https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/fallout/todd-howard-new-vegas-obsidian-show/
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 needs to like, take some shrooms and meditate in the mountains.
Lots of the worst people in tech did this, and they just got worse....
Ehh but did they really though? Or did they microdose shrooms in chocolate bars and attend some bougie retreat at a ski resort? I'd say the latter is the real problem. Nobody has respect for anything anymore.
The behind the bastards four part series on him was a huge eye opener into how incredibly terrible of a human being he was
That's where I learned exactly how shitty he really was. I had always kind of figured he wasn't a great person, people who rise to that level usually aren't, but I hadn't realised really how terrible he was.
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.
This is so sad fate. Morrowind was absolute gem of that era, nothing compared to it at the time. It has wonderful world it takes place in which is believable and filled with interesting characters, supported by truly brilliant soundtrack. And while story is quite decent there's about gazillion other things to do, explore, see.
It's sad that every upcoming bethesda game was more and more simplified and lost a bit of the morrowind magic.
I don't think their games are necessarily becoming more simplified, it's more that they seem to focus on areas of the games which would help make them more "mainstream" (for example, Fallout 4 made crafting and upgrading more complex compared to 3 and NV, but this is similar to other AAA games), while focusing less (and thus simplifying) other areas.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, I personally think Fallout 4 improved over 3, and Skyrim over Oblivion (though NV and Morrowind are still better). But this also leads to disasters like Fallout 76.
That's true, but isn't contrary to my point - Fallout 76 is a disaster because they set out to create a mainstream Fallout live service game, instead of focusing on the strengths of the series. This was further reinforced when they introduced a battle royale mode IMO.
Ted Peterson, one of the actual creators of TES, was involved in writing for Morrowind. It’s the only reason it retained even a shadow of Arena & Daggerfall’s creepy, ambitious charm.
And if you were with TES from the start… with Arena, Daggerfall, and even Battlespire… then Morrowind was nothing but a massive disappointment. And the franchise went even further downhill from there. It’s clear that Todd has no respect whatsoever for the magic that Peterson, Lakshman, and LeFay created together.
I've tried to get a sense of pre-Morrowind Elder Scrolls titles, but, as a later arriving fan they can be impenetrable. I'm old enough now to get annoyed when people say that about ES3 though, so I guess it's come full circle.
I'm not really interested in arguing with anyone about which game is better or anything, I just feel a sense that I'm missing something. What was lacking with Morrowind that you saw in its predecessors?
The unity remake of daggerfall is free, slightly more accessible and absolutely worth checking out.
I get that old games can be really hard to pick up, especially if they were before your time.
It basically comes down to two elements: the gameplay ambition and the world itself.
Arena and Daggerfall were wildly ambitious; and I don't just mean the scope of the world. They tried to bring a tabletop level of freedom to a real-time first-person RPG. The games had complex interconnected simulation systems long before anyone else attempted something like that again. This was largely the doing of Julian Lefay and Ted Peterson. Morrowind scaled that ambition way back. If it's the first TES game you played, it's easy to not realize how pared back it was compared it's predecessor. Each release after pared things back even further.
That is less important than the world, though. Lakshman and Peterson created a dark, sinister, thoroughly creepy world in the vein of Robert E Howard. It had deep lore, darkness, and unapologetic savage maturity that permeated everything. And it mattered. The world mattered. The lore affected everything... from sacred rights that could only be performed on certain days (which you discovered by reading lore-heavy texts), to huge dungeons both handmade and procedural and labyrinthine, to dark secrets that only revealed themselves in certain circumstances...
What Todd did is loot it and turn it into something else entirely. You can see this with Redfall, Todd Howard's cheery, bright, swash-buckling adventure game spinoff that utterly disregarded Peterson and Lakshman's lore and world-building. Vijay and Peterson had written a bible (which may still be floating around online) outlining the series through to Oblivion, which was supposed to be the literal end of the world and the darkest game in the series. We all know how that turned out.
Lefay and Peterson did return as contractors to work on Morrowind, which is why it still retains a bit of the character despite Todd's directorship and being stripped of some of the darker themes... but we can all see where things went after.
There has never been another game like Daggerfall. It was the first and last of it's kind.
Thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me. Were that Daggerfall found me as a kid, it sounds like it would have been exactly my thing. Even as a preteen I was already deep into dark, novelistic RPGs like Fallout 1+2 and (to a lesser extent) Strife and the early Baldur's Gate games.
Since someone in this thread reminded me of Daggerfall Unity I've been looking at some gameplay footage, which was quickly apparent to be the wrong way to take in the game even before you described its depth as textual and tantalisingly obscurantist. At this point in my life, masquerading as a breadwinning parental archetype, I'm thinking the best way for me to vicariously digest a portion of Daggerfall might be through the imperial library site (link).
Looking forward, it's impossible to come to any other conclusion about Todd Howard and his ilk being something like the Musk of great novelistic game franchises, buying and cheapening anything that captures the imagination and profiting immensely from it. Such voices are unwelcome in the conversation about games as art.
I still hold out hope that there are enough grown up bookworms like me to carry that torch as indie developers, though. Games like Disco Elysium still do get made, and as games get easier to produce over time it's not hard to believe that the more writerly among us can make use of the medium to good effect in the traditions established by Lefay and Peterson.
I concur completely. I mean, I like Morrowind quite a bit, but coming from playing 1000 hours in Daggerfall and seeing this tiny simplified, constrained game world in the sequel was disheartening. The fact that everything since has been so much worse in that regard had made Morrowind age pretty well I suppose.
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.
But then, we wouldn't have VtM: Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity or The Outer Worlds.
Tim Cain has been hitting it out of the park since the first Fallout.
Yes. Outer Wilds was good, although the combat was a bit bullet spongy at times. The writing and direction was on point. Funny to read that the "Spacer's Choice" edition introduced graphical bugginess - Tim's got jokes.
I don't get this. Sounds like Tim Cain is a shit business and you're blaming the person who had nothing to do with the company going under.
Another thing I don't get, you think bathesda fallout is "garbage"? Really? Why is it every game is either a 10/10 or hot garbage? Why is there no in between? Why can't you admit it's just not for you? Fallout 1 and 2 weren't for me, I didn't like them. But I like bathesda fallout. It doesn't mean I can 1 and 2 "garbage". Fallout 3 and 4 gave across the board good reviews and millions of sales, clearly many people don't think it's garbage.
There seems to be an incredible amount of things you don't get regarding this subject. And you're refusing to learn any of them.
Yeah, I can believe that there are some people who just don't like Bethesda's games, but I don't agree with them. I like the isometric games, New Vegas, and Bethesda's releases.
All of them had their own warts and limitations. I didn't like the timer -- one had to complete a major portion of the game plot by a given period of time -- in Fallout 1. I didn't like the dialog system in Fallout 4, or how enemies tended to get really bullet-spongy late game. I didn't like the bugginess or limited draw distance with kinda prominent pop-in in New Vegas. Fallout 76 -- owing to its multiplayer nature -- has a kinda limited story and single-player game.
The series as a whole has always has some balance issues with the various skills/perks.
But there also isn't a game in the (mainline) series that I regret having purchased, either.
And I think that the series definitely progressed in a number of ways.
Some people didn't like the shift from the "skill percentages" system present from the first game through Fallout: New Vegas. I don't think that it was a great system. It tended to be grindy, and there were some clearly-better paths to take. I think that the series is better-off for having dropped it.
Some people really didn't like having a voiced PC in Fallout 4, like it breaks their sense of immersion. I don't really feel strongly one way or the other, though I do think that having a voiced PC, absent good voice cloning and synth, makes it hard for mod authors to fit content in seamlessly.
Fallout: New Vegas had a lot of complex story interactions, ways in which you could reshape the world; one choice and another interacted. Fallout 4 was simpler. I liked Fallout: New Vegas doing that...but then, I also remember sitting on a game guide so that I wouldn't make "wrong" choices, because a lot of the interactions aren't obvious.
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.
I think my view still stands, without bathesda that series would have ended with that weird ass "fallout: bos" for PS2. If it hadn't been bought by bathesda, we would have no fallout 3, 4 or even NV. Cause as much as people claim it isn't, NV uses the bones and parameters of fo3, just builds on it. We also wouldn't have gotten the show, which was great
You imagine Bethesda was the sole bidder on the IP, but this isn't the case. But for their shrewdness, the series would have survived just fine.
Do you have some insider knowledge about other companies that bid on the rights or?
From what I can find online, there's not much out there aside from Activision, which... Lmao
No, not them. I'm trying to figure out what interview I read about this. Pardon my source amnesia, I'll write back if it comes to me.
You have to take a look on the size of the "gaming market" at release dates of those games. At mid 90s gaming was barely a thing, since PCs were still unbelievably expensive. Ten years later it was very different. Plus consoles on top of it...
since PCs were still unbelievably expensive
Heh. I think of things as being "incredibly cheap" these days and then being the norm.
The point is PCs are much more affordable now. Not sure if it was just my country specific, but getting higher end PC in 90s was like one year of saving whole salary level expensive, while today it's like one or two months.
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_%28video_game%29?wprov=sfla1
You criticized Todd Howard for his game design skills in your original comment, I just pointed out that the sentence you quoted didn't refer to designing the story of a game.
You also claimed "He bought a franchise" which seemed unnecessarily personal.
I don't see how Van Buren is related to this at all (except for its relation to New Vegas, I guess, but I don't see what this has to do the article or either of our comments).
"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.
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".
how is it a retcon at all? you clearly never played new vegas, considering that nuking the ncr is something the player can fucking do
get over it, you are just a bethesda hater, grasping at straws
No man, you're a tod Howard dick rider for some reason who refuses to acknowledge that the show clearly put no effort into respecting NV cannon, or intentionally mislead fans into thinking that's what they were doing. It doesnt take a fucking genius to look at that whiteboard and realize that it conflicts with the literal year that NV takes place.
no it doesnt. you dont even know the lore of new vegas or the ncr, because the ncr is massive yet in new vegas they were spread too thin, their president was not well liked, they are desperate to get hoover dam for some reason (maybe they've idk started to fall?)
and you fail to even see that there is an arrow pointing to a nuke. do you really not know that an arrow indicates time passing? do you really not know that the ncr did not capital in shady sands anymore?
you must think it would be a better idea to pretend new vegas never existed than to incorporate it into something new again. you must really hate new vegas to think that
Ha, as if Obsidian would work on another fallout when they didn't get paid for the last one.
Part of the contractual agreement between the studios was that Obsidian would only earn their "bonus" if the game performed well and got an 85 on Metacritic. Somehow, FO:NV missed that rating at the last moment and only scored an 84, denying obsidian the promised money.
I mean, when the only quest available at launch was "FalloutNV has stopped working", and it only had one solution, I'd say 84 is pretty damn good.
Still, there is something that just feels terrible about Obsidian not getting the bonus considering they made one of the best RPGs of all time in 18 months...
80% of the game was already made in the form of Fallout 3. 10 years prior NV would have been considered an expansion pack, not a standalone game. Most of what they did was story work and added a few new things like gambling mini games and use the ingame editor to make new npc faces and clothing. It was an impressive undertaking but they still bit off more than they could chew
80% of the game being made is definitely a stretch. The engine and many assets were there but they still had to build the world and populate it, that in itself is a gargantuan task. Call it DLC if you want but it's a fully fledged story with a full game's worth of content and deserved to be full price.
Ah gotcha. If that had been sold as a DLC it would probably have been the most comprehensive DLC I've ever seen.
After apparently being given insufficient time to properly tune the game. There's another story going around about how Bethesda wants to increase their output since at the moment we're not going to see any proper Fallout from them until into the 2030s, over 15 years after the last one. I say hire Obsidian now and pay their bonus up front including their New Vegas bonus they got scammed out of last time.
The current Obsidian made The Outer World's. I don't know how you go from FO:NV to that. I guess the difference is that, while NV had jokes, the world was taken seriously with jokes added. TOW was essentially 100% jokes. There isn't a single part that was seriously considered I don't think.
Honestly I thought Outer Worlds was really well made, it was also just very low on content. One thing it did super well was for optional quests to not be obnoxiously telegraphed but placed in a way where I just found them while wandering around which feels a lot better than running down a cheklist. It also prevented me from feeling like I'd missed out on content even after finishing the game and learnign there were a bunch I missed.
TLDR: Outer Worlds was a fantastic tech demo.
Haven't you played Old World Blues? It was like the best DLC while also 100% jokes, even more jokes than Outer World while being the best DLC.
It had a lot of jokes, but it wasn't a joke. It still took its place in the world seriously and made sense in-universe. The Outer Worlds doesn't really ever. It never tries to be consistent.
Even The Outer World was in development 6 years ago. Before covid and during Microsofts acquisition.
Game studios have high churn, the writers, designers, artists, etc are so far removed from their previous works that its a brand name like every other studio.
The New Vegas director did work on Pentiment but thats a perfect example of how a single person doesn’t mean a lot. Not to say he doesn’t do good work, but that its a collaborative job with many influences.
Actually you're right, I forgot about that detail on Obsidian. I'm not a fan of Microsoft owning Everything but at least there's a chance someone higher up will see all the dollars they would be missing out on here
What a nice dream. They’ll push it to the fallout 76 devs so it’s broken as fuck at release instead!
It's hard to say if it was "given insufficient time" vs Obsidian leadership agreeing to a date that was too ambitious for them to accomplish, but I get everyone just wants to say Bethesda bad here.
I wasn't in those discussions, so I can't say for certain one way or the other, but it definitely would have been nice of Beth if they had still paid out the bonus considering it was one point off, alas American corporations rarely do anything (especially if it involves money) out of kindness.
they did not get scammed out of anything. old practice nobody really does anymore, sure, but obsidian released a game so buggy nearly everybody had crashes, or the game wouldnt start, or permanently lose saves. and obsidian agreed to the 18 month timeframe, which for a team like them should have been enough time given they had all of bethesda's resources at hand and didnt need to create a whole lot of the assets. obsidian has been know to mismanage their time (like kotor II) and new vegas is just another showcase of it. they only have themselves to blame for missing the bonus
obsidian agreed to the 18 month timeframe, which for a team like them should have been enough time given they had all of bethesda’s resources at hand and didnt need to create a whole lot of the assets
Sorry, but you must not be very familiar with game development to think that a mere 18 months would be enough time to churn out a AAA game. It needed 2-2.5 years at least.
new vegas was a larger dlc rather a AAA game. and if it needed 2.5 years at the least then go ask obsidian why they didnt ask for a little more time. they obviously were able to deliver a game in 18 months, but they yet again went too far and mismanaged their time resulting in unfinished legion quests and the buggiest launch maybe ever
at the least then go ask obsidian why they didnt ask for a little more time.
You want Obsidian to ask the guys who would eventually stiff them over a single MetaCritic score point to give them more time? Obviously, there was a rather hostile relationship between the two.
For anyone who wasn't into Fallout in 2010 when the game launched: it was a fucking disaster. Crashes, broken story triggers and in some cases completely unplayable. The fact that it got 80 was a miracle and it was only months after their original deadline they got the game working. A lot of fans were also rightfully pissed DLC was beinf dropped before patches for day one bugs.
I never had egregious visual bugs like Skyrim's dragons flying in reverse. But when I first launched New Vegas the doc waking you up from your coma had a glitch where his head would gently rotate like a clock hand while his mouth flapped. If his mouth stopped flapping his head stopped pivoting on the top of his neck.
I honestly thought it was intentional until his cheek went inside his shoulder.
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
And he implied that TES is Todd's baby, it super wasn't. The real creators of TES left before Morrowind.
The lead designer for Morrowind was also involved in Battlespire and Redguard, so it's not quite that simple.
Red guard and battlespire were worthless side projects that no one cared about, the actual TES guys left before MW.
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
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.
Does it affect mod compatibilities? I have a better gpu now too which might give some additional room as well but I'm not sure if I'm motivated enough to try at the moment.
I haven't played since it released, but Stewie is basically a god of New Vegas modding and I doubt it would cause any issues.
Your GPU might or might not make a difference, most of the issues with performance are poor optimization and engine-level issues (that Stewie seem to have addressed). There are several more stability mods out there like Tick Fix and Heap Replacer that help, plus the 4GB patch for the executable of course.
The Viva New Vegas modding guide is a good place to look for more info, even if all you do is stick to the performance improvement stuff.
