Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Polish site Polygamia.pl send word that they’ve got their hands on some of the images from vapour-MMO Project V13, which would be Fallout Online, via the court case between Bestheda and Interplay. Probably not even vaguely representative of what said game will come to look like, if it ever comes to be, but worth a look to see what the Interplayians have been up to in their backwoods game shed.

This broke on Friday, but RPS were dividing and conquering across the world, requiring Kadayi – cheers! – to bring it to our attention. In short, Gamasutra reports that the coldness between Interplay (Original Fallout IP holders) and Bethesda (Purchaser of the Fallout IP) has crossed into an actual legal suit. However, it isn’t about the MMO situation, as described in the link. It’s to prevent any further distribution of the compilation Fallout Trilogy’s sales via Digital Download companies causing “immediate, substantial, and irreparable harm”. Do read the whole thing, and a little industry thought below…
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Confused squinting at legal dispute time! We’ve known for a while that Fallout 1/2 publishers Interplay had clung onto rights for a Fallout MMO as part of their skin-saving deal to flog the Fallout 3 license to Bethesda, and a few months back the reborn publisher had coolly revealed they have one ‘Project V13‘ in the pipeline. Deal done, right? Apparently not. Bethesda may now dispute Interplay’s right to make Fallout Online…
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Rejoice, for there is suddenly and magically a crapton of information about the cancelled Interplay Fallout game. No, not Van Buren – the other cancelled Interplay Fallout game. What, eh, etc? Okay. Back before Bethesda’s take on Fallout split PC gamers down the middle, Interplay caused similar controversy by side-stepping the series into the action-RPG curio Brotherhood of Steel on Playstation 2 (which, confusingly, was itself an entirely different game to Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel that hit PC a few years earlier).

While fairly (and justifiably) reviled by Fallout fans at the time, you could argue it was a little closer to the world of the original two Fallouts than the recent Fallout 3 was. Hence, the leak of a design document for a never-made sequel to BoS is a pretty big deal for Fallout veterans. And hey, probably for new Fallout fans too.
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Well, we’re all presuming the reborn Interplay’s secret project is a Fallout MMO, as there’s plenty of proof out there and nobody’s denied it yet.

Yesterday the new Interplay website opened up, and with it came a mention of “Project V13,” the working title for a ‘next generation’ MMO. No details whatsoever on that, but what is scintillating is the announcement that they’ve hired Chris Taylor to work on it. Not Gas-Powered Games’ Chris Taylor – who perhaps shouldn’t be allowed near any kind of roleplaying game again after the disappointing mess that was Space Siege – but the other Chris Taylor, a key member of the original Fallout/Fallout 2 team.
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Some of the Fallout chatter on here reminded me of the canceled “Van Buren” project, which would have been Fallout 3 had Interplay not closed down the Black Isle project in 2003. Most of you will have seen this last year, but I thought it worth mentioning that the tech demo was leaked in 2007 and is now freely available over on StrategyInformer. There’s not a great deal to it, but the very existence of an alternate Fallout 3 makes for an interesting compare and contrast.

Bethesda have said there isn’t going to be a demo for their Fallout 3, which should hit the PC on October 28th.

[The original version of this appeared in PC Gamer. There's been a handful of additions.]

Maths was always our favourite lesson, for the simple reason we never did any Maths in it. There were always more obvious rebels for the teacher to whip into line than David Hyland, Simon Holmes and myself, crouched over our desks and using the class’ infinite supply of squared paper to copy out each others maps. From a distance, it even looked as if we were working.
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This article is a revised version of a retrospective written last year for PC Gamer UK.

There was nothing funny about Kingpin. It was a genuinely vicious game, with some of the most violent scenes from any shooter I can recall. Severed heads, gashed bodies, screamed obscenities: only the absolute dismemberment of Soldier of Fortune managed to outrank it in bloodiness. Presumably it was this surface gore that drew me in: the promised thrill of transgressive videogame violence. Then again, maybe it was PC Gamer’s (overzealous) review, or perhaps it was the fantasy-gangster chic, with its 1920s Bladerunner horrors. Then again, perhaps it was a hunger for something in the FPS world that did things differently. Whatever it was, something plugged me straight into its ugly wavelength. And whatever that thing was, it meant that I stayed a while.
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A quick follow-up to the scurrilous speculation a little while back that Interplay was about to resuscitate most of its major franchises. Actually, they are. “The company will leverage its portfolio of gaming properties by creating sequels to some of its most successful games, including Earthworm Jim, Dark Alliance, Descent, and MDK,” says robot-press-releaseman right here. They’re also setting up a new in-house development studio to get all this done. Exciting!
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Odd timing, this – on the same day that Obsidian, a company formed from the ashes of Black Isle, finally step out of Bioware’s shadow and announce their own game, we also see the return of Black Isle’s much-troubled owners, Interplay.

Interplay.com now hosts this excited image:

and a Coming Soon message. See the full pic here. Going left to right, we’ve got MDK, Earthworm Jim, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and apparently the browny-green bit underneath the Interplay logo is concept art from Fallout Online. Edit – and Descent on the far left.
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