LogFAQs > #929124317

wwinterj25 posted...

Interplay Productions developed and published Fallout back in 1997 so nope. Bethesda bought it from those during Fallout 3's development. New Vegas is the only Fallout Obsidian worked on as far as I know.

yutterh posted...

They used to work for interplays black isle studios and then made obsidian. So your right, first fallout game made by obsidian. But they were the original people on fallout.

The first Fallout game was made by Interplay, but afterwards most of the development team got shuffled down into a division of Interplay known as Black Isle (and the rest left the company completely to form Troika).

Fallout 2 was entirely developed by Black Isle under the Interplay banner, and Black Isle developed a really strong reputation off it - as well as being the publisher of Baldur's Gate (developed by BioWare), and the developer of Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. aka, most of the classic WRPGs of the era that people still praise today.

When Interplay basically collapsed into bankruptcy, they liquidated the entirety of Black Isle, and most of the developers who left went on to form Obsidian almost immediately after. And then Interplay sold off the rights to all of their IP to Bethesda/Zenimax.

So most people absolutely see Obsidian as the direct successor to Black Isle (and in turn Interplay before it), which makes it easy to see them as the ones who have more moral claim to "creating" Fallout. Certainly moreso than Bethesda, who had literally nothing to do with it, bought it with cash, and seem to have kind of misunderstood the entire point of it.

So that's why a lot of people felt like Fallout: New Vegas was the only real successor to the series post-Fallout 2, and it was more "valid" than the Bethesda games. Especially since half the plot of NV was based on the original story outline of the version of Fallout 3 Black Isle was originally working on before Interplay went out of business.

The real variable in all that is Tim Cain (pretty much universally seen as the main inspiration behind the franchise), who is one of the ones who left Interplay to form Troika as opposed to going to Black Isle/Obsidian. But Troika went out of business almost immediately after releasing the tragic almost-wonderful Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines (finally getting a "sequel" next year!). Meanwhile, Tim Cain had absolutely nothing to do with Fallout 3 or 4 (and was somewhat critical of them), nor New Vegas, so "THE Fallout guy" hasn't really worked on a Fallout game since Fallout 1.

Though Tim Cain actually joined Obsidian a few years back, so between that and Obsidian basically being the direct successor to Black Isle, they've got more connection to the original Fallout than anyone else. About the only thing they're really missing is the actual rights to the franchise.

So The Outer Worlds is basically a game made by the two most important people who helped create Fallout 1, as part of a company which is more or less the same group of people (20 years later) who made Fallout 1 and 2, to sort of recapture the same sort of feel/tone as Fallout in a different setting.

In some ways, The Outer Worlds is more the direct successor to Fallout at this point than Fallout 3 and 4 were.

Which is kind of ironic, because Fallout itself only exists as a franchise because Interplay lost the rights to their original game along those lines (Wasteland), and made Fallout as a sort of Wasteland clone in a slightly different setting.
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