If the youtube video is any representation of the final product; I am so much happier that Betheseda took over because it looks just gnarly compared to the other......

Mind you I was extremely impressed already, but this is just the clincher.

Keep in mind, that demo was released SEVERAL years ago....

...

Of course the FO3 we got looks better. You're comparing a game meant to come out in 2000 with one which came out in late 2008.

Black Isle worked a bit on BG, but it was mostly Bioware.

Black Isles did a lot of BioWare's work on the earliest DnD stuff -- BG & IWD.

Obsidian is a separate developer, and this time, they worked for Atari to release NWN2. I suspect that KotOR2 was done by Obsidian for LucasArts, not for BioWare to SELL to LucasArts.

Heh, personally, I'm of the mind KOTOR2 and NWN2 were immense improvements upon the original games, both of which I found bland and disinteresting. I don't know where people get off calling the sequels linear, seeing as it was in the original games where it really didn't matter what kind of a character you were playing at, everything basically came down to going everywhere, killing everything and picking up all unqiue objects. It's true that the sequels were buggy as hell, but then, the same unfortunately applies to most great RPGs.

*grooving to Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers*

That was the tech demo. Like the alpha stage of the game. There never was a finished product. Also keep in mind that that's from 2003. So for an alpha version, made in 2003 it's actually fairly decent. Add on top of that, Black Isle was designing it to appeal to the original Fallout fans; when Beth picked it up, they wanted to have something that appealed to their TES audience as well as the Fallout community.

They did a great job making Fallout 3, but it doesn't make the loss of Van Buren any less tragic.

Honestly?
That sounds totally stupid

Cryo-Prison?

WHY would your character........a complete UNKNOWN...start off as a prisoner in a Cryo-Prison..........How does that even in the SLIGHTEST, tie in with FO 1 and 2?

Space-Station? The world has NO resources......maybe enough GAS...STALE 200 year old GAS to power your car in FO2, and yet somehow you can fly to a space station?


Yea, Now I'm REALLY glad Black Isle is gone.....

Listen, I'm sorry that was so harsh. It just breaks my heart to see someone calling Black Isle, who revived the RPG genre in the late 90s with some truly innovative products, to be called "Sequels 'R' Us" and accredited with lacklustre games they didn't produce. To me that's like confusing Stanley Kubric with Uwe Boll.

I saw red, and didn't stop to breath before posting. All apologies, Tyana Rie.

Bioware made the infinity engine that blackisle used for fallout, baldurs gate, and Icewind dale
- NWN was supposed to be made by Blackisle, but Hasbro decided to pull Interplays D&D rights , so Bioware ended up finishing NWN on their own - thats why NWN is better than NWN 2 (my opinion)

Well obsidian is the company who got paid to do those games for bioware as they were probably busy with other games... to bad obsidian aint half as good

They are owned by Zenimax, which at some level equals it ... well since Morrowind its somewhat degrading in game quality. But thats my oppininon (Frankly without Zenimax Bethesda how we know it would not be around anymore for a long time either facing bankruptcy or bought by EA maybe)

For Bioware. I think future titles have to show if EA will play a lot of its influence on Bioware. But they would very stupid to do so cause Bioware was usualy a relative healty and good company in its own rights.

Worked a bit ? You have no idea what you are talking about! Until NWN bioware only made the game platform (the infinity engine) that other company's (primarily Interplay/Blackisle) made their games on the infinity engine. Hasbro decided to take/pull Interplay's/Blackisle D&D liscence/Rights away when they were in the middle of working on NWN w/ bioware, using Biowares newest game engine at the time called the Aurora engine, so then bioware finished NWN on its own (thats why NWN better than NWN 2) Bioware makes the game building engine, just like Havok does and was used in Bethesda's Fallout 3.

INTERPLAY / BLACK ISLE - were the creators of BG (a bit - PLEASE)

GAMES FOR GAMERS, BY GAMERS

Of course EA is all about money, that's why they expanded their IP's with games like Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, yeah all about money, never about Quality products.
Also the EA game studios (the ones making our yearly hate titles) are the ones making those other titles possibly with their funding, get a grib, this is a business, not a charity.

Wow...that's something you don't see on "Teh Interwebs" everyday.....

Someone apologizing.

I accept InterKarma....thank you...that took a lot for you to do that, especially on this Highschool run Narcissistic pile of filth we used to call the Internet.

I DO Have a feeling that I'm missing SOMETHING done by Black Isle....because I remember going to their site when I read they went under, and all that had was that familiar splash-screen
and nothing more, and I remember feeling pretty MAD about it.

I just wish I could remember WHY...

Stupid forums dumped my rather large post... I'll just say that Tim Cain has apparently been Hired as lead designer by a division of NCsoft who is working on a Secret Project MMO

That's true, but there has to be an element of caring present in the finished product. What I mean is, if a game is being made just to make money, and it's being pushed out the door as fast as it can be, just to have people buy it sooner, then it's not going to be as good. The dev needs to have a passion for what they're doing, and if it's not there, it'll show in their finished product.

There sure is a lot of confusion in this thread.

Black Isle was an internal development studio for Interplay. Most of the staff left or was laid-off in 2003 as Interplay fell apart. Bioware was an independent developer until their recent acquisition by EA. Obsidian is an independent RPG developer made up of many of the former Black Isle staff, founded in 2003 by the former Black Isle division head.

Black Isle created Fallout 1 and 2, though many key team members left to form Troika as Fallout 2 was getting started.

Bioware created Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, though some members of Black Isle helped out during crunch time since Interplay published the Baldur's Gate Games.

Black Isle licensed the game engine Bioware was using for the Baldur's Gate games and used it for the Icewind Dale games as well as Planescape: Torment.

Neverwinter Nights was developed by Bioware from day one. Interplay was originally going to publish the game, but a dispute developed between Interplay and Bioware. At the same time, Atari had gained overall control of the D&D electronic games, which meant Interplay had to pay royalties on D&D products to Atari. Interplay had fallen behind on royalty payments, so they "sold" Neverwinter Nights to Atari, which funded the game to completion and published it.

Bioware developed KOTOR for LucasArts.

Obsidian produced KOTOR 2 and NWN2 because Bioware decided to work on their own settings rather than license them. That allowed Bioware to develop Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.

I hope that clears things up.

As for Black Isle's Fallout 3, there are a lot of design documents around that show what they were going to do. While it probably would have been a good game and made the NMA/hardcoe crowd happy, the story was less than thrilling, IMHO. I don't know that it would have expanded the franchise nor would it have been a particularly big hit.

What do expect from a company the makes all their money on sports games - (I cant beleive svckers actually go out and buy 06, 07, 08, 09 every GD year)
and its SHEET / CRAP, oh lets wow them with the graphics, and the advertising, and spend about $3 on the actual game play! LOL
Just like Microsoft does, and recently Lukas Art w/ the CRAP Unleashed

-_-... How nice. Keep in mind Black Isle did produce, or at least work on several well liked games (fallout 2 aside just look at some of the other posts in this thread) and making judgements on a the beginning and end of something with no knowledge of the rest of it really doesn't show much for intelligence, especially since there are a pretty large amount of games that started out with protaganists of completely unknown origins.

Hell, don't think you knew anything about the dude from bioshock until close to the ending, and Gordan Freeman was introduced to you in halflife through dialogue. You generally learn about the story as you go through so criticizing a "complete unknown" is criticizing every character at the start of any movie/book/game. And keep in mind black isle didn't leave quite as many gaps in plot as Bethesda did. They accounted for a fairly large amount the "fallout universe" rather than simply putting it together and leaving several holes for the player to fill in.

Lastly, the only things that have remained consistant in the fallout universe and played an important role story wise (that doesn't include character development and skill systems n such) are

A. the vaults
B. the wastelands
C. The Geck or water chip
D. the brotherhood of steel.

The Enclave didn't even appear in the first fallout nor did they appear in tactics. And dismissing the space-station theory on the premise of the availability of gas is probably a bit wrong since a rather large, sea based platform in the main story of Fallout 2 happened to be a friggen oil rig -_-. You don't think there's even the remote possibility that they were actually using it for oil? or that they had more than one?

Van Buren (F3) would have been a great game for its time, I have no doubt.

However, $%^**# ending or not, if it wasn't for Bethesda, there would be no more Fallout.

Now that Fallout is back I can go back to waiting for Duke Nukem forever . . . lolz.

You do realize again that if people want those games, which they do, they buy them, EA and other studious will continue to develope them for profits, it shouldn't be hard to understand.
And to our luck this allows them to expand their portfolio at the same time.

Do you know how EA can fund games like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, Skate and so on and so on?
That's right, they can do these big games because of their yearly titles, they don't cost them much but they get a lot of money back, so they can expand and take risks with new projects, be thankful of that.

Same thing with Ubisoft, they create a lot of (really, REALLY bad titles IMO) titles for the Nintendo DS and Wii, they sell a lot and don't cost them much, in return they can spend this money on huge titles like Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, Far Cry 2, etc. etc.

In the end all people need to understand is the following:

GAMES INDUSTRY IS A BUSINESS, NOT A CHARITY.

Wow this is elitism at it's video game best! To dog players because they enjoy sports titles, or other genre of games you find uniteresting. If it werent' for those gamers, most of the games we enjoy to play wouldn't be bank rolled.

V13 the Fallout MMO looks like it might be some Kind of Xbox 360 only MMO.

But after the Way Interplay treated their employees during the collapse, I seriously doubt if I will every buy another Interplay game, especially if the are affiliated with EA games again.

Edited: I like sports games too btw but EA destroyed the NHL franchise of Games for me and left me really soured, plus they don't have enough respect for their customers to actually spend with Patches in most cases.

EA take risks. What are you on ?

They have taken every IP they purchased and mutilated them. They mass produce trash fill it full of malware and spend more time in litigation than they do on actual concept creation. EA have almost singly handedly killed innovation in the games market.

In regard to your earlier post about profit..I will paraphrase a quote from a real businessman.

" EA should produce (and support) the finest games possible for the lowest cost possible. Whilst paying the highest salaries possible."

They are on a path to self destruction currently as more and more gamers avoid their "titles" due to prior bad experiences.