sposocke said:
Actually it might not be quite as bad, from what I've heard Obsidian is producing Kotor2, thus those two companies are working together closely. Bioware might actually hand it over to them since 17 out of 18 employees are former BIS staff according to Furgus and have Fallout experience. Not to mention Furgus himself who's really keen on making another FO part.
News Flash: Just because they worked a bit on Van Buren and contributed to the near mess that was Fallout 2, that doesn't mean they would be able to do anything resembling the original Fallout. In fact, the original had far more people, and resembles more of Troika's work than anything BIS had modded for the Inbred Engine. Don't forget, BIS still were going along the BioWare misconception that evil is good for hire.
Howeve, the man has said some incredibly stupid things involving Fallout, many of which were at Terra-Arcanum.com. The most major of which was trying to excuse the game having a rating low enough that it would be acceptable to sell at Wal-Mart.
As for the Bioware matter; don't think I missed the point I just doubt that Bioware working together with Obsidian would really change the FO gameplay.
You are clueless. BioWare refuses to work with anything that doesn't appeal to crackheads, and evil is so cliche and hokey, it isn't funny. You could only call BioWare great in recent terms. For the course of CRPG history and development, BioWare has done nothing but piss onto the ideal constructs of the CRPG genre, instead labeling their crap as a CRPG when it could only be so by the "anything with stats" definition, as their games have been RTS + Pause w/speech systems. That pretty much makes for a lame CRPG, especially when you get into BioWare's technical incompetence with writing poor...well, everything. They can't write AI or decent pathfinding worth a damn, still haven't been able to, even after all they've sucked themselves off about NWN.
I've seen games years ago, most from Origin, that have pre-emptively buried anything BioWare has to offer, except in terms of their rather lame "SDK". Yes, it allows you to do some novel things, but if you're going to waste your time programming something that resembles everything else that was released by the "SDK", you will have to rely on someone else's incompetence that you can't even patch out. While you're busy programming, you might as well hire or find a friend artist to make a real attempt. I also know more competent dev houses. They aren't media and D&D whores, either.
Apart from Feargus not allowing that, the main point speaking against it is why buy a license if you want to change the game?
Stop sucking Feargus off. "Feargus not allowing that..." Well, obviously you have no idea as to what he's said in the past, nor the unbelievably stupid things he's tried to get Fallout fans to buy. This especially is true for his quixotic TORN adventures.
He doesn't need any more mindless fanboying to addle him further.
I mean Fallout isn't some blockbuster Hollywoodmovie which can live only from it's name. If you buy Fallout you're buying a package, an entire concept imho, anything else just isn't Fallout and doesn't require the license to be developed, nor would it profit from the fanbase but instead get rejected most likely.
Try explaining that to an attention whore (Carsten Strehse, who mentions Fallout at the drop of a hat, but hasn't proven he has any idea of the universe or influences/inspirations), a primadonna (insert BioWare dev here, who will go out of their way to make comments about how turn-based is bad, and how multiple story outcomes takes "exponentially more work", nevermind that most of their crap isn't really new - it's just playable for the ADHD kiddies and those spun out of their minds so the story has little pertinence to the slashfest as usual), and someone who has gone out of their way to alienate most of the Fallout fans with some of the most stupid suggestions under the sun (and I liked the Fallout MMORPG considerations at Interplay/BIS for a while...which rather disproves your silly notion that they wouldn't fuck with the franchise that way).
Then pay careful attention to the responses you get. All of which have spoken about Fallout. It would have to be seriously fucked over for BioWare to touch it, else their programmers would get completely confused when told that they can't reasonably skimp on the AI or pathfinding routines. Then there's the "evil = good for hire" bullshit, or some cliche aspect, and not the shades of grey and survival feeling that a wasteland needs. Need I mention that BioWare is still trying to perfect their use of a speech system, which they haven't really been able to
So much for P&P CRPG, instead using the media whore excuse of calling anything with stats and where you equip a weapon a CRPG. They were just yet another newbie development house with no clue of the genres when they started. Now that they have money, they're just idiots with money who are still trying to lobotomize the definition. They have little care for wold depth, often the world is lifeless, and the world construction is simply
dull. They could use a few good pointers from Pirahna Bytes, or play some Ultima games to get a similar feeling. Ultima 7 is RT, so it will appeal to those who can't understand TB there at BioWare. About all they have got going for them is giving NPCs a little more character than most (there's still games that have that, and have more interesting characters in their world than a mere handful, in case anyone tries to credit them with such). Well, that and they've been dry-humping D&D for a long time, in a format that appeals to the lowest common denominator like Diablo. That still doesn't mean that it's a CRPG.
Now, are you going to top Feargus off with your next reply, or will you hopefully go through and dig around to find exactly why that clown isn't really that credible with the Fallout audience? That doesn't mean everyone that worked at BIS is/was worthless, a few were confused and some were still learning, but they do have talent. It will be nice to see more actual role-playing in KOToR2, and hopefully they won't use any more of those stupid old logic puzzles.
And if you think BioWare wouldn't have some design influence on a joint BioWare-Obsidian adventure, considering that the BIS devs just removed themselves out from Interplay and are still sucking on BioWare's teat as they have since Baldur's Gate (when their original work got ignored or canned by Interplay), then I find it hard to put much faith into anything resembling Fallout coming from that direction given the past. It would likely be in name, only.
