Obsidian CEO Talks Working on Fallout Again

[Surf Solar]

I'm a big fan of being able to have a smoke in one hand and play the entire game with the other.

This. One of the reasons I love those old isometric 2d games so much is that I can play them with only one hand and the mouse.

Problem is i don't have the same feeling playing the old fallout that the new one.
The gameplay and the view are so different it doesn't feel at all the same kind of game.
So it's sad they still call those games fallout, especially if you like better the old TB isometric gameplay.
I'm not excited by it and i'd rather like they made a new cRPG IP.

Sums up what I think about it much better than I could. Thanks![/quote]

 

[Starwars]

I would gladly welcome a New Vegas 2.

Now, I think what I would welcome the most would be OEI doing a brand new game with some similar design goals in regards as to the open quests and so forth as I would rather see Fallout as a license buried as well. But clearly this is not going to happen and New Vegas also showed me that, even with the massive shift in gameplay, the "new" Fallouts can still win me over if certain aspects of them are good enough.
New Vegas is to me the best RPG released in a really long time, flaws and all. To me it was *easily* worth it despite being wrapped up in the guise of new FP, action-y Fallout.

As far as Wasteland 2 goes, I'm mostly cautiously optimistic. It looks good, they seem to have the ingredients. But for me it definitely remains to be seen if they can actually craft something good out of it, and not just fly on wings of nostalgia. InXile is good at targetting the old-school fans bitterness about newer games at the moment, but having an old-school game doesn't necessarily make it a good game. It will be interesting to see whether WL2 will actually be *good* and not feel like a half-assed attempt at emulating games of old.

 

[MurkyShadow]

As much as I sympathize with Obsidian and their ideals, they have yet to produce a game that catches my interest.
Most of the time it tastes of unfulfilled potential.

Fallout New Vegas may be better than Fallout 3. But it still just feels like a 3rd person shooter with stats / an arpg. Just maybe with some more story elements.

 

[DemonNick]

.. the combat is slow in a bad way, less about deliberation and tactics and more about waiting for dozens of uninvolved NPCs to move.

The game let you to sip coffee and relax a bit, what's wrong with it? Much better than any frenetic action developed later, if you ask me. Anyway, I can foresee how the new Fallout will look like - a lot of those fancy online achievements (and experience points) will popping up every few seconds and perhaps you'll even gain two perks per level. Yay!

What's wrong with it is that it's tedious. If it were slow in a way that was more tactically interesting, that'd be different. I like slow games, but I think that if a game's slow it should take advantage of that. Adding things like stances (think Tactics' standing, crouching and prone) or bothering to actually do something with multiple ammo types, would go a long way towards making the slow combat more engaging. As it is, I think it feels like an obstacle to the parts of the game that are actually interesting.

Again, I think it goes back to most of FO1's systems being hastily slapped together in order to compensate for losing GURPS.

Yes, I agree, they did a nice job, but, somehow it still had that plastic taste of Beth's F3. In most parts they did what lot of us would do to save the day: they ignored Beth's F3 whenever they could. But that's the problem - why fixing something that's obviously going in a direction that was not logical and expected (by most players at the time) continuation of previous games? I don't have problem with NV; it's good game in its own right. I'm arguing that energy should be invested in creating brand new universe, not wasting it in fixing someone else screw-ups (imo).

Well, they are investing a lot of energy in a new IP, Eternity. It looks like a cool, interesting take on the usual wizards and elves setup. Sure, it's not a new post-apocalyptic IP, but people aren't exactly lining up to pay third-party developers like Obsidian to pitch new IP.

The lion's share of their work is probably always going to be other peoples' IP. It'd be nice if it were different, but it's not. It'll be IP that other people have made a mess of in the past. Should they stop going after Star Wars because of The Old republic?

 

[Ulrox]

The lion's share of their work is probably always going to be other peoples' IP. It'd be nice if it were different, but it's not. It'll be IP that other people have made a mess of in the past. Should they stop going after Star Wars because of The Old republic?

Not because of the old republic.........

 

[Ares]

A fallout setting based entirely on LA? Could be interesting. Probably something similar to Bloodlines in terms of hub areas and side-quests. The only real downside IMHO is that Beth does not allow to move back in the timeline. Pretty dumb because now what I have gathered from the fallout lore, the LA area has become reasonably civilized. Would be much more interesting and "fallouty" to have the setting in a destroyed and barbaric city lets say 30-40 years after the war. In terms of game engine it really does make more sense to put a entire city as your map area- gives a much bigger sense of scale in contrast to lets say NV where you could walk from one end to the other in about 3-4 hours. Areas that in the real world are actually much wider apart.

 

[Lexx]

Not 30-40 years after the war, but the NCR gold reserves are stashed away in the Boneyard. The setting kind of screams for a NCR vs. Brotherhood war scenario. Though, NCR was used already once now, so people most likely would think it's a cheap New Vegas rip-off....

Other than that, LA offers everything a generic Fallout game needs:

- Huge City with ruins all around (and city skyline)
- A desert on the outside
- Ocean on the other
- Radiated areas (after all, Cathedral got destroyed by a nucelar bomb)
- Civilized enclaves like Adytum, the Gun Runners factory and the Blades territory.
- landmarks that can easily be remembered
- The lore allows the existence of renegade super mutants to kill

etc. etc...

In my old 7 days wasteland clone game thingy from long time ago, I had the idea to move slavers into the hollywood area. I thought that was a great idea that even fits the Fallout setting. :>

 

[FearMonkey]

Would a game set in L.A. include Orange County as well? I wouldn't mind exploring a post-apocalyptic Disneyland. :p

 

[Wr4i7h]

I'd really dig this because I honestly think New Vegas is a better game than Fallout 1.

You gotta be shitting me/everyone here. I can appreciate Obsidian's efforts to make something decent out of the mess that Beth created, but still... you gotta be shitting me.

Edit:

Beth bought id software, so it's possible that they're finally working on a stable and well-documented engine. If not, then it's a shame.

Oh man, that's a good one! But seriously, Bethesda has had a love affair with Gamebryo since Morrowind.

If they can't see id for what it is - great game tech/engine makers - then why did they buy the company?

 

[DemonNick]

The lion's share of their work is probably always going to be other peoples' IP. It'd be nice if it were different, but it's not. It'll be IP that other people have made a mess of in the past. Should they stop going after Star Wars because of The Old republic?

Not because of the old republic.........

That doesn't change anything. I'm sort of struggling to understand your point. What exactly do you think happened? The existence of Fallout 3 somehow conjured a magical fairy into existence that transformed the excellent world-building and intricate quest design in New Vegas into a thirteen year old's D&D map and a succession of FedEx quests? The Star Wars example doesn't hold up either. I mentioned TOR because it specifically, point by point, negates the entire plot of KotOR II. Yet KotOR II is still one of the smartest and most compelling takes on Star Wars in any medium.

At the end of the day, New Vegas isn't a sequel to Fallout 3. It's a sequel to Fallout 2. I'm assuming a New Vegas 2 set in the boneyard would be similarly detatched from what Bethesda's doing, so I don't really get how whatever they do with 4 should poison my enjoyment of it.

On top of that, as I said before: they get an opportunity to take a crack at a new IP very rarely. The only reason they got one with Eternity was that they went to Kickstarter. Since they are primarily going to be dealing with existing IP in the future, why shouldn't they keep doing interesting things with Fallout? I'd much rather see them do that than another South Park or Dungeon Siege game.

 

[smber2cnma]

What's wrong with it is that it's tedious. If it were slow in a way that was more tactically interesting, that'd be different.

Funny you say that b/c that's one of my main gripes with FO3 and NV. I got FO:3...was amazed...then bored (walk, shoot, linear conversation, walk, walk, walk, shoot, walk, boring conversation)...then as I encountered more & more of the world disappointed by it's lack of interest, realism, or the affect I could have on it.

With NV, I don't think I ever had the amazed stage (balanced by less disappointment in the end), but I did have the bored stage.

The FPS maps make getting around a chore. I put 100 hrs in the game but most of it was walking toward grey or tan blobs.

In FO and FO2, combat may not have been fast paced, but it was much more tactical than the garbage Beth gives us and in any case it was never the focus. I loved FO2 (my first Fallout) b/c of the conversations, b/c of interesting quests, b/c I could affect locals and b/c they remembered what I did and marked me for it. And little did I know it then, but b/c I could do those things in pretty rapid succession without hours of walking from place A to B shooting stupid crabs & lizards on the way.

I'm fine with wandering around in Elder Scrolls b/c I did ton's of it in Daggerfall, but they have never had great conversation or only in Morrowind much affect on the world - so who needed to be in cities when they were so static and underwhelming. FO was different and to me better without the 3D map exploration aspect included b/c it's characters and cities where where it thrived.

 

[TorontoReign]

I loved Fallout New Vegas. I still play it quite frequently, the mods add a lot to the game. Another game even close to that would suit me just fine. Some of the hardliners around here just don't like the aRPG genre very much. To each their own. Fallout LA would rock my world. I've liked many of Obsidian's games, FNV is probably in my top 10 favorite games, so I trust them far more than Bethesda. They did pretty damn good considering the engine they used.

 

[smber2cnma]

Not 30-40 years after the war, but the NCR gold reserves are stashed away in the Boneyard. The setting kind of screams for a NCR vs. Brotherhood war scenario. Though, NCR was used already once now, so people most likely would think it's a cheap New Vegas rip-off....

Other than that, LA offers everything a generic Fallout game needs:

- Huge City with ruins all around (and city skyline)
- A desert on the outside
- Ocean on the other
- Radiated areas (after all, Cathedral got destroyed by a nucelar bomb)
- Civilized enclaves like Adytum, the Gun Runners factory and the Blades territory.
- landmarks that can easily be remembered
- The lore allows the existence of renegade super mutants to kill

etc. etc...

In my old 7 days wasteland clone game thingy from long time ago, I had the idea to move slavers into the hollywood area. I thought that was a great idea that even fits the Fallout setting. :>

I'm not clear on how established how strong NCR's control of the region is supposed to be, but I guess they could have some issue in the Boneyard that leads to a quaranteen zone much like STALKER. NCR would have power at the periphery while some other mutant, goul, or other faction running the innermost reaches. BOS or whomever else could be written into such a scenario and varied settings to players to experience would depend on them having some access (as you say) to the sea, to some civilized NCR towns with cultivated farms/ranches around it, a Vault, and lots of urban inside the zone.

 

[ramessesjones]

I'm not clear on how established how strong NCR's control of the region is supposed to be, but I guess they could have some issue in the Boneyard that leads to a quaranteen zone much like STALKER. NCR would have power at the periphery while some other mutant, goul, or other faction running the innermost reaches. BOS or whomever else could be written into such a scenario and varied settings to players to experience would depend on them having some access (as you say) to the sea, to some civilized NCR towns with cultivated farms/ranches around it, a Vault, and lots of urban inside the zone.

The Los Angeles sprawl is really big, instead of a densely populated central area like a lot of big cities, it is spread across hundreds of miles. NCR could easily have multiple cities in the area and there could still be plenty of room for areas that are uncivilized, dangerous and out of control.

 

[DemonNick]

I'd really dig this because I honestly think New Vegas is a better game than Fallout 1.

You gotta be shitting me/everyone here. I can appreciate Obsidian's efforts to make something decent out of the mess that Beth created, but still... you gotta be shitting me.

No, I'm serious. FO1 had really bad systems design and tedious combat. The problems with SPECIAL range from the ambiguity about early and late game weapon skills, the weird split between First Aid and Doctor, useless traits like Fast Shot, and the way that Outdoorsman is built around a system that was cut...

Then there's the combat, which is tedious and shallow. There are all kinds of half-assed elements here, like multiple ammo types (IIRC only the .44 and 10mm had variants, and the 10mm AP didn't work). On top of that, combat in Fallout feels like they chopped magic out of a standard RPG and weren't really sure what to replace it with. So in the end a lot of combats boil down to plinkiing the other side. The 'deepest' it gets is, say, pick-pocketing ammo off of people before the fight. Even Arcanum had better combat, mostly because the inclusion of abilities and crafted machines added depth.

New Vegas has better systems, including the use of non-speech skills in dialogue, and I'd argue that the way it actually commits to things like weapon modding and multiple ammo types, and uses them to make non-combat skills more relevant to combat. I think that this, along with the way it makes skills other than speech relevant to conversations and quests, is good.

I'd also argue that New Vegas has better quest design. There's nothing in FO1 as sophisticated as Beyond the Beef or How Little We Know. The Cathedral sort of comes close in terms of having multiple ways to make your way to the bottom of the dungeon and to get rid of the Master, but that's about as good as it gets.

 

[arikel]

Well I'd be excited for another obsidian FO game. I'm even half looking forward to Beth's FO4, because I know at least I'll get a good few hours of wandering around in a nice post apoc wasteland even if the story/game is shit. Sure the originals have their own flavour/je ne sais quoi which wasn't quite brought over to the new iterations, but the damage is done there already and there would be no reason not to continue making more of them, and if obsidian can provide us with a second good story to go along with the fallout world I'm all for it.

 

[Makenshi]

useless traits like Fast Shot

Sir, you may not Fast Shot and that is fine, but you should not say it is useless, because even if the whole planet did agree with you, I disagree, and that alone makes your point relative.

To me, Fast Shot is one hell of a badass trait on its own*, and I always use it in F1/2/Tactics.


* not to mention combos with Bonus Rate of Fire, Action Boy, Turbo Plasma Rifle, Alien Blaster, Chocolate Cookie, etc.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Chocolate Cookie O . o ?

nomnom?

 

[Real_Kilkun]

A Fallout New Vegas 2? Sure I'd dig it. As long as the series doesn't devolve into a JRPG it will still maintain fun moments for at least a few hours, and most likely have mods that fix the issues that I would have with it.

 

[woo1108]

IMO obsidian has lot of potential to make good rpg.
Faction
multi ending
good story
game world
skill usage
etc
NV wasn't that perfectly made but they show me their potential.
Too bad beth has right of fallout and they are bad publisher.