Fallout Apocrypha - By Chris Avellone

Because when it boils down to it the guys that made the games are less obsessed about it than NMA is. They just did it for money and because they liked Dungeons and Dragons.
 
TorontoReign said:
Because when it boils down to it the guys that made the games are less obsessed about it than NMA is. They just did it for money and because they liked Dungeons and Dragons.
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I see it in comics. People aren’t going to bad mouth other comic creators because A. It’s not great to limit your employment options and B. No one deserves the smug “I told you so” hate sludge from the worst kind of People
 
Also, as TorontoReign said, they likely for the most of it don't really care. It makes a huge difference if you are paid to work on something or if you are a fan of something. Just look at the last video of Tim Cain and Boyarsky playing Fallout 1. At this point it's safe to say we know more about this game than they do.
 
Just a side note, because I figured my post before might sounded a bit aggressive about Tim and Leonard: I'm not hating on them for not knowing everything about the game anymore after 20 years. Just saying that this is how it is and we are the ones who need to accept that many of them have moved on a long time ago. :>
 
Dude was doing apologetics for Bethesda and admitting he didn't even bother playing F4 and F76 in the same text.
 
I guess at this point it's just nice to see them talking about it. Doesn't really matter if it's stuff we've heard a hundred times already.

Personally I just wish we would get our hands on all the other unreleased design documents that a few modders have access to, but not everyone.
 
Don't really understand the people who want him to tear apart Fallout 3 on his blog tbh. He's obviously not going to do that as he'd just be making himself look weird and bitter for no reason lol.
 
He just added a response to the whole question regarding the "Bethesda sucks" debate:

Fan question said:
Most of the fans of the oldschool Fallout games have a lot of very legitimate reasons to be frustrated over the direction Bethesda has taken the franchise into. Todd and Emil's writing are, let's be quite frank, dogsh*t and the RPG mechanics have been watered down aggressively with every new release and, in my experience, the disdain for this dumbing down of the franchise is very much a consensus among the community of fans of the Fallout games made by Interplay and Obsidian. All of this feels so dissonant from the attitude many of the people actually involved in making the classic Fallout games, including yourself and Tim Cain, among many others. What happened to make the old devs so complacent and apologetic of the decline of the franchise? Everyone is just afraid of burning bridges because they have hopes of working for Bethesda someday? Did they all just lost their taste for classic RPGs? Or perhaps everyone just isn't playing these new games to actually know how bad they really are?
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Avellone said:
I'm not apologetic or complacent about it, but while the narrative may have suffered, there are some positive things Bethesda unquestionably added to the franchise.
I think completely demonizing everything they did is an extreme take, but I don't like everything they did, either. I don't have any skin in the game (I'm never going to work on another Fallout), but I do miss the amount of character customization the old Fallout 1 and 2 systems allowed for, as the granularity of those character development systems allowed you to make a character that felt truly unique vs. being a copy of thousands of other players.
Lastly, it is possible that had Bethesda not acquired Fallout, that the franchise would have died on the table or been given to someone worse. As it happened, Bethesda increased the visibility on the franchise even if you disagree with how they continued developing the world (and I wouldn't necessarily object to that argument). I think that in Fallout 3 especially, the use of "Speech" was especially painful to see implemented so poorly, but I'm obviously biased since I LOVE Speech options.
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So, yeah, he also agrees that the writing and roleplaying are worse in the Bethesda games, but thinks the series could have fallen in the hands of someone worse.

In my opinion, it could have just as well fallen into the hands the hands of someone better though.
 
Avellone said:
I'm not apologetic or complacent about it, but while the narrative may have suffered, there are some positive things Bethesda unquestionably added to the franchise.
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I wish he would have named even one... I cannot.

Avellone said:
Lastly, it is possible that had Bethesda not acquired Fallout, that the franchise would have died on the table or been given to someone worse.
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This would have been a positive in my book. As it is, Fallout came back not so unlike the dead in Steven King's Pet Sematary [sic]; all the potential & appearance possible from Bethesda (you want to love it)...and yet this is —not— your beloved franchise saved/reborn/restored... it's a vile impostor with a new agenda and no respect for past tenets.

It was a slap to the face that they exploited the remaining series' fans for publicity sake, only to then deride them, and later throw them under the bus afterward.

It was a bit like camping out to be first in line, only to have busloads of VIPs shuttled in ahead of you at Noon the next day.... and then to find out that they were not serving up the implied product anyway, merely their old slop with a new skin applied.
Unconscionable pricks all of them.
 
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Avellone said:
Lastly, it is possible that had Bethesda not acquired Fallout, that the franchise would have died on the table or been given to someone worse.
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It would have ended up in the original Fallout creators' hands, Troika Games.

Troika Games was already working on a new engine for a Fallout game, that they then tried to adapt into a new post-apocalyptic game after they lost the bid for the Fallout IP because Bethesda suddenly swooped in.

I think that even if the original creators of the IP had made a worse Fallout game than Bethesda (which I doubt since I love ALL of the games Troika released), it would have been in the right hands since they created Fallout. It would have been the right hands for the IP to have found its end.
 
Troika was on the brink of bankruptcy. It's pure speculation if they would have even been able to finish the game. All their games financially bombed and they were running out of potential publishers. So nobody can really say if they would have been able to pull that off.
 
Lexx said:
Troika was on the brink of bankruptcy. It's pure speculation if they would have even been able to finish the game. All their games financially bombed and they were running out of potential publishers. So nobody can really say if they would have been able to pull that off.
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Yep, because they couldn't find any publisher that would want to finance their unknow post-apoc game. Would any publisher have been willing to finance Troika's Fallout 3 back then? Maybe not, but at least it would have been a known IP.

Also, even if Troika had gone bankrupt before doing any Fallout games, I'm pretty sure the IP would have eventually passed on (or at least could be lent) to Obsidian, since most of the owners of Troika games ended up at Obsidian, including Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky (which I assume would retain the IP rights, as the creators of it and founders of Troika).
 
I cannot imagine Interplay not having them as contract/ work for hire, where Interplay would own the IP 100% even if the team invented the entire setting, the writing, and all of the assets.
 
The bridge with Interplay was completely burned. Not to forget Interplay was dead in the water.
 
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