'New Vegas is a very, very important game to us,' says mildly exasperated Todd Howard, who will never stop getting grilled about New Vegas
'New Vegas is a very, very important game to us,' says mildly exasperated Todd Howard, who will never stop getting grilled about New Vegas
As for whether another Obsidian Fallout could happen, he won't say.
..."it is obviously difficult to deal with when you're going back to an area where a game had multiple endings."
No, Howard. What you are finding difficult is to have any particular vision for a game beyond its literal systems and gameplay loops. You resent New Vegas because people care about it, and nobody cares about 76.
If you have a story you want to tell, you make choices that serve that vision; the problem is Todd doesn't have one. He bought a franchise built on evocative storytelling and biting commentary and decided its best use is for players to bash virtual action figures together.
For real though. Todd Howard needs to like, take some shrooms and meditate in the mountains. Touch grass. Given the headass shit he's said lately it's transparently clear he's one of the biggest things standing in the way of another decent Bethesda game- I think the days of those might be done for good, I hate to say.
Todd Howard, Pete Hines, and the other guy I can't think of his name right now, are the holy Trinity at Bethsoft. They figured out how to take the success of Morrowind and milk the shit out of it while "streamlining" every game.
The original ES creators said years ago the direction of the series is not what they would have done. And you can see how these three did the same thing to Fallout that they did with Elder Scrolls. Their "best" contributions have been creating DLCs and charging for mods. They've made bank for Zenamax. And that's all they care about.
They're creativitly bankrupt. I feel bad for the devs that grew up on the og elder scrolls games and became devs with the company.
That's fine, it's hardly as if we'll ever run out of good games to play. Hell, I haven't even gotten to AC6 yet and I've been looking forward to that for ages
He was ALWAYS the one standing in the way of good Bethesda games. He’s responsible for Redguard as the followup to Daggerfall. Redguard!
He should have been chased out of the industry decades ago.
I think he was refering to the show being set after new vegas and having to continue on from a game which had different possible endings
I know, and I'll allow that I'm not being very tidy in my rhetoric but the point stands that if you're writing a FO:NV show, you could easily pick the game ending that suits whichever story you're trying to tell with the show.
I was trying to connect that dot (my response to his quote) to my other grievances with how the Bethesda house style deemphasizes textual storytelling in favour of commercially safe gameplay loops and more environmental storytelling that, even when well done, isn't very meaningful on its own.
I feel like the fallout fans who geek out over continuity can be safely disregarded. The entire franchise is built on the joy of jank, from to to bottom
I honestly don't get the hate. To me, fallout 3 was on another level. It was oblivion with guns in a post apocalyptic wasteland and I loved every minute of it. I had never heard of fallout before bathesda bought it. I think the first 2 games plus tactics only sold like a million copies combined. Fallout 3 sold like 10 million.
I'm just saying, had it not been for bathesda, fallout would be dead and forgotten. I mean I sure as heck would have never heard about it. So I'm glad they made fallout 3, and it was a landmark game in my life.
Fallout was created by Tim Cain at Interplay. Herve Caen staged a hostile takeover of the company, forced out Cain and Brian Fargo, and proceeded to run the company into the ground and loot its corpse. Tim Cain was in the process of buying back IP from Interplay when Todd Howard swooped in and bought it for more than Cain could afford. Basically, Tim Cain had his baby - his magnum opus - stolen from him TWICE.
If not for Bethesda, we would have had multiple BG3 level sequels by now, instead of the looter-shooter garbage that Bethesda turned it into.
I can't see a way to frankly assess the quality of a game on its commercial success, but let's at least not pretend the franchise's popularity is based on its later installments - that puts the cart before the horse imo.
Interplay going bankrupt is the reason Bethesda owns this IP. FO3 wasn't a bad game, but it started development before their involvement. Everything Bethesda made on its own has been increasingly in their own simulationist, environmental style, which can be fun but isn't a good fit for the highly novelistic style that made it popular to begin with.
To try to answer, succinctly (which I'm bad at): looking backward is easier than looking forward. What I mean by that is since you didn't get into the series until 3, it makes sense that you wouldn't have a problem with 3 and 4, since it's harder to see what the series could have been...as pretentious as that sounds.
Where much of the hate comes from (and I think a lot of it is overblown - I'm not trying to justify the behavior of the maniacs out there) is that the overarching progression of the series feels reset. Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 showed a progression in a *post-*post-apocalyptic world, with society advancing again, to some degree. Shady Sands grew between 1 and 2, and was the foundation of the NCR.
So Fallout 3 at the time was IMHO a disappointment because the setting felt more generic, and like they were just playing the greatest hits from 1 and 2. I get the arguments that the setting in-universe was hit harder, but it still felt weird that it was post-apocalpytic instead of post-post-apocalyptic.
One reason (as always, IMHO) that New Vegas was so popular is that it continued to build on 1 and 2. We saw the NCR had continued to grow, other factions rise in importance, and generally felt less like the bombs had dropped the year prior. It's what a lot of folks hoped Fallout 3 would be, in that sense. That's my own biased view though, so take it with a grain of salt - there's folks who want more humor, only isometric, more complex and branching storylines, etc.
It’s hard to compare sales numbers of 90s games to late 2000s games lol the whole industry had a massive growth spike post-Xbox introduction and PCs getting massively cheaper to build
I was skeptical of the jump to 3D at the time, and sure, it changed the series, but I think that it was done well.
If one wants more isometric games in the rough setting and genre as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, there's the Wasteland series, the first of which inspired Fallout.
checks
The series is apparently currently on sale on Steam. Wasteland 3 and its expansions are 80% off:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/
And Wasteland 2 is 75% off:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/
...and the latter is bundled with the (very, very elderly) Wasteland 1.
I'd be curious to see the sale results of the games while takeling the amount of console/PC present as well as the market size during the release year.
We might have surprise about results of all the games with these parameters.
That quote actually makes sense in context, it's talking about handling the story of the second season of the show.
Also, I doubt Todd Howard was in a position to independently decide to buy the Fallout franchise in 2004.
See for yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_(video_game)?wprov=sfla1
"Like, where do you draw the line between what's true and what's not true?" he said. "What we tend to do is, the most truthful thing is what people saw on the screen, right? That's the most truth. And then things that are written officially along with the games are kinda second truth. And then, other things that are written or done outside of that—spin-off things, or somebody answering on the internet—those things are kinda third place.
...Huh, what??? I can understand him wanting New Vegas to have lower priority in terms of canon in comparison to games made by Bethesda, but why the hell would he want a TV show's canonicity to be above the actual source material, and the one that they themselves made on top of that?????
I think the "most truthful" thing encompasses the games too. It comes across as "whatever the players do is what is canon to them" and "along with the games" means things alongside the games, not the games themselves.
Kinda like the game manual saying x character was killed in the previous game or something but you as a player never let that happen. Your canon is the true canon, not what is written.
That sounds much more like a todd thing to say.
It's so weird that the vault dweller would punch Preston in the face 37 times, but it's canon.
Ok, that's fair. The article might be omitting context with that quote.
I read that as saying what people saw on their screens while playing the games was most truthful, not as a reference specifically to the TV show.
I don't think screen specifically means TV, I think he's talking about the original works like the games, tv shows, movies, being in first place, as opposed to material that comes with those original works, like instruction manuals, press releases, which is a second priority in terms of what canon is, and then Q&A sessions or, and this is when I'm also confused, spin off games.
Now, if spin off games means things like fallout shelter, sure. If spinoff means New vegas or Fallout 76 , that would be more surprising to me.
I need to watch the source video to know better, but life.
EDIT : nah, it seems he means gimmicky tie ins like fallout shelter.
Lol this article goes out of its way to try and tamp down the New Vegas controversy.
A) no it's not a stretch to look at the chalkboard in the show and see that the dates do not line up with new vegas' timeline.
B) Josh Sawyer didn't say he didn't care what they did with fallout because he actually didn't care but because he has had to make peace with the fact that he doesn't control it anymore
C) Tim Cain said he loved the look and feel of the world in the show, not the plot elements or then retconning NV, and basically just said maybe the whiteboard is a lie / I don't control it anymore so I'm not going to publicly criticize it but posted links to the timeline descrepencies.
new vegas fans can never understand plot points unless a character has 5 minute exposition explaining it
like fuck, do people really not know what an arrow means? did nobody play new vegas and realize the ncr was spread way too thin in new vegas? they couldnt even send troops to their defenses that are right next to legion territory, basically left them to die. hell new vegas talks a lot about how the ncr is barely holding on. how does that not tie in to the chalkboard timeline exactly? i seriously dont understand the confusion about it
like fuck, do people really not know what an arrow means?
Like fuck, do you not know that "fall of the NCR" happening before the events of New Vegas is a clear retcon at best, and nuking Shady Sands immediately after NV ends is completely shitting on all the themes of hope in the NV narrative?
I seriously don't understand how you can read that whiteboard and think "oh yeah, they're totally respecting the NV cannon".
Ha, as if Obsidian would work on another fallout when they didn't get paid for the last one.
Majority of their pay was contracted on a bonus to be awarded if they for a metacritic score of 85 by a certain deadline after launch.
The game was rushed and underfunded and Obsidian wasn't really up to the task resulting in a pretty catastrophic launch that took over a year to fix all the bugs while also shoveling out DLC.
They were decieved into thinking it'd be an easy job and missed the mark just like how they fumbled the KotoR2 launch just 6 years priorr. And lost their bonuses as a result.
If they make games who take place outside of the US. They don’t have to hear about how they broke the lore. But Todd said no. Or Bethesda can make a new Fallout timeline. You have a OG timeline (FO1, FO2, Tactics, and FNV) and a Bethesda timeline (all the games/shows they made). They have two outs to stop people from hating them. But Bethesda is not doing them.
Personally I think multiple timelines/versions of the story would complicate things unnecessarily.
Todd bought Fallout because Fallout was only just seen as a way to make merch out of. Yes, let's have vault boy on everything, let's have nuka-cola replicas, let's have bottle cap replicas .etc
But nothing about whether or not the games are even worth a toss to play. There's people who still to this day, favor FO 1, 2 and New Vegas. They were made with a level of charm and care that got YOU to where you are today. FO 3, 4 and 76 all feel like just empty open worlds with recycled material, it's running in place with no forward progression.
The OG creator of FO may be a humble guy, but the series still deserve better.
I think I figured out why Todd Howard seems to have tried to make Fallout die; he never wanted to buy Fallout, but was pressured by Zenimax into purchasing a second IPin case The Elder Scrolls ever fails.
Fallout has always been a backup to The main Elder Scrolls games in case he makes a mistake. If Fallout succeeds in a massive way, there is a chance he will have to start giving it more resources than his own pride and joy.
It's classic step-parent mentality. The suits made him into a step parent, so he managed a quick skin over oblivion and just copied bits and pieces of the first games stories like a high school student copying a book report from a book he never read. He didn't really care about the substance from the previous games, but there was a lot of old concept art they could mash up and the 50's aesthetic meant they could save a lot of money on licensing fees for music.
Then is sold big and ruined his chances for quietly making the story go away. But Skyrim was a huge success which should have made the idea of a second IP unnecessary. So, they decided to focus on their new game and let a company known for doing cheap sequels for other game companies IP.
Personally I wonder if Todd Howard was actually paying attention to who Obsidian had on staff, or if he just wanted a company who was willing to take the millstone from his neck so he could focus on the game he really wanted to make. The reason I think that Todd didn't know who Obsidian were is because of how he treated the next company who he let play with the Fallout IP.
Fallout 76 was the only other title made by a mostly outside developer. I say mostly, because they were a newly acquired studio who had no real experience. Which led to a failure in Fallout 76 from launch. Compare that to how ESO was put together. It was built by Zenimax Online a core studio designed just for an online MMO Elder Scrolls game. They weren't forced to use the single-player Gamebryo/Creation Engine. It was designed as it's own online game.
Fallout has been consistently designed to fail, which is why Microsoft should just remove it from Bethesda and get someone who understands the story and is willing to follow the real story Canon make new games. We're in this issue because Todd Howard has been forced to work on Fallout, which is amazing how even with him trying the screw it up, we still enjoy the Fallout world.
You say this as if Todd Howard solely developed Fallout and had absolute control over everything
I was just thinking aloud is all. Fallout has always seemed as a left behind second class property compared to anything from the Elder Scrolls.
Also, I do understand that it's all not a one person deal, but it's a lot easier to put a single person as the face of the developer who has acted as the face of the entire studio. He acts as the arbiter of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout in the Media, I shouldn't have to look up the org chart for each game.
The same reading between the lines everyone else does when they're h8alf asleep too.
Like everyone else, I don't work for them or have any inside information, but I do know that Zenimax was part of the Koch Industry funded machine and having a backup brand makes good business sense.
Trying to make fallout die? He helped make a show that has done insanely well and brought the fallout series player counts to record highs. You can not like Todd but to claim he's trying to kill the series is hilarious
The T.V. show was great, huh fellas?
If there is one thing I know about New Vegas fans, its that they are more rabbid than the mongrel dogs of the Empire. If ever there was a thing to blame "we can't have nice things" on in the Fallout community, the answer is almost probably New Vegas fans.
Also, I never played much of New Vegas. I spent more time trying to get the game to not crash after leaving the starting town that I did actually playing the game. When my character got stuck inside of a stop sign, thats when I decided it was no longer worth the trouble.
Tried to get into a few years ago but on my back then RX 580 the game would run like absolute trash, dipping down below 20 FPS even around the starting town. I know Gamebryo sucks on more modern hardware but that was even worse than newer titles (Yes, those are technically "Creation Engine" at this point but that still is an evolution of Gamebryo).
Don't know if you're interested anymore but there are a ton of mods out there that fix the stability issues, including a partial engine rewrite last year.
New Vegas is ass.
Congrats on being the minority opinion 🎉
But what about the dialog?