Yay?
I do find it ironic that the one time Feargus is competent as a financial manager, perhaps the only thing he seems to ever acknowledge in his "SLAM DUMP!" excuses, it actually takes priority over him whoring out for "cool minigun effects", "crackhead gameplay", and the like.
So hooray for selective integrity.
Metzer said:
wow so they were planing a fallout mmorpg that could of saved blackisle from bankruptcy. shame it most probably would have been very good the way they were improving on fallout games back then.
What the fuck?
First, Black Isle got canned because HERVE later decided to take everything they were doing and changed the direction of Interplay, probably according to some of the shit Feargus was spewing previous to then. As in, axe anything good that might actually be role-playing and might take more than 18 months to crap out, but for "cool stuff" (miniguns and lightsabers for Feargus, like "boobies" for Todd - each becomes a mindless mass incapable of cognitive thought after mentally masturbating to them). Including his earlier defenses of Fallout being axed down to a less than M rating game to be sold in Wal-Mart (with the argument that M rated games don't sell, both on the BIS forums and at Terra-Arcanum), and later he says
this about Fallout. So Herve saw no reason for a PC division anymore and went straight for trendy, cheap, SLAM DUNK! material.
Hey, if Lionheart was indeed everything Fallout fans have been <s>waiting for</s> dreading since <s>Fallout 2</s> TORN, then F
OS was the next "logical" step for the trend-chasing Frenchman. So Herve axed apart the company, went for consoles and other trendy things, and BIS was one of those tossed out at the expense of both Jefferson and Van Buren, as those were just PC titles that probably had "too much time" put into them to be worth anything, kind of like Daikatana. So consoles it is!
And people wonder why I try to get some developers to learn when to shut the fuck up. Especially when it's for their own good, but then I get told to shut up because I was not being nice in pointing out how Interplay was swirling the drain, obvious from anyone watching the efforts of said company to glean as much money as possible for the least amount of work.
Herve took that lesson to heart, apparently, his own incompetence and initial competence level of the concept compiling to what Interplay now resembles, since Feargus' SLAM DUNK!s weren't helping much.
FU: I'm cool with it. I mean that's why I didn't want to leave Black Isle for so long because I wanted to make the next Fallout, and knew if I left that I couldn't make Fallout.* It's one of those things that I want to wish them the best of luck--Fallout fans are the worst fans there are. I'd still like to make another Fallout, but something that worries me is whether or not making another Fallout makes sense. It was cool and a lot of fun seven years ago, but is it pertinent anymore? Both of those games sold about 500-750,000 games--it's not a blockbuster, but still pretty good for a game like that--would still that many people buy it? It's a different market now--that was around the last time that people can ship sleeper hits--it's hard to have a sleeper hit now because if something doesn't sell in two weeks Walmart wants its shelf space back. I think it's tough. My personal opinion is I don't think that Bethesda will make a game that's like a Fallout 3. I had an argument on some forum recently and said that having another Fallout game in another way of playing would be great. I don't think Interplay's game--I haven't played it so I can't say--but the reviews weren't that great. Would I like to make another Fallout? Yes, but I don't go out and search for it.
(I still find it funny that after all this time, news, word of mouth, Feargus is still dense enough to use Fallout's sales figures instead of looking at the notice it has across the international industry.)
And secondly, what makes you think FOOL in any form wouldn't have sucked? Really, what "improvements to Fallout games back then" are you talking about? It's hardly with Fallout 2, given the bugs and sloppy attention to the story and setting, then there's the point of the game system not being anywhere near the mechanics for a MMO, nor the game style, the setting wouldn't resemble a wasteland with thousands of other combatants running around milling the same quests, and a number of other problems that made it as unlikely to make a good MMO as it is for Feargus to ever develop a decent CRPG that he's been actively involved in. Lionheart & TORN = SHIT.
So it would be like UO, which has been nothing but a superficial cash cow for EA, and Ultima has since died.
Even more fun. Page one has Feargus' hemorrhoid, JE Sawyer, spouting his classically stupid and infamous line to the agreement of the shining happy retards wanting to swallow his "better be nice to developers or they will go off into their own little delusional world" bullshit**. Sorry, "nice" obviously didn't work with you morons for Fallout 2, nor for Descent to Undermountain (and the lies were still kept on-site even after they were publicly found to be completely untrue), so if someone is going to do something wrong, we will say so. You guys can take credit for your fuck-ups as well as your overhyped BioWare Whore status.
* - Why? It's not as if Feargus had much to do with Fallout 1 or Fallout 2 but try to first glory hog and then later to argue for the skullfucking of the title. I just wish some people would realize that just because he's in the credits, however absent from designing the games as he was, that doesn't mean Feargus should have anything to do with Fallout in the future, or should even keep speaking about it as if he had much to do with either game's development. He certainly didn't do any favors for Descent to Undermountain, as his MIS-management of that project was one of the worst developments I've seen in the industry. Lionheart was simply DtU II, which he used to sell out Fallout fans as a favor for his friends at Reflexive, yet people still talk to Feargus
as if he were somehow responsible for good games.
Feargus Urquhart: The impetus seems like "we need make a product that sells as much as Diablo," but that is not necessarily bad. I think developers needed to figure out how to make RPGs again, so that they were not always thinking they were too hard, took too long, and cost too much. They are probably more difficult than other kinds of products, but I'm sure it's not a walk in the park for Id to make the Quake series. The biggest problem that people had, and probably still have to come to terms with is that the content of an RPG takes a long time to make - so you can't do it all three or four times, which happens a lot in other genres.
So, what's with the the SLAM DUNK! mentality?
Yeah, we now see where his obvious problem is, ironic that he would state exactly how he would have his head crammed up his ass years before he's mistakenly thought to be responsible for good games.
Now, if there is a silver lining to the whole thing it is that the team was eventually able to fix most of people's issues with the product except for the graphics, and Interplay learned a good lesson. DTU taught us that even if a product is 99.9% done, or rather 99.9% shippable - done and shippable are two different things - that we should not hesitate to kill it if is not a good product.
Too bad Feargus hasn't learned a DAMN thing since, and forgot that lesson TWICE in lieu of smiling as his asshole was being routinely licked by license whore fanboys. On that note, I can't WAIT for Lionheart II and anything stupid he might have to say about it...
IGN interview circa the year after Fallout was released said:
Interplay is arguably the leading game company in the RPG genre today.
And then Feargus helped destroy it. Aside from the Bard's Tale Construction set, Feargus hadn't really touched a CRPG until Fallout (as the CRPG division lead, no less), and his subsequent mistakes as the division lead make it clear he really wasn't that involved with the titles that managed to escape unscathed from his touch; there's the mistakes around Fallout 2, many false starts with Fallout 3, DtU, TORN, the crappy mods BIS did for the Infinity Engine (minus PS:T, as he had little to do with that, but Asswind Dale has to be noted twice for the crappy expansion), Lionheart, and then KoTOR 2. Really, it's hard to see what Feargus has done for CRPG development at all, except for the games that escaped from his mentality, and his rather amusing but clueless remarks even back when he could count his years as a CRPG developer on only one old shop teacher's hand and yet he's supposedly in charge of said division at the same time, over people who had well more than a decade of practical development experience on him. By that circumstance, I have to extend it from games to the entirely of BIS, Interplay, and the CRPG genre.
Interplay must have been really desperate for lead people, if Chuck Cuevas and Feargus Urquhart were both put into leadership positions almost straight from testing positions.
I think I now have a further suspicion of what made Troika and others leave.
** - "Actually, I'm pretty sure that if Brotherhood of Steel had sold much better than it had, Interplay might have had enough money to continue paying the Black Isle employees who were working on Van Buren."
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