Also, Pete, big question, if there were original Fallout devs doing a "job inquiry", per your own words, where are these guys now? Not good enough to work for Bethesda?
That is a sour point. On one hand I understand their need to do their own thing, but I can't help thinking that there never was a chance for them to work for Beth, since they are respected in the community and didn't cut all ties with the fans, so the company feared that their precious secrecy could be broken. A bit paranoid view on things, and curious since Bethesda asked the Van Buren devs to think about inquiring for a job, they were ready to give a try to a few of them in the days after the announcement of the end of Van Buren/FO3, on the Iplay forum.
Oh well not really surprising at the end, so the only thing that I find hard to swallow is the fact they said no to the long-time fallout devs and then hired and later promoted a kid whose hate for the Fallout fansites and every Fallout fan that dared to speak something against his simplistic views was legendary on the Iplay forum. That isn't nice.
blacklisted fansites can't see very much, that's true.
I've already said in another place that I'm not comfortable to say "blacklisted" anymore, since if we want to be rigorous then STG and RPGCodex are indeed blacklisted, but with NMA links still working on the TES forum and a few channels still open it's better to talk about a boycott and not an outright blacklisting.
And I know it's their way of doing things, to keep a low profile until nothing can be changed in the games, but in this case it's a boycott, not just business as usual, I would only like to know their reasons to do it, since their explanations are too vague.
Pete Hines wrote:
Again, you can't make the game that everybody wants because you'll get ten different answers about what that game is.
Glutton Creeper wrote:
We know we cannot please everyone
Chuck Cuevas wrote:
So trying to please [Fallout fans] was almost like trying to please everybody, but you can't.
Yeah that textbook PR talk there. But let me add two notes:
First I don't believe everyone was that knowledgeable of the games, or that everyone was a fan.
second to be fair there are a lot of Fallout fans working on the game, so that's partially true, I remember their love letters to Fallout on the Iplay forum.
Pete Hines:here was a game reviewer who emailed us and said Oblivion was crashing every five minutes, and we got him in touch with QA and it turned out his printer had software attached to it that was running in the background and making Oblivion crash all the time. I mean, how can you--I promise, that has never happened to an Xbox 360 user in the history of 360s, that some printer driver would be doing this. [laughs] We certainly, for something like the Elder Scrolls or other franchises where it's appropriate, want to make games available on all the platforms where it's appropriate, but at the same time it's a pain in the ass. People just don't understand what a pain in the ass it is. All of these problems you don't have with a video game console.
Oh shit
Pete Hines: Absolutely. We'll continue to develop on PC for anything that's appropriate for PC.
Oh ok
Pete Hines: It's the vision of a group of folks. Much like The Elder Scrolls, it starts with Todd Howard who drives everything, but then there's definitely the lead designer, lead artist, lead programmer. More than anything, those team leads are the guys who champion for things, saying, "This is what it has to play like, this is what it has to look like, this is how the systems have to work." It's definitely a group of folks but at the end of the day it falls on Todd to set the pace and and how he thinks it should look and play.
So everything starts and ends with Todd? Everything? Hmm that's a great responsibility, but now we know who to turn our heads if something goes wrong. Or right, of course.
Pete Hines:There is a little bit of that sentiment out there that we have to prove that we're worthy to be the guys to make Fallout 3.
True, definitely true.
Pete Hines:I loved Baldur's Gate, Fallout.
OMG it's Per
(inside joke, not important)
Pete Hines:That time is not that far off.
We'll wait then.
Someone should create an anti-add banner based on that picture. 
