What will your choice be...

You decide

Oh great, another MMO thread, we can't have enough of those...

I say no thank you. The game would probably be almost completely combat-oriented, even if it's possible to make a speech character. So we can throw away science, repair, and all those other non-combat skills, and introduce dungeondelving post-apocalyptic style! There are tons of other reasons why I wouldn't really want to see a Fallout MMO, but I'm too tired to keep repeating myself in all these MMO threads. Let's just say it wouldn't fit the atmosphere of the game (a desolate wasteland, humans are nearly extinct, but hey, there's 500.000 people over there!) and it would really traumatize my Fallout experience if some bloody kid comes up to me going "OMFG DO U NO WHERE IZZ GECK????!!!!!!"

If case anyone doesn't know yet, a http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Online is already being developed at Interplay, by the original creators of the Fallout series:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Online_FAQ

I don't think Interplay will raise the 30 million needed to get this game off the ground. Also with as much as I would like to see Interplay do this I would have loved to have seen this happen if Tim Cain was involved but unfortunately he is at Carbine Studios working on an MMO for NCSoft so he is kind of out of the question. Plus add to that no one on that team seems to have any experience launching or even having been close in the production of an MMO the License will go back to Bethesda come April.

Chris Taylor worked on Lord of the Rings Online, actually. And the only other member of the team we know (aside from concept artists) is Jason Anderson. How do you know the other members have no experience?

As for the financial matters, I wouldn't count out the possibility of Herve Caen selling Interplay to someone who does have the required amount of money if he doesn't manage to raise it himself.

It is possible, but I have a lack of faith. as it stands I see only 4 people on that list. Chris Taylor worked and knew how Tim Cain did the things that made Fallout great. Yet I have a feeling that Interplay will not get the money or even be bought by a company as interplay hasn't brought out any thing for years now. And with this Economy I really don't see it happening. MMO's cost a ton of money and not every MMO is guaranteed to be a cash cow. I think I will wait to see how Fallen Earth does before I count on a Fallout MMO. I figure Fallout will end up back in the hands of Bethesda any way. Just my thought, doesn't mean it will happen of course.

Well, I think that given Fallout 3's financial success, other companies might be interested in a MMO version of Fallout, so they might be interested in buying Interplay for that alone. And Caen might prefer to sell the company and at least get some money for the Fallout Online license instead of simply losing it to Bethesda with no profit for himself.

And he might even pull it off, since some people might be tempted to invest in Interplay based on Fallout 3's sales alone.

I guess we'll see in April.

Actually, Interplay have leased the Fallout rights for the MMO from Bethesda. Bethesda still owns the IP, so this would still have to get the stamp of approval from them for this to work I believe. I really don't think Bethesda will let Interplay sale the lease to someone else who has higher finances as I am sure this could have been a stipulation in the clause. I don't see a Fallout MMO coming out for a very long time.

I'm not saying they will sell the lease to someone else. I'm saying that Herve Caen can sell his Interplay *stocks* (he owns the majority) to someone else,who has higher finances. It's not the lease that will change ownership, it's the company that leases it.

I also talked about a person doing this would be taking a great risk in this uncertain economy and like I said before making an MMO is not like making a normal game it takes large sums of cash. Hell man before Ensemble Studio was closed by Microsoft they were working on the Halo MMO. That MMO will not see the light of day any time soon. Lets face it if you don't have the funds the way things stand by now the simple fact is your not going to find them unless you are extremely lucky. Like Vault Tec CEO I feel the U.S. Economy is in the hole and it has not even gotten bad yet, and this plays a factor in how strong my faith is about Interplay being able to sale its stocks or even get the 30 million in capitol it needs to produce this game. As much as I want to see a Fallout MMO I don't want to see the game under a defined schedule that would hinder the games over all performance and also be underfunded and have issues with workers being over stressed because they are working to hard to fast. These kinds of things give Charlie Horses and putting out a game stiff legged isn't good for the game itself or the people who have spent considerable time making this game in hopes of it being a success only to have a really painful experience. Lets face it, our desires can't always be met in short order and we will just have to hope for the future and think in an optimistic manor. However, I am taking a pessimistic view as of seeing the way things are going right now.

Just my 2 caps...

This may or may not make a difference. It depends on how the lease is written.

The days are over when someone could muddle through launching an MMO. It's going to take developers with extensive experience and deep pockets, neither of which Interplay has currently. if I had to make a guess, I'd say that the lease defaults and ZeniMax either puts it back on the block...established MMO publishers need only apply, or they start attracting some real talent

Would I play? I'd be interested, but it would require a solid game for me to play.

Same here. I'm curious to see what a Fallout MMO ends up looking like, but it would have to be a pretty compelling MMO to get me to play one again.

For myself, I used to play EVE: Online for about three years continuously. I still look back fondly on the game, but eventually I had to decide to give it up. A good MMO can quickly become a job more than a game, and the time investment gets to be a bit too much. For me, the good qualities of an MMO (focus on player interaction, meeting others and teaming up, etc) also end up resulting in responsibilities and such.

It'd have to be pretty frakking deep and compelling to get me to fork over a regular monthly fee at this point. (And frankly, if EVE wasn't deep enough to keep me playing, I sort of doubt a Fallout MMO is going to have much of a chance with me.)

I'm not even interested in Fallout Online as a game, but I can't wait for new additions to the Fallout lore from original Fallout devs.

Heh, nice bias in your choices there. But I'm curious to see how they pull it off, like Ausir, how they expand the lore.

That's as much as I can muster up as well. I roll my eyes at the very concept of MMO's but I kowtow to the world Taylor and Anderson helped create.

Originally I was going to say "No." My impressions of Fallout is that it is supremely tailored to be a single-player experience - but then I gave it a bit more thought.

MMO has a certain connotation associated with it - mostly related to WoW. About the required critical mass of subscribers to maintain a persistent world and provide at least semi-regular updates to it. About the nature of gameplay, be it grinding in PVE and Raid- Level dungeons or PVP situations which are variations of FPS standards like Capture the Flag or Deathmatch.

But that's not necessarily what an MMO is. The original multi-player RPGs, MUDs and the like, weren't like that (at least not all of them were like that), and although the time of MUDs has come and gone, perhaps a different type of multi-user online game might work.

The Fallout franchise has a large fanbase of players interested in storytelling and narratives. A Fallout MMO wouldn't necessarily have to be about upgrading your gear - but instead could be just about exploring new areas and finding the stories there, or altering existing power structures in an already complex world. For some Fallout fans, being part of the team that final stopped a certain group of Raiders from rauaging an area probably appeals more than a shiny new rifle with plus ten damage.

So, I guess my answer is that it depends on what the game is like. A WoW clone set in the Fallout Universe? I definitely would not play that. An MMO where players have the power to actually meaningfully change the game-world, where quests had multiple solve paths including distinctly unsavory ones, where most of the people playing the game are doing so for the role-playing experience instead of trying to acquire a new purple hat? Very tempting.

As you know, MMOs are a radically different beast than single player games. The main feature of MMOs is, of course, the ability to play with other people. If you don't like taht form of social interaction, MMOs typically aren't strong enough to hold attention.

I like the interaction...the guilds, the roleplay, etc, so I'm comfortable playing MMOs in general. However, for me, the key to MMOs is how well the mechanics work, specifically the class structure. What might make a Fallout MMO interesting is that Fallout is a classless system, so that I would be able to build the type of character I'd like to play...and not conform to a prebuilt character class. If they do SPECIAL right, a Fallout MMO could be very interesting.

Oh, absolutely. But I'm coming from an MMO (EVE Online) that already had extremely well thought-out player interaction built right into the game, for one. (All players were on the same "realm," and every single item in the game was made and distributed by other players. You needed people to mine the ore to sell to other players who refined it, who passed it on to other players to build it into something and sell that. Plus you needed "truckers" to distribute all this stuff at each stage. Add in that the more valuable and useful ores were usually in zones where PVP was free and openly encouraged, and you had an extreme influence towards building up relationships with other players.) I had a lot of fun in that game building trust with a core circle of friends I met in the game, planning the logistics of making mining runs into hostile territories, eventually forming ourselves into a corporation, bidding with various mercenary factions for protection, etc.

That game also was totally classless, and there's like hundreds of skills to select from (and in an interesting turn, you earn XP at a set rate per hour - regardless of whether you are online or not. So one skill might take 45 minutes to get to level 1, another might take over a month to get from level 3 to 4.)

So I'm already experienced with very deep game mechanics (in the tutorial, it's about half an hour before they even get around to telling you how to pilot your spaceship ), extensive player interactions, etc.

So yeah... a Fallout MMO would have to be pretty deep and compelling to get me interested. I'm going to be interested to see what it turns out like, I might even play a free trial just to check it out. But if EVE wasn't enough to keep me going at this point, I don't hold out any hopes for Fallout, either.

(Honestly, MMO's just became too much of a time investment, for me. I don't find them very compelling until you start interacting with and meeting other players, and once you get that going it leads to responsibilities and such. It got to where I had at least two hours out of every day set aside for that game. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but I just can't do that sort of thing anymore.)

This is true. It takes some work to find a guild that fits. Well run guilds can be both casual and still get things done. Playing with advlts helps as well.

Yeah. In my case, I was one of the founding members of the Corp I participated in - we grew from a small handful of mining contractors to a Corporation that employed over 100 players. I eventually stepped down from my responsibilities once I realized it was affected my "real" social life (when I started realizing that I never had anything to talk about with my friends in real life, for example, aside from things that happened in a game they weren't terribly interested in.) And once I did that, it just didn't feel the same, have the same appeal.

It was the people I met in the game, that made it so compelling and interesting - I wouldn't have played for 3 years had I not met people I enjoyed playing it with. I was spending way too much time in the game because I wanted to, mostly. Sure, alot of it was like work, but I wouldn't have been doing it if the payoff didn't feel worth it at the time. It just got to be too much for me, though. I saw myself ending up as one of those guys who died of exhaustion playing too much WoW. I tried limiting my play-time in the game, and once I did that, the "magic" sort of went away and I stopped playing altogether.

It's very much myself that's the problem, not MMO's in general, though. I've just realized I have a very obsessive personality - I spend too much time playing single-player games; MMO's are dangerously addicting for me.

So I'm interested in seeing what Fallout ends up looking like, but it'd have to be pretty frakking new and interesting to get me interested in playing MMO's again, to make me feel like it was worth it.

Depends on how Interplay handles theirs in developement.If it handles like the old Fallouts it could be fun and make it alittle more accesible to newer players (they need the money.)

First off I would like to thank all of you that are taking part in this dialogue. I would like to think that a Fallout MMO would focus on game play, story, and tactics. I remember playing Fallout Tactics and the way the companions worked in Tactics was really good, even if your own guys killed you if you got in the way of their burst fire. I sort of miss having to think about where the players on my team are and that if I get in their way I have to think fast or I am in Berserker mode and though I am in their line of fire my mind is completely on killing the foe in front of me and even if I am hit a few times my teammate would have to move because I may end up killing them for shooting at me. However being short funded and having only 4 years to do a ton of work doesn't help them produce something that we would consider expansive. Mind you this is my point of view and I could be wrong.

I would play it, yes. It should be graphically updated, but be roughly the same style as the old games.

As long as they make it markedly different from WoW and allow house owning and other interesting things I'd be all for it.

It won't be isometric, if that's what you mean. It will be 3rd person over the shoulder or fP, WoW style.

I think they should look at the view put into Diablo 3 (of course interplay or Bethesda will not be able to use that engine, but it would sure be nice.) or use the Engine that Star Wars: The Old Republic is using. I think the Hero Engine would be great for a Fallout MMO.