ethanquin
First time out of the vault
Hey everyone,
I will be posting my Part 2 of Media Consumes Me's History and Review of the Fallout Series on Tuesday and have included some excerpts for those on NMA to freely discuss, criticize, pick at, and dissect. If there is any place that is filled with Fallout scholars it is here.
I have only posted paragraphs that included facts and detail involving VB and Bethesda's F3. The rest of the article will be up at mediaconsumesme.com on Oct. 27, for now it is being proofread by the editors there (yeah there is a system now). Please though, feel free to let me know if I have my facts wrong.
Also the article might change a bit from what is listed here...
Excerpts:
Immediately after the release of Fallout 2, Black Isle Studios began working on another sequel to the series. Interplay at the time had just gone public on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange and their shares began to take a nosedive after several years of reporting loses. Even though Interplay published some great games, they were purportedly spending boatloads of money on projects like Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury (a project I was eagerly awaiting, seeing the preview in PCGamer magazine). Fallout 3 along with many other upcoming projects were cancelled.
Interplay was funding its projects through credit agreements, game sales, and loans from the head of the company himself, Brian Fargo. They never kept much cash at the ready, and once troubles grew out of their hands in 1999, Titus Interactive, a French based production company, acquired a majority interest in Interplay. In 2001, Brian Fargo left the company and Titus Interactive's own Herve Caen took over as CEO. A deal with Vivendi Universal was signed to publish Interplays games, giving a much needed lifeline to the troubled company.
Black Isle Studios returned to making Fallout 3, codenaming their production Van Buren. Details began to emerge and fans salivated at the thought of another game in the franchise. The game would feature a 3D graphics engine (the Jefferson engine developed for Baldur's Gate 3) and continued the Fallout storyline in the American southwest in locations such as Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. The player would have started off as a prisoner thrust into war between factions of the New California Republic (featured in Fallout 2) and the Brotherhood of Steel. It also featured a mad scientist named Victor Presper bent on using a Ballistic Missile Satellite to destroy what was left of the post-nuclear world. Supposedly at the end of the game, the player would have to choose where the satellite would target, something very familiar to players of Bethesda's Fallout 3 DLC, Broken Steel, but we'll get to that later.
As quickly though as Van Buren was introduced to us, on December 8th, 2003 Interplay cancelled it. The troubles had escalated even with Vivendi Universal picking up publishing duties. The next year, Interplay was slapped with an eviction notice from its landlord, and shut down because of non-payment to some of their employees. Somehow though, Interplay survived moving to a smaller office space, possibly one with a lower overhead.
Years later in 2007 a leaked version of the Van Buren tech demo was released on the internet at No Mutants Allowed, an extensive Fallout fan site. The demo contained a small incomplete tutorial level from the game, giving fans of the series a "what could have been" look at the cancelled game. Although the game was to feature real-time combat and turn-based combat like that of Fallout Tactics, a requirement Interplay insisted on, the demo sadly only has real-time mode. Once loaded up, a character is created in the updated creation system, and the player's character starts off in an unnamed town during the Great War somewhere in the Commonwealth. Your character is escorted by a Corporal of the 4th Infantry Division through the war torn streets of the town, fighting against communist insurgents, as you make your way to a Vault located at the end of the level.
Playing the tech demo, fans easily saw the potential Black Isle Studios' Fallout 3 had. The graphics were spot on echoing the atmosphere of the rest of the series. The tech demo is very buggy with almost all options missing, but it is great to see for anyone who is a fan of the Fallout series. It is hard to say how well the game would have succeeded with the new engine in its final release, maybe if in some alternate universe Fallout 3 was released, I am sure the Fallout fans residing there would have been more then happy with the final outcome then what occurred here back in ours.
Back to 2004, after cancelling Fallout 3, Interplay sold the rights to Bethesda Softworks, the makers of another successful RPG series, The Elder Scrolls. Bethesda at that time was in production of the fourth game in their TES series named Oblivion. Bethesda announced they would be starting production of Fallout 3 immediately but it was evident production didn't fully start until Oblivion was released. Leading up to Fallout 3's release, fans of the series were split on whether Bethesda would give the series a faithful update.
Eventually in 2008, Bethesda's Fallout 3 was released for the PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. The game featured the same engine (Gamebryo) as Oblivion, and it was easy for fans to see that it had less in common than what they were used to in a Fallout title. It was transformed into a real-time RPG First Person Shooter, and no longer exhibited many of the traits fans were used to in the previous installments. To fans, it looked like a big budget Oblivion total conversion, but you could tell Bethesda tried very hard to make everything resemble as closely as possible to the story and atmosphere of the original games.
I will be posting my Part 2 of Media Consumes Me's History and Review of the Fallout Series on Tuesday and have included some excerpts for those on NMA to freely discuss, criticize, pick at, and dissect. If there is any place that is filled with Fallout scholars it is here.
I have only posted paragraphs that included facts and detail involving VB and Bethesda's F3. The rest of the article will be up at mediaconsumesme.com on Oct. 27, for now it is being proofread by the editors there (yeah there is a system now). Please though, feel free to let me know if I have my facts wrong.
Also the article might change a bit from what is listed here...
Excerpts:
Immediately after the release of Fallout 2, Black Isle Studios began working on another sequel to the series. Interplay at the time had just gone public on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange and their shares began to take a nosedive after several years of reporting loses. Even though Interplay published some great games, they were purportedly spending boatloads of money on projects like Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury (a project I was eagerly awaiting, seeing the preview in PCGamer magazine). Fallout 3 along with many other upcoming projects were cancelled.
Interplay was funding its projects through credit agreements, game sales, and loans from the head of the company himself, Brian Fargo. They never kept much cash at the ready, and once troubles grew out of their hands in 1999, Titus Interactive, a French based production company, acquired a majority interest in Interplay. In 2001, Brian Fargo left the company and Titus Interactive's own Herve Caen took over as CEO. A deal with Vivendi Universal was signed to publish Interplays games, giving a much needed lifeline to the troubled company.
Black Isle Studios returned to making Fallout 3, codenaming their production Van Buren. Details began to emerge and fans salivated at the thought of another game in the franchise. The game would feature a 3D graphics engine (the Jefferson engine developed for Baldur's Gate 3) and continued the Fallout storyline in the American southwest in locations such as Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. The player would have started off as a prisoner thrust into war between factions of the New California Republic (featured in Fallout 2) and the Brotherhood of Steel. It also featured a mad scientist named Victor Presper bent on using a Ballistic Missile Satellite to destroy what was left of the post-nuclear world. Supposedly at the end of the game, the player would have to choose where the satellite would target, something very familiar to players of Bethesda's Fallout 3 DLC, Broken Steel, but we'll get to that later.
As quickly though as Van Buren was introduced to us, on December 8th, 2003 Interplay cancelled it. The troubles had escalated even with Vivendi Universal picking up publishing duties. The next year, Interplay was slapped with an eviction notice from its landlord, and shut down because of non-payment to some of their employees. Somehow though, Interplay survived moving to a smaller office space, possibly one with a lower overhead.
Years later in 2007 a leaked version of the Van Buren tech demo was released on the internet at No Mutants Allowed, an extensive Fallout fan site. The demo contained a small incomplete tutorial level from the game, giving fans of the series a "what could have been" look at the cancelled game. Although the game was to feature real-time combat and turn-based combat like that of Fallout Tactics, a requirement Interplay insisted on, the demo sadly only has real-time mode. Once loaded up, a character is created in the updated creation system, and the player's character starts off in an unnamed town during the Great War somewhere in the Commonwealth. Your character is escorted by a Corporal of the 4th Infantry Division through the war torn streets of the town, fighting against communist insurgents, as you make your way to a Vault located at the end of the level.
Playing the tech demo, fans easily saw the potential Black Isle Studios' Fallout 3 had. The graphics were spot on echoing the atmosphere of the rest of the series. The tech demo is very buggy with almost all options missing, but it is great to see for anyone who is a fan of the Fallout series. It is hard to say how well the game would have succeeded with the new engine in its final release, maybe if in some alternate universe Fallout 3 was released, I am sure the Fallout fans residing there would have been more then happy with the final outcome then what occurred here back in ours.
Back to 2004, after cancelling Fallout 3, Interplay sold the rights to Bethesda Softworks, the makers of another successful RPG series, The Elder Scrolls. Bethesda at that time was in production of the fourth game in their TES series named Oblivion. Bethesda announced they would be starting production of Fallout 3 immediately but it was evident production didn't fully start until Oblivion was released. Leading up to Fallout 3's release, fans of the series were split on whether Bethesda would give the series a faithful update.
Eventually in 2008, Bethesda's Fallout 3 was released for the PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. The game featured the same engine (Gamebryo) as Oblivion, and it was easy for fans to see that it had less in common than what they were used to in a Fallout title. It was transformed into a real-time RPG First Person Shooter, and no longer exhibited many of the traits fans were used to in the previous installments. To fans, it looked like a big budget Oblivion total conversion, but you could tell Bethesda tried very hard to make everything resemble as closely as possible to the story and atmosphere of the original games.
