I don't know if IPLAY mismanaged their business or not, and probably neither do you. There ahve been a large number of developers and publishers who have ended up on the wrong end of cash flow. It's a major challenge for any media company: Investment is high, and payoff can be years away. Meanwhile, while you are developing your title, the market shifts, the economy goes bad, investors reconsider...

IP cut production on VB because they couldn't afford to continue development. The money ran out, and/or it started looking like the product wouldn't be sufficiently successful to warrant continued investment.

And no, I'm not an IPLAY apologist.


Now, as far as IPLAY creating an MMO, I'll say this again: The one thing that IPLAY has done right is to partner with a company that has experience creating an MMO. They know the engine, and they ahve done a considerable amount of preproduction. Also, MMOs are not single player games, to the extent taht differences are staggering. What works in a single player game may not work in an MMO. It would be better to understand these differences as early in teh process as possible,

Indeed, if it weren't for Jason Anderson and Chris Taylor, I wouldn't be interested in it at all. I'm just interested because it will feature new lore from the original creators of Fallout.

As for experience with MMORPGs, Chris Taylor himself also worked on LotRO.



Er, not really. He said he liked some things, while he'd do other things differently. He didn't say he loves it.

I agree with some of what you said, but at the time IP got in so much trouble the economy was at an all time high. By the time that they were closing their doors and moving out of that building Fallout had a cult following, the market was doing great. Black Isle had already developed a new graphics engine they were going to use for Fallout 3, which IP made them scrap. Why? At least they should have kept that, since it was a vast improvement over their previous Fallouts.

Yes, production can be years away, especially when dealing with a company like Bethesda; but IP cranked out the two major Fallout games in under 4 years, not to mention all the sides they did, 5 years all told. Bethesda takes 5 years to make one title, but because they are so stable, it is a secure investment and it pays off. If it didn't, MS wouldn't be backing them.

And investors don't reconsider if they feel secure in their investment. The stability of the company is what causes the waiver in nerves. They can't pull out once the money is in IP hands. They have to ride out the contracts, otherwise it would be a breach, and that can be remedied in a court of law.

And Interplay was actually the third company Herve Caen sank.

Fallout, and RPGs in general, have always suffered from small market share compared to other genres. That, combined with a business in which one or two "failed" products can destroy the company, makes RPG development even riskier than game development in general. BIS, Troika, Origin, they all went down, sold or fold. Without access to the financials, claims that IP was mismanaged is, at best, conjecture.

As far as investment, there is often a need for further investment after the initial injection, due to project changes, or changes in the financials. One would normally go back to the original investors and pitch for additional funds. If the investors feel secure in the company, the product, and the market, they will likely pony up more funds. This was not the case with IPLAY, The company became unstable; the project, which was always going to be a modest seller, because it was an RPG, started looking like it wasn't going to make enough profit; and the money ran out. When the money runs out, and you can't find more, it's game over. In the end, if you are IPLAY, all you have is the IP and some unfinished code. Without the IP, the code is worthless, and anyone who licenses/purchases the IP, probably won't be interested in unfinished code, especially if it results in a sort of game that would appear dated to the mainstream production standard.

I make several assumptions here, to show you that your assumption that IPLAY was mismanaged is, at best, unsupported.

I believe it. He made business decisions that were odd to say the least. Money is not budgeted properly maybe? I know that deal with the French investors IP did not act correctly in, and you can only go to the top of the business when it comes to putting blame on that action.

I believe it. He made business decisions that were odd to say the least. Money is not budgeted properly maybe? I know that deal with the French investors IP did not act correctly in, and you can only go to the top of the business when it comes to putting blame on that action.




I agree totally with what you say here, RPG is a much smaller genre and demographic (but a loyal one); and that does make it a riskier investment. However, you can see the difference between how Bethesda has operated it's company in this same time period with RPG's; and has been successful. (even though IP also had an addictive game with a cult following). It is a matter of mis-management on IP's part, and reading the comments from the people that have fled IP (Including Jason Anderson) verifies that.

Also, at the same time IP was folding, Feargus Urquhart took six of the developers with him and founded Obsidian Entertainment, which is still thriving. That shows that it wasn't the people working for the company that caused the problems, but the people running the company. Investors when making a decision look at the past history of a company in the same way you look at the past races of a racehorse before betting on them. If IP can't find investors for the reasons you mentioned, than why is Bethesda able to find them, why is Obsidian able to get them when it is built on the same crew as IP had?

A lot of what you say is true for the over-all industry, but I don't think it explains in full why IP failed when it did.

Since there have been many threads recently about Fallout MMOs we're going to consolidate the discussion. I've locked the more recent threads on this topic and directed them into this one.

with fallout 4 in las vages does that mean that a mmo for fallout could be even longer away from our screens?

The Fallout MMO is being made by Interplay, not Bethesda - so will not be effected by anything Bethesda does. Also, Bethesda has contracted with Obsidion (Feargus and 6 other original developers from the Fallout 1, Fallout 2, etc.) for Fallout: New Vegas, leaving Bethesda's team free to work on Fallout 4.

Here is the current lineup for Post Apocolyptia:

Up and coming:

*Fallout: New Vegas - Obsidion (with 7 original Fallout series developers on staff)
Fallout 4 - Bethesda
Vault 13 - Interplay - (with 2 original Fallout series members on staff, 1 is a developer)
Wasteland - InXile - (with 2 original Fallout series members on staff, 1 is a developer)

And more Bethesda:

*Bethesda announced more Oblivion DLC coming out this year
*Bethesda announced TESV next year
*Bethesda announced more Fallout 3 DLC this year

(And we still don't know what Bethesda's Secret Project is)

It's worth noting that Bethesda has taken legal steps to re-acquiring the Fallout MMO license from Interplay. As part of their licensing agreement Interplay needed to raise a certain amount of funding by April 4th and it looks like they may have not met this. We don't know what the outcome of this will be, maybe Interplay has raised the money and just wasn't as forthright as Bethesda wanted them to be, maybe they haven't raised the money but they can negotiate a new contract with Bethesda.

This has been a very volatile topic on the forums, and at the moment the discussion has been locked. If people can keep the discussion civil and on topic I don't have a problem with it continuing here, but I hope no one will trash mALX's thread.


Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Bethesdan't hasn't announced anything yet.

Pete has said that they'll be doing http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3986/growing_your_long_tail_hines_on_.php with Oblivion, but I don't think he's explicitly said it's more DLC. Also, while there has been unofficial comments about a new TES game coming out in 2010 this was far from official and the date was specifically generalized.

Emil's comments about working on more FO3 DLC aren't technically an announcement, but they're as close as you can get without being official.

Fallout: New Vegas is not officially called "Fallout 4". It's similar to how GTA: Vice City and San Andreas were not called GTA4 and GTA5, but they waited with a numbered sequel to when they updated the engine.

** I thought Masthead provided Interplay with the funds when they partnered with them on V13 the last week of March; (saw it in an article on the internet) - but it would be Awesome if it was wrong and Bethesda gets to do it! When Jason Anderson left Interplay on March 18 he sounded like Interplay was not going to do a great job on it, so I was not getting excited over it, but if Bethesda does it I will have my credit card warming in my hand !!

I agree, I was whooping and dancing around after that interview with Emil !!

* @Zezzo - Fallout 4 is totally different than Fallout: New Vegas, and both are seperate from the Fallout MMO. I may not have written it out clearly, but the Fallout MMO was contracted to be made by Interplay if they met certain conditions (which I thought had been met, but according to what Hungry Donner said, may not have been); Fallout: New Vegas has been contracted to be made by Obsidion (who has the majority of the original Fallout developers on their staff); and Fallout 4 is being made by Bethesda's team, the same ones that made Fallout 3.

I can't believe I missed that. Thanks Ausir


As some have pointed out Masthead is itself a struggling developer, it seems unlikely that they'd have $30 million sitting around to spend on other projects. While Interplay may be using Masthead's engine, and Masthead may even help with some aspects of the developement, I don't believe they're involved in the funding.

If Bethesda does re-acquire the rights I don't see them making an MMO. Bethesda's sister-company, Zenimax Online Studios, specializes in MMOs but they're working on their own project right now.

I wasn't totally impressed with Masthead's graphics engine (or Interplay's for that matter).

I did notice an enormous spike on the Nasdaq for Interplay on or about March 27th, at that time IP was running around Europe trying to get financing, which was also right around the time of the Masthead partnership agreement. Masthead may be able to drum up more investors than IP, IP burned some investors years ago and have waivered on the brink of financial instability since; which may have scared off a lot of investors. The Atari guy invested a huge amount in IP last summer, though. ( but it seems IP burned thru that pretty quickly by the look of the following quarter's report). The financial reports for the first quarter of 2009 have to have been published by now, I will dig around and see what I can find.

IP had been trying to impress investors by saying they had the original Fallout team on their staff, but that wasn't true, Chris Taylor and one dept. head are all that is left there from the original team. Also, they had to report the size of their staff on their financial reports, and it wasn't as high as they were telling everyone it was. Either they reported falsely in the Quarterly reports or (more likely) they were telling the public a falsehood to drum up support and bring back their old fan base. Not to say Chris Taylor isn't impressive, but who do they really have hired to work with him, and how good are they? IP was telling the public they had a lot of the Black Isle team back working on this project, and yet all he was able to mention was Chris and Jason (and Jason left there March 18 not happy at all with IP and how they were handling V13).

Also, they are hoping the massively wonderful response Bethesda had on Fallout 3 will boost the sale of their MMO, plus the loyalty of their own company by Fallout fans who played the original games - I do agree with both, and believe they will be the basis for success if they ever were to make it and succeed with it.

I see Bethesda as perfectionists in how they make their games, and would buy anything they make with confidence that it will be an above average quality game. IP had a very talented group of developers, which I feel they lost thru a series of poor decisions by IP's management. In the years since the exodus of developers from IP, IP still appears to be an unstable work place, and not just financially. They seem to do things in a sporadic and haphazard manner, which can't make for happy employees.

I don't know if that's really fair. Maybe it is, but so what? They did the right thing: They farmed out the heavy lifting to people whi ahve the toos and the knowhow to mayb pull the project off.

Well, I agree with what you are saying, my point in it all is that if Interplay is making the game, I would be hesitant to buy until I saw gameplay of it on Youtube, and checked out the forum pvssyr on it. As far as Masthead goes, they are OK, but their graphics engine is not as good as some of the main games out there either. If IP is betting it's last dollar on this game keeping them afloat, it really has to be excellent, especially after the world has had a taste of Fallout 3 as made by Bethesda; and has been playing with such online graphics as COD4, GOW2, etc. - a lot of gamers have trouble going backwards on graphics, me included.

As far as fair goes, I don't like to put down anyone. I just stated facts that are public knowledge. What bothers me the most about the whole thing is that the developers who had such talent were caught in the middle of the whole business, and lost years of their own visions for Fallout because of the whole thing. At least Obsidion will be doing Fallout: New Vegas, there are 7 of the original team will be working on it, I'll bet they can't wait to sink their hands back onto it!

This is an MMO we are talkinga bout here. We aren't going to see single player quality graphics on any MMO.

COD4 and GOW2 are both online games. Have you seen the quality of the graphics of these two online games? They are Awesome!

Not online game, MMO, like World of Warcraft.

I have never played CoD4 or GoW2, infact I've never played a CoD or a GoW But I'd imagine that online FPS' (as I assume both are) are more arena based (maps etc), and around 10 - 20 players at any one time (off the top of my head). Online FPS' also have little scope beyond deathmatch arena, and all the familiar variants.

My assumption of an MMORPG is that the worlds are alot bigger, and probably try to be as seamless as possible, with thousands of players at any one time, and with alot more attention on content. It is then my assumption that visuals would need to take a hit, to make the performance demand as mainstream friendly as possible.

This is all complete conjecture however, beyond watching Halo online, and playing UT04 Online, I've little idea

ok serious fallout overload here after hearing latest news on Project v:13, i just got done replacing the fallout 3 soundtrack with that of Bioshocks (which is amazing) and installed even more mods (which is about to hit 11GB) and now broken steel is coming out next month

so i think im feeling good and well, and then *BAM* OBLIVION DLC! so now im thinkin this is a dream and then *WHAM!* new fallout game by obsidian set in vegas, now by this time im absolutely drooling not being able to focus in any of my classes and now you telling me there is a Wasteland game in development? somebody just kill me before i explode with joy!

and then i realize fallout 4 is in development! :drool:

lord knows this is too much for the populous to handle! but its ok because i know i wont have to wait years at a time to get some good old fashioned fallout

:fallout:

OK, I see what you are saying. I was thinking online/XBox Live type games, not WOW. You are right, there is a huge difference in WOW and GOW2 or COD4 in the graphics. Like Fallout Chris mentioned, these are parties of 20; but not arena. Their graphics are so good they are like the campaign modes in the party mode. Kjarista has a great point, I was looking at online games, not MMO's.



I can see I will spend the next two years at least broke as a skunk from just TES and Fallout series, lol. - and no telling what the Secret Project will do to me (unless it's a FPS).

Chris Taylor is the only Fallout developer currently at Interplay.

I agree with you that graphics are important, though. After playing Age of conan with it's stellar graphics (for an mmo), the Masthead graphics do look a bit dated.