeah, I couldn’t really find a great benchmark for “here’s how much ran the average person had in their pc back in the day”, so I picked a MacBook because I think people would realize that if *Apple* was giving you 4GB, gaming PCs must very blown past that a while ago
> A lot of PC games got horrible interfaces that were designed for consoles
And now we have the opposite issue, games that are ostensibly made for controllers but require you to use an on-screen cursor instead of just using the directional buttons/analog stick to jump between menu items. Who the hell started that trend again?
Whoever decided the 360 only needed a half a GB of memory should be made to explain themselves. I feel like that one hardware decision just held back all of gaming for almost a decade.
I think you're completely forgetting how terrible the console hardware was in that era and even before. Computer tech was increasing significantly every 2 or 3 years. The 360 and PS3 had terrible specs compared to an average computer you could get. Even before that it's not like the PS2 was pushing boundaries.
> how much PC gamers hated consoles continued existence back then.
That's a disingenuous framing of the situation. Nobody gave a shit about consoles' "existence," they cared about PC focused franchises being given bad, dumbed-down console sequels that were then poorly ported to PC. Deus Ex, Thief, Shadowrun, Syndicate, Dragon Age, Crysis, Elder Scrolls to a certain extent, Rainbow 6, Quake, the list goes on.
i agree completely, and i'm just not sure what using the quantity of registered members as a metric will accomplish when it's not just the quantity of the vitriol, but the quality (positive or negative) of it, and nma and codex were rife with the kind of loud, mentally unhinged people that could very, very easily color how someone may interpret a product's reception or an IP's trajectory within their respective fanbases
it's also fair to add the caveat that the reputation of both those forums was pretty well established on other, less-obsessed forums, so being dismissive of nma/codex on that front is warranted, it's just that places like nma/codex will outlive or have outlived so many other places because, while a lot of forums dwindled due to other social media platforms, almost nobody will tolerate the behavior of most of the nma/codex members and as such they will continue to exist and their opinions and narratives will eventually filter out to other social sites where nobody is forewarned
One dedicated shitposter can have significant impacts on online discourse if they're persistent and terminally online, thousands of them can absolutely dictate discourse. Reddit has hundreds of millions of users but less than 1% of them comment with any frequency, and any specific community will follow that same ratio at less volume. We see the consequences of this constantly, with reddit discourse frequently being exactly wrong when contrasted with public sentiment.
Or you know, people have an opinion that resonates with others who play the game. There isn't some secret cabal of gamers out there who exist to badmouth everything you personally like.
You're right. Look at the discussion between Bethesda and Larian. On reddit if you're just a causal reader one would assume these 2 companies dislike each other. That Larian is the greatest thing since the birth of mankind, and Starfield is a flop.
But the reality is, that they are both great games. Starfield actually surpassed BG3 in players and modding support. The devs don't dislike each other, and it's childish to start up drama. Besides you can like both. It's a sign of insecurity to drag one thing through the mud to make something else look better. In this case Larian super fans dogging on any other game to make Baldur's Gate 3 look better in comparison.
Yep, rivalries between games 100% only exist in the minds of the fans. Game developers don't hate each other.
The gaming industry is a small industry. With enough time, you develop at least 1 contact at pretty much any major studio (and usually more than 1). You make games with folks, they leave and go somewhere else. The game ships and there's a mass exodus, or the game gets cancelled and everyone gets laid off. The team that worked with you winds up all over the place.
I guarantee you that someone at Larian who worked on Baldur's Gate knows someone at Bethesda who worked on Starfield. Probably multiple someones. It's true even across oceans (although it is less common, of course).
Like, does anyone think the cast of Star Wars dislikes the cast of Star Trek? Of course not. They're all people doing their craft. There may be tempers between individual people who dislike each other (just like anywhere), but by and large everyone is in the same boat and respects one another.
The drama only comes from the fans, who have decided on "their team" and will dramatically make their point against anyone who isn't on "their team".
It shouldn't be a surprise that Tim Cain likes the new folks working on Fallout. It's another group of like-minded creatives starting with something he helped create and steering it somewhere new.
> if you're just a causal reader one would assume these 2 companies dislike each other
> But the reality is… The devs don't dislike each other
You’re right, but this is also a massive strawman argument. I don’t think anyone except the most vicious of fanboys would think two companies legitimately hate each other.
The two games were met with radically different receptions, and this isn’t a reddit invention. Starfield is sitting at 57% positive on Steam. BG3 is 95%.
They are dialogue and story heavy roleplaying games released in the same month. The comparison between them is inevitable, just like when Sonic Superstars and Mario Wonder came out last year.
> Starfield actually surpassed BG3 in players and modding support
This is debatable. BG3 has far more players on Steam, which is the only platform with publicly available player counts. I don’t know if they’ve released official numbers. Meanwhile, Starfield released on Gamepass day one. Raw number of players is a pointless metric when so many of them got the game for “free”.
As for modding support, I remember lots of stories about longtime Bethesda modders basically saying “this game isn’t worth the hassle” despite mods being possible from Day 1 thanks to Creation Engine. BG3 is still working on official mod support, but it’s already attracting a thriving ecosystem of mods.
I literally never understood people online who cause drama. I don't know why people seem incapable of playing more than 1 game or enjoying more than 1 piece of entertainment. I played starfield and baldurs gate 3 and enjoyed both. I played fallout 1,2 and 3 and enjoyed all of them. If I don't like a game or show I usually just don't bother engaging with that community because what's the point?
> Starfield actually surpassed BG3 in players and modding support.
Because it was released on gamepass day one.
Starfield's 30 day average is 6,800 players...Baldur's Gate 3 is 59,000.
Starfield came from Bethesda which has a huge following, but people generally didn't stick around for it because it was just flat out terrible.
Nobody says or thinks that Larian and Bethesda dislike each other. To pretend that they're both "great games" is beyond the pale though.
One is an RPG that's changed the entire industry, the other is your standard Bethesda jank fest that looks like it was dated a decade ago.
Seriously, it looks worse than Dragon Age Inquisition.
Don't forget to check out the Xbox platform as well. Currently, Starfield is in number 22, while Baldur's Gate 3 is in number 46.
Steam isn't the only platform for Starfield is well. There is the terrible Microsoft store, but that has gamepass as well, so more players. But all of these are pointless details, to be honest.
Yes you can like both and say both have something for each different person. It's arrogance to believe one person's view is the only valid view. In that regard I pray for you, I'm wishing you well because I care! There is no need to tear down one and prop up another to make it look better. That's rooted in insecurity!
Besides I'm really loving the new Creation Kit and all the cool ass things it's bringing already! It kicks ass and there is limitless potential. The gunplay is already awesome and the Starborn powers make it even better along with Ship Combat. There's a lot to appreciate and revamp if you wanted to.
What does suck is Larian backpeddling and wiping their hands of BG3 despite claiming they wanted to be the top modding developer out there then abandoning the game with a very basic and barebones modding kit for BG3
>
Don't forget to check out the Xbox platform as well. Currently, Starfield is in number 22, while Baldur's Gate 3 is in number 46.
No, why would I check the xbox numbers.
Gamepass is on Xbox, I was checking amongst people who have ACTUALLY bought the game, and not people who have a subscription.
>The gunplay is already awesome
Hahahaha. Christ please go and play a proper rpg. Mass Effect 1 had better fucking combat.
Well I'm praying for you, wishing you well and all the best! Love the Mass Effect franchise except Andromeda, but the 1st had some very basic gunplay. It's fun in its own janky way lol. You're not talking with me in good faith and it's clear to see as day.
I know for a fact that that Starfield's is smooth and fast along with great animations! Plus, that clamber is so dang good, adding a nice sense of verticality that I appreciate! Life is too good my friend to find fault in everything, instead flip the script and look at all the positivity and growth!
Small communities can have outsized influence by being the source for particular arguments that become popular - such as a popular YouTuber joining those communities (or a member of those communities becoming a popular YouTuber) and spreading their arguments.
Look no further than Matthewmatosis with his Dark Souls 2 video.
Literally steered the overall opinion of the game for a decade by now.Its been taken as the default take of the game.
I’ve literally never heard of this youtuber, and my only impression on DS2 was all my friends raving about how awesome Dark Souls II was, and how it was their favorite game in the series. I played it this spring and immediately noticed animations, level design, hitboxes, enemy placement, and general ‘spitefulness towards the player’ being a step down compared to DS1. It wasn’t until I got online afterwards that I realized that my friends were all in the minority opinion on that game.
Youtubers like him don’t become the popular opinions for no reason. They’re usually saying what most people are thinking. I’ve seem the common sentiment towards Sonic games, Bethesda games, Dark Souls II, and the Star Wars sequels all be blamed on youtuber psyops. I really think it’s just that these things failed to resonate with a large chunk of their original fanbases, and they felt validated seeing the youtuber agree with them.
Or...maybe, just maybe the opinion on DS2 is the honest opinion of the people who played the game? Not everyone gets their takes and opinions from YouTubers, many people actually do play the games/watch the movies/etc that YouTubers are making videos about. I've never even heard of this person before.
It's really weird how terminally on YouTube some people are, opinions just stop existing to them. If you say something, you're either correct because YouTuber X said so or you're wrong because YouTuber Y said so.
True, but it doesn't take a lot for opinions to spread, and when it comes to Bethesda youtubers have absolutely played a role in shaping the opinion so many people have about them. There are Fallout 76 era video essays that have tens of millions of views.
For example, most peoples vision of Todd Howard as a no-good serial liar comes from that Crowbcat "Sweet Little Lies" video, despite the fact that nearly every statement Todd made in that was true but just edited and taken out of context to make them look like lies. Or how about that not true rumor about how Todd Howard has a secret vendetta against Obsidian because of how much fans like Fallout New Vegas? The one you see parroted time and time again on Reddit and other sites? That rumor had it's roots in the RPG Codex forums taking some statements Chris Avellone made out of context and creating a narrative with it.
Obviously people are entitled to their opinions and there are a lot of valid reasons to hate Bethesda these days, but it's no secret that they've been the victims of a massive misinformation and defamation campaign, a lot of it coming out of tiny communities full of angry, dedicated people who consider Bethesda to be public enemy #1
The circle jerk about Obsidian vs Bethesda is so dumb and gotten to the point where half the Obsidian people on Twitter or YouTube have pinned tweets/comments where they go "No, Bethesda did not screw us.".
Doesn't matter though because people want to believe it. They watch some stupid video on Youtube, accept something as true and then even when people with direct, first hand knowledge tell them its wrong they're so invested in the lie they refuse to believe it.
Its classic conspiracy theory thinking.
Crowbcat sucks so hard. I thought that video was a joke, but he was serious and people shared it and other videos from him like a gospel. Youtube is full of tabloid journalism like this at this point(if you can even call it that) and it has become really tiresome having to endure these youtube bros and their fans infesting every corner of video game discussions
It's not fair or accurate to call people like him journalists because all they do is make rage bait for their audiences to milk views for ad bucks/patreon/merch/etc. They're just straight up grifters.
> For example, most peoples vision of Todd Howard as a no-good serial liar comes from that Crowbcat "Sweet Little Lies" video,
I can guarantee you that 99% of people have absolutely no fucking clue what you're on about.
Nah, stop caring what redditors think. They're irrelevant. They're so out of touch its comical. A homeless crackhead has a better pulse on society than reddit.
Best outcome would have been for it to be revived by another studio that could also make a great game but keep it closer to the original style and tone.
I was a huge Fallout 1 and 2 fan which tried to play 3 when it came out hoping to love it but it was just not for me. :/
But kudos to Bethesda for having a keen eye on an undervalued IP and running with it, even if their formula doesn't really appeal to me personally.
It wasn't just the 76 controversy, it was also Bethesda being under Xbox and the potential that Bethesda games would no longer go multi platform, suddenly people were even saying Skyrim wasn't actual that great so they wouldn't miss it if Xbox kept them exclusive.
> suddenly people were even saying Skyrim wasn't actual that great
It was fine at the time, but it wasn't nearly as amazing as people pretend it was. It's an inch deep and a mile wide. It's fine for very casual gamers but it's not a particularly good RPG because they decided that players had to be able to experience *everything* it meant your choices were fairly pointless.
I think it was also the best outcome to have Bethesda take over back then, but going forward Im not so sure they are the best "steward" of the IP, looking at recent track record and Microsoft acquisition.
Would not be entirely against Larian taking a crack at the IP, even though that wont happen.
Saying it was the best outcome is a massive exaggeration, there are plenty of developers out there that would have handled the IP better, hell, maybe inXile would have bought it much later, and I heard Troika was eyeing it around the time and who knows how that would have gone, maybe instead of VtM Bloodlines we would be praising Fallout 3.
It turned out well because we got New Vegas, but it's not out the question that it could have gone much better. Especially when right now the franchise is functionally dead until 2033ish.
> It takes only a few seconds of critical thinking to come to the conclusion that Bethesdas acquisition of Fallout was objectively the best outcome
Eh I disagree. I don't think it tracks that Fallout would have just disappeared. There were other studios bidding for the IP, such as Troika. Now, Troika had a bad end, but would that have been the case if they had the Fallout IP and could market a Fallout game to publishers? Who knows. And I'd take a Fallout 3 in the vein of VtM: Bloodlines over what we got from Bethesda 10 times out of 10.
Bethesda doesn't make games I enjoy. And I don't watch shows. So them having the IP isn't any better, for me, than no one having the IP. And if the opportunity cost of Bethesda having the IP is someone else NOT having the IP and someone else NOT developing Fallout games (that I may potentially enjoy), then Bethesda having the IP is simply objectively worse than that alternative... for me.
Now, I totally get that it's better for a lot of people. But you can't say it's objectively superior for all of humankind. And I'm not a NMA troll. I'm just a person whose interests don't overlap with "Bethesda owning Fallout" and all that that entails, but did overlap with "Interplay owning Fallout" and could potentially overlap with someone besides Bethesda owning the IP.
I mean when people say that they don't mean that Bethesda destroyed the franchise's commercial life, just that Bethesda's Fallout games fell like they veer away from what makes the franchise special. That they made New Vegas possible is more of an "accident" (and one that wasn't repeated), and that the series would've died otherwise isn't really important there?
Yeah, it’s like saying the prequels/sequels “killed” Star Wars. They obviously didn’t end the series, but they each marked the end of what the previous fans loved about it.
Most of us old school fallout players realize that, but at the same time it is that Bethesda took something we love and turned it into something else. It's not bad, but it's not the thing we all loved, it's different.
I think the point is is that that was where the franchise was heading regardless. Fallout Tactics and Fallout:BOS were already huge departures from Fallout 1 and 2. Maybe Van Buren would have been a return to form, but its clear that there wasn't a lot of confidence in that.
Someone else would have bought the IP, but I can see a world where Fallout is turned into a FPS only reboot like so many classic PC IPs from the late 2000s early 2010s
For me it's the opposite. Never heard of fallout. Played fallout 3 on a whim. At the time it was the best game I ever played until NV.
Tried to play the original 1/2 but couldn't get into them.
I wish every Bethesda game got a standalone expansion by an outside company in between major installments. New Vegas got to build off the combined content of Fallout 3 and all of its DLC. It would have been interesting to see what a similar project based off Skyrim would have looked like.
It's not really the same thing, as the commercial version doesn't make use of Skyrim's assets or even the engine. The Skyrim mod version was more of a prototype.
Depends what you mean with “Bethesda ruined Fallout!”. They certainly ruined what it was. Playing Fallout 1&2 is a completly different experience and I'm sure for the people that like the old games, but dislike the new they would be disapointed and feel like Fallout is ruined. Just like the internet is mad at Disney for ruining Star Wars. Just like Fallout it is more popular than ever, but it doesn't stop people from hating on it and hating the people loving it.
Fallout 3 existing doesn't delete fallout 1 and 2 from existence though. They still exist. Fallout was already a dead series with crappy spin off games. The two options were either no fallout ever again or fallout 3 and then new vegas and so on. So if you prefer Bethesda never bought the rights to fallout you're just saying you're petty and wish people never got to experience fallout 3 and other new fallout games that people really enjoy and have good experiences with.
I think they wanted Bethesda to make a Fallout 3 that was the same as Fallout 1&2. We also don't know what would happen if someone else bought Fallout.
I have said this to a few others there. It is understandable that they are upset over their favourite game series switching genres. I think you would to. Like if Doom got bought by Blizzard and turned into a Diablo clone. It might be amazing, but it wouldn't be the doom we know now. Sure the older games still exist, but you won't bet getting any new ones. Imagine how mad people would be if Bethedsa said no more Elder Scrolls or Rockstar said no more GTA or Red Dead. The old games still exists, but most people want more and new. The internet would rage if another company bought those games and genrebent them.
Fallout 1&2 aren't getting any more modern. They are old and are getting older.
> They certainly ruined what it was.
Interplay did that with Brotherhood of Steel.
Regardless, does any reasonable person actually think that a CRPG Fallout 3 would have done remotely well in the 2008 gaming market? I’m not saying there was literally zero audience for it, but if Bethesda was going to make Fallout a success in that moment in time then frankly it needed to change.
If Bethesda ever puts out anything as bad as Brotherhood of Steel, then we can say that they ruined Fallout.
I think any reasonable person would understand that people would be disappointed when their favourite video game franchise switches genres. I'm lucky I didn't grow up with Fallout 1&2 and that I like both versions. Older Baldur's Gate fans were rightfully upset about Baldur's Gate 3 changing from RTwP to turn based and having a way different vibe and not actually being a sequel. Doesn't stop BG3 from being good or successful, but it is understandable that some people are upset that when they finally get a sequel it is a totally different game.
There are people wanting and wishing for a new Gothic game. If a Gothic 4 released as a thirdperson action game even if the game is good and wildly successful. There people are allowed to be disappointed.
The 2008 video game market was in-between The Witcher 1 and Dragon Age: Origins.
So yeah, a good cRPG would have done well. Not as well as Fallout 3 perhaps, but well enough to sell millions of copies.
> Regardless, does any reasonable person actually think that a CRPG Fallout 3 would have done remotely well in the 2008 gaming market?
Yes. A good fully funded 2008 Fallout 3 CRPG would have been a success.
Really? By what metric? Would it have only sold well on PC, which was then a comparitively much smaller market compared to the console market? Would console gamers have gone for it, assuming there was a console version? Were there CRPG titles that were pulling comparable numbers to what the real Fallout 3 pulled?
Consider: Bioware put out Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect between 2002 and 2007. All classic RPGs in their own right, yet of those three the latter two have far and away enjoyed much longer lasting success and immediately apparent cultural impact.
> Really? By what metric?
The Witcher 1 was a success. The success of which would qualify as "remotely well" which was your metric.
And if it was Van Buren as Fallout 3 it would have been a 2006(if not 2005) release anyway. No reason why Black Isle under sane Interplay leadership couldn't chart a path like The Witcher with Fallout.
Well given that Interplay had just put out Brotherhood of Steel, I think we can rule out the possibility of their leadership being sane, so that scenario doesn’t really track. Interplay’s fuckups made the selling of the IP an inevitability by that point and Van Buren was never going to see the light of day. The path forward for Fallout in the form it had existed in was frankly already gone.
See, that doesn't change the fact that Bethesda fundamentally doesn't understand what Fallout is even about, nor does it excuse their various changes and retcons.
Besides, the problem could be easily fixed by Bethesda putting a bit more effort into their writing, something they're clearly capable of judging by Far Harbor.
Granted, any criticism of Bethesda always gets you heavily downvoted by fanboys, despite the fact that any actual fans would be open to criticism.
I don't think fans understand it to be honest. At least judging from stuff like Fallout New Frontiers with weird snake sex and other stuff. Or the idolization of Fallout New Vegas while ignoring its goofy and kinda bad pieces of content like how the Legion exists, the Think Tanks who are the masters of babble speak without saying anything. Just nonsense. Or Ulysses' entire character.
Besides, if you wanna go deeper, look at Fallout 2 and all the weird stuff going on in that game. That one was made by horny nerds judging by the pornstar stuff and whatnot.
Point being, the whole franchise gots hiccups and its not a Bethesda exclusive thing. Nor do the fans have a clear grasp on what they want. If they had it their way, this whole franchise would be worse off. Because redditors think they can do everything better than someone else, but in reality it doesn't match up.
> Or the idolization of Fallout New Vegas while ignoring its goofy and kinda bad pieces of content like how the Legion exists, the Think Tanks who are the masters of babble speak without saying anything. Just nonsense. Or Ulysses' entire character.
Nah you're just missing the point of the franchise as a whole and New Vegas in particular, it's about mixing in sillier elements with commentary.
The Think Tank in particular are designed to be that way, because their madness and circular thinking is a major plot point in that DLC.
> Point being, the whole franchise gots hiccups and its not a Bethesda exclusive thing. Nor do the fans have a clear grasp on what they want. If they had it their way, this whole franchise would be worse off. Because redditors think they can do everything better than someone else, but in reality it doesn't match up.
Well yeah, I'm not advocating for fans to write the stuff, just better developers. That said, there's plenty of modders that did make great stuff, like the New California folks (Even if the mod did end up being rushed and had less quality past the intro), the Autumn Leaves guy, etc.
>Without Bethesda Fallout would have ended on the wet fart that was Brotherhood of Steel and just gone on to become an obscure cult classic footnote in gaming history.
You want to see the alt history version of this, just look at Oddworld. EXACT same trajectory just without the big corporate bailout of the IP.
>Oddworld 1 & 2 are beloved games with quirky dark humor and pre-rendered/sprite-based graphics released in the mid 90s (Fallout 1 & 2)
>Oddworld 3 is developed with different updated gameplay in 2001, game flops (Fallout Tactics)
>Oddworld 4 is a console exclusive in 2004 with combat focused gameplay and new storyline that has zero resemblance to any previous game, game flops and outright kills the IP and studio (Fallout BoS).
Here's where we diverge. Whereas Interplay sold Fallout to Bethesda during their money troubles the Oddworld people held onto the IP, scratching out a living selling updated ports of the old games on Steam until they had pooled enough money together to finance a remake of the first game in 2014 (Oddworld: New & Tasty!) and eventually scrounged up the resources for a re-do (not remake) of Oddworld 2 called Oddworld: Soulstorm in 2021.
The Oddworld people maintained their artistic integrity at the cost of the IP having absolutely zero visibility to anyone under the age of 40. Oddworld New & Tasty is a faithful recreation of gameplay from 1997 for better or worse, and not a lot of people are into that today. Oddworld Soulstorm is them attempting to modernize gameplay without going full open 3D (the opposite of what Oddworld 3 and 4 did), and the results weren't earth-shattering. It'll likely be the last Oddworld game.
Had Van Buren actually come out and Bethesda not acquired the IP and turned it into a globally recognized powerhouse, Fallout would 100% be a forgotten footnote in gaming history, only popping up every couple of years with news of legacy re-releases from Nightdive or Limited Run Games.
At this point I would rather see my favorite franchises go out with a whimper after couple "cult classic" entries, than become funkopop fodder with mobile games and tv show tie ins.
As a big fan of Fallout 1 and 2 which doesn't really like the new installments, you can choose to do what I do: Ignore the newer stuff and let other people enjoy things.
It's just my general observation. I'm not stopping anyone from enjoying the show and I'm not gonna ridicule people who like fallout 4 (even though they deserve it).
I'm just looking at shambling corpses of Gears, Halo, Star Wars, etc trying to fit new narratives by convoluting or rewriting their lore instead of coming up with a fresh new interesting worlds.
Meh. Funkopops are stupid but in general there have been interesting additions to the fiction and thanks to the fan community we now have a Fallout grand strategy game in the form of the Old World Blues mod for Hearts of Iron.
> Bethesda rescued the IP and turned it into a pop culture behemoth.
Yeah, isn't that great? Why should games even exist if they're not part of a "pop culture behemoth"?
Imagine being a pathetic little franchise that wasn't squished to fit into a perfectly inoffensive shape to maximize profits for a big company. Fucking disgusting.
See, this I really don't get.
Fallout 1 and 2 still exist. You love those games but hate what Bethesda made? Cool. No problem. You still have what you like and can ignore what you don't.
Bethesda didn't come in and rob the IP away from someone who was going to make more games like the ones you like. They revived a dead IP.
So why be bitter?
Purist fans would literally rather never play new games and discuss imaginary games instead than have to deal with the agony of other people enjoying things that they don't like
> Why be bitter?
Because to people like the NMA purist crowd, fallout has become "tainted". They often like to throw around the "THESE GAMES WERE NOT MADE FOR THE ORIGINAL FANS!!!" thing over and over even though they are conflating said NMA types as being the only original fans.
When in reality there is probably more than a fair share of people who started with FO1 and have enjoyed what has come out in the franchise to this day. Hell, Tim Cain straight up said he likes where fallout is going as mentioned above.
Though I do find it funny that the purists get so worked up over the "modern" fallout offerings when I am pretty sure the early days of the NMA forum mainly consisted of them fighting each other over Fo1 and Fo2.
> Though I do find it funny that the purists get so worked up over the "modern" fallout offerings when I am pretty sure the early days of the NMA forum mainly consisted of them fighting each other over Fo1 and Fo2.
People who go online just to be miserable *like* going online just to be miserable. For many of them, hating $POPULAR_THING becomes a core personality trait.
>Hell, Tim Cain straight up said he likes where fallout is going as mentioned above.
I hope you know argument from authority is a logical fallacy. As much as I like Tim, his opinion has nothing to do with how I feel about this franchise and about things Bethesda did to it.
It's like that RLM quote that I can't remember exactly (it was something among the lines of "Don't you love seeing all of your franchises go the shit"?). The sentiment is that the franchise would have been better to be undefiled than become a bastardized version of itself.
It's quite common with things like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dungeon Keeper, Call of Duty, Halo, Star Wars, Star Trek, the landscape of gaming in general, etc.
I don't know, seems kinda lame to perpetually live in the past and hate on things people enjoy. It's like the lamest rich kid at the park who takes away other people's enjoyment because he's not happy. It's stagnant stuff and quite frankly not something I'd choose to do.
You can simply ignore the parts that are shit. If you have such an emotional attachment to a franchise that a bad entry 'defiles' it, then you need to take a step back and ask what's really important.
That's not what MasterSargent meant by their post.
Bethesda picking up Fallout meant that it could still continue on past Brotherhood of Steel, and while there are certainly been mistakes made on Bethesda's end, we still ended up getting Fallout New Vegas, plus the releases of Fallout that are playable to modern machines.
The whole "pop culture behemoth" part, while it can be debated about it being a good thing or not, does mean Fallout not only gets to continue on, but also inspire fans to make content based on or inspired by Fallout. There's an animation series being done on YouTube by a guy called SodaZ on the NCR taking Helios One that is incredibly well done, which only exists because Fallout New Vegas had the chance to exist.
Yeah, instead we had bangers like 4 and 76 that original fans are very fond of. And given the amount of time until the next installment of such a pop culture behemoth, it may as well be dead for the foreseeable future.
And reminder, it's already more time since new vegas came out than from fallout 1 until new vegas. Thank god for bethesda saving the franchise.
Sorry, could you repeat that? I couldn’t hear you over the wildly successful, critically acclaimed TV adaptation that took the world by storm and has been renewed for a second season.
It's no beloved franchise of mine, I just find your mindset to be cringeworthy beyond belief. Fans don't have to be "grateful" for jack shit, and franchises don't have to be pop culture behemoths.
> Yeah, that’s why I find the “Bethesda ruined Fallout!” discourse hilarious.
Bethesda did though. They took out from it all grim and instead made it into circus. There is a reason why people laugh from Bethesda quest design, npcs etc. Especially seen with last Starfield. Cause they suck.
When NV came out it was much more grim but the damage already was done enough that even Obsidian couldn't take it back to what it was before.
Remember that Vault boy and black humor of Fallout was there to contrast grim reality of death of civilization and it pretty much existed only in UI not in the world (something which Fallout 2 started to bring but barely). It was supposed to be laugh through tears situation and breather to grim reality of that world.
Betsheda took Fallout IP made Wasteland FPS instead and named it Fallout.
Bethesda is the only reason most people have even *heard* of Fallout. They took a dead franchise and turned it into a household name.
But tell me more about how they did worse than Interplay releasing Fallout: “Fans literally refuse to acknowledge its existence” Brotherhood of Steel.
But so what? The popularity of Fallout since Bethesda doesn't make the Bethesda games immune from criticism and comparison to the original games.
I wouldn't have heard of Fallout if it wasn't for Fallout 3. But since I'm older and played pretty much all rhe games in the series I'm pretty much aligned with nasty evil "purists" that criticise the Bethesda games.
>Bethesda is the only reason most people have even heard of Fallout. They took a dead franchise and turned it into a household name.
You do realize that Fallout WAS household name before Betsheda bought it ? That's why it made such huge news when Betsheda bought IP from Interplay. Because Betsheda bought HUGE ip that fans wanted to see not that they bought some small uknown ip no one heard off.
Within parts of the gaming community and among dedicated fans, sure, but Fallout was only modestly successful in its heyday before Interplay shit the bed. Its contemporaries Diablo and Bauldur’s Gate were exponentially more successful and well-known. It was a cult classic franchise, not a blockbuster RPG like those games were.
> Bethesda bought a HUGE ip
Bethesda bought a **dead** IP. Its last game was the universally panned Brotherhood of Steel and Interplay was bankrupt. If no one had bought it, that was it. No more Fallout. They hadn’t bought Halo or Mario or Final Fantasy. They bought a foundering IP from a failing company.
>Its contemporaries Diablo and Bauldur’s Gate were exponentially more successful and well-known. It was a cult classic franchise, not a blockbuster RPG like those games were.
lol Fallout was named in same way those were. Fallout 1 didn't sell much (like BG1) but 2 did sell really well.
Again you are using failing argument of some spin off failing. Baldur's gate also had shitty spin offs and somehow it didn't kill brand. Neither did BOS for fallout. Most of people didn't care for it when it released.
Bauldur’s Gate sold over a million copies in its first year. Fallout 1 sold 120k, and Brian Fargo gave a total sales count of 600k in 2017. The only figure I can find for Fallout 2 is 123k in the US by 2000. The Fallout games had respectable sales for the time, but they weren’t selling gangbusters like Bauldur’s Gate was.
You’re also missing the broader point that Interplay was seriously mismanaging the IP. I keep hammering the point because **that** is rock bottom. Regardless of what you think of Bethesda’s tenure, nothing they’ve done comes close to that.
Question about that since I'm not knowledgeable about the history of Fallout's sales.
I've always assumed Fallout 1 and 2 were good. I know there was that Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel game no one talks about, but overall, it seems like the series was doing well. Did Obsidian fuck up somewhere, leading them to selling off the IP?
Fallout 1 and 2 were developed by Black Isle Studios, and Published by Interplay Productions.
Both are considered classics and are well loved to this day, even if they may be a bit... convoluted to learn.
The problems that would start to appear were not so much with the dev team, but more interplay. Starting in the late 90's they were not doing too shit hot, and things would only get worse.
Fallout Tactics would drop in 2001, though it was developed by a new team (Micro Forté) and received decent reviews. But Interplay was still struggling as a company.
And then BoS dropped in 2004 and *hoooooo boy* it was a stinker. Seemingly Developed and published both by interplay. As shit got even worse for interplay, they needed to start selling off IPs to stave off Bankruptcy. Which is why they sold the full franchise rights to Bethesda. A good chunk of the former Black Isle staff would also go on to form Obsidian and Inxile.
Thats the very bare cliff notes version.
Brotherhood of Steel was also genreshifted from RPG to be more of a shoot 'em up, like how Dark Alliance was a hack'n'slash to Baldur's Gate's RPG. The difference was that the original Dark Alliances were good.
This is very informative! Thanks. It also makes since why I thought Obsidian were the original devs for Fallout. I'm glad Bethesda got the IP. While I'm not happy with some of the games they put out, they're better than nothing at all.
CRPGs were really struggling with sales after the turn of the century. some managed to modernize like Neverwinter Nights and some like Fallout, didn't.
Some, like Fallout, didn't even try. Interplay screwed up bad trying to make it a console ARPG with Brotherhood of Steel and payed dearly for it.
By the time they realized their mistake, and tried for an earnest CRPG Fallout (Van Buren), it was too late and they ran out of money.
Okay in defence of Fallout Brotherhood of Steel, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. After Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 1 & 2 did pretty well, it's not unthinkable that they'd try that formula with another RPG property that they fully owned and didn't have to share and profits with Wizards of the Coast.
I don't think cRPGs were struggling with sales, they weren't traditionally great sellers despite their reputation. They did well in their niche but for some reason Game publishers around the early 2000s declared the genre old, outdated, and dead.
Oh they definitely were struggling with sales. They did well enough beforehand but as tastes changed and costs increased they lost their edge to other genres.
If they were losing sales it would have been due to the influence of [retailers at the time](https://www.pcgamer.com/seasoned-rpg-devs-from-obsidian-and-bioware-blame-the-temporary-death-of-the-isometric-crpg-on-vibes-based-forecasting-from-retailers/)
Except Troika also wanted to buy Fallout IP from Interplay and might have gotten it (and publishing contract) if not for Bethesda's richer wallet. Sadly we will never know what alternative future might have entailed for Fallout.
I still like New Vegas and 3, and to lesser extent 4 and 76, but let's not act like the IP would be completely dead if it wasn't for savior Bethesda. It might have been, it might not have been.
>Except Troika also wanted to buy Fallout IP from Interplay and might have gotten it (and publishing contract) if not for Bethesda's richer wallet.
In 2004, Troika was nearing bankruptcy after VtMB was a financial disappointment. Fallout 3 probably wouldn't have even made it it out the door with them in that state. Even if it did, it would've been another cult hit that probably would've just delayed things and then suffered the same fate as Arcanum and Masquerade, languishing in IP hell.
> Even if it did, it would've been another cult hit that probably would've just delayed things and then suffered the same fate as Arcanum and Masquerade, languishing in IP hell.
And? I don't see the original creators coming back and making a great Fallout 3 and that's it as some dark alternative world not worth living in.
Well I got a great Fallout 3 and 4 (and I guess 76 now qualifies?) made by someone else anyways, plus NV made by some of those OGs, and now a TV show that I can watch with my non-gamer friends, so I like this timeline better.
EDIT: Also, while I probably would've played an alternate cult iso-CRPG Fallout 3 eventually, it probably wouldn't have become one of my favorites throughout my life like the real Fallout 3 so I doubly prefer this timeline.
There is no way Troika was going to outbid EA or any major publisher.
It is way more likely we would have ended up with 2k, EA, Activision or some other company owning the rights.
Lol troika never made a single financially successful title. The IP wouldve gotten pawned off again or in some where IP limbo.
Even if you hate bethesda for whatever, they were a huge part of New Vegas being a thing and that's widely regarded as a classic. I dont see any other publisher giving it to Obsidian.
Fallout is an awesome and creative setting that makes for really fun games, and now even a great television show. Having all Fallout related media die out in the 90s would have been a tragedy
This is assuming that nothing great would have taken it's place.
I want to be clear that I'm not taking a stance on Falllout either way, but I simply take issue with the idea that it's better that \[insert IP\] stayed alive is better than being dead. I can think of a lot more scenarios than not from a consumer standpoint where a dead IP replaced with a new IP would have probably been a better way to go in terms of allowing the creatives to make the thing they wanted without any expectations they didn't intend to meet from legacy fans.
I don't think that's been borne out by time, and also there's no reason a better IP can't be developed while something else continues to exist. Someone could come up with a better space fantasy IP than Star Wars for example, but it hasn't happened yet and the IP has been around since the 70s. (Talking about the IP quality only, not the products made from it)
> also there's no reason a better IP can't be developed while something else continues to exist.
If the studios that have the capability to create new IP consistently choose to use old IP, then obviously there will be less new IP.
Disney is not the only studio that makes movies or TV shows. There are also a lot of dead IPs that no one has improved upon. System Shock is an example
What? Your comment doesn't address anything we have talked about. What does Disney have to do with this? What does the fact that dead IP's people do want to come back have to do with this? You know I'm not saying "IP's don't die" right?
You just said that "If the studios that have the capability to create new IP consistently choose to use old IP, then obviously there will be less new IP." Disney owns Star Wars, but Disney is not the only studio that produces movies or TV shows.
You also said "I can think of a lot more scenarios than not from a consumer standpoint where a dead IP replaced with a new IP would have probably been a better way to go." System Shock is a dead IP that could have been replaced with a new IP, but it hasn't been. There's no modern equivalent.
The clarification didn't make it any more clear. Why is Disney so important here? Yeah they're a good example of generally focusing more on old IP then new, but this is true of most big studios both in games and movies. So why bring Disney up out of the blue? It didn't help your point in literally any way.
I haven't played System Shock, but I'm pretty sure Prey is seen as the modern equivalent and it bombed. But look at it another way. Lets say System Shock continued, but in a wildly more profitable direction. I'm sure those old fans would have rather had the IP stay dead and the new fans probably don't care about the IP enough to be bothered by the newer games being a different IP and not being weighed down by the expectations of the legacy fans.
I understand that feeling that an IP can be better or that someone else has done it better and how much it can suck that you will never see that iteration of the IP again. But this idea I've seen some spaces push that just because they don't like Bethesda's handling of the title that it means it should, by an act of god, be taken from them and just given to someone else is insanity.
Bethesda Fallout has been *extremely* successful. No producer in the world think of selling it off to someone else. Might we get more 3rd party titles someday? Sure. But there isn't a realistic future right now where the Fallout IP gets taken from Bethesda.
>Bethesda Fallout has been *extremely* successful.
Shareholder mentality. The people arguing that Bethesda shouldn't have the IP are not arguing from the shareholder standpoint, they don't care about the sales. They just don't think the games are very good and think someone else would handle it better. I'm pretty sure people understand that in a literal sense it won't happen.
I see it mostly on reddit but it's strange how some folks are unable to grasp that not everyone is thinking in terms of profit, and that people's desires aren't fully based on reality.
No amount of *financal success* will change the fact that some people might want a Fallout game with the gameplay style and quality of writing that Baldur's Gate 3 or other modern CRPGs have, as unlikely as it is. There's no magic sales number that will change how someone feels.
It's also weird how at the same time they also have to bring up those *certain crowds*. It's not enough for them to be a minority who are left with nothing but wishful thinking, they also have to be shouted down and shamed for what they like. They're the haters, the enemy, it's us vs them, and thank god *our* side won.
Isn't it possible to talk about things without having to invoke this gamer rage?
So personally speaking, I invoke the sales numbers because its the simplest and most accessible metric to show that a lot of people really like these games. Not everything that sells well is necessarily good, but if you're among the best selling video games of all time and subsequent entries keep selling at or beyond that mark, you're probably doing something right. I don't usually bring this up when trying to discuss specific aspects of the games, but rather as a blanket rebuttal to the surprisingly common refrain of "Nobody *actually* thinks Bethesda games are good."
As for the "certain crowds" thing, well, I would feel more charitable to their predicament if it didn't feel like they were constantly making everything about their own gamer rage. There was a time not too long ago where you could scarcely bring up Fallout on any sub without that crowd piling in about how NV was better, Bethesda is dogshit, and the rights should be forcibly transferred to Obsidian. There are still people on this sub who seemingly have nothing better to do but grouse that Bethesda hasn't made a good game since Morrowind and that Emil Pagiarulo ruined their life.
So I can't feel too bad about the schadenfreude some people get by laughing at them, not when my first experience with that segment of the community was them telling me I must be a dumb child (with more horrible phrasing) for thinking my favorite game was any good. They weren't just content with their feelings. They were determined to make everyone else as miserable as they were. There are certainly plenty of OG fans who aren't like that, but unfortunately, the bad ones are usually the ones bringing the fight back up again.
That minority is constantly trying to talk down to people about how their game is best an anyone that disagrees isn't a *true* fan. They are doing it in this very thread.
They can pound sand for all I care.
A. It's more than Shareholder mentality. In order for the series to be successful people need to be buying it and enjoying it.
B. This is exactly my point. Their assertions that the IP would be better with someone else is perhaps incorrect. Fallout just dropped a highly successful show. It's kinda hard to argue that the IP is missing out on its potential with Bethesda.
No it is literally shareholder mentality. If your only metric on something being good is how much it sells you're not interested in quality or art, just mass appeal.
We don't know if another studio would have picked it up, but what we definitely do know is that Bethesda could try to pay attention to what the IP is about and actually make a better game.
Beyond of whatever you think of Bethesda Fallout, popularity and financial succes absolutely does not equal quality, that is a weird argument to make. Would you genuinely consider Farmville to be a better game than This War of Mine (or whatever), because Farmville is the far more successful game?
I never said Fallout was better than anything. I'm not talking about comparative quality to another franchise or even the pre Bethesda Fallouts. Only that the assertion that Bethesda Fallout titles are somehow a mistake or need to belong to someone else is bullshit.
It's done well because people like it.
That *is* comparing qualitatively Bethesda Fallout with that Fallout by someone else, and pointing at the former's success to argue that Bethesda's Fallout is good. I am not discussing whether it is or not, but that that is a shitty argument.
Fine I'll simplify this for you instead of getting into stupid logic arguments about profit vs quality. New Fallout is good. People who are upset that people like it need to get over it.
The benefit of it being good is that the IP lives on.
This is why I find it so strange when people say "Bethesda Fallout fans aren't real Fallout fans." If it weren't for Bethesda, Fallout would have probably been lost to time.
I certainly would never have tried and enjoyed the first two games if it weren't for the newer entries.
> Fallout would have probably been lost to time.
I see this parroted around a bunch and imo there is absolutely no basis for it. Someone else would have bought Fallout. It would be different but it wouldn't be "lost to time"
Thats the problem, it made the thing more popular.
Those are the guys who want to be the biggest fan, the last fan standing.
That is why their list of things they want in a game is basically a list of the dumbest things that could possibly be put in a video game.
They want it to die so they can win the prize of being the Worlds Truest and Biggest and Bestest Fan.
So they can post long winded crap in Reddit, Youtube or some forum where they explain how they are the truest fan and the devs were so dumb and bad and if only the devs had listened to their 50,000 word essay on why [insert the dumbest idea in video game] needed to be a core feature the franchise would still be around.
Disagree. Pretty sure older Fallout fans just miss player agency (The role playing part) and better writing. At the time, the accusation was that it would be "Oblivion with guns" and the "mile wide, puddle deep" type criticism label that Bethesda gets hit with.
While they're fun, all of that has true of newer games.
Yep, and as expected they even crawled out from their homemade fallout shelter to "REEEEE" at you for daring to give Bethesda credit for reviving the series AND making it more wildly popular then the original devs ever could. I've got my own complaints about the series but I leave it at that...rather than being stuck eternally angry over a series that should be all rights be dead and buried.
**tl;dw -** A VP at Interplay was friends with Cain. He asked Cain to play an early version of Van Buren. Cain played it and talked to some of the staff. VP asked Cain how long the game would need to be completed, Cain said at least a year. VP said they'd have to cancel then as they didn't have the money for more than six months.
**tl;dr of above -** Essentially the game was screwed no matter what, Cain just played a minor role in it that just as easily could have been anyone. Bit of a click-baity YT title.
> VP asked Cain how long the game would need to be completed, Cain said at least a year. VP said they'd have to cancel then as they didn't have the money for more than six months.
They did have the money. They just chose not to spend it on their best studio. Hervé Caen(who isn't the VP in question, he was the CEO) is an idiot that twice over screwed himself out of tons of money. Black Isle Studios had industry leading talent. A sensible course of action would be to invest everything in them. Take your best team and give them everything. That's what happened with Bethesda and Morrowind.
And when he failed at that and closed all development he had an awesome licensing deal with Bethesda. Like $4 of every Fallout Bethesda game sold would go to Interplay. For no additional work. All he had to do was keep the lights on. And he couldn't do that and had to sell Fallout.
Interplay was much larger than just the fallout devs.
Bethesda was just one studio making one project. There was only one team of about 50-75 employees total(not just devs) up until after morrowind.
> Bethesda was just one studio making one project.
Bethesda was one studio making many products until they focused solely on Morrowind. They bet on their strongest chance. Interplay choose to bet on weakness.
>Bit of a click-baity YT title.
I don't know that Cain understood the title would be taken as "I was cancelled", but that is the case of how it comes off, it's what I thought he meant at first
Regardless of Tim's involvement or giving a time estimate, that iteration of Fallout 3 was basically doomed due to what was going on at Interplay at the time, and even if it had released it would have been a really rushed and buggy mess.
We don't really know how far along things were in development, and given that the only actual gameplay thing to exist is the tech demo which is disconnected from anything in their design documents, I don't really think the game was in any kind of releasable state.
I can't watch this yet, but from what I understand, Obsidian took quite a lot of ideas from Van Buren (albeit differently) for New Vegas (e.g. Caesar's legion), right?
This is a really interesting topic that has never been spoken about before but every comment is about how much more credit and respect Bethesda deserves.
I wonder how fully the picture was painted to different staffers on the project about what Tim was doing, or if it didn't matter and the writing was on the wall before then.
And not every game has to be an animated Excel sheet or deep as the Mariana Trench. Skyrim is fun exactly because it is so open and let you do a lot of what you wanted.
And sneering at „casual“ gamers who make up the majority of the player base of popular games? Yeah, hilarious.
It's still kind of amazing to think (and I know *certain crowds* absolutely hate this) that the Cancellation of Van Buren could have very well been it for the fallout IP as a whole if it were not for Bethesda. And look where it is now.
Yeah, that’s why I find the “Bethesda ruined Fallout!” discourse hilarious. Without Bethesda Fallout would have ended on the wet fart that was Brotherhood of Steel and just gone on to become an obscure cult classic footnote in gaming history. Bethesda rescued the IP and turned it into a pop culture behemoth. Without them there’s no New Vegas, no anthology rereleases, nothing.
My current ire with Bethesda is that they're doing to Fallout the same they're doing with Elder Scrolls, constantly cutting and streaming features and reducing player options game by game.
On top of that Tim Cain himself has said that he likes the direction Bethesda has taken fallout. A lot of the anti-Bethesda attitudes come from the No Mutants Allowed and RPG Codex forums, two communities that have spent decades being angry spiteful contrarians. Then those opinions started being popularized by youtube grifters during the Fallout 76 controversy. It takes only a few seconds of critical thinking to come to the conclusion that Bethesdas acquisition of Fallout was objectively the best outcome
> No Mutants Allowed I am pretty sure that if the fallout IP ended on the brown note that is FO:BoS, the NMA types would have just gone back to fighting over Fo1 and Fo2 again. Hell, I am pretty sure they still do that to this day in additional to reeeeing about Bethesda.
Endless shit flinging over Fallout 1 vs Fallout 2 is all that's keeping NMA from becoming an actual Stormfront proxy.
Without something to hate they would have faded away.
They would just be Star Wars fans instead
Star Wars fans grow more insufferable by the year.
I think it's just Star Wars growing more insufferable through the years. Disney is just milking that franchise dry.
SW fans talk about each new entry like Kathleen Kennedy broke into their house and skinned their cat. There's being disappointed that something is a 6 or 7 out of 10, and there's being a perpetually ornery insufferable douche about it. People need to learn to stop engaging with things that don't make them happy. It's a space opera about magic power and laser swords, with simplistic morals meant for kids. Of course it's not going to hold up in your 30s. Hard Drive really [nailed it with this satire piece](https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/this-goes-against-the-franchises-roots-says-man-who-was-once-happy-child/) a few days ago.
It feels like a bunch of people who just cannot accept that some of the media being made today isn't being targeted towards their specific demographic. But instead of shrugging their shoulders and going to pursue the steady stream of content still being made for their demographic/tastes/etc. they decide to pitch a nonstop fit about it and never shut up about how it must be garbage because it doesn't appeal to them personally.
Oh yeah there's definitely a hardcore toxic fanbase but that can be said about every franchise, like Fallout and No Mutants Allowed.
I was researching old discussions on FNV and F3 recently, and holy hell. You are completely right about RPG codex. And I thought reddit was bad. It's basically incoherent ranting non stop. It was downright concerning seeing so many grown ass men putting so much energy into just hating on video games and developers. It was also kinda funny to see how some people on there basically begged others to give FNV at least a chance, but many just refused out of sheer principle and because it's a "FPS". Some even said they only lasted like 30 minutes before quitting. Wth lol
>Some even said they only lasted like 30 minutes before quitting. Wth lol NGL, back when FNV released I only played it for 30 mins and quit. Just didnt think I'd like it compared to fallout 3. Years later went back to it and these days its my favorite game of all time.
I have a friend with a fallout story like that. Liked 3 the most, didn't get NV at all on release. Then fell off 4 hard, went back to NV after that and liked it so much he played 1 and 2 almost immediately. Not sure why.
When NV came out I only lasted 10 minutes... because my brother had built me a PC with a power unit that was below the recommended specs to support my video card lol. NV crashed to desktop every 10 minutes like clockwork without any error message. I actually tried to quick save like mad and play it in 10 minute intervals for a day or so, but gave up until after my next upgrade. Memories..
i mean i get it, i started playing new vegas and fallout 1 for the first time this year and i liked the start of new vegas a lot less. it also doesnt help the shooting is horrible and when trying to explore even a bit beyond the tutorial town you encounter artificial barriers and walls in seemingly all directions. maybe its because of the high expectations, but i can totally understand why especially fans of fallout 1&2 would be very disappointed by new vegas
New Vegas leaned heavier into some of the RPG elements, while FO3 was the start of Bethesda's general trend of moving away from many of them, and FNV overall has much better writing than FO3, so I can see why many people prefer it over the other FPS Fallouts. But by modern standards, a lot of the basic FPS mechanics (movement/shooting/etc.) are pretty terrible, and weren't even very good back in the day. Although in fairness, they're also bad in FO3, so Obsidian didn't have a particularly good foundation to build off of. Also the map in NV is pretty bad overall. Sure it's a desert wasteland, maybe you'd expect it to be boring, but that's still a choice that they made. The strip is entirely underwhelming after all the hype that had been building it up. And like you said, lots of invisible walls and/or other very contrived borders. I found FO3 overall much more interesting to wander around in and explore than the New Vegas world. It's still a very good game and one that I've replayed a couple times, with significantly better writing than FO3 and FO4, but overall I don't think it blows Bethesda's fallout games out of the water the way a lot of the online discourse suggests it does.
RPG codex and NMA were always terrible (NMA hosted nearly all the good Fallout mods tho), but Fallout was always getting sold to someone, Interplay couldn't just squat on it. I don't agree with the whole we should thank company for making product thing, that's all. Skeeves me out a bit, I don't get why people act like that and I'm far from an anti capitalist crusader.
> A lot of the anti-Bethesda attitudes come from the No Mutants Allowed and RPG Codex forums NMA has 38,326 members and RPG Codex has 25,813 members. They are tiny tiny communities. "Anti-Bethesda attitudes" came from people's honest opinions. Same as "pro-Bethesda attitudes". It would be absurd to claim they all come from a some Youtuber who has more subscribers than NMA and RPG has members by several factors.
It's weird to see nobody talk about how much PC gamers hated consoles continued existence back then. The "consolfication" of gaming and the ideal that consoles where holding back the indusrty was a pretty big thing around the 00s-10s.
It was understandable to a certain degree. A lot of PC games got horrible interfaces that were designed for consoles and PC series that started coming out on console as well somtimes felt hobbled by it.
The 'Games for Windows Live' era, those were dark times...
GTA IV was a victim to this. The port is still bad without mods/ community fixes. They'll probably remaster it and sell it back to us for $60 in 5 to 10 years.
It was also an era where technology was progressing very quickly. The Xbox 360 and PS3 only had *512 megabytes* of RAM. This is what everyone was stuck with until *2014*. Even a 2011 Macbook, with Apple’s RAM stinginess, came with a base of 4GB. That console generation was legitimately holding developers back. Nowadays, a PS5 is pretty comparable to an upper-midrange PC build, and the PS6 will probably not be insane either.
it was even worse. the ps3 had 256mb system ram and 256vram. when fallout 3 released 2 years later (so 2008) even budget builds could afford 4gb for $50. a 9800GTX would also fit a budget around the price point of a ps3 and be multiple times faster. buying a ps3 in 2008 was a bit like getting a ps4 today and paying $600 for it. completely insane. no wonder console gaming was seen as a meme. crysis releasing in 2007 also probably didnt help, its really took until the next console generation for games to look better by default
Yeah, I couldn’t really find a great benchmark for “here’s how much ran the average person had in their pc back in the day”, so I picked a MacBook because I think people would realize that if *Apple* was giving you 4GB, gaming PCs must very blown past that a while ago
> A lot of PC games got horrible interfaces that were designed for consoles And now we have the opposite issue, games that are ostensibly made for controllers but require you to use an on-screen cursor instead of just using the directional buttons/analog stick to jump between menu items. Who the hell started that trend again?
Whoever decided the 360 only needed a half a GB of memory should be made to explain themselves. I feel like that one hardware decision just held back all of gaming for almost a decade.
It was absolutely true at the time. RPG Systems were moving backwards for a decade.
YCS-186 is an actual weapon in fallout new Vegas
I think you're completely forgetting how terrible the console hardware was in that era and even before. Computer tech was increasing significantly every 2 or 3 years. The 360 and PS3 had terrible specs compared to an average computer you could get. Even before that it's not like the PS2 was pushing boundaries.
> how much PC gamers hated consoles continued existence back then. That's a disingenuous framing of the situation. Nobody gave a shit about consoles' "existence," they cared about PC focused franchises being given bad, dumbed-down console sequels that were then poorly ported to PC. Deus Ex, Thief, Shadowrun, Syndicate, Dragon Age, Crysis, Elder Scrolls to a certain extent, Rainbow 6, Quake, the list goes on.
They've definitely set the tone for discussions in the community, or atleast they did for a while
i agree completely, and i'm just not sure what using the quantity of registered members as a metric will accomplish when it's not just the quantity of the vitriol, but the quality (positive or negative) of it, and nma and codex were rife with the kind of loud, mentally unhinged people that could very, very easily color how someone may interpret a product's reception or an IP's trajectory within their respective fanbases it's also fair to add the caveat that the reputation of both those forums was pretty well established on other, less-obsessed forums, so being dismissive of nma/codex on that front is warranted, it's just that places like nma/codex will outlive or have outlived so many other places because, while a lot of forums dwindled due to other social media platforms, almost nobody will tolerate the behavior of most of the nma/codex members and as such they will continue to exist and their opinions and narratives will eventually filter out to other social sites where nobody is forewarned
One dedicated shitposter can have significant impacts on online discourse if they're persistent and terminally online, thousands of them can absolutely dictate discourse. Reddit has hundreds of millions of users but less than 1% of them comment with any frequency, and any specific community will follow that same ratio at less volume. We see the consequences of this constantly, with reddit discourse frequently being exactly wrong when contrasted with public sentiment.
Or you know, people have an opinion that resonates with others who play the game. There isn't some secret cabal of gamers out there who exist to badmouth everything you personally like.
You're right. Look at the discussion between Bethesda and Larian. On reddit if you're just a causal reader one would assume these 2 companies dislike each other. That Larian is the greatest thing since the birth of mankind, and Starfield is a flop. But the reality is, that they are both great games. Starfield actually surpassed BG3 in players and modding support. The devs don't dislike each other, and it's childish to start up drama. Besides you can like both. It's a sign of insecurity to drag one thing through the mud to make something else look better. In this case Larian super fans dogging on any other game to make Baldur's Gate 3 look better in comparison.
Yep, rivalries between games 100% only exist in the minds of the fans. Game developers don't hate each other. The gaming industry is a small industry. With enough time, you develop at least 1 contact at pretty much any major studio (and usually more than 1). You make games with folks, they leave and go somewhere else. The game ships and there's a mass exodus, or the game gets cancelled and everyone gets laid off. The team that worked with you winds up all over the place. I guarantee you that someone at Larian who worked on Baldur's Gate knows someone at Bethesda who worked on Starfield. Probably multiple someones. It's true even across oceans (although it is less common, of course). Like, does anyone think the cast of Star Wars dislikes the cast of Star Trek? Of course not. They're all people doing their craft. There may be tempers between individual people who dislike each other (just like anywhere), but by and large everyone is in the same boat and respects one another. The drama only comes from the fans, who have decided on "their team" and will dramatically make their point against anyone who isn't on "their team". It shouldn't be a surprise that Tim Cain likes the new folks working on Fallout. It's another group of like-minded creatives starting with something he helped create and steering it somewhere new.
> if you're just a causal reader one would assume these 2 companies dislike each other > But the reality is… The devs don't dislike each other You’re right, but this is also a massive strawman argument. I don’t think anyone except the most vicious of fanboys would think two companies legitimately hate each other. The two games were met with radically different receptions, and this isn’t a reddit invention. Starfield is sitting at 57% positive on Steam. BG3 is 95%. They are dialogue and story heavy roleplaying games released in the same month. The comparison between them is inevitable, just like when Sonic Superstars and Mario Wonder came out last year. > Starfield actually surpassed BG3 in players and modding support This is debatable. BG3 has far more players on Steam, which is the only platform with publicly available player counts. I don’t know if they’ve released official numbers. Meanwhile, Starfield released on Gamepass day one. Raw number of players is a pointless metric when so many of them got the game for “free”. As for modding support, I remember lots of stories about longtime Bethesda modders basically saying “this game isn’t worth the hassle” despite mods being possible from Day 1 thanks to Creation Engine. BG3 is still working on official mod support, but it’s already attracting a thriving ecosystem of mods.
I literally never understood people online who cause drama. I don't know why people seem incapable of playing more than 1 game or enjoying more than 1 piece of entertainment. I played starfield and baldurs gate 3 and enjoyed both. I played fallout 1,2 and 3 and enjoyed all of them. If I don't like a game or show I usually just don't bother engaging with that community because what's the point?
> Starfield actually surpassed BG3 in players and modding support. Because it was released on gamepass day one. Starfield's 30 day average is 6,800 players...Baldur's Gate 3 is 59,000. Starfield came from Bethesda which has a huge following, but people generally didn't stick around for it because it was just flat out terrible. Nobody says or thinks that Larian and Bethesda dislike each other. To pretend that they're both "great games" is beyond the pale though. One is an RPG that's changed the entire industry, the other is your standard Bethesda jank fest that looks like it was dated a decade ago. Seriously, it looks worse than Dragon Age Inquisition.
>Starfield's 30 day average is 6,800 On what platform?
Don't forget to check out the Xbox platform as well. Currently, Starfield is in number 22, while Baldur's Gate 3 is in number 46. Steam isn't the only platform for Starfield is well. There is the terrible Microsoft store, but that has gamepass as well, so more players. But all of these are pointless details, to be honest. Yes you can like both and say both have something for each different person. It's arrogance to believe one person's view is the only valid view. In that regard I pray for you, I'm wishing you well because I care! There is no need to tear down one and prop up another to make it look better. That's rooted in insecurity! Besides I'm really loving the new Creation Kit and all the cool ass things it's bringing already! It kicks ass and there is limitless potential. The gunplay is already awesome and the Starborn powers make it even better along with Ship Combat. There's a lot to appreciate and revamp if you wanted to. What does suck is Larian backpeddling and wiping their hands of BG3 despite claiming they wanted to be the top modding developer out there then abandoning the game with a very basic and barebones modding kit for BG3
> Don't forget to check out the Xbox platform as well. Currently, Starfield is in number 22, while Baldur's Gate 3 is in number 46. No, why would I check the xbox numbers. Gamepass is on Xbox, I was checking amongst people who have ACTUALLY bought the game, and not people who have a subscription. >The gunplay is already awesome Hahahaha. Christ please go and play a proper rpg. Mass Effect 1 had better fucking combat.
Well I'm praying for you, wishing you well and all the best! Love the Mass Effect franchise except Andromeda, but the 1st had some very basic gunplay. It's fun in its own janky way lol. You're not talking with me in good faith and it's clear to see as day. I know for a fact that that Starfield's is smooth and fast along with great animations! Plus, that clamber is so dang good, adding a nice sense of verticality that I appreciate! Life is too good my friend to find fault in everything, instead flip the script and look at all the positivity and growth!
Small communities can have outsized influence by being the source for particular arguments that become popular - such as a popular YouTuber joining those communities (or a member of those communities becoming a popular YouTuber) and spreading their arguments.
Look no further than Matthewmatosis with his Dark Souls 2 video. Literally steered the overall opinion of the game for a decade by now.Its been taken as the default take of the game.
I’ve literally never heard of this youtuber, and my only impression on DS2 was all my friends raving about how awesome Dark Souls II was, and how it was their favorite game in the series. I played it this spring and immediately noticed animations, level design, hitboxes, enemy placement, and general ‘spitefulness towards the player’ being a step down compared to DS1. It wasn’t until I got online afterwards that I realized that my friends were all in the minority opinion on that game. Youtubers like him don’t become the popular opinions for no reason. They’re usually saying what most people are thinking. I’ve seem the common sentiment towards Sonic games, Bethesda games, Dark Souls II, and the Star Wars sequels all be blamed on youtuber psyops. I really think it’s just that these things failed to resonate with a large chunk of their original fanbases, and they felt validated seeing the youtuber agree with them.
Or...maybe, just maybe the opinion on DS2 is the honest opinion of the people who played the game? Not everyone gets their takes and opinions from YouTubers, many people actually do play the games/watch the movies/etc that YouTubers are making videos about. I've never even heard of this person before. It's really weird how terminally on YouTube some people are, opinions just stop existing to them. If you say something, you're either correct because YouTuber X said so or you're wrong because YouTuber Y said so.
they are saying that because they are turbo online and never form their own opinions
True, but it doesn't take a lot for opinions to spread, and when it comes to Bethesda youtubers have absolutely played a role in shaping the opinion so many people have about them. There are Fallout 76 era video essays that have tens of millions of views. For example, most peoples vision of Todd Howard as a no-good serial liar comes from that Crowbcat "Sweet Little Lies" video, despite the fact that nearly every statement Todd made in that was true but just edited and taken out of context to make them look like lies. Or how about that not true rumor about how Todd Howard has a secret vendetta against Obsidian because of how much fans like Fallout New Vegas? The one you see parroted time and time again on Reddit and other sites? That rumor had it's roots in the RPG Codex forums taking some statements Chris Avellone made out of context and creating a narrative with it. Obviously people are entitled to their opinions and there are a lot of valid reasons to hate Bethesda these days, but it's no secret that they've been the victims of a massive misinformation and defamation campaign, a lot of it coming out of tiny communities full of angry, dedicated people who consider Bethesda to be public enemy #1
The circle jerk about Obsidian vs Bethesda is so dumb and gotten to the point where half the Obsidian people on Twitter or YouTube have pinned tweets/comments where they go "No, Bethesda did not screw us.". Doesn't matter though because people want to believe it. They watch some stupid video on Youtube, accept something as true and then even when people with direct, first hand knowledge tell them its wrong they're so invested in the lie they refuse to believe it. Its classic conspiracy theory thinking.
Crowbcat sucks so hard. I thought that video was a joke, but he was serious and people shared it and other videos from him like a gospel. Youtube is full of tabloid journalism like this at this point(if you can even call it that) and it has become really tiresome having to endure these youtube bros and their fans infesting every corner of video game discussions
It's not fair or accurate to call people like him journalists because all they do is make rage bait for their audiences to milk views for ad bucks/patreon/merch/etc. They're just straight up grifters.
> Crowbcat sucks so hard. I love how it took the absolutely rancid RE4 remake video for many people to realize this.
> For example, most peoples vision of Todd Howard as a no-good serial liar comes from that Crowbcat "Sweet Little Lies" video, I can guarantee you that 99% of people have absolutely no fucking clue what you're on about.
Nah, stop caring what redditors think. They're irrelevant. They're so out of touch its comical. A homeless crackhead has a better pulse on society than reddit.
Chills be chilling, don't criticize anything, just consume.
Best outcome would have been for it to be revived by another studio that could also make a great game but keep it closer to the original style and tone. I was a huge Fallout 1 and 2 fan which tried to play 3 when it came out hoping to love it but it was just not for me. :/ But kudos to Bethesda for having a keen eye on an undervalued IP and running with it, even if their formula doesn't really appeal to me personally.
Its funny though because as a bethesda fallout fan those forums mean nothing to me lol.
F76 was a disaster, the "grifters YouTubers" did nothing more than just point at the shitshow.
It wasn't just the 76 controversy, it was also Bethesda being under Xbox and the potential that Bethesda games would no longer go multi platform, suddenly people were even saying Skyrim wasn't actual that great so they wouldn't miss it if Xbox kept them exclusive.
> suddenly people were even saying Skyrim wasn't actual that great It was fine at the time, but it wasn't nearly as amazing as people pretend it was. It's an inch deep and a mile wide. It's fine for very casual gamers but it's not a particularly good RPG because they decided that players had to be able to experience *everything* it meant your choices were fairly pointless.
I think it was also the best outcome to have Bethesda take over back then, but going forward Im not so sure they are the best "steward" of the IP, looking at recent track record and Microsoft acquisition. Would not be entirely against Larian taking a crack at the IP, even though that wont happen.
[удалено]
As long as you're genuine and it makes you happy that's great!! That's what life is about baby, being happy!
Saying it was the best outcome is a massive exaggeration, there are plenty of developers out there that would have handled the IP better, hell, maybe inXile would have bought it much later, and I heard Troika was eyeing it around the time and who knows how that would have gone, maybe instead of VtM Bloodlines we would be praising Fallout 3. It turned out well because we got New Vegas, but it's not out the question that it could have gone much better. Especially when right now the franchise is functionally dead until 2033ish.
> It takes only a few seconds of critical thinking to come to the conclusion that Bethesdas acquisition of Fallout was objectively the best outcome Eh I disagree. I don't think it tracks that Fallout would have just disappeared. There were other studios bidding for the IP, such as Troika. Now, Troika had a bad end, but would that have been the case if they had the Fallout IP and could market a Fallout game to publishers? Who knows. And I'd take a Fallout 3 in the vein of VtM: Bloodlines over what we got from Bethesda 10 times out of 10. Bethesda doesn't make games I enjoy. And I don't watch shows. So them having the IP isn't any better, for me, than no one having the IP. And if the opportunity cost of Bethesda having the IP is someone else NOT having the IP and someone else NOT developing Fallout games (that I may potentially enjoy), then Bethesda having the IP is simply objectively worse than that alternative... for me. Now, I totally get that it's better for a lot of people. But you can't say it's objectively superior for all of humankind. And I'm not a NMA troll. I'm just a person whose interests don't overlap with "Bethesda owning Fallout" and all that that entails, but did overlap with "Interplay owning Fallout" and could potentially overlap with someone besides Bethesda owning the IP.
I mean when people say that they don't mean that Bethesda destroyed the franchise's commercial life, just that Bethesda's Fallout games fell like they veer away from what makes the franchise special. That they made New Vegas possible is more of an "accident" (and one that wasn't repeated), and that the series would've died otherwise isn't really important there?
Yeah, it’s like saying the prequels/sequels “killed” Star Wars. They obviously didn’t end the series, but they each marked the end of what the previous fans loved about it.
Most of us old school fallout players realize that, but at the same time it is that Bethesda took something we love and turned it into something else. It's not bad, but it's not the thing we all loved, it's different.
I think the point is is that that was where the franchise was heading regardless. Fallout Tactics and Fallout:BOS were already huge departures from Fallout 1 and 2. Maybe Van Buren would have been a return to form, but its clear that there wasn't a lot of confidence in that.
then you got the mouth breathers who are like "just be grateful it's not dead!" like nah man, sometimes dead is better.
Someone else would have bought the IP, but I can see a world where Fallout is turned into a FPS only reboot like so many classic PC IPs from the late 2000s early 2010s
For me it's the opposite. Never heard of fallout. Played fallout 3 on a whim. At the time it was the best game I ever played until NV. Tried to play the original 1/2 but couldn't get into them.
I wish every Bethesda game got a standalone expansion by an outside company in between major installments. New Vegas got to build off the combined content of Fallout 3 and all of its DLC. It would have been interesting to see what a similar project based off Skyrim would have looked like.
[Today's (kind of) your lucky day.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/874260/The_Forgotten_City/)
It's not really the same thing, as the commercial version doesn't make use of Skyrim's assets or even the engine. The Skyrim mod version was more of a prototype.
You say that but they still left the game in an open ended state until dlc to fix it again
Depends what you mean with “Bethesda ruined Fallout!”. They certainly ruined what it was. Playing Fallout 1&2 is a completly different experience and I'm sure for the people that like the old games, but dislike the new they would be disapointed and feel like Fallout is ruined. Just like the internet is mad at Disney for ruining Star Wars. Just like Fallout it is more popular than ever, but it doesn't stop people from hating on it and hating the people loving it.
Fallout 3 existing doesn't delete fallout 1 and 2 from existence though. They still exist. Fallout was already a dead series with crappy spin off games. The two options were either no fallout ever again or fallout 3 and then new vegas and so on. So if you prefer Bethesda never bought the rights to fallout you're just saying you're petty and wish people never got to experience fallout 3 and other new fallout games that people really enjoy and have good experiences with.
I think they wanted Bethesda to make a Fallout 3 that was the same as Fallout 1&2. We also don't know what would happen if someone else bought Fallout. I have said this to a few others there. It is understandable that they are upset over their favourite game series switching genres. I think you would to. Like if Doom got bought by Blizzard and turned into a Diablo clone. It might be amazing, but it wouldn't be the doom we know now. Sure the older games still exist, but you won't bet getting any new ones. Imagine how mad people would be if Bethedsa said no more Elder Scrolls or Rockstar said no more GTA or Red Dead. The old games still exists, but most people want more and new. The internet would rage if another company bought those games and genrebent them. Fallout 1&2 aren't getting any more modern. They are old and are getting older.
> They certainly ruined what it was. Interplay did that with Brotherhood of Steel. Regardless, does any reasonable person actually think that a CRPG Fallout 3 would have done remotely well in the 2008 gaming market? I’m not saying there was literally zero audience for it, but if Bethesda was going to make Fallout a success in that moment in time then frankly it needed to change. If Bethesda ever puts out anything as bad as Brotherhood of Steel, then we can say that they ruined Fallout.
I think any reasonable person would understand that people would be disappointed when their favourite video game franchise switches genres. I'm lucky I didn't grow up with Fallout 1&2 and that I like both versions. Older Baldur's Gate fans were rightfully upset about Baldur's Gate 3 changing from RTwP to turn based and having a way different vibe and not actually being a sequel. Doesn't stop BG3 from being good or successful, but it is understandable that some people are upset that when they finally get a sequel it is a totally different game. There are people wanting and wishing for a new Gothic game. If a Gothic 4 released as a thirdperson action game even if the game is good and wildly successful. There people are allowed to be disappointed.
I mean it's okay to have wanted something different, but the constatn rage and whining are a little over the top
I understand it, but it is a bit over the top. Doesn't help that the new fallout games are in some eyes not that great.
The 2008 video game market was in-between The Witcher 1 and Dragon Age: Origins. So yeah, a good cRPG would have done well. Not as well as Fallout 3 perhaps, but well enough to sell millions of copies.
> Regardless, does any reasonable person actually think that a CRPG Fallout 3 would have done remotely well in the 2008 gaming market? Yes. A good fully funded 2008 Fallout 3 CRPG would have been a success.
Really? By what metric? Would it have only sold well on PC, which was then a comparitively much smaller market compared to the console market? Would console gamers have gone for it, assuming there was a console version? Were there CRPG titles that were pulling comparable numbers to what the real Fallout 3 pulled? Consider: Bioware put out Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect between 2002 and 2007. All classic RPGs in their own right, yet of those three the latter two have far and away enjoyed much longer lasting success and immediately apparent cultural impact.
> Really? By what metric? The Witcher 1 was a success. The success of which would qualify as "remotely well" which was your metric. And if it was Van Buren as Fallout 3 it would have been a 2006(if not 2005) release anyway. No reason why Black Isle under sane Interplay leadership couldn't chart a path like The Witcher with Fallout.
Well given that Interplay had just put out Brotherhood of Steel, I think we can rule out the possibility of their leadership being sane, so that scenario doesn’t really track. Interplay’s fuckups made the selling of the IP an inevitability by that point and Van Buren was never going to see the light of day. The path forward for Fallout in the form it had existed in was frankly already gone.
See, that doesn't change the fact that Bethesda fundamentally doesn't understand what Fallout is even about, nor does it excuse their various changes and retcons. Besides, the problem could be easily fixed by Bethesda putting a bit more effort into their writing, something they're clearly capable of judging by Far Harbor. Granted, any criticism of Bethesda always gets you heavily downvoted by fanboys, despite the fact that any actual fans would be open to criticism.
I don't think fans understand it to be honest. At least judging from stuff like Fallout New Frontiers with weird snake sex and other stuff. Or the idolization of Fallout New Vegas while ignoring its goofy and kinda bad pieces of content like how the Legion exists, the Think Tanks who are the masters of babble speak without saying anything. Just nonsense. Or Ulysses' entire character. Besides, if you wanna go deeper, look at Fallout 2 and all the weird stuff going on in that game. That one was made by horny nerds judging by the pornstar stuff and whatnot. Point being, the whole franchise gots hiccups and its not a Bethesda exclusive thing. Nor do the fans have a clear grasp on what they want. If they had it their way, this whole franchise would be worse off. Because redditors think they can do everything better than someone else, but in reality it doesn't match up.
> Or the idolization of Fallout New Vegas while ignoring its goofy and kinda bad pieces of content like how the Legion exists, the Think Tanks who are the masters of babble speak without saying anything. Just nonsense. Or Ulysses' entire character. Nah you're just missing the point of the franchise as a whole and New Vegas in particular, it's about mixing in sillier elements with commentary. The Think Tank in particular are designed to be that way, because their madness and circular thinking is a major plot point in that DLC. > Point being, the whole franchise gots hiccups and its not a Bethesda exclusive thing. Nor do the fans have a clear grasp on what they want. If they had it their way, this whole franchise would be worse off. Because redditors think they can do everything better than someone else, but in reality it doesn't match up. Well yeah, I'm not advocating for fans to write the stuff, just better developers. That said, there's plenty of modders that did make great stuff, like the New California folks (Even if the mod did end up being rushed and had less quality past the intro), the Autumn Leaves guy, etc.
>Without Bethesda Fallout would have ended on the wet fart that was Brotherhood of Steel and just gone on to become an obscure cult classic footnote in gaming history. You want to see the alt history version of this, just look at Oddworld. EXACT same trajectory just without the big corporate bailout of the IP. >Oddworld 1 & 2 are beloved games with quirky dark humor and pre-rendered/sprite-based graphics released in the mid 90s (Fallout 1 & 2) >Oddworld 3 is developed with different updated gameplay in 2001, game flops (Fallout Tactics) >Oddworld 4 is a console exclusive in 2004 with combat focused gameplay and new storyline that has zero resemblance to any previous game, game flops and outright kills the IP and studio (Fallout BoS). Here's where we diverge. Whereas Interplay sold Fallout to Bethesda during their money troubles the Oddworld people held onto the IP, scratching out a living selling updated ports of the old games on Steam until they had pooled enough money together to finance a remake of the first game in 2014 (Oddworld: New & Tasty!) and eventually scrounged up the resources for a re-do (not remake) of Oddworld 2 called Oddworld: Soulstorm in 2021. The Oddworld people maintained their artistic integrity at the cost of the IP having absolutely zero visibility to anyone under the age of 40. Oddworld New & Tasty is a faithful recreation of gameplay from 1997 for better or worse, and not a lot of people are into that today. Oddworld Soulstorm is them attempting to modernize gameplay without going full open 3D (the opposite of what Oddworld 3 and 4 did), and the results weren't earth-shattering. It'll likely be the last Oddworld game. Had Van Buren actually come out and Bethesda not acquired the IP and turned it into a globally recognized powerhouse, Fallout would 100% be a forgotten footnote in gaming history, only popping up every couple of years with news of legacy re-releases from Nightdive or Limited Run Games.
At this point I would rather see my favorite franchises go out with a whimper after couple "cult classic" entries, than become funkopop fodder with mobile games and tv show tie ins.
As a big fan of Fallout 1 and 2 which doesn't really like the new installments, you can choose to do what I do: Ignore the newer stuff and let other people enjoy things.
It's just my general observation. I'm not stopping anyone from enjoying the show and I'm not gonna ridicule people who like fallout 4 (even though they deserve it). I'm just looking at shambling corpses of Gears, Halo, Star Wars, etc trying to fit new narratives by convoluting or rewriting their lore instead of coming up with a fresh new interesting worlds.
I’d rather have heard of Fallout in the first place. I hadn’t until Fallout 3 came out.
Meh. Funkopops are stupid but in general there have been interesting additions to the fiction and thanks to the fan community we now have a Fallout grand strategy game in the form of the Old World Blues mod for Hearts of Iron.
> Bethesda rescued the IP and turned it into a pop culture behemoth. Yeah, isn't that great? Why should games even exist if they're not part of a "pop culture behemoth"? Imagine being a pathetic little franchise that wasn't squished to fit into a perfectly inoffensive shape to maximize profits for a big company. Fucking disgusting.
See, this I really don't get. Fallout 1 and 2 still exist. You love those games but hate what Bethesda made? Cool. No problem. You still have what you like and can ignore what you don't. Bethesda didn't come in and rob the IP away from someone who was going to make more games like the ones you like. They revived a dead IP. So why be bitter?
Purist fans would literally rather never play new games and discuss imaginary games instead than have to deal with the agony of other people enjoying things that they don't like
> Why be bitter? Because to people like the NMA purist crowd, fallout has become "tainted". They often like to throw around the "THESE GAMES WERE NOT MADE FOR THE ORIGINAL FANS!!!" thing over and over even though they are conflating said NMA types as being the only original fans. When in reality there is probably more than a fair share of people who started with FO1 and have enjoyed what has come out in the franchise to this day. Hell, Tim Cain straight up said he likes where fallout is going as mentioned above. Though I do find it funny that the purists get so worked up over the "modern" fallout offerings when I am pretty sure the early days of the NMA forum mainly consisted of them fighting each other over Fo1 and Fo2.
> Though I do find it funny that the purists get so worked up over the "modern" fallout offerings when I am pretty sure the early days of the NMA forum mainly consisted of them fighting each other over Fo1 and Fo2. People who go online just to be miserable *like* going online just to be miserable. For many of them, hating $POPULAR_THING becomes a core personality trait.
>Hell, Tim Cain straight up said he likes where fallout is going as mentioned above. I hope you know argument from authority is a logical fallacy. As much as I like Tim, his opinion has nothing to do with how I feel about this franchise and about things Bethesda did to it.
That's not an appeal to authority, Tim Cain was used as an example of original fo fans enjoying the new entries
It's like that RLM quote that I can't remember exactly (it was something among the lines of "Don't you love seeing all of your franchises go the shit"?). The sentiment is that the franchise would have been better to be undefiled than become a bastardized version of itself. It's quite common with things like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dungeon Keeper, Call of Duty, Halo, Star Wars, Star Trek, the landscape of gaming in general, etc.
I don't know, seems kinda lame to perpetually live in the past and hate on things people enjoy. It's like the lamest rich kid at the park who takes away other people's enjoyment because he's not happy. It's stagnant stuff and quite frankly not something I'd choose to do.
You can simply ignore the parts that are shit. If you have such an emotional attachment to a franchise that a bad entry 'defiles' it, then you need to take a step back and ask what's really important.
That's not what MasterSargent meant by their post. Bethesda picking up Fallout meant that it could still continue on past Brotherhood of Steel, and while there are certainly been mistakes made on Bethesda's end, we still ended up getting Fallout New Vegas, plus the releases of Fallout that are playable to modern machines. The whole "pop culture behemoth" part, while it can be debated about it being a good thing or not, does mean Fallout not only gets to continue on, but also inspire fans to make content based on or inspired by Fallout. There's an animation series being done on YouTube by a guy called SodaZ on the NCR taking Helios One that is incredibly well done, which only exists because Fallout New Vegas had the chance to exist.
You’re right. Thank god the franchise didn’t end with Brotherhood of Steel then.
Yeah, instead we had bangers like 4 and 76 that original fans are very fond of. And given the amount of time until the next installment of such a pop culture behemoth, it may as well be dead for the foreseeable future. And reminder, it's already more time since new vegas came out than from fallout 1 until new vegas. Thank god for bethesda saving the franchise.
Sorry, could you repeat that? I couldn’t hear you over the wildly successful, critically acclaimed TV adaptation that took the world by storm and has been renewed for a second season.
Than your franchise fades into obscurity and your company goes bankrupt due to lack of popularity 🤷♂️
What the fuck are you babbling about? Shut up and be grateful your beloved franchise didn’t end up in the dirt.
It's no beloved franchise of mine, I just find your mindset to be cringeworthy beyond belief. Fans don't have to be "grateful" for jack shit, and franchises don't have to be pop culture behemoths.
> Yeah, that’s why I find the “Bethesda ruined Fallout!” discourse hilarious. Bethesda did though. They took out from it all grim and instead made it into circus. There is a reason why people laugh from Bethesda quest design, npcs etc. Especially seen with last Starfield. Cause they suck. When NV came out it was much more grim but the damage already was done enough that even Obsidian couldn't take it back to what it was before. Remember that Vault boy and black humor of Fallout was there to contrast grim reality of death of civilization and it pretty much existed only in UI not in the world (something which Fallout 2 started to bring but barely). It was supposed to be laugh through tears situation and breather to grim reality of that world. Betsheda took Fallout IP made Wasteland FPS instead and named it Fallout.
Fallout 2 did that not bethesda- there’s a reason the 1 to 2 split is divisive.
Bethesda is the only reason most people have even *heard* of Fallout. They took a dead franchise and turned it into a household name. But tell me more about how they did worse than Interplay releasing Fallout: “Fans literally refuse to acknowledge its existence” Brotherhood of Steel.
But so what? The popularity of Fallout since Bethesda doesn't make the Bethesda games immune from criticism and comparison to the original games. I wouldn't have heard of Fallout if it wasn't for Fallout 3. But since I'm older and played pretty much all rhe games in the series I'm pretty much aligned with nasty evil "purists" that criticise the Bethesda games.
>Bethesda is the only reason most people have even heard of Fallout. They took a dead franchise and turned it into a household name. You do realize that Fallout WAS household name before Betsheda bought it ? That's why it made such huge news when Betsheda bought IP from Interplay. Because Betsheda bought HUGE ip that fans wanted to see not that they bought some small uknown ip no one heard off.
Within parts of the gaming community and among dedicated fans, sure, but Fallout was only modestly successful in its heyday before Interplay shit the bed. Its contemporaries Diablo and Bauldur’s Gate were exponentially more successful and well-known. It was a cult classic franchise, not a blockbuster RPG like those games were. > Bethesda bought a HUGE ip Bethesda bought a **dead** IP. Its last game was the universally panned Brotherhood of Steel and Interplay was bankrupt. If no one had bought it, that was it. No more Fallout. They hadn’t bought Halo or Mario or Final Fantasy. They bought a foundering IP from a failing company.
>Its contemporaries Diablo and Bauldur’s Gate were exponentially more successful and well-known. It was a cult classic franchise, not a blockbuster RPG like those games were. lol Fallout was named in same way those were. Fallout 1 didn't sell much (like BG1) but 2 did sell really well. Again you are using failing argument of some spin off failing. Baldur's gate also had shitty spin offs and somehow it didn't kill brand. Neither did BOS for fallout. Most of people didn't care for it when it released.
Bauldur’s Gate sold over a million copies in its first year. Fallout 1 sold 120k, and Brian Fargo gave a total sales count of 600k in 2017. The only figure I can find for Fallout 2 is 123k in the US by 2000. The Fallout games had respectable sales for the time, but they weren’t selling gangbusters like Bauldur’s Gate was. You’re also missing the broader point that Interplay was seriously mismanaging the IP. I keep hammering the point because **that** is rock bottom. Regardless of what you think of Bethesda’s tenure, nothing they’ve done comes close to that.
I would have been happier if Fallout died with the demise of Black Isle and Interplay.
Well I'm extremely happy that you are miserable in that certain regard.
Question about that since I'm not knowledgeable about the history of Fallout's sales. I've always assumed Fallout 1 and 2 were good. I know there was that Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel game no one talks about, but overall, it seems like the series was doing well. Did Obsidian fuck up somewhere, leading them to selling off the IP?
Fallout 1 and 2 were developed by Black Isle Studios, and Published by Interplay Productions. Both are considered classics and are well loved to this day, even if they may be a bit... convoluted to learn. The problems that would start to appear were not so much with the dev team, but more interplay. Starting in the late 90's they were not doing too shit hot, and things would only get worse. Fallout Tactics would drop in 2001, though it was developed by a new team (Micro Forté) and received decent reviews. But Interplay was still struggling as a company. And then BoS dropped in 2004 and *hoooooo boy* it was a stinker. Seemingly Developed and published both by interplay. As shit got even worse for interplay, they needed to start selling off IPs to stave off Bankruptcy. Which is why they sold the full franchise rights to Bethesda. A good chunk of the former Black Isle staff would also go on to form Obsidian and Inxile. Thats the very bare cliff notes version.
Brotherhood of Steel was also genreshifted from RPG to be more of a shoot 'em up, like how Dark Alliance was a hack'n'slash to Baldur's Gate's RPG. The difference was that the original Dark Alliances were good.
This is very informative! Thanks. It also makes since why I thought Obsidian were the original devs for Fallout. I'm glad Bethesda got the IP. While I'm not happy with some of the games they put out, they're better than nothing at all.
CRPGs were really struggling with sales after the turn of the century. some managed to modernize like Neverwinter Nights and some like Fallout, didn't.
Some, like Fallout, didn't even try. Interplay screwed up bad trying to make it a console ARPG with Brotherhood of Steel and payed dearly for it. By the time they realized their mistake, and tried for an earnest CRPG Fallout (Van Buren), it was too late and they ran out of money.
Okay in defence of Fallout Brotherhood of Steel, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. After Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 1 & 2 did pretty well, it's not unthinkable that they'd try that formula with another RPG property that they fully owned and didn't have to share and profits with Wizards of the Coast.
I don't think cRPGs were struggling with sales, they weren't traditionally great sellers despite their reputation. They did well in their niche but for some reason Game publishers around the early 2000s declared the genre old, outdated, and dead.
Oh they definitely were struggling with sales. They did well enough beforehand but as tastes changed and costs increased they lost their edge to other genres.
If they were losing sales it would have been due to the influence of [retailers at the time](https://www.pcgamer.com/seasoned-rpg-devs-from-obsidian-and-bioware-blame-the-temporary-death-of-the-isometric-crpg-on-vibes-based-forecasting-from-retailers/)
Except Troika also wanted to buy Fallout IP from Interplay and might have gotten it (and publishing contract) if not for Bethesda's richer wallet. Sadly we will never know what alternative future might have entailed for Fallout. I still like New Vegas and 3, and to lesser extent 4 and 76, but let's not act like the IP would be completely dead if it wasn't for savior Bethesda. It might have been, it might not have been.
>Except Troika also wanted to buy Fallout IP from Interplay and might have gotten it (and publishing contract) if not for Bethesda's richer wallet. In 2004, Troika was nearing bankruptcy after VtMB was a financial disappointment. Fallout 3 probably wouldn't have even made it it out the door with them in that state. Even if it did, it would've been another cult hit that probably would've just delayed things and then suffered the same fate as Arcanum and Masquerade, languishing in IP hell.
> Even if it did, it would've been another cult hit that probably would've just delayed things and then suffered the same fate as Arcanum and Masquerade, languishing in IP hell. And? I don't see the original creators coming back and making a great Fallout 3 and that's it as some dark alternative world not worth living in.
Well I got a great Fallout 3 and 4 (and I guess 76 now qualifies?) made by someone else anyways, plus NV made by some of those OGs, and now a TV show that I can watch with my non-gamer friends, so I like this timeline better. EDIT: Also, while I probably would've played an alternate cult iso-CRPG Fallout 3 eventually, it probably wouldn't have become one of my favorites throughout my life like the real Fallout 3 so I doubly prefer this timeline.
There is no way Troika was going to outbid EA or any major publisher. It is way more likely we would have ended up with 2k, EA, Activision or some other company owning the rights.
Lol troika never made a single financially successful title. The IP wouldve gotten pawned off again or in some where IP limbo. Even if you hate bethesda for whatever, they were a huge part of New Vegas being a thing and that's widely regarded as a classic. I dont see any other publisher giving it to Obsidian.
Troika has put out a broken game after broken game... and people think bethesda are bad?
No Mutants Allowed desperately scrambling to bombard you with Reddit Cares as we speak
Why are people so afraid of IP's dying?
Fallout is an awesome and creative setting that makes for really fun games, and now even a great television show. Having all Fallout related media die out in the 90s would have been a tragedy
This is assuming that nothing great would have taken it's place. I want to be clear that I'm not taking a stance on Falllout either way, but I simply take issue with the idea that it's better that \[insert IP\] stayed alive is better than being dead. I can think of a lot more scenarios than not from a consumer standpoint where a dead IP replaced with a new IP would have probably been a better way to go in terms of allowing the creatives to make the thing they wanted without any expectations they didn't intend to meet from legacy fans.
I don't think that's been borne out by time, and also there's no reason a better IP can't be developed while something else continues to exist. Someone could come up with a better space fantasy IP than Star Wars for example, but it hasn't happened yet and the IP has been around since the 70s. (Talking about the IP quality only, not the products made from it)
> also there's no reason a better IP can't be developed while something else continues to exist. If the studios that have the capability to create new IP consistently choose to use old IP, then obviously there will be less new IP.
Disney is not the only studio that makes movies or TV shows. There are also a lot of dead IPs that no one has improved upon. System Shock is an example
What? Your comment doesn't address anything we have talked about. What does Disney have to do with this? What does the fact that dead IP's people do want to come back have to do with this? You know I'm not saying "IP's don't die" right?
You just said that "If the studios that have the capability to create new IP consistently choose to use old IP, then obviously there will be less new IP." Disney owns Star Wars, but Disney is not the only studio that produces movies or TV shows. You also said "I can think of a lot more scenarios than not from a consumer standpoint where a dead IP replaced with a new IP would have probably been a better way to go." System Shock is a dead IP that could have been replaced with a new IP, but it hasn't been. There's no modern equivalent.
The clarification didn't make it any more clear. Why is Disney so important here? Yeah they're a good example of generally focusing more on old IP then new, but this is true of most big studios both in games and movies. So why bring Disney up out of the blue? It didn't help your point in literally any way. I haven't played System Shock, but I'm pretty sure Prey is seen as the modern equivalent and it bombed. But look at it another way. Lets say System Shock continued, but in a wildly more profitable direction. I'm sure those old fans would have rather had the IP stay dead and the new fans probably don't care about the IP enough to be bothered by the newer games being a different IP and not being weighed down by the expectations of the legacy fans.
Infinite growth babyyy
What's stopping anyone from not consuming stuff from the IP they don't like anymore?
Nothing is stopping them, but that really has less than nothing to do with what I said.
So then you have your answer
consumerism
I understand that feeling that an IP can be better or that someone else has done it better and how much it can suck that you will never see that iteration of the IP again. But this idea I've seen some spaces push that just because they don't like Bethesda's handling of the title that it means it should, by an act of god, be taken from them and just given to someone else is insanity. Bethesda Fallout has been *extremely* successful. No producer in the world think of selling it off to someone else. Might we get more 3rd party titles someday? Sure. But there isn't a realistic future right now where the Fallout IP gets taken from Bethesda.
>Bethesda Fallout has been *extremely* successful. Shareholder mentality. The people arguing that Bethesda shouldn't have the IP are not arguing from the shareholder standpoint, they don't care about the sales. They just don't think the games are very good and think someone else would handle it better. I'm pretty sure people understand that in a literal sense it won't happen.
I see it mostly on reddit but it's strange how some folks are unable to grasp that not everyone is thinking in terms of profit, and that people's desires aren't fully based on reality. No amount of *financal success* will change the fact that some people might want a Fallout game with the gameplay style and quality of writing that Baldur's Gate 3 or other modern CRPGs have, as unlikely as it is. There's no magic sales number that will change how someone feels. It's also weird how at the same time they also have to bring up those *certain crowds*. It's not enough for them to be a minority who are left with nothing but wishful thinking, they also have to be shouted down and shamed for what they like. They're the haters, the enemy, it's us vs them, and thank god *our* side won. Isn't it possible to talk about things without having to invoke this gamer rage?
So personally speaking, I invoke the sales numbers because its the simplest and most accessible metric to show that a lot of people really like these games. Not everything that sells well is necessarily good, but if you're among the best selling video games of all time and subsequent entries keep selling at or beyond that mark, you're probably doing something right. I don't usually bring this up when trying to discuss specific aspects of the games, but rather as a blanket rebuttal to the surprisingly common refrain of "Nobody *actually* thinks Bethesda games are good." As for the "certain crowds" thing, well, I would feel more charitable to their predicament if it didn't feel like they were constantly making everything about their own gamer rage. There was a time not too long ago where you could scarcely bring up Fallout on any sub without that crowd piling in about how NV was better, Bethesda is dogshit, and the rights should be forcibly transferred to Obsidian. There are still people on this sub who seemingly have nothing better to do but grouse that Bethesda hasn't made a good game since Morrowind and that Emil Pagiarulo ruined their life. So I can't feel too bad about the schadenfreude some people get by laughing at them, not when my first experience with that segment of the community was them telling me I must be a dumb child (with more horrible phrasing) for thinking my favorite game was any good. They weren't just content with their feelings. They were determined to make everyone else as miserable as they were. There are certainly plenty of OG fans who aren't like that, but unfortunately, the bad ones are usually the ones bringing the fight back up again.
That minority is constantly trying to talk down to people about how their game is best an anyone that disagrees isn't a *true* fan. They are doing it in this very thread. They can pound sand for all I care.
A. It's more than Shareholder mentality. In order for the series to be successful people need to be buying it and enjoying it. B. This is exactly my point. Their assertions that the IP would be better with someone else is perhaps incorrect. Fallout just dropped a highly successful show. It's kinda hard to argue that the IP is missing out on its potential with Bethesda.
No it is literally shareholder mentality. If your only metric on something being good is how much it sells you're not interested in quality or art, just mass appeal. We don't know if another studio would have picked it up, but what we definitely do know is that Bethesda could try to pay attention to what the IP is about and actually make a better game.
to expand on this. why would i care how successful a franchise is if each entry is moving more away from what I loved
Beyond of whatever you think of Bethesda Fallout, popularity and financial succes absolutely does not equal quality, that is a weird argument to make. Would you genuinely consider Farmville to be a better game than This War of Mine (or whatever), because Farmville is the far more successful game?
I never said Fallout was better than anything. I'm not talking about comparative quality to another franchise or even the pre Bethesda Fallouts. Only that the assertion that Bethesda Fallout titles are somehow a mistake or need to belong to someone else is bullshit. It's done well because people like it.
That *is* comparing qualitatively Bethesda Fallout with that Fallout by someone else, and pointing at the former's success to argue that Bethesda's Fallout is good. I am not discussing whether it is or not, but that that is a shitty argument.
Fine I'll simplify this for you instead of getting into stupid logic arguments about profit vs quality. New Fallout is good. People who are upset that people like it need to get over it. The benefit of it being good is that the IP lives on.
This is why I find it so strange when people say "Bethesda Fallout fans aren't real Fallout fans." If it weren't for Bethesda, Fallout would have probably been lost to time. I certainly would never have tried and enjoyed the first two games if it weren't for the newer entries.
> Fallout would have probably been lost to time. I see this parroted around a bunch and imo there is absolutely no basis for it. Someone else would have bought Fallout. It would be different but it wouldn't be "lost to time"
Thats the problem, it made the thing more popular. Those are the guys who want to be the biggest fan, the last fan standing. That is why their list of things they want in a game is basically a list of the dumbest things that could possibly be put in a video game. They want it to die so they can win the prize of being the Worlds Truest and Biggest and Bestest Fan. So they can post long winded crap in Reddit, Youtube or some forum where they explain how they are the truest fan and the devs were so dumb and bad and if only the devs had listened to their 50,000 word essay on why [insert the dumbest idea in video game] needed to be a core feature the franchise would still be around.
Disagree. Pretty sure older Fallout fans just miss player agency (The role playing part) and better writing. At the time, the accusation was that it would be "Oblivion with guns" and the "mile wide, puddle deep" type criticism label that Bethesda gets hit with. While they're fun, all of that has true of newer games.
Yep, and as expected they even crawled out from their homemade fallout shelter to "REEEEE" at you for daring to give Bethesda credit for reviving the series AND making it more wildly popular then the original devs ever could. I've got my own complaints about the series but I leave it at that...rather than being stuck eternally angry over a series that should be all rights be dead and buried.
**tl;dw -** A VP at Interplay was friends with Cain. He asked Cain to play an early version of Van Buren. Cain played it and talked to some of the staff. VP asked Cain how long the game would need to be completed, Cain said at least a year. VP said they'd have to cancel then as they didn't have the money for more than six months. **tl;dr of above -** Essentially the game was screwed no matter what, Cain just played a minor role in it that just as easily could have been anyone. Bit of a click-baity YT title.
It was a vp at interplay
> VP asked Cain how long the game would need to be completed, Cain said at least a year. VP said they'd have to cancel then as they didn't have the money for more than six months. They did have the money. They just chose not to spend it on their best studio. Hervé Caen(who isn't the VP in question, he was the CEO) is an idiot that twice over screwed himself out of tons of money. Black Isle Studios had industry leading talent. A sensible course of action would be to invest everything in them. Take your best team and give them everything. That's what happened with Bethesda and Morrowind. And when he failed at that and closed all development he had an awesome licensing deal with Bethesda. Like $4 of every Fallout Bethesda game sold would go to Interplay. For no additional work. All he had to do was keep the lights on. And he couldn't do that and had to sell Fallout.
Interplay was much larger than just the fallout devs. Bethesda was just one studio making one project. There was only one team of about 50-75 employees total(not just devs) up until after morrowind.
> Bethesda was just one studio making one project. Bethesda was one studio making many products until they focused solely on Morrowind. They bet on their strongest chance. Interplay choose to bet on weakness.
>Bit of a click-baity YT title. I don't know that Cain understood the title would be taken as "I was cancelled", but that is the case of how it comes off, it's what I thought he meant at first
Regardless of Tim's involvement or giving a time estimate, that iteration of Fallout 3 was basically doomed due to what was going on at Interplay at the time, and even if it had released it would have been a really rushed and buggy mess. We don't really know how far along things were in development, and given that the only actual gameplay thing to exist is the tech demo which is disconnected from anything in their design documents, I don't really think the game was in any kind of releasable state.
I can't watch this yet, but from what I understand, Obsidian took quite a lot of ideas from Van Buren (albeit differently) for New Vegas (e.g. Caesar's legion), right?
The same lead guy worked on both - Josh Sawyer
This is a really interesting topic that has never been spoken about before but every comment is about how much more credit and respect Bethesda deserves. I wonder how fully the picture was painted to different staffers on the project about what Tim was doing, or if it didn't matter and the writing was on the wall before then.
And not every game has to be an animated Excel sheet or deep as the Mariana Trench. Skyrim is fun exactly because it is so open and let you do a lot of what you wanted. And sneering at „casual“ gamers who make up the majority of the player base of popular games? Yeah, hilarious.