90 People Working On Fallout Online

The new Edge came sliding through my letterbox today. I was about to cut it up and reassemble it into a huge paper effigy of myself, like I always do, but then something caught my eye. An interview with Interplay's president, Eric Caen? Ooh. What does he have to say?

Some quite heartening things about Fallout Online, as it turns out.

In short, there are 90 people at Interplay currently developing Fallout Online, and both the game and its beta are both scheduled for 2012. Caen says that "Even in January 2009, you were already able to move across the world," so it sounds like the game's a ways into development. He also says that the team are planning on amassing one MILLION subscribers, which strikes me as a pretty meaningless number.

On the subject of what Interplay are actually doing with Fallout Online, Caen is naturally pretty cagey, but the few things he does say have been published on the Edge site. To whit:

I think [Bethesda] miss a lot of the humour. Our Fallout MMOG will be extremely funny. At the same time, an MMOG must be a lot deeper than a standalone game... you can shoot, but it's a very small portion of the game. The game itself is about reconstructing the world.

He also says Fallout Online will be unique in its approach to communication systems, and goes on to joke about Trolls receiving SMS messages from one another in World of Warcraft. So, by the sounds of things there'll be some kind of player courier network, or fighting over radio stations. Reconstructing the world, and communication systems providing a unique challenge? Colour me very curious indeed.

If the idea of waiting more than a year doesn't faze you, you can sign up for a place in Fallout Online's beta on the official site.