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Let’s be clear on this, Brother none is saying that Hines is a hypocrite about purporting a ‘love for the fallout franchise’ because it’s a business decision and business decisions aren’t made out of a passion for the subject only financial gain and I’m calling BS on that statement, because in my experience as a working designer you don’t invest immense amounts of your time and your (companies) money into anything unless you collectively have a passion for it. If you personally work to live and that’s your choice, good for you, but there are plenty of people out there who live for their work. Consider the RPS guys, they churn out articles left right and centre for various magazines and websites, sure it’s a job and they get paid for them, but it clearly a career and subject for which they have a passion for. It’s not quite the same as clocking in an 9 and simply flipping burgers down at MikeyDs for 7 hours 5 days a week.

Apologies for the Ad hominems, but I was responding to AndrewCs post. The sad truth is that speaking out of line on NMA, which should be a place of honest discussion about the fallout series often does result in childish scapegoating by certain admins, when your viewpoints don’t tie in with their’s and it’s why the site has become a target for ridicule in broader gaming circles.

Anyhows change subject, you making an interesting point in your last paragraph, and I have my take on it. I’d say the lack of development of recent Post-apoc RPGs has a lot more to do with the general shift by games towards towards 3D engines and the inherent problems associated with asset creation, environmental replication and player containment, Post-apoc environments bring.

In a fantasy or science fiction game as developers you have free reign to define the game world in terms of it’s extents, the look and feel of the environments and the assets/items, and players readily accept those decisions without question. With Post Apoc you dealing with an altered version of a reality people are familiar with, and naturally this poses all sorts of problems in terms of defining your game world, (Why can’t I walk/drive to the next town?, this place looks nothing like Vegas!!!, Where’s the Starbucks on 5th?), and it’s not something any 3D game yet has successfully overcome. Take GTAIV for example, now Rockstar have done a bang up job in aping New York, but they rely upon humour in order to mask the lack of diversity they are able to apply to their game world in terms of advertyising billboards etc etc. There’s no Coke and Pepsi in GTA IV, there’s sprunk and sprunk alone. Replicating reality is a challenging task, replicating a broken down shattered post apoc reality is a challenging task 10.

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Then, you start in on the ad hominems. You don’t have any argument, you’re not interested in a discussion, you’re interested in “winning” some debate that only you’re participating in.

I think much of the paucity of post-apoc RPGs is due to the relatively few RPGs that are released. Not to mention the roots of RPGs in the D&D franchise and the domination of the MMORPG market by various fantasy settings. It’s not just post-apoc that gets a short-thrift anyway – hopefully Alpha Protocol gets a few companies to think outside the grand sc-fi/high fantasy box a little.

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I’ve read enough of your News and forum posts in my time to know NMAs angle on Fallout 3 and how flexible to discussion you guys are on the matter, and protestations of personal innocence regarding what your team do hardly qualifies as grounds for acceptability in your moderators conduct.

If you buy the rights to an IP there’s little obligation to reference/employ those who worked upon it previously, and not doing so is hardly a crime, even in gaming circles.

Perhaps it’s a translation thing, but you seem caught up on this word ‘love’. It’s perfectly natural in the professional world if not preferable to do things that not only make you money, but are also things you enjoy and have a passion for.

If a man is acquitted of a crime, as Altman was, is it fair and reasonable to still label him a criminal and assume those who work with him are by association?

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And the funny thing is, you’re talking to the one person who knows all the details about this “alleged” for-hire designer. I’m not going to divulge details out of internet egoism, but it’s easy enough to say you’re wrong, as you are. All your assumptions are false. You may believe me or you may not. The whole case is quite a lot simpler than you put it, I’m afraid.

And it is your assumption that I’m talking about something shady or dark. When I asked Kieron way, way up there if he really believes Bethesda made a business decision “out of love”, wasn’t he being naive, from a simple business viewpoint? There’s nothing more to it than that; Bethesda doing something with primacy “out of love” is nonsense because it doesn’t fit any business model, not of Bethesda, not of any other developer.

And yes, I did remark ZeniMax has a bit of a shady board. That’s not really opinion, it’s fact. Read up on Robert A. Altman if you don’t believe me

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Not really, at No Mutants Allowed the mods such as Brother None ban you if you dare to disagree with them on the evils of fallout 3:-

http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41857

Fairly reasonable post tbh, fairly unreasonable response and pretty much par for the course if you dare to question their ‘authoritah’ it seems. There is a common misconception held by people with more time on their hands than is healthy to invest in a particular subject that such investment naturally conveys a superior position to all others. The great truth in life is though this isn’t always the case. Plenty of people drive cars for a living, but very few of them are racing drivers.

@Briosafreak

And from what I understand it was more an informal approach by him rather than a fully fledged interview, and he’s not unhappy or resentful of the rebuttal tbh.

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Not really, at No Mutants Allowed the mods such as Brother None ban you if you dare to disagree with them on the evils of fallout 3:-

http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41857

Fairly reasonable post tbh, fairly unreasonable response and pretty much par for the course if you dare to question their ‘authoritah’ it seems. There is a common misconception held by people with more time on their hands than is healthy to invest in a particular subject that such investment naturally conveys a superior position to all others. The great truth in life is though this isn’t always the case. Plenty of people drive cars for a living, but very few of them are racing drivers.

@Briosafreak

And from what I understand it was more an informal approach by him rather than a fully fledged interview, and he’s not unhappy with the result tbh.

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but it completely skips over the notion that he/she might not have had the required skillset or experience for the job,

It was Leon Boyarsky, one of the original Fallout creators and developers, the one that pushed for the alternate 50′s thing back in the day.

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I’m not sure why you say you are agreeing with me because quite clearly there is no common perception between us regarding the workings of the games industry (or are you conceding that your way too cynical?). Where I see everyday business actions, you see sinister shadowy conspiracies. That one former BIS employee (allegedly) applied for a job at Beth and didn’t get it, is a great starting point for endless fan forum speculation about how ‘Beth don’t really love the fallouts’, but it completely skips over the notion that he/she might not have had the required skillset or experience for the job, wanted more money than they were prepared to offer, was a boorish ‘I’m better than you’ asshole in the interview, or shock horror a better candidate came up. It’s entirely possible to be a fan of what someone may produce but not necessarily like them as people. Phil K Dick wrote some excellent Sci-Fi novels, but the man himself was a complete asshole in real life to a lot of people. Does that diminish what he produced? No of course not, but does his work excuse his often reprehensible real life behaviour? Of course not.

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Kadayi: I agree. But you see, this realist vision that you and I both have of the game industry pretty much means Pete Hines’ statement that they’re doing Fallout “out of love” is bullshit. It’s that simple. ZeniMax purchased Fallout for profit. Again, I do not preclude the possibility that Bethesda suggested Fallout to ZM “out of love”, but that doesn’t match up with what Bethesda is doing much.

Bethesda is a business. They do not act out of love. That’s true of them, it’s true of most studios in the industry, a few exceptions nonwithstanding. My problem isn’t with that reality, it is what it is, my problem is when we’re supposed to accept a line where they claim to do it out of love. That’s unrealistic.

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Of the above, which has more experience with original IPs at this stage of the game? I’m going to have to go with Bethesda.

That said, I would think it would be more comforting if they had *more* experience working with other people’s IP, not less.

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