Fall(out)ing in Love Again
Bethesda resurrects Interplays dusty but fondly remembered role-playing series.
Cindy Yans
Computer Games Magazine
October 04
Only in the bizarre world of role-playing game fanaticism would the salvaging of a beloved game franchise by an experienced and successful developer be greeted with howls of anguish and wails of disbelief. Yet when Bethesda, makers of the successful and critically acclaimed Elder Scrolls series, acquired the rights to make the third Fallout game from moribund Interplay, that's precisely what happened. Web boards overheated. Flame wars burned. Moderators banned. Blood fell from the sky. You would have thought that Fallout 3 had been cancelled, not saved.
So why did Bethesda's Todd Howard seem so happy to have taken on the task of creating the third of the wasteland's holy trinity? "We always talked about doing another RPG, something different than Elder Scrolls, that held the same things true that we love, player choice, open-endedness, great characters and such," he says. "So we would always talk about doing something like Fallout, because we liked it so much." The game is being developed alongside the next Elder Scrolls game, and like it's deep and intricate Morrowind, will be available on PCs and consoles as well. "We're fluent now on XBOX and PC," he says, "and new tools like Microsoft's XNA should speed development on both platforms."
There's not much to reveal yet about the games storyline, or even it's style of play or visual representation, but it's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. character system, and it's gritty drug-and-prostitute-speckled irreverence is still at the core; "I don't plan on tempering it. I think we're looking at a hard M [rating]. We new that going in," says Howard. The biggest challenge is "to create something for today's market that has the same impact that Fallout had on gaming in 1997," and to that end, Howard is looking to capture the feel and essence of the original title. "I'd say the impact the original had in it's day was about so much more than the angle you viewed it at, or how combat was executed." As for the rest, including turn-based or real-time combat, isometric or first-person perspective, and the like, Howard isn't saying yet. "To early to say" is his standard reply, and no wonder. Anything more might get the lynch mob fired up yet again.
), i do believe that they were our best shot at making an authentic FO3.