You relize that business man fail misrably in the end right lol, and now teh company with his name sake is begging for 25billion.

The market dictates this, people WANT their stuff, otherwise they wouldn't be here, you can sit here all day and cast blame, but in the end they DO make quality games.
I can agree with everyone that EA milk their licenses completely [censored] dry, but hey, I don't care because no one forces me to buy their [censored], I can buy only the quality stuff if I want to.

I tell you what, last month I bought Dead Space and it was one of the greatest games for me all year, guess who made it and published it? EA Redshore developed, EA Games published, wooptifreakingdoo eh?

They do take risks, games like Mirror's Edge and Dead Space are risks, they had huge developement costs and ad campaigns and it's far from certain that they sell well, hell Dead Space barely got in on NPD, they possible make loses on those new IP's.

Hmm... look I hate to sound even more negative than I have already but the problem I have with game companies these days, especially companies that pick up the "Cult hit" titles like Fallout are that they take the system previous and pretty much ruin it by diminishing the things that made it great and trying to incorparate new aspects into gameplay.

Lets take Final Fantasy, with the eleventh (or maybe it was the twelfth, can't say for sure atm) game in the series they decided to incorparate real time combat and movement but in actuallity all they added was movement to the same turnbased system they had begun with.

Same bar indicating how long till a character can act, same spells, same attacks (excluding different system of special attacks such as limit breaks and overcharge from previous games) and the only difference was melee attacks could occur more frequently and you're character could actually move around while waiting. This didn't improve dodging chance if you moved out of the way of an attack nor did it actually have any sort of free movement affect on actual combat. You still had to wait till your bar filled (or emptied) to attack. Visual concept added, actual gameplay not changed at all.

Same can be said for several RPGs (including fallout 3, except the system was diminished from previous titles in exchange for visual pleasure/ease of gameplay) and even FPS games. Interplay just happened to make a game that was innovative, new, and still entertaining. So yeah I'm afraid I have to agree with all the comments on here about EA and gaming companies in general. Even the big hit titles were somewhat disappointing.

And if you played the previous fallouts and picked them up expecting more of the same with maybe a little change, would you be satisfied with the fact that you probably won't be able to return the game even though you were sorely disappointed in your experience? I think what people are more pissed at is that companies take titles and pull them away from what they were originally, to an rather extreme degree.

Well [censored], I'm getting tired though and I'm sure by now I've started rambling and saying crap that's off topic so I think I might be done for the night.

^

But I don't get this logic, if Bethesda hadn't picked this game up and made it in their own fashion the Fallout franchise would have remained dead as it was.
No one forced you to buy this game, it's a choice you make, it's not like Bethesda bought out Black Isle and ruined a living franchise, the franchise was dead and Bethesda poured some life into it again, for the better or worse.

And it was FFXII that incorporated real time, FFXI was the MMO.

False. There were other people interested in the license. Beth was simply the highest bidder at that time (and not even the highest bidder ever, but Herve was stupid enough to refuse a much better deal until he was totally broke and that deal was no longer available.



Really? I find it much more thrilling than anything in Beth's Fallout 3.



It wasn't a cryo-prison. It was a pre-war automated prison that, unbeknownst to you, actually functioned as a quarantine center for the New Plague virus you were infected with.



There was a working space shuttle hidden in a pre-war airbase. But no one could use it without the proper access code, and that one was very hard to get.



No. Yes, BioWare made the Infinity Engine, but Fallout didn't use it and Baldur's Gate was made by BioWare and only published by Interplay/Black Isle. Only the Icewind Dale part is correct.

Ah, thx for the correction on the final fantasy bit.

I guess it comes down to whether you care more about the "purity" of the original concept of the game or whether it was maintained at all. Maybe it is better that fallout was... I don't wanna say resurrected but that's what comes to mind. Still, if they coulda incorparated the skill system without dumbing it down to a level even less than the first game, I think I wouldn't have been quite as disappointed, although the ending is still just flat out no on my list. Plus it doesn't help that I tend to take a "let the dead rest in peace" kind of position and have respect for what was great in the past rather than trying to improve upon it in the present.

Anyway I don't think I've said yet that I did still enjoy Fallout 3, just had a bit of disdain for not having the same fallout feel to it.

Anyone ever notice that trying to follow the history of game developers is like trying to follow the exploits of that girl in high school who dated the hockey team?

At any rate, I don't see any problem with going to a space station in a post apocalyptic world as long as the story leading up to that point is played out right. All said and done though, what we got for Fallout 3 was still a great game, but I'd still love to play a completed Van Buren

Lost Odyssey is the new Final Fantasy . . . FF is garbage these days.

After watching the linked vids in the orginal post ive come to the following conclusions:

- B.I studio's appeared to be using a polished version of the updated game engine from Fallout tactics, (which in turnwas a polished version of the fallout 2). That said, the engine appears to be the most advanced interation of the offset isometric view that fallout always used.

- the lack of turn based combat in this context (RPG as opposed to tatical squad based game), i found disconcerting for some reason.

- There was most definately some streamlining of the UI, but i think in the process of that streamlining, some of the original feel from the first two fallouts appears to be lost.

- as a gamer, i think i have most definately moved on from the offset isometric view. It was great back in the day, but the look and feel of it now, is something that just doesn't grab me no matter how much i'd like to wax nostalgia over fallout 1 and 2.

It was actually a completely new engine that BIS developed. They first used it on at Baldur's Gate title that was never finished (they lost the rights to make D&D games during development) and then started working on Fallout 3 with it.

Another thing to note was that they were going to make changes to the skill list that the first two Fallout games used, something that did not sit well with the hardcoe fans at the time. hardcoe fans also were upset over the plan to offer both real-time and turn-based combat options since many people felt Fallout:Tactics had flawed versions of each when it tried the same approach.

a very nice game

No. The Tactics engine was 2D, the Van Buren engine (first used for a cancelled Baldur's Gate 3) was fully 3D, with zoomable and rotatable camera. Note that this was an early tech demo which used some Tactics art as placeholders. And no, Tactics engine was also not based on the FO2 one.



The tech demo didn't have the turn-based system implemented yet. The final version was going to have both turn-based and real-time combat, although turn-based was going to be the default.



Again, this was a very early, internal, pre-alpha technical demo that was to demonstrate the engine during the very early stages of development. Most of the UI was a placeholder by this stage.



Isometric vs. FPP is not about nostalgia, it's about gameplay style. Some people prefer one, some prefer the other.

How he feels based on the way fallout has always been gives him nostalgia about the old style. Your also over-your-head about what was a placeholder, based on finances some of your so called place holder were actually their to stay.

Well, as far as im concerned, any further fallout title's by black island studio's has a lot in common with Duke Nukem Forever - neither one of them will ever see the light of day. It seems a vocal crowd of people are overconcerning themselves with "would have could have should have" instead of the "Here and now". In the words of Burgess Meredith, ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV-p51fvYLc )

The central theme to threads like this one seems to be, "Fallout 3 isnt fallout, here's what it should be". While i slightly disagree, i have to say, i love mods. There's already a number of them that recreate the look and feel of the first two (three) games that people more nostalgic then I seem to crave.

Yeah, Black Isle never wanted for the Fallout series to be a success Instead they chose to focus on going other directions, Baldur's Gate II and what not. It worked out well, I loved Baldur's Gate II, but I wish Black Isle had given Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 a better chance.

Black Isle wanted it to be a success, but their parent company, Interplay, didn't.

(I stopped reading halfway through the 3rd page but I do have something to say)

I think Interplay is a good example of what happens when a company gets bought out.

Brian Fargo, founded and was CEO of Interplay. They made such great games like Fallout, Fallout 2, etc.

Come 1999, Herve and his company some [censored] I don't remember, bought Interplay and forced Fargo out.

Which lead to...Fallout Tactics..............Fallout BOS............Canceled/Pushed back Fallout 3/Van Buren for....Fallout BOS 2.
So I think Interplay itself if still lead by Fargo, and still with BIS and its employees, could of made Fallout 3 really work, and this MMORPG.

Dont get me wrong, I enjoy Fallout 3. There are a few things I dont like plot/story wise and whatnot, but if I could get the game to run longer then like 2-10mins with out a CTD, Ill be alot happier with it.

Van Buren would have been a good game, and even though the ending was bad for Fallout 3 it runined it for me. The fact that there really wasn't a funny quest just do this and do that, be my message boy and boring crap like that turned me off as well. Like where are the [censored]s, jimmy hats, gecko, and such fun things like boxxing a tyson wanna be or be a porm star...i know its a different game but they could have done something funny like that. Even if Van Buren looked like what it did, it still would had all that fun things you could do in fallout. Maybe in fallout 4 bethesda will make it better but we can only hope

FO3 as it exists now is a solid game, one of the better ones released in the last little while, no question. But nobody who was actually around for the originals when they came out can truly feel that this was the FO3 we all dreamed of for years. There's no need to be an angry really devoted fan, as they say, but there is a reason why people talk about things like "spiritual successors." I don't think Bethesda's FO3 is the spiritual successor to the originals, but it's still a good game.

That having been said, I loved the concept art from the Van Buren project. It looked brilliant.

Voil?, http://fallout.wikia.com/index.php?title=Van_Buren!

While there is speculation about the nature of the prison the player starts in, I do not believe it was ever intended to be a "cryo prison", but more of a maximum security prison cell. I could be wrong though, but I think the idea was that the player was to be a plain ol' Wastelander thrown in jail for a crime, percieved or real depending on the player's discretion, who for some reason sees himself transfered to an automated high-security pre-war prison while sleeping (without waking up, probably drugged). The main plot was be based on the Ulysses AI whose main directive was the prevention of rampant spread of the Limit 115 Virus - the main character and others were infected with this Virus and set free to entice the AI to respond with an undiscriminating Nuclear attack from the B.O.M.B.-001 space station to prevent furher spread of the virus.

As for Gas powering your car in Fallout 2, it didn't - your car ran on Microfusion cells of the type that powered your Plasma and Laser Rifle. Old microfusion cells are appearantly abundant enough to be used as ammunition in weapons for organizations like the Enclave as well, so a space shuttle using Microfusion technology wouldn't be that far fetched, with the exception of the maintainance standards actually being high enough to maintain a working space shuttle. The materials to build one aren't at hand and restoring an old one to working condition would certainly be a feat in the Wasteland, but not impossible considering the standards the Enclave is capable of keeping (notably in Fallout 3 - their gear and base is pimp and well kept, almost sterile).

I do agree that the plot is far fetched all things considering, but complaining about it not being tied in with Fallout 1 and 2 is pretty... well I don't know what it is, but Bethesda's Fallout 3 is not tied into Fallout 1 and 2 either with the exception of two certain NPC's, so you'd better be complaining about that as well.

It had ties to Fallout 1 and 2 - it featured Harold, and the consequence of the NCR's expansion in FO2 - its war with the Brotherhood of Steel.

He said with the exception of an npc so he included Harold but I can't see how the consequence of NCR's expansion is related. I probably just missed something in the game though.

Frankly, I'll admit Van Buren had a great story and I would have loved to play with the vehicles.

But in terms of game mechanics, I'm not so sure it would have turned out that great.

Fallout 3 is a solid game but not exactly what I was hoping for when I heard of a Fallout sequel. I have been playing Fallout 2 this week and really miss the original (Top-Down) Fallout 1 & 2 experience.

There may be another more precise thread on this topic, but I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for so here goes...

When the Van Buren (Black Isle's FO3) tech demo was leaked with all of the Design Documents, was the 3d level editor also leaked? It seems that Black Isle's game/concept/idea of Fallout 3 was "almost" complete (Design Documents indicate a well thought-out story, quests and the demo is buggy but playable).

Even if the Van Buren level editor/engine is not available, I wonder if it would be possible for the internet community to complete the unfinished game, using the existing 3d engine and release it as a community "mod-type" release. It appears that Van Buren is using an engine similar to BG1 or BG2. Clearly this would be a serious project but I think that it would be something really awesome to see. I am not a modder, but given the tech demo is almost 6 years old, I am hopeful it would be easier to finish Van Buren in 2008/2009 (the 3d engine appears to be antiquated so would tools/resources be available to complete it?).

Obviously there would be copyright issues, but if the project was free, hopefully gamesas would not object. Also, if copyright violations became too problematic, the release could be more of a "spiritual successor" but with the TOP-DOWN perspective most Fallout fans were hoping to see.

Am I the only one who would donate $ to an ambitious project such as this?

Seeing those videos, I'm glad Bethesda took over.