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Here is a video from Timothy Cain and how Fallout Van Buren was cancelled (basically, they didn't have the money to complete the game) : search for the video "The Canceling of Fallout Van Buren...And Me"
@greatgameplayswalkthroughs660 You'll notice I commented on that video the day it was released. I considered adding that fact to mine, but it didn't really change anything to the story I had already researched.
Thank you! UA-cam recommendations aren't really favoring me much anymore, so it's nice to hear that my subtler video approach is still appreciated by some.
"The game needed to meet Bethesda's quality standards." It can't be understated how INFAMOUS that statement is. If a story contains that line, it means the Bethesda is going to force the company into going bankrupt, and buy them.
@@MusicaX79 Why do you think bethesda's employees are so desperate to unionize? Microsoft is pretty mad that starfield was a flop and is starting to realize that 2 billion was a bit more than zenimax/bgs was worth. They're going to be doing some redundancies.
@@honeybadger6275 They are desperate to unionize because they increased staff from 1000 to 3000 yet put out a game that is the same size as before. due to massive mismanagement. They are looking around going "OH NO" were all getting fired. Will Shen did a GDC tell all and you can tell they had no clue how to handle the massive influx of employees that happened during starfield.
I was one of those people unfortunately but I just realised I did some research a few years back into how much it sold and now i feel dumb for thinking it was always a niche series
I guess it could happen if they look at raw sales figures; Fallout 1 sold 20 times less than Fallout 3. Let's rounds it off and consider the vast majority of sales of F1 happened before the year 2000. Then we're in the 300,000 sales ballpark. That kind of number would definitely counts as a failure when given to a "triple-A" game today. Half a fricking million sales _pre-2000_ is fucking HUGE considering the market back then.
probably cause PC gaming in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty niche and small compared to consoles, so people didnt pay attention much to what was happening on PC with a few exceptions, of things like Half Life, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and so on. And WRPGs were even more niche, i for one never knew the existence of WRPGs until Fallout 3, for me, RPGs was JRPGs, mostly cause i was a mostly console user and PC was to play MMORPG and the occasional super hit like Half life 2.
His first directing role was Morrowind, which is awesome, so it's hard to really say he's entirely inept, but at the same time, that one had Ken Rolston and Micheal Kirkbride doing most of the heavy lifting, so idk man.
@@plebisMaximus I believe it was PatricianTV who pointed out Todd's contributions in Morrowind were suspect, at least tonally. IIRC he's credited for the questline where the ghost of a murdered man comes to you and outright tells you who murdered him and why, so you don't have to work those brain cells too much. Considering the main quest encourages you to arrive at your own conclusion about many things, like how Nerevar truly died or if you're actually his reincarnation, I'm inclined to agree.
@@plebisMaximus Id recommended looking into the dev history of Morrowind. The game went through three directors, including Todd. He was basically handed Morrowind, all the real work was done. Indigo had an interview with Julian Lafay (the first director) and he speaks on the creative differences between him and the second director during Morrowinds development.
He sucks as a game dev, but is great at leading others in game development. Just like Steve Jobs. Jobs did nothing except bitch to people about his ideas but he knew nothing about the work that went into it. So it makes sense that Starfield was supremely average with no real identity or soul.
@@nicholasgutierrez9940Todd Howard is more a salesman than a creative. His credit consist to make profitable games. He doesn't care about quality or a good story writing...
So so glad someone is digging into Interplay. Apart from Firaxis, Maxis, Looking Glass and Micropose, they were one of the most important PC developer/publisher of 90s.
Interplay being bought out by Titus, a pathetic company whose few successes likely happened by accident, is a cosmic joke, much as the video game industry in general is a joke.
@livanbard They attempted to break into console games many times but never had a breakout hit other than decent sales on Dark Alliance (which they promptly fumbled by using that engine again without permission).
@@Indigo_GamingTodd Howard, a saintlike figure who bought small little indie franchise, fallout, out of the kindness of his heart just because he *weally* liked it.
In the modern AAA gaming world, it benefits publishers to present themselves as saviours and innovators to franchises they acquire. And, let's be honest, gamers are much more inclined to buy the corporate narrative than they would like to admit.
>gamers are much more inclined to buy the corporate narrative than they would like to admit. Way to understate that. In my general, 25+ years experience as a gamer, I can attest that most gamers are some of the most moronic, filthy, droolingly idiotic subhuman fucking imbeciles in any consumer niche.
In that they got shafted intentionally? Maybe? Obsidian definitely signed an agreement where that was all spelled out. Whether or not that's particularly ethical or it should have been based on sales is a different discussion @sgtmarcusharris4260
As someone who read the actual reviews for Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate in actual magazines, the notion that Fallout was a "small and obscure" series is kind of laughable. I guess this is in the same vein as when Activision bragged about how they "saved" Blizzard, since their model of paying their devs peanuts and then giving them a fat bonus when the games were released was absolutely unsustainable (You have to pay the devs peanuts and then take all the money they would have gotten for their bonuses and pay that out to the higher executives instead, that's the model that makes companies THRIVE!) Not to mention why Bethesda hates Obsidian so much after they took the clunky engine and made a superior game by focusing on what actually matters - the storytelling.
@@its_eis Sport and FPS games were already not, CRPGs always had a small community (compared to other genres) and later on Niche to the point of death community. So if your game was Niche even in CRPG golden age, it was very, very small community and almost non-existent in late 2000s. Only now CRPGs have a kind of resurgence with BG, but that series always had the biggest community out of all CRPG games.
A small note. In RPGs what matters most is not storytelling, but gameplay. That's why people are so much into a crappy story like DOS2 and still play it to death. Bethesda games have neither story nor gameplay. Sawyer and Co. delivered both elements with New Vegas
Hey, I really appreciate you creating this video for the record. I was also surprised to see that the Fallout TV show referred to Todd Howard as the creator. I think it’s the messy and complex aspect of this story that makes it hard to keep in mind, and you did a really good job capturing that complexity in way that remains digestible and memorable. Well done
I was not. A bit shocked, especially when none of the original creators where even thanked in the credits, but not surprised. Todd Howard has become a brand, and a brand needs PR. He's already the strongest person in BGS and one of the strongest at Zenimax, but there's still room to grow, expand his amount and avenues for optioning shares, and with Zenimax looking for a buyer for itself several years back he has even more potential growth there. Be prepared for that to happen more and more. This is a post Last of Us tv show word, now directors and producers could have their names in Hollywood, on the lips of movie star, and their feet on red carpet and on lots of notorious trophies.
robo-brains used to be a horror story, buried deep in the depths of human depravity in a bunker. then bethesda made them roam around everywhere, disregarding everything.
Then they were turned into a joke in the form of a Brain-on-a-Roomba in the Fallout show. Watch the subtitles of those scenes, that's literally what they named it.
We could have had Brain Bots that remembered their past lives and lost humanity. They are either desperate to regain their former humanity by kidnapping people to insert their brains into new bodies. Or succumbed to complete insanity and murdering people on sight. The horror of living through two centuries and not having the biological feedback that we take for granted. There might even be a few brain bots that embrace their new bodies. For good or ill.
They even messed up the tone within Fallout 4. One Mechanist mission has you go through a facility where brains of unstable people were extracted, tested, and put in to robobrains. Then in Far Harbour, there is a goofy detective whodunnit mission with rich high society people who volunteered for the process. In Fallout and Fallout 2, they were only found in pre-war military facilities, and never spoke - except for Skynet.
Comments like this make no sense. In 1940 cars didn't have seatbelts so should they keep making them without them? Oh no in the original fallout power armor didn't need fusion cores, they ruined the franchise forever! Time passes, things evolves, be happy that you can still play a fallout game even if it's not the dream one (new vegas was close enough). Things can't be the same forever and also can't last forever
Matt Berry said it best in the awful tv show: you're a product, Im a product, hell, the bloody end of the world is a product." That's exactly how Bethesda has been handling the ip since fallout 3. Great video, you've definitely got another subscriber.
New Vegas was just the taste of what the whole franchise could have been. And they say we're always talking foolishly high of the game, but the truth is they're too blind to see what real love, dedication, and creativity looks like.
No thanks to Bullshithesda, they didn't seem too keen to have Obsidian developing FNV, and so they forced them to shorten the development cycle and cut a lot of content out, which in turn made the game a lot buggy. You're right, not only the game was the closest experience we had for a proper Fallout story like 1 and 2, but it also bared the potential to be a lot greater than how it initially was launched, even, perhaps, by today standards, more than F4 and 76.
The idea that Bethesda "saved" Fallout presupposes that a franchise continuing on is inherently a good thing. It isn't. Overall I'm glad we live in the world we do just because New Vegas exists, but if the Fallout series remained dormant and we just had those two classic games, that would be absolutely fine. We'd at least be spared the travesty that was the TV show.
I am not surprised at all to learn that part of the reason they acquired Fallout was due to aggressive lawyering. Zenimax's lawyers had SHARP elbows, which I suppose is not too surprising given that Robert Altman was a former litigator himself.
...and Altman was banned from banking pre-Zenimax due to shady practices. Bethesda was infamous for its litigation back in the days, and it helped them buy a $50 million dollar franchise for less than $10M.
@@Indigo_Gaming Oh yes, I was indirectly involved when Zenimax sued Facebook over the Oculus deal claiming they owned the IP. It was unpleasant to say the least.
The internal demo was leaked several years after the game was cancelled, but yeah... It's sad to see what could have been... Especially looking at all the design docs that hadn't been implemented yet.
Yes, nothing is more sad then wasted potential. This slop that exists today is fallout in name only. It is banal, it is trite, it is sadistic and perverse and dumbed down to the max
IDK after I eat food, well you know. The video certainly has put light to Bethesda, however the last good game was Skyrim and what made that game great was the modding and with Starfield being so piss poor compared to games that have been on scene and released in the time that Starfield came out they didnt stand a chance still trying to produce a 2011 game an shell it out as next gen my ass and so a lot of good modders are not making mods for Starfield. Modding scene there is way behind the other titles and top it off they outright broke most of the armor mods with an update to the game changing some flag viarables in the meshes used.
First Elder Scroll game I played was actually Skyrim and I had quite good time with it for a while though... Playing Skyrim gave me allergy towards all Bethesda games due to constant deja vu feelings in it's gameplay. But hell, I like replaying same games from time to time, I even did some speedruns - nothing to really serious but it's definitely slightly above casual approach towards gaming and I'm writing this because... Is Skyrim really that good as a RPG game? It's decent exploration game but gameplay is so dull that you're able to master it within 1 hour of gameplay. And Bethesda titles aren't short. Neither gameplay is really strong point, it's just serviceable and nothing beyond that. Easy to start and easy to master. With Morrowind it was slightly different but that one just never clicked with me but whenever someone says that Skyrim was a good game there comes the question - what were the qualities you loved the most? And quite frankly I never got any strong answers. I can get appeal, damn, I felt same, I had decent time but maybe I just don't have problem admitting that at times I enjoyed pretty mediocre stuff without much to prasie about? Because Skyrim starts strong, it sells the promise of open world with many builds, many stories but when it comes to unfolding... Well, okay, some questlines were actually pretty good but most were pretty meh and it was rather hard to feel like you're making any impact on the world properly. And builds... Hard to call it that way as those were so simple and most obvious answers how to play were the best ones, otherwise combat time was increasing dramatically.
@masterpainter78 yeah no, Skyrim was so heavily stripped down it's not even funny, no classes, no attributes, no branching questlines, no spell crafting, and mods aren't the product Bethesda made despite Todd constantly expecting modders to fix his shit games. The last good game Bethesda made was Morrowind, they've been dumbing everything down since then.
I always think of that promo that James Cameron recorded for Terminator: Genisys... "I’m in a dark theater. Movie starts. And I start to see things I recognize, done with, you know, contemporary technology and all that, but things I recognize like okay, this is pretty cool."
@@Indigo_Gaming Now that is another franchise that died after their second major release. At least Fallout fans got Tactics and New Vegas. Terminator fans just got continually shat on after '91.
When the new Fallout show came out, my friends who are super casual gamers were all excited for it. I asked them if it was like the games and realized none of them knew what Fallout was before Fallout 3.
I didn't include the audio, but I love the bit in Brian Fargo's Wasteland 2 Kickstarter video, where a "game publisher" asks Brian Fargo, "There was a Fallout 1 and 2?!" XD
@@BigBossXCV Cain got to go to the screening so we was a vip and his opinion doesn't matter as much. Christ you people are just as bad as the people when ME3 came out and they gasslighting all the fans because of artistic integrity.
FINALLY. A video explaining what ive been saying for YEARS The concept that Fo was a forgotten cult classic and didnt sold is so ridiculous that i coildnt know where to start.
Well, it sold well. Not "very" well. Indigo math on that is somewhat deceptive, physical distribution had huge cost so most of the street price of a game did NOT go to the net income of the publisher. That's not allegoric, manufacturing and distribution was a large majority of the street price. Plus, sales, and in some cases regional prices. I strongly agree that the narrative that BGS and Todd Howard were and ae crafting is bullshit, but let's go overboard, Fallout was not a blockbuster (although the IP could have been if Interplay was better managed).
@@LiraeNoir "Well, it sold well. Not "very" well. Indigo math on that is somewhat deceptive," I've seen earlier, and i can't believe it's already here but: "Zoomers not understanding economics always tend to forget, the year of release and the scale of sales record is "success" for the context of its time; "Context" is a word Zoomers cannot understand, picture, visualize - and if they tried, they'd understand the past a lot more, time and its relativity." Called it with your reply. You're being *disingenuous* here, this is history that is explaining to you, learn from it. They were successful, and your take is a product of that word you so fondly projected - a narative - one fed to you and being historical revisionism in nature.
@@LiraeNoir Fallout sold very well for the kind of marketing it was catering to, specially if compared to almost any non diablo crpgs. Picking that out of context and saying the game sold poorly when a sequel was being developed immediately after its release and being shipped one year later is frankly idiotic.
please the masses, is cope for releasing actually profitable game. Fallout 3: 12.4 million sales Fallout 4: 25 million sales The first 2 fallout games combined don't even reach 1 mil
@@sownheard : Except Fallout started from nothing. F3 and F4 had Bethesda's name behind them. Different circumstances, and you weren't smart enough to notice.
@@sownheard profitable also doesnt mean quality either ESPECIALLY when the "profitable" comes from stock market, which has absolutely no basis in reality either
We got Fallout back in '97, and it was instant love. The setting, the tone, the different outcomes, and that intro that has your eyes locked on to the TV until it fails, and revealing the devestation. Fallout 2 was an instant buy, but I remember at the time feeling it was too long compared to the first. Fallout 3 and 4 were purchases too, on release. But I never quite felt like they had grasped what made the originals so loved.
@@shira_yone Got it, played it more than 3. A better product in terms of replay factor and story, in my opinion. I also played a lot of Tactics (instant buy too), and I enjoy how it constantly ups the difficulty. For example, the first time you face a robot, it is shock as the guns that had been so effective against supermutants and deathclaws are suddenly doing very little. In contrast, the first time you take on a power armour soldier in 3, it is just a couple of extra shots and he is dead.
Finally someone who doesn't worship FO2. I feel like it gets the most praise of the isometric Fallouts, but I just really didn't enjoy it. Way too long and far too goofy.
@@plebisMaximusit was too short and it perfectly goofy. I probably put 1000s of hours into the game. It always felt like there was one more hidden encounter out there and a secret line or quest or interaction with a companion.
Some time after Morrowind came out, being a huge Daggerfall fan, I bought a brand new computer to play it. I didn't realize it at the time, but fallout came with the computer. Id never heard of it before, and I was much too busy playing Morrowind to give the cd a second glance. One day I was bored of my current games library, and I rifled through my stuff. "Fallout? Hmm. I wonder what this is. " I installed the game. "Hmm an rpg? Cool!". I played it a lot after that, and I came back to it now and then, as it always scratched a unique itch.
The original Fallout is absolutely a one of a kind game. Love New Vegas too, but nothing I've ever played feels anything like the first Fallout. Good shit.
Fallout was sold and normified, just like basically everything else that was good from the 90s/00s. Damn shame.. but nothing can be done about it now. At least we still have the good old stuff (both original and modded) to play. Forever if we want. Thanks for the video, man. Cheers.
Knowing more context about what happened with bioware and Baldur's Gate explains a lot more about the existence of Dragon Age Origins as an extremely faithful spiritual succesor. However it also makes the eventual fate of that franchise even more sad.
DA: Inquisition is absolutely solid, very good even. Not as good as DAO, but nothing really wrong with it. I hate it when people bellyache about DA sequels, when even the notably flawed DA2 had the Bioware fundamentals right.
Whenever I watch an Indigo Gaming video, I always end up with a ton of new tabs open to look into games and movies I have never heard of before. Thank you for your work sir.
I had no idea Bethesda played so dirty. This video is eye opening. And kind of depressing. But very good. It just reminds me that looking behind the curtain is a dangerous act. Thanks, Indigo.
They have a long history of blood on their hands. Among the other studios already mentioned they also destroyed Arkane so they could purchase them for nothing.
@@plebisMaximus Oh yeah, other than Interplay, Arkane was probably one of the most notable casualties of Bethesda expansionism. They did them so dirty.
Didn't watch the video yet but I remember hearing about obsidian wanting to make a skyrim spinoff and fallout 4 spinoff bethesda rejected them both after the success of new vegas lol even after the Interplay they couldn't bare the devs from that stuidio having success one upping them at their own games they even rejected free money bags in the form of skyrim spinoff and fo4 spinoff.
My sister was a community manager there about the time when Fallout 2 released. I sent her a link to your video and she texted back "I COMPLETELY agree with that title. I'm going to have to watch it." 🤣
Mauler is where I first saw that clip. It lined up pretty well with the nonsense I read in the interviews with Game Informer and Vanity Fair, prior to the show's release.
The Fallout franchise has had it's soul scooped out leaving nothing but an empty shell with a recognisable face to it. Flanderization kills another franchise.
Man, this sure opened an old wound in me. I was also left with a smirk when I saw Amazon credited Howard but omitted any reference to the franchise original creators, most likely due to legal reasons.
I was one of those 10s of thousands downloads of the demo. That one town sold me so much on the game; I rarely bought new release games, but Fallout was one of them. I still remember the giddy disbelief when I managed to steal the one guy's minigun.
Stealing the minigun was one of my favorite moments, too. Especially since I failed and died a couple of times, during the attempt. I also liked using the mult-tool to break the generator and make everyone abandon the town. It was the easiest ending to get.
Thank you for this video, may it reach long and far!. As a vet of NMA, I've long been the recepient of derogatory terms for talking about these things.
It makes my blood boil when the original fans of things (from anything from Star Wars, Ghostbusters to Fallout) are labeled "toxic" for not liking a bastardization of the media they enjoyed.
Lets hope some of the toxic fans in Bethesda don't brigade this video, because this is geniunely important even if you didn't criticise their fallout titles, its pretty scummy to force a dying company into court just to get an IP that you know u can make more than they could
As one of the probably 12 people who played and remembers Scrolls, that lawsuit killed off any of the residual goodwill I had towards them. It was nice to see it get mentioned in a documentary like this.
I really liked Scrolls. That was during the gold rush to make the best digital card game, and I enjoyed Scrolls' twist in making it a more tactical battlefield. A shame how things turned out.
Its crazy how many mistakes interplay made if they only made half of the mistakes they made, they would be still alive today, making rpg gems till this day. Interplay is a perfect example of what happens when you dont pay attention to legal issues, money and market.
I'm glad you referenced Freespace 2 around the 22 minute mark. These days I suppose we should be glad that nobody bought the IP and burned it down but it's amazing to see just how unknown it is to space game fans. The modding community is incredible for it, the community owns the game and IP now.
@@velDANTe The team behind Fallout London is incredibly talented and made a great mod. It just tries to be it's own thing instead of trying to "make a TRUE fallout sequel" like a lot of other mods try.
Being a fan who started with new Vegas, I recently got a pc and got to experience the glory of fallout 1 and 2. I couldn't believe just how much I enjoyed fallout 2. I was running the restoration patch with it but it's oh my god the early game is so hard and rewarding. Once I got a couple decent companions and some APA I was a force to be reckoned with but until that point it genuinely felt like such a challenge to thrive. I loved it. I've played through fallout 3 twice in all and all and the dialogue and quests don't match up at all to fallout 2. The dilaogue really surprised me as a lot of didn't really feel dated at all. Nearly most of the NPC's felt like legitimate people with their own ways and mannerisms of speaking. Making me so interested in every single one of them as you never knew just what their story was. Those 2 games have forever changed my view on fallout. What an interesting universe. I think the thing I hate most of 3 was the goddamm green raiders😂 I loved talking with super mutants and was very disappointed to see just how stupid they had made them
It truly is disheartening to hear the full breakdown of what happened. You have such talented and passionate people who were conned and cheated out of something they created, only for the creation to be a corpse being marionetted around by people taking credit for it by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Fallout has been watered down to power armor and the vault boy by Bethesda.
Really, the best way to enjoy modern Fallout is just running a tabletop GURPS campaign in the universe. There's a decent GURPS fanbook for Fallout that came out about three months prior to the launch of Fallout 3, and it's an interesting time capsule of optimism.
@@Mirthful_Midorito be honest, TTRPGs only need to be as complicated as you want to make them. You You could play a campaign in that setting without using any stats or dice rolls for the majority of the game, so long as the players are engaged with the story they're participating in. Most TTRPGs are too complicated to be enjoyed RAW so it's completely viable to just make it up as you go
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 It really depends on the play group. Some groups are more casual, but some really enjoy it being more complex. You just have to know your audience.
@@Mirthful_Midori true, but I feel like actually playing those types of ultra crunchy really just sucks the momentum out of things and also increases the probability of the game just devolving into a series of encounters that need to be made extremely punitive in order to counter the players cheesing the game, or having nightmare sessions where the entire party are thwarted because they couldn't roll high enough to ford a river and lose their cart along with all their possessions as it is carried away by a sudden change in current as they reach the mid point of the river. It's much easier to say "I don't think that there's much chance of that working, but I'll let you succeed with a roll of X" or "that's a good idea and your character should be able to succeed, so don't worry about rolling and we'll play it out", or even just a simple "no." I'm not saying that all crunchy games end up being bullshit, but in my experience the authorial control afforded by tossing out most of the rules often leads to a much more consistent and less frustrating style of play where you're always able to rely on your characters being competent enough to perform basic tasks relating to their respective specialities. Random chance is a big part of the fun, but sometimes it pays to be selective with when you get the dice out and to encourage players to think about how to strategise in combat without making everything about popping off high level abilities with flowery flavour text that effectively just makes a fight they were inevitably going to win anyway take longer by making all the other numbers bigger to compensate for the extra damage and causing additional arguments over how to interpret the rules.
I thought bethesda couldn't get any worse after reading about what they did to Prey 2 and humanhead, but that part about interplay only actually having the trademark instead of the copyright was the icing on the cake.
The Fallout TV show took Bethesda's Fallout and cranked the tropes to 11. Hollow iconography with no substance, asinine plot lines and constant member berries to when the franchise was actually good and innovative. Ironically one of the most revolutionary RPGs of its time got watered down into being Borderlands-lite for real life NPCs to seal-clap over.
Even the gameplay. I get the feeling they're gonna continue with the whole "grinding legendaries for legendary loots," same basic shit you do in Borderlands 2. Even the "mutations" are just a revised form of the evolving Goliaths. Borderlands-lite is a good word for it.
@kaijin2k11 They already continued that trend with Starfield. It's funny that "legendary" started by recycling the enchanting system from Skyrim, because I can pretty much guarantee that TES VI will have the same loot system.
Its always sad to know we will never get a Dark Alliance 3. That game might not have been the most in depth gameplay series but it meant so much to me as a child when i played it with my dad.
It's hard for me to be too upset since it resulted in the Champions games which I actually liked more. Wouldn't mind seeing more of that flavor of game in the modern day though.
@@Sabagastache I believe the story went that Chris Avellone was hired to work with Snowblind Studios (makers of the original Dark Alliance) even after they had a falling out with Interplay, showing that they had a lot of respect for these developers, despite the executives' terrible and often illegal decisions (like stealing the Snowblind engine, for example).
The fact that there are legions of people who are foaming at the mouth defending Bethesda Fallout games only adds insult to injury... Always ruins my mood whenever I think about it.
@@iacodino People believing, that bethesderp writing is anything to write home about leaves me doubting their mental prowess and wisdom. IMO anyone who isn't intelligent enough to see consequences of their vote and just pulls that lever based on feelings is detriment to societal progress and should not be allowed to vote. If you find beth writing competent, you're very likely not able to articulate your reasons for voting something or someone.
@@raifthemad the problem with that is that someone would have to decide who is smart enough, and there is no real good way to determine whether someone is "smart enough" or not, and as such it leaves wayy to much power to whoever is set to decide, paving the way to dictatorship and authoritarianism. Also liking a videogame or it' s writing is an extremely subjective thing so it' s not a very good way to calculate someone' s intelligence anyway.
@@iacodino Good, witty writing is not subjective. There are just many people who can't tell the difference between it and slop. Some of it is down to experience and some of it is down to mental capability. Average human is not that bright, barely able to follow simple logic, and half the population by definition is below that. But I do agree, that discerning that would be very abusable.
What a fantastic (and often depressing) dive into the history of this company. How heartbreaking it must have been for the original Fallout devs, forced to permanently warm the bench while another team took their baby. Isn't it telling that Bethesda immediately reached for their lawyers instead of acknowledging that a fallout project developed by someone else might benefit both parties. Petty and disgusting.
Really sad how it all turned out. Still wonder what Van Buren or Troika's version of Fallout 3 could have brought to the table. Thanks for watching, mate!
Seems like the only actual games left that are also made by gamers for gamers are traditional rogue likes, or maybe some indie games. All of the AA or AAA games released in the 15 years are just corporate, wall street, G man, money grabs with 0 actual game.
Okay, so I finished watching the video. Great job fitting all that info in one hour, and with excellent pacing! And, oh man, the loss of Black Hound and Van Buren still hurts, even after all these years...
I only recently saw some of the gorgeous art and design for Black Hound. Would have been something special. But I legitimately feel that if we had gotten the Van Buren that Avellone/Sawyer envisioned, it would have elevated the CRPG genre. I love the idea of an evolving Pip Boy, and an "Anti-Party" that changes the world while you're not looking.
@@nomi.8658 I wonder if we'll ever get a playable build leaked at some point. Might have been deleted now, but it's crazy that you can make three quarters of a triple-A game and then one day be like, "Oops, we can't make a D&D game anymore. Mondays, amirite!"
@@Indigo_Gaming That's exactly what I was thinking, but didn't even dare to write. Thanks for being our voice, as you are great at it, Indigo :) It is indeed crazy, but as we know, even resources for games that were actually released are lost, like some of the original graphic art for Baldur's Gate and source code for Icewind Dale II altogether.
As someone who likes Elder Scrolls for what it is but detests Bethesda's """take""" of Fallout, Starfield's current negative state feels like decades of bad karma biting Bethesda in the ass. They just couldn't keep getting away with the bullshit forever. Thank you so much for this video.
I don't think it was the unmitigated disaster that was Fallout 76, but I think more than anything, Starfield shows that the studio just doesn't have the mojo anymore. The setting is bland, the design is all over the place, and even the mainstream is rejecting their games now.
As someone who came from fallout 3, I agree with OPs sentiment entirely. I loved that game as a kid and I'm happy to have been introduced to fallout, but fallout being a successful franchise off of mediocre games does not mean that a series is going to have a bright future. Fallout was the greatest at it's start. I doubt that anyone who holds the fallout IP will bring it to that greatness again as long as they're wielding fallout as a product to be consumed@@spartanx9293
Once Bethesda inevitably gets folded up into Microsoft the IP will be in eternal limbo just like all the other IP's Microsoft gobbled up back in the day.
Microsoft probably just wanted their savage lawyers. The way they gobbled up Fallout was reminiscent of a crocodile ripping chunks of flesh off their prey.
Hey. The vid you mentioned were making in the patracian tv podcast is here. I'm definitly gonna enjoy this immensly. Behind the scenes game dev can be more interesting stories then the games themselve!
Absolutely amazing video Indigo! The quote from Josh Sawyer at 56:08 was genuinely interesting to hear with how right he is when looking at RPGs now and specifically how well received and popular Balder’s Gate 3 is. It makes me wonder if Bethesda didn’t buy the IP, would Fallout go the same way as Baldur’s Gate 3.
Probably my favorite quote in the whole video. "Fans never left that style of game. PUBLISHERS left that style of game." So applicable to all the abandoned genres that are now getting a revival in the indie/mid-market space.
The same way as BG3? Get a "sequel" in name only that shares absolutely nothing with the original games and actively goes out of it's way to disrespect them?
@@Indigo_Gaming It's the way of the industry. The players don't leave, it's the money men who've increasingly flooded into the industry as it's grown who insist that everything has to be a blockbuster, leading to safe, cookie-cutter, lowest common denominator game design.
@@z2ei Eh. I wouldn't go as far as saying it "disrespected" the original duology. But I do agree that Larian's game didn't need to share the name. Maybe they wanted the name recognition, but Larian's game could have stood on it's own with a different name.
@@z2ei Y'know, kind of ironic you mentioning that when the video itself points out that the OG concept for BG3 would've, effectively, shared little with the previous two entries.
Honestly, with the more I hear of Bethesda and how they have worked with other companies, including the ones when they dealt with the Prey (2006 one) license (Civvie 11 talked about it during his video) and how Bethesda was so petty and screwed over Obsidian with New Vegas, the more I never want to ever touch the company. I guess it was a good thing that I got bored of Skyrim faster than I did with Fallout 3 or Oblivion and stopped touching any of their games afterwards. Also the fact that Bethesda said themselves that they were the ones that 'Invented Shooters' since they acquired DOOM didn't help leave a sour taste in my mouth either. What a disgusting company.
An absolutely outstanding video, thank you for the love you put into creating this. It's really quite sad how idiotic management of this franchise has created the fallout we have today. I can only hope somehow the original creators will get another chance to take up fallout one more time.
I do watch reactions and blind playthroughs from time to time. The amount of people trying to play the original Fallout like some cluncky outdated clicker with bad graphics by putting it into 1920x1080 where nothing will actually fight back and everything should have had an arrow pointing at the quest solution and complaining about everything on the screen being too small... As well as the amount of people that say "Oh, I've just watched that cool new Fallout show that everyone is talking about. I'm a gamer, but I've never played any Fallout games. But now I will definitely install the Fallout 76 to see what it's all about!"... These two things have almost succeeded at destroyed my soul. Thank you for some healing, Indigo. One of my favorite channels for a good reason.
It causes me great pain when anybody plays Fallout 1/2 in higher resolution than 720p. Looks awful. The later patches gave you the option for widescreen, which is desirable (still think it messes up the dialogue screen though). But yeah, I've seen 1080p, 1440p and even 4k gameplay. Maddening!
@@mantazerted7155 this sounds like a description of a perk. First of all. Usually calm as a cucumber. And just as cool. I thus point you to my cool sunglasses for a proof 8^[ Second of all. COME ERE YOU HECKIN' NAUGHTY WIDDLE YOUUUUUGHHH!
To me, the most tragic thing about this whole story, beyond the series's loss of identity and intelligence, is that Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky do not own the licence, nor are they even acknowledged as its creators in the adaptation.
Leonard's quote from that ~2004 interview really got to me. You could see how frustrated they were that the thing they made ended up getting sold by one guy who didn't make it, to another guy who didn't make it. Such is the business, but I'm forever curious about what the Troika team (in a very similar desperate situation as the Morrowind team were in the early days) could have done with Fallout.
Fast forward to today, almost every mainstream PC game is basically already ruined due to them being released on consoles and mobile which still puts huge constraints on how the game is designed, "by (PC) gamers for (PC) gamers" became "by nobodys for everyone".
We also have to remember that when it comes to development Bethesda prefer a to reduce down. This isn’t explicitly bad, but Bethesda (their not alone but one of the most aggressive) doesn’t look to streamline or build on up but just take a cleaver out cut out completely. In hindsight Skyrim was the last game that they could really get away with. After Skyrim the bloody holes left behind were far too noticeable to look past to see what little bits were left behind.
Wow, I never realized just how scummy Bethesda was with interplay & Black Isle. Like I knew they screwed them over for Fallout New Vegas for the bonus money but this court shit is unreal.
I have no love for Herve Caen and how he took over Interplay, but Bethesda was arguably worse with how they led Interplay on for years, only to pull the rug under them at the last minute, proving they had no intention of letting Fallout Online happen.
You should look up the development of Prey 2 and how Bethesda mistreated Human Head Studios. Bethesda seems to make a habit of screwing over anyone doing contract work for them. I first found out about it through Civvie 11's video on Prey, but there are other videos that go more in depth.
There have been occasional bad reviews since games existed, but in general, we usually got more from a review than the identity of the characters on-screen, the graphic fidelity, and how amazing the latest gooey scoop of Call of Duty is.
I've never even heard about Fallout having tv show spin-off, but statement of Howard being creator of the game/franchise/whatever is an insult and spit in the face of original creators and IP.
I'm surprised you didn't! It was everywhere a few months ago. I know that Emil, Todd and a couple others who worked on F3/F4 were executive producers on the show, and that usually comes with a credit, but heavily implying that Todd was somehow the mastermind behind it all when he hadn't touched the franchise until well after all its creators had been fired/quit from the company they bought it from, felt so wrong.
As someone who just started playing the franchise through, from Fallout 1 to currently New Vegas, it's still insane to me just how well they nailed down the aesthetic in just the very first game, a top down rpg from the 90s no less.
I was recently recording a director's commentary on my old Fallout video and praising the insane care and detail they put into simple things like the wall around Junktown. Unmatched!
I've been saying this since 2008. It's good someone was able to articulate thoughts I've had for half a life time. The paltry amount they paid for Fallout, just to creater Oblivion With Guns- the thing we all said was going to happen before the first screenshot even released- and now we've been watching this corpse shamble around for half its life.
Even Elder Scrolls isn’t what it used to be at Bethesda, with games being more in depth than what we got with Skyrim in Morrowind and Oblivion. I say this because The Elder Scrolls is an original Bethesda IP.
@@Indigo_Gaming The expansion for it, Trudograd, also has power armor. And it's probably the best power armor I've seen in a game with how they handled it.
Yeah that sucks. I'm sure it would have helped him and his company a lot to be attached to Fallout, but at some point, when a licensor for a GENERIC ruleset keeps wanting to make changes to your setting and story, you gotta draw a line somewhere.
As a brand, I'd love for more companies to take a swing with Fallout. London is proof of concept in that it sure would be really sweet to get some Fallout from the perspectives of other countries. Also, a throw back to a traditional CRPG would be welcome too. I'd love to see what a Larian Fallout would look like.
Technically Caen is pronounced "cohh" (very French), but I don't want to fumble a foreign language so I went with the nearest anglicization of it. But yes, I get your joke, lol.
Thanks for walking down memory lane of the highs and lows of this very influential and risk-taking video game empire. If you enjoy my work, I'd be forever grateful for your support!
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Here is a video from Timothy Cain and how Fallout Van Buren was cancelled (basically, they didn't have the money to complete the game) :
search for the video "The Canceling of Fallout Van Buren...And Me"
Always hype when the new Indigo vid drops.
@greatgameplayswalkthroughs660 You'll notice I commented on that video the day it was released. I considered adding that fact to mine, but it didn't really change anything to the story I had already researched.
Great video. But of a bummer but I think we were forewarned. Thanks!
@@Indigo_GamingSo basically you’re a hack fraud liar.
I like this video a lot. No bullshit zoomer editing, no cutting a joke every 30 seconds, just straight to the point history of a once beloved company.
Thank you! UA-cam recommendations aren't really favoring me much anymore, so it's nice to hear that my subtler video approach is still appreciated by some.
The tv show completely ignoring the master by having more vaults in the boneyard full of people told me all I had to know the old fallout is gone
"The game needed to meet Bethesda's quality standards." It can't be understated how INFAMOUS that statement is. If a story contains that line, it means the Bethesda is going to force the company into going bankrupt, and buy them.
Which ironically is not too far off from the fate that awaits Bethesda since being bought out by Microsoft.
@@Salt-Upon-Woundss If karma willing.
@@MusicaX79 Why do you think bethesda's employees are so desperate to unionize? Microsoft is pretty mad that starfield was a flop and is starting to realize that 2 billion was a bit more than zenimax/bgs was worth. They're going to be doing some redundancies.
@@honeybadger6275 They are desperate to unionize because they increased staff from 1000 to 3000 yet put out a game that is the same size as before. due to massive mismanagement. They are looking around going "OH NO" were all getting fired. Will Shen did a GDC tell all and you can tell they had no clue how to handle the massive influx of employees that happened during starfield.
@@MusicaX79 Thats what I said.
Wait wait wait... People actually think the original Fallout games werent popular‽‽‽
They were HUGE.
I was one of those people unfortunately but I just realised I did some research a few years back into how much it sold and now i feel dumb for thinking it was always a niche series
I guess it could happen if they look at raw sales figures; Fallout 1 sold 20 times less than Fallout 3.
Let's rounds it off and consider the vast majority of sales of F1 happened before the year 2000. Then we're in the 300,000 sales ballpark. That kind of number would definitely counts as a failure when given to a "triple-A" game today. Half a fricking million sales _pre-2000_ is fucking HUGE considering the market back then.
It is a niche series @@danpaz9485
probably cause PC gaming in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty niche and small compared to consoles, so people didnt pay attention much to what was happening on PC with a few exceptions, of things like Half Life, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and so on.
And WRPGs were even more niche, i for one never knew the existence of WRPGs until Fallout 3, for me, RPGs was JRPGs, mostly cause i was a mostly console user and PC was to play MMORPG and the occasional super hit like Half life 2.
They wouldn’t know considering half was born after 2005
Howard's only original work is Starfield. Make of that what you will
His first directing role was Morrowind, which is awesome, so it's hard to really say he's entirely inept, but at the same time, that one had Ken Rolston and Micheal Kirkbride doing most of the heavy lifting, so idk man.
@@plebisMaximus I believe it was PatricianTV who pointed out Todd's contributions in Morrowind were suspect, at least tonally. IIRC he's credited for the questline where the ghost of a murdered man comes to you and outright tells you who murdered him and why, so you don't have to work those brain cells too much.
Considering the main quest encourages you to arrive at your own conclusion about many things, like how Nerevar truly died or if you're actually his reincarnation, I'm inclined to agree.
@@plebisMaximus Id recommended looking into the dev history of Morrowind. The game went through three directors, including Todd. He was basically handed Morrowind, all the real work was done.
Indigo had an interview with Julian Lafay (the first director) and he speaks on the creative differences between him and the second director during Morrowinds development.
Todd howard aint a game dev btw, he is just a project manager essentially
@@gyderian9435 so with that logic he came into bethesda as a manager ?
It says alot about Howard that the only IP that HE created was the impressively mediocre world of Starfield.
He sucks as a game dev, but is great at leading others in game development. Just like Steve Jobs. Jobs did nothing except bitch to people about his ideas but he knew nothing about the work that went into it. So it makes sense that Starfield was supremely average with no real identity or soul.
And Shitfield is different Fallout.
@@nicholasgutierrez9940 That makes no sense.
Jobs was a tyrant, but they made good products. And Howard is a mistake, abomination.
Starfield is basically indicative of TES6
When TES6 gets out, it will likely be an outdated mess that feels 20 years old
@@nicholasgutierrez9940Todd Howard is more a salesman than a creative. His credit consist to make profitable games. He doesn't care about quality or a good story writing...
So so glad someone is digging into Interplay.
Apart from Firaxis, Maxis, Looking Glass and Micropose, they were one of the most important PC developer/publisher of 90s.
Pc? They had a decent success on consoles of the 90s.
Interplay being bought out by Titus, a pathetic company whose few successes likely happened by accident, is a cosmic joke, much as the video game industry in general is a joke.
@sheets75 That Fallout was ruined by the same people behind Superman and Carmageddon 64 will always be one of the biggest tragedies in gaming.
@livanbard They attempted to break into console games many times but never had a breakout hit other than decent sales on Dark Alliance (which they promptly fumbled by using that engine again without permission).
RIP Maxis.
So obscure that Bethesda wanted to buy it in the first place.
I'm always buying obscure little IPs with no popularity or potential for millions of dollars!
@@Indigo_GamingTodd Howard, a saintlike figure who bought small little indie franchise, fallout, out of the kindness of his heart just because he *weally* liked it.
In the modern AAA gaming world, it benefits publishers to present themselves as saviours and innovators to franchises they acquire. And, let's be honest, gamers are much more inclined to buy the corporate narrative than they would like to admit.
Not just buy the narrative: actively seek out opportunities to aggressively defend the massive corporation that sees them as marks.
corpo simps are everywhere
@@nathanlevesque7812especially the Disney star wars fans.
@@tom.m who knew syndicate would become the most prophetic peace of cyberpunk media.
>gamers are much more inclined to buy the corporate narrative than they would like to admit.
Way to understate that. In my general, 25+ years experience as a gamer, I can attest that most gamers are some of the most moronic, filthy, droolingly idiotic subhuman fucking imbeciles in any consumer niche.
"The game needed to meet Bethesda's quality standards." That wouldn't be too hard.
Apparently they only apply quality standards to OTHERS' games.
_* ahem * New Vegas Metacritic bonus._
@@Indigo_GamingIsn't that a myth
@@sgtmarcusharris4260 why are you so desperate to defend a Sh@tty company?
In that they got shafted intentionally? Maybe? Obsidian definitely signed an agreement where that was all spelled out. Whether or not that's particularly ethical or it should have been based on sales is a different discussion @sgtmarcusharris4260
That's literally the exact excuse Bethesda used to screw over Human Head Studios. It's the reason Prey 2 was never finished.
As someone who read the actual reviews for Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate in actual magazines, the notion that Fallout was a "small and obscure" series is kind of laughable.
I guess this is in the same vein as when Activision bragged about how they "saved" Blizzard, since their model of paying their devs peanuts and then giving them a fat bonus when the games were released was absolutely unsustainable (You have to pay the devs peanuts and then take all the money they would have gotten for their bonuses and pay that out to the higher executives instead, that's the model that makes companies THRIVE!)
Not to mention why Bethesda hates Obsidian so much after they took the clunky engine and made a superior game by focusing on what actually matters - the storytelling.
That was a primary motivation to make this video. Fallout was very successful and was greatly respected a DECADE before we got Bethesda's Fallout 3.
to be fair, back then, all video games were small and obscure (relatively speaking), but your point is still valid
@@its_eis Sport and FPS games were already not, CRPGs always had a small community (compared to other genres) and later on Niche to the point of death community. So if your game was Niche even in CRPG golden age, it was very, very small community and almost non-existent in late 2000s.
Only now CRPGs have a kind of resurgence with BG, but that series always had the biggest community out of all CRPG games.
A small note. In RPGs what matters most is not storytelling, but gameplay. That's why people are so much into a crappy story like DOS2 and still play it to death.
Bethesda games have neither story nor gameplay. Sawyer and Co. delivered both elements with New Vegas
@@arthurvandelay. Vegas gameplay sucked, but story was great
Hey, I really appreciate you creating this video for the record. I was also surprised to see that the Fallout TV show referred to Todd Howard as the creator. I think it’s the messy and complex aspect of this story that makes it hard to keep in mind, and you did a really good job capturing that complexity in way that remains digestible and memorable. Well done
I got pretty lost in the last part with all the legalese and business stuff, but hopefully it came through clearly.
I was not. A bit shocked, especially when none of the original creators where even thanked in the credits, but not surprised.
Todd Howard has become a brand, and a brand needs PR. He's already the strongest person in BGS and one of the strongest at Zenimax, but there's still room to grow, expand his amount and avenues for optioning shares, and with Zenimax looking for a buyer for itself several years back he has even more potential growth there.
Be prepared for that to happen more and more. This is a post Last of Us tv show word, now directors and producers could have their names in Hollywood, on the lips of movie star, and their feet on red carpet and on lots of notorious trophies.
robo-brains used to be a horror story, buried deep in the depths of human depravity in a bunker.
then bethesda made them roam around everywhere, disregarding everything.
Then they were turned into a joke in the form of a Brain-on-a-Roomba in the Fallout show. Watch the subtitles of those scenes, that's literally what they named it.
We could have had Brain Bots that remembered their past lives and lost humanity. They are either desperate to regain their former humanity by kidnapping people to insert their brains into new bodies. Or succumbed to complete insanity and murdering people on sight.
The horror of living through two centuries and not having the biological feedback that we take for granted. There might even be a few brain bots that embrace their new bodies. For good or ill.
They even messed up the tone within Fallout 4. One Mechanist mission has you go through a facility where brains of unstable people were extracted, tested, and put in to robobrains. Then in Far Harbour, there is a goofy detective whodunnit mission with rich high society people who volunteered for the process.
In Fallout and Fallout 2, they were only found in pre-war military facilities, and never spoke - except for Skynet.
flanderization on meth
Comments like this make no sense. In 1940 cars didn't have seatbelts so should they keep making them without them? Oh no in the original fallout power armor didn't need fusion cores, they ruined the franchise forever! Time passes, things evolves, be happy that you can still play a fallout game even if it's not the dream one (new vegas was close enough). Things can't be the same forever and also can't last forever
I wasn't even aware that Bethesda did historical revision on the popularity of Fallout, and I even started with 3.
@gooslauve that's the point of revisionism, that you don't even know it's revisionism.
Matt Berry said it best in the awful tv show: you're a product, Im a product, hell, the bloody end of the world is a product." That's exactly how Bethesda has been handling the ip since fallout 3. Great video, you've definitely got another subscriber.
What was so bad about it? Haven’t seen it yet.
@@KrustyJoeSeen it yet?
New Vegas was just the taste of what the whole franchise could have been. And they say we're always talking foolishly high of the game, but the truth is they're too blind to see what real love, dedication, and creativity looks like.
No thanks to Bullshithesda, they didn't seem too keen to have Obsidian developing FNV, and so they forced them to shorten the development cycle and cut a lot of content out, which in turn made the game a lot buggy. You're right, not only the game was the closest experience we had for a proper Fallout story like 1 and 2, but it also bared the potential to be a lot greater than how it initially was launched, even, perhaps, by today standards, more than F4 and 76.
a crappy addon to oblout3?
"And they say we're always talking foolishly high of the game" Literally never heard this before.
@@Edax_Royeaux Gen Z can't get over the floaty combat and ancient graphics.
@@jesperburns Gen Z was between the ages of 13 and not born yet when New Vegas came out.
The idea that Bethesda "saved" Fallout presupposes that a franchise continuing on is inherently a good thing. It isn't. Overall I'm glad we live in the world we do just because New Vegas exists, but if the Fallout series remained dormant and we just had those two classic games, that would be absolutely fine. We'd at least be spared the travesty that was the TV show.
I am not surprised at all to learn that part of the reason they acquired Fallout was due to aggressive lawyering. Zenimax's lawyers had SHARP elbows, which I suppose is not too surprising given that Robert Altman was a former litigator himself.
...and Altman was banned from banking pre-Zenimax due to shady practices. Bethesda was infamous for its litigation back in the days, and it helped them buy a $50 million dollar franchise for less than $10M.
@@Indigo_Gaming Oh yes, I was indirectly involved when Zenimax sued Facebook over the Oculus deal claiming they owned the IP. It was unpleasant to say the least.
Crazy to think that there was a time where I could play a "demo" of Van Buren and dreaming of what could've been a new Fallout.
The internal demo was leaked several years after the game was cancelled, but yeah... It's sad to see what could have been... Especially looking at all the design docs that hadn't been implemented yet.
@@Indigo_Gaming Yes, also specifically before 3 came out. I want to say even before it was announced.
@@MrsterThey annouced 3 in 2005 if I'm not mistaken
@@Passageofsky I'm gonna say that the please stand by site that was gonna show the teaser came in 2007 or maybe late '06.
You still can, leaked demo is available on the internet
It hurts my soul that Fallout is now some generic post-apo/sci-fi franchise.
that's what happens when everything unique gets flanderized
You can only have so many good ideas before you end up self-referential, happens to everything creative eventually.
Dude it’s awesome
@@asiblingproduction That's very obviously not the reason Fallout has had that issue, but okay dude.
Yes, nothing is more sad then wasted potential. This slop that exists today is fallout in name only. It is banal, it is trite, it is sadistic and perverse and dumbed down to the max
"Fallout 3 is a sequel to Fallout 2 the same way shit is a sequel to food."
- Unknown No Mutants Allowed forum user, ca 2008.
The NMA crowd, cooking with gas as usual! 😆
Brutal and True.
IDK after I eat food, well you know. The video certainly has put light to Bethesda, however the last good game was Skyrim and what made that game great was the modding and with Starfield being so piss poor compared to games that have been on scene and released in the time that Starfield came out they didnt stand a chance still trying to produce a 2011 game an shell it out as next gen my ass and so a lot of good modders are not making mods for Starfield. Modding scene there is way behind the other titles and top it off they outright broke most of the armor mods with an update to the game changing some flag viarables in the meshes used.
First Elder Scroll game I played was actually Skyrim and I had quite good time with it for a while though... Playing Skyrim gave me allergy towards all Bethesda games due to constant deja vu feelings in it's gameplay. But hell, I like replaying same games from time to time, I even did some speedruns - nothing to really serious but it's definitely slightly above casual approach towards gaming and I'm writing this because... Is Skyrim really that good as a RPG game? It's decent exploration game but gameplay is so dull that you're able to master it within 1 hour of gameplay. And Bethesda titles aren't short. Neither gameplay is really strong point, it's just serviceable and nothing beyond that. Easy to start and easy to master. With Morrowind it was slightly different but that one just never clicked with me but whenever someone says that Skyrim was a good game there comes the question - what were the qualities you loved the most? And quite frankly I never got any strong answers. I can get appeal, damn, I felt same, I had decent time but maybe I just don't have problem admitting that at times I enjoyed pretty mediocre stuff without much to prasie about? Because Skyrim starts strong, it sells the promise of open world with many builds, many stories but when it comes to unfolding... Well, okay, some questlines were actually pretty good but most were pretty meh and it was rather hard to feel like you're making any impact on the world properly. And builds... Hard to call it that way as those were so simple and most obvious answers how to play were the best ones, otherwise combat time was increasing dramatically.
@masterpainter78 yeah no, Skyrim was so heavily stripped down it's not even funny, no classes, no attributes, no branching questlines, no spell crafting, and mods aren't the product Bethesda made despite Todd constantly expecting modders to fix his shit games. The last good game Bethesda made was Morrowind, they've been dumbing everything down since then.
Fallout has been turned into a collection of recognisable images that people will buy products for.
Ironically it became a piece of real Americana :(
Yes, you will buy it, consume it and get excited for the next product. 🇺🇸
This is so accurate
I always think of that promo that James Cameron recorded for Terminator: Genisys...
"I’m in a dark theater. Movie starts. And I start to see things I recognize, done with, you know, contemporary technology and all that, but things I recognize like okay, this is pretty cool."
@@Indigo_Gaming Now that is another franchise that died after their second major release. At least Fallout fans got Tactics and New Vegas. Terminator fans just got continually shat on after '91.
When the new Fallout show came out, my friends who are super casual gamers were all excited for it. I asked them if it was like the games and realized none of them knew what Fallout was before Fallout 3.
I didn't include the audio, but I love the bit in Brian Fargo's Wasteland 2 Kickstarter video, where a "game publisher" asks Brian Fargo, "There was a Fallout 1 and 2?!" XD
at this point they probably wouldn't understand the difference between crazed ghouls in Fo and the rage zombies of Fo4 onward
Christ...
Even Tim cain said it captured the fallout aesthetics so please stop yapping about it
@@BigBossXCV Cain got to go to the screening so we was a vip and his opinion doesn't matter as much.
Christ you people are just as bad as the people when ME3 came out and they gasslighting all the fans because of artistic integrity.
FINALLY. A video explaining what ive been saying for YEARS
The concept that Fo was a forgotten cult classic and didnt sold is so ridiculous that i coildnt know where to start.
its now just a fallout skinned digital theme park
oh we knew about this way long ago. its about time people recognize how greed can kill off art so easily
Well, it sold well. Not "very" well. Indigo math on that is somewhat deceptive, physical distribution had huge cost so most of the street price of a game did NOT go to the net income of the publisher. That's not allegoric, manufacturing and distribution was a large majority of the street price.
Plus, sales, and in some cases regional prices.
I strongly agree that the narrative that BGS and Todd Howard were and ae crafting is bullshit, but let's go overboard, Fallout was not a blockbuster (although the IP could have been if Interplay was better managed).
@@LiraeNoir "Well, it sold well. Not "very" well. Indigo math on that is somewhat deceptive,"
I've seen earlier, and i can't believe it's already here but: "Zoomers not understanding economics always tend to forget, the year of release and the scale of sales record is "success" for the context of its time; "Context" is a word Zoomers cannot understand, picture, visualize - and if they tried, they'd understand the past a lot more, time and its relativity." Called it with your reply.
You're being *disingenuous* here, this is history that is explaining to you, learn from it. They were successful, and your take is a product of that word you so fondly projected - a narative - one fed to you and being historical revisionism in nature.
@@LiraeNoir Fallout sold very well for the kind of marketing it was catering to, specially if compared to almost any non diablo crpgs. Picking that out of context and saying the game sold poorly when a sequel was being developed immediately after its release and being shipped one year later is frankly idiotic.
What was once a great game is now just dumbed down to an aesthetic to please the masses. I'm looking at you Bethesda.
please the masses, is cope for releasing actually profitable game.
Fallout 3: 12.4 million sales
Fallout 4: 25 million sales
The first 2 fallout games combined don't even reach 1 mil
@@sownheard : Except Fallout started from nothing. F3 and F4 had Bethesda's name behind them.
Different circumstances, and you weren't smart enough to notice.
@@sownheard did you really just compare sale prices of 1990s flopy disc gaming to 2010 gaming. literal brain rot
@@sownheardget ratioed, numbnutz
@@sownheard profitable also doesnt mean quality either
ESPECIALLY when the "profitable" comes from stock market, which has absolutely no basis in reality either
I'm just glad that I got to experience New Vegas and the original Fallout. If I can ever make an RPG those two games will be primary inspirations.
Actually almost impressive how the Khan Brothers did literally nothing but miss after miss after miss. Perennial failures. Wild.
I would say The Khan Brothers represents everything wrong with the gaming industry.
That's Caen brothers axcctually. And yeah, they're the quintessential greedy suits.
We got Fallout back in '97, and it was instant love. The setting, the tone, the different outcomes, and that intro that has your eyes locked on to the TV until it fails, and revealing the devestation.
Fallout 2 was an instant buy, but I remember at the time feeling it was too long compared to the first.
Fallout 3 and 4 were purchases too, on release. But I never quite felt like they had grasped what made the originals so loved.
New Vegas?
@@shira_yone Got it, played it more than 3. A better product in terms of replay factor and story, in my opinion.
I also played a lot of Tactics (instant buy too), and I enjoy how it constantly ups the difficulty. For example, the first time you face a robot, it is shock as the guns that had been so effective against supermutants and deathclaws are suddenly doing very little. In contrast, the first time you take on a power armour soldier in 3, it is just a couple of extra shots and he is dead.
To me Fallout 2 felt like Fallout and Monthy Python had a baby. Easter eggs are only cool when they are rare
Finally someone who doesn't worship FO2. I feel like it gets the most praise of the isometric Fallouts, but I just really didn't enjoy it. Way too long and far too goofy.
@@plebisMaximusit was too short and it perfectly goofy. I probably put 1000s of hours into the game. It always felt like there was one more hidden encounter out there and a secret line or quest or interaction with a companion.
Some time after Morrowind came out, being a huge Daggerfall fan, I bought a brand new computer to play it.
I didn't realize it at the time, but fallout came with the computer.
Id never heard of it before, and I was much too busy playing Morrowind to give the cd a second glance.
One day I was bored of my current games library, and I rifled through my stuff.
"Fallout? Hmm. I wonder what this is. " I installed the game. "Hmm an rpg? Cool!".
I played it a lot after that, and I came back to it now and then, as it always scratched a unique itch.
The original Fallout is absolutely a one of a kind game. Love New Vegas too, but nothing I've ever played feels anything like the first Fallout. Good shit.
Fallout was sold and normified, just like basically everything else that was good from the 90s/00s.
Damn shame.. but nothing can be done about it now. At least we still have the good old stuff (both original and modded) to play. Forever if we want. Thanks for the video, man. Cheers.
Knowing more context about what happened with bioware and Baldur's Gate explains a lot more about the existence of Dragon Age Origins as an extremely faithful spiritual succesor. However it also makes the eventual fate of that franchise even more sad.
Indigo could make a fascinating video about the Dragon Age saga I’m sure!!
DA: Inquisition is absolutely solid, very good even. Not as good as DAO, but nothing really wrong with it. I hate it when people bellyache about DA sequels, when even the notably flawed DA2 had the Bioware fundamentals right.
@@legion999 Inquisition isnt bad its just not the same. Its more of its own thing rather than what Origins was trying to do.
This is probably the best presentation on the timeline of this IP. Great video, like a proper documentary
Thank you! Put a lot of time into this, giving all the context and evidence I could find.
Whenever I watch an Indigo Gaming video, I always end up with a ton of new tabs open to look into games and movies I have never heard of before. Thank you for your work sir.
Always happy to help people find new things. Thanks for watching!
Everyone I knew back then who was into gaming knew about Fallout (more so than about Daggerfall for sure)
I had no idea Bethesda played so dirty. This video is eye opening. And kind of depressing. But very good. It just reminds me that looking behind the curtain is a dangerous act. Thanks, Indigo.
Type Human Head studios and Prey 2, see how much of a scum Bethesda truly is.
@@chrisbj5251 insane and messed up how they close down the studio because it didn't meet Bethesda's 'quality standards'
like wtf?
They have a long history of blood on their hands. Among the other studios already mentioned they also destroyed Arkane so they could purchase them for nothing.
@@plebisMaximus Oh yeah, other than Interplay, Arkane was probably one of the most notable casualties of Bethesda expansionism.
They did them so dirty.
Didn't watch the video yet but I remember hearing about obsidian wanting to make a skyrim spinoff and fallout 4 spinoff bethesda rejected them both after the success of new vegas lol even after the Interplay they couldn't bare the devs from that stuidio having success one upping them at their own games they even rejected free money bags in the form of skyrim spinoff and fo4 spinoff.
My sister was a community manager there about the time when Fallout 2 released. I sent her a link to your video and she texted back "I COMPLETELY agree with that title. I'm going to have to watch it." 🤣
Was your sister a man back in the day?
Small world! That's awesome. Hopefully she gets a kick out of the video.
your sister sounds based. i would buy her a nuka cola
That reminds me of the quote from the creator of the fallout show
"Remember this? Remember this?
And then, no story."
It's amazing we got a showrunner so blatantly honest about his creative process.
Also: "Why make characters awesome, when they can be dumb instead?"
It's taking "writing what you know" to its logical extreme.
@lordtea7688 did you watch mauler's review per chance? Is that why you know the quote by the showrunner? I'm curious because I watched it
@@minion3806 Yeah, that's mostly it
Mauler is where I first saw that clip. It lined up pretty well with the nonsense I read in the interviews with Game Informer and Vanity Fair, prior to the show's release.
The Fallout franchise has had it's soul scooped out leaving nothing but an empty shell with a recognisable face to it. Flanderization kills another franchise.
Hideehoo there neighborooni!
It's more like "flaying it's skin and parading around inside it haphazardly", a hollow imitation of it's former self.
War! War noodly-neveroo changes.
@@MazarothGoodbye Horses plays in the background.
5@@Mazaroth0
Bro had all language in the world to speak, but he chose to speak facts.
Man, this sure opened an old wound in me. I was also left with a smirk when I saw Amazon credited Howard but omitted any reference to the franchise original creators, most likely due to legal reasons.
I was one of those 10s of thousands downloads of the demo. That one town sold me so much on the game; I rarely bought new release games, but Fallout was one of them.
I still remember the giddy disbelief when I managed to steal the one guy's minigun.
Stealing the minigun was one of my favorite moments, too. Especially since I failed and died a couple of times, during the attempt. I also liked using the mult-tool to break the generator and make everyone abandon the town. It was the easiest ending to get.
Yesterday Majuular and Dungeon Chill, and today this. 👍
Just had Maj on the podcast a week or two back!
Are you me?
Seems like there are more people with good taste...
Oh, thanks for the info I guess. Gonna check them out now :P
Dungeon Chill: For when you want Grimbeard without anything that makes Grimbeard good
Thank you for this video, may it reach long and far!. As a vet of NMA, I've long been the recepient of derogatory terms for talking about these things.
It makes my blood boil when the original fans of things (from anything from Star Wars, Ghostbusters to Fallout) are labeled "toxic" for not liking a bastardization of the media they enjoyed.
@@Indigo_Gaming Which is why I hate normies with all my beings and will not help them when sh** hits the fan.
Y'all were right. The whole friggin' time!
Lets hope some of the toxic fans in Bethesda don't brigade this video, because this is geniunely important even if you didn't criticise their fallout titles, its pretty scummy to force a dying company into court just to get an IP that you know u can make more than they could
@@danpaz9485The simps will always defend their masters.
As one of the probably 12 people who played and remembers Scrolls, that lawsuit killed off any of the residual goodwill I had towards them. It was nice to see it get mentioned in a documentary like this.
I really liked Scrolls. That was during the gold rush to make the best digital card game, and I enjoyed Scrolls' twist in making it a more tactical battlefield. A shame how things turned out.
Its crazy how many mistakes interplay made if they only made half of the mistakes they made, they would be still alive today, making rpg gems till this day.
Interplay is a perfect example of what happens when you dont pay attention to legal issues, money and market.
I'm glad you referenced Freespace 2 around the 22 minute mark. These days I suppose we should be glad that nobody bought the IP and burned it down but it's amazing to see just how unknown it is to space game fans. The modding community is incredible for it, the community owns the game and IP now.
So many great games from that era, yet not many of them succeeded.
Star Control 2 is another game that is underrated.
Seeing Fallout become a shell of inself makes you wish for a nuclear wintter
Depending on which side of radicals loses the 2024 presidential election, you might get one
@@JoshuaJacobs83 From a Centrist, nah only be wary of the leftists, too weak to prevent it from other belligerents.
It's just a game dude
@@livanbard and like a truly worth playing game, it taugh us a lot about rl. 🙂
@@JoshuaJacobs83 middle of the road Harris is radical now....
Fallout was the first real RPG i played, one of the few. Fallout 3 wasn't Fallout.
Releasing right as Fallout London was~ Good timing yous.
Hadn't even heard of Fallout London until recently, completely coincidental.
@@Indigo_Gaming That's even better in a way. Great video, though rather sad at the same time.
fallout london doesnt even compare to mods like like sonora or nevada
@@velDANTe The team behind Fallout London is incredibly talented and made a great mod. It just tries to be it's own thing instead of trying to "make a TRUE fallout sequel" like a lot of other mods try.
@@tomerpilo5193 they just made "bethesda fallout" mod. bethesda fallouts bad
I had no idea this story went so deep. Damn fine work.
Thanks man, and I appreciate the shout-out on Twixter. 👍
Being a fan who started with new Vegas, I recently got a pc and got to experience the glory of fallout 1 and 2. I couldn't believe just how much I enjoyed fallout 2. I was running the restoration patch with it but it's oh my god the early game is so hard and rewarding. Once I got a couple decent companions and some APA I was a force to be reckoned with but until that point it genuinely felt like such a challenge to thrive. I loved it. I've played through fallout 3 twice in all and all and the dialogue and quests don't match up at all to fallout 2. The dilaogue really surprised me as a lot of didn't really feel dated at all. Nearly most of the NPC's felt like legitimate people with their own ways and mannerisms of speaking. Making me so interested in every single one of them as you never knew just what their story was. Those 2 games have forever changed my view on fallout. What an interesting universe. I think the thing I hate most of 3 was the goddamm green raiders😂 I loved talking with super mutants and was very disappointed to see just how stupid they had made them
It truly is disheartening to hear the full breakdown of what happened. You have such talented and passionate people who were conned and cheated out of something they created, only for the creation to be a corpse being marionetted around by people taking credit for it by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Fallout has been watered down to power armor and the vault boy by Bethesda.
You never disappoint. Another well researched, narrated and edited video. Top notch presentation. You're the best out there man.
Thanks very much! This was a much bigger detour than I anticipated, but I wanted to make sure it was as thorough as I could make it.
Really, the best way to enjoy modern Fallout is just running a tabletop GURPS campaign in the universe. There's a decent GURPS fanbook for Fallout that came out about three months prior to the launch of Fallout 3, and it's an interesting time capsule of optimism.
Never got into GURPS but I've wanted to do a post-apoc tabletop game for a while. Gamma World was pretty popular back in the day, too.
The SPECIAL system is also pretty close to being a TTRPG system as is. Although that would take a bit more effort than GURPS.
@@Mirthful_Midorito be honest, TTRPGs only need to be as complicated as you want to make them.
You You could play a campaign in that setting without using any stats or dice rolls for the majority of the game, so long as the players are engaged with the story they're participating in.
Most TTRPGs are too complicated to be enjoyed RAW so it's completely viable to just make it up as you go
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 It really depends on the play group. Some groups are more casual, but some really enjoy it being more complex. You just have to know your audience.
@@Mirthful_Midori true, but I feel like actually playing those types of ultra crunchy really just sucks the momentum out of things and also increases the probability of the game just devolving into a series of encounters that need to be made extremely punitive in order to counter the players cheesing the game, or having nightmare sessions where the entire party are thwarted because they couldn't roll high enough to ford a river and lose their cart along with all their possessions as it is carried away by a sudden change in current as they reach the mid point of the river.
It's much easier to say "I don't think that there's much chance of that working, but I'll let you succeed with a roll of X" or "that's a good idea and your character should be able to succeed, so don't worry about rolling and we'll play it out", or even just a simple "no."
I'm not saying that all crunchy games end up being bullshit, but in my experience the authorial control afforded by tossing out most of the rules often leads to a much more consistent and less frustrating style of play where you're always able to rely on your characters being competent enough to perform basic tasks relating to their respective specialities.
Random chance is a big part of the fun, but sometimes it pays to be selective with when you get the dice out and to encourage players to think about how to strategise in combat without making everything about popping off high level abilities with flowery flavour text that effectively just makes a fight they were inevitably going to win anyway take longer by making all the other numbers bigger to compensate for the extra damage and causing additional arguments over how to interpret the rules.
I thought bethesda couldn't get any worse after reading about what they did to Prey 2 and humanhead, but that part about interplay only actually having the trademark instead of the copyright was the icing on the cake.
The Fallout TV show took Bethesda's Fallout and cranked the tropes to 11. Hollow iconography with no substance, asinine plot lines and constant member berries to when the franchise was actually good and innovative. Ironically one of the most revolutionary RPGs of its time got watered down into being Borderlands-lite for real life NPCs to seal-clap over.
Even the gameplay. I get the feeling they're gonna continue with the whole "grinding legendaries for legendary loots," same basic shit you do in Borderlands 2. Even the "mutations" are just a revised form of the evolving Goliaths.
Borderlands-lite is a good word for it.
@kaijin2k11 They already continued that trend with Starfield. It's funny that "legendary" started by recycling the enchanting system from Skyrim, because I can pretty much guarantee that TES VI will have the same loot system.
Its always sad to know we will never get a Dark Alliance 3. That game might not have been the most in depth gameplay series but it meant so much to me as a child when i played it with my dad.
Recently replayed the remasters of DA1 and 2. They're very simple but have a great charm to them. Would have liked to see how they progressed.
Come on DA is basically Diablo in d&d and it’s great
It's hard for me to be too upset since it resulted in the Champions games which I actually liked more. Wouldn't mind seeing more of that flavor of game in the modern day though.
@@Sabagastache I believe the story went that Chris Avellone was hired to work with Snowblind Studios (makers of the original Dark Alliance) even after they had a falling out with Interplay, showing that they had a lot of respect for these developers, despite the executives' terrible and often illegal decisions (like stealing the Snowblind engine, for example).
The fact that there are legions of people who are foaming at the mouth defending Bethesda Fallout games only adds insult to injury... Always ruins my mood whenever I think about it.
Even worse, many of them can even vote.
@@raifthemadyou want to remove people the right to vote just because they disagree with you on videogames???
@@iacodino People believing, that bethesderp writing is anything to write home about leaves me doubting their mental prowess and wisdom. IMO anyone who isn't intelligent enough to see consequences of their vote and just pulls that lever based on feelings is detriment to societal progress and should not be allowed to vote. If you find beth writing competent, you're very likely not able to articulate your reasons for voting something or someone.
@@raifthemad the problem with that is that someone would have to decide who is smart enough, and there is no real good way to determine whether someone is "smart enough" or not, and as such it leaves wayy to much power to whoever is set to decide, paving the way to dictatorship and authoritarianism. Also liking a videogame or it' s writing is an extremely subjective thing so it' s not a very good way to calculate someone' s intelligence anyway.
@@iacodino Good, witty writing is not subjective. There are just many people who can't tell the difference between it and slop. Some of it is down to experience and some of it is down to mental capability. Average human is not that bright, barely able to follow simple logic, and half the population by definition is below that.
But I do agree, that discerning that would be very abusable.
Todd should have stuck with Apocalypse Road.
I would be very interested in how things played out in an alternate timeline where Bethesda made their original IP instead of buying Fallout.
What a fantastic (and often depressing) dive into the history of this company. How heartbreaking it must have been for the original Fallout devs, forced to permanently warm the bench while another team took their baby. Isn't it telling that Bethesda immediately reached for their lawyers instead of acknowledging that a fallout project developed by someone else might benefit both parties. Petty and disgusting.
Really sad how it all turned out. Still wonder what Van Buren or Troika's version of Fallout 3 could have brought to the table. Thanks for watching, mate!
This could genuinely be one of the most important and relevant videos in video game history.
Seems like the only actual games left that are also made by gamers for gamers are traditional rogue likes, or maybe some indie games. All of the AA or AAA games released in the 15 years are just corporate, wall street, G man, money grabs with 0 actual game.
Okay, so I finished watching the video.
Great job fitting all that info in one hour, and with excellent pacing!
And, oh man, the loss of Black Hound and Van Buren still hurts, even after all these years...
I only recently saw some of the gorgeous art and design for Black Hound. Would have been something special. But I legitimately feel that if we had gotten the Van Buren that Avellone/Sawyer envisioned, it would have elevated the CRPG genre. I love the idea of an evolving Pip Boy, and an "Anti-Party" that changes the world while you're not looking.
I didn't even know Black Hound was at 75% done. Damn. So much regrets. Not to mention all the real creative work lost with it.
@@nomi.8658 Indeed.
@@nomi.8658 I wonder if we'll ever get a playable build leaked at some point. Might have been deleted now, but it's crazy that you can make three quarters of a triple-A game and then one day be like, "Oops, we can't make a D&D game anymore. Mondays, amirite!"
@@Indigo_Gaming That's exactly what I was thinking, but didn't even dare to write. Thanks for being our voice, as you are great at it, Indigo :) It is indeed crazy, but as we know, even resources for games that were actually released are lost, like some of the original graphic art for Baldur's Gate and source code for Icewind Dale II altogether.
Fargo and the Caen brothers are two lessons in how not to run a company.
As someone who likes Elder Scrolls for what it is but detests Bethesda's """take""" of Fallout, Starfield's current negative state feels like decades of bad karma biting Bethesda in the ass. They just couldn't keep getting away with the bullshit forever.
Thank you so much for this video.
I don't think it was the unmitigated disaster that was Fallout 76, but I think more than anything, Starfield shows that the studio just doesn't have the mojo anymore. The setting is bland, the design is all over the place, and even the mainstream is rejecting their games now.
The time restriction in the main quest in Fallout 1 was not removed in the patch, it was just made longer.
less than 6 hours after i said "bethesda didn't save fallout they ruined it and turned it into asthetic" this drops
Sorry it took so long!
Buddy where do you think most of the fan base came from
As someone who came from fallout 3, I agree with OPs sentiment entirely. I loved that game as a kid and I'm happy to have been introduced to fallout, but fallout being a successful franchise off of mediocre games does not mean that a series is going to have a bright future. Fallout was the greatest at it's start. I doubt that anyone who holds the fallout IP will bring it to that greatness again as long as they're wielding fallout as a product to be consumed@@spartanx9293
I feel you. I've been saying that same thing since Fallout 3 came out.
@@spartanx9293 What's that have to do with anything?
Once Bethesda inevitably gets folded up into Microsoft the IP will be in eternal limbo just like all the other IP's Microsoft gobbled up back in the day.
Microsoft probably just wanted their savage lawyers. The way they gobbled up Fallout was reminiscent of a crocodile ripping chunks of flesh off their prey.
The king of video essays returns and crushes it once again.
Yeah, always felt that F3 was just like Force Awakens - a poor rehashing of what was before.
Bethesda doesn't understand fallout
bethesda doesnt understand any of its ips
@@Maethendias Starfield is completely soulless and lacks all humanity and passion. I'm sure they understand that.
can't and is never going to.
Bethesda COMPLETELY misses the point of Fallout.
Yeah, just like Interplay.
Okay, maybe not AS bad as interplay...
Long have I needed vindication like this.
After seven years, we got ourselves another banger Fallout vid.
As foretold by legend...
Hey. The vid you mentioned were making in the patracian tv podcast is here. I'm definitly gonna enjoy this immensly. Behind the scenes game dev can be more interesting stories then the games themselve!
Took a lot longer than I was anticipating, but I hope it was worth the wait.
Absolutely amazing video Indigo! The quote from Josh Sawyer at 56:08 was genuinely interesting to hear with how right he is when looking at RPGs now and specifically how well received and popular Balder’s Gate 3 is. It makes me wonder if Bethesda didn’t buy the IP, would Fallout go the same way as Baldur’s Gate 3.
Probably my favorite quote in the whole video. "Fans never left that style of game. PUBLISHERS left that style of game."
So applicable to all the abandoned genres that are now getting a revival in the indie/mid-market space.
The same way as BG3? Get a "sequel" in name only that shares absolutely nothing with the original games and actively goes out of it's way to disrespect them?
@@Indigo_Gaming It's the way of the industry. The players don't leave, it's the money men who've increasingly flooded into the industry as it's grown who insist that everything has to be a blockbuster, leading to safe, cookie-cutter, lowest common denominator game design.
@@z2ei Eh. I wouldn't go as far as saying it "disrespected" the original duology. But I do agree that Larian's game didn't need to share the name. Maybe they wanted the name recognition, but Larian's game could have stood on it's own with a different name.
@@z2ei Y'know, kind of ironic you mentioning that when the video itself points out that the OG concept for BG3 would've, effectively, shared little with the previous two entries.
It's sad what Fallout has become under Bethesda, hopefully this video gets millions of views.
Honestly, with the more I hear of Bethesda and how they have worked with other companies, including the ones when they dealt with the Prey (2006 one) license (Civvie 11 talked about it during his video) and how Bethesda was so petty and screwed over Obsidian with New Vegas, the more I never want to ever touch the company.
I guess it was a good thing that I got bored of Skyrim faster than I did with Fallout 3 or Oblivion and stopped touching any of their games afterwards.
Also the fact that Bethesda said themselves that they were the ones that 'Invented Shooters' since they acquired DOOM didn't help leave a sour taste in my mouth either. What a disgusting company.
Add Arkane to your list. They killed them to get their IPs cheap too.
An absolutely outstanding video, thank you for the love you put into creating this. It's really quite sad how idiotic management of this franchise has created the fallout we have today. I can only hope somehow the original creators will get another chance to take up fallout one more time.
I do watch reactions and blind playthroughs from time to time.
The amount of people trying to play the original Fallout like some cluncky outdated clicker with bad graphics by putting it into 1920x1080 where nothing will actually fight back and everything should have had an arrow pointing at the quest solution and complaining about everything on the screen being too small...
As well as the amount of people that say "Oh, I've just watched that cool new Fallout show that everyone is talking about. I'm a gamer, but I've never played any Fallout games. But now I will definitely install the Fallout 76 to see what it's all about!"...
These two things have almost succeeded at destroyed my soul.
Thank you for some healing, Indigo. One of my favorite channels for a good reason.
It causes me great pain when anybody plays Fallout 1/2 in higher resolution than 720p. Looks awful. The later patches gave you the option for widescreen, which is desirable (still think it messes up the dialogue screen though). But yeah, I've seen 1080p, 1440p and even 4k gameplay. Maddening!
You get angered easily
@@mantazerted7155 this sounds like a description of a perk.
First of all. Usually calm as a cucumber. And just as cool. I thus point you to my cool sunglasses for a proof 8^[
Second of all. COME ERE YOU HECKIN' NAUGHTY WIDDLE YOUUUUUGHHH!
To me, the most tragic thing about this whole story, beyond the series's loss of identity and intelligence, is that Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky do not own the licence, nor are they even acknowledged as its creators in the adaptation.
Leonard's quote from that ~2004 interview really got to me. You could see how frustrated they were that the thing they made ended up getting sold by one guy who didn't make it, to another guy who didn't make it. Such is the business, but I'm forever curious about what the Troika team (in a very similar desperate situation as the Morrowind team were in the early days) could have done with Fallout.
"Bethesda doesn't understand fallout" - an obscure subgenre on youtube
Fallout is when Nuka Cola and super mutants
@@plebisMaximus And Brotherhood of Steel everywhere
@@plebisMaximus And old 30's-50's music
'Member Vault Boy??!
Really liked Fallout Tactics, if they could have made it open exploration it would have been Jagged Alliance but Fallout.
Fast forward to today, almost every mainstream PC game is basically already ruined due to them being released on consoles and mobile which still puts huge constraints on how the game is designed, "by (PC) gamers for (PC) gamers" became "by nobodys for everyone".
Wake up to a new Indigo video…… oh hell yea
"Love the smell of mushroom clouds in the morning!"
We also have to remember that when it comes to development Bethesda prefer a to reduce down. This isn’t explicitly bad, but Bethesda (their not alone but one of the most aggressive) doesn’t look to streamline or build on up but just take a cleaver out cut out completely.
In hindsight Skyrim was the last game that they could really get away with. After Skyrim the bloody holes left behind were far too noticeable to look past to see what little bits were left behind.
Wow, I never realized just how scummy Bethesda was with interplay & Black Isle. Like I knew they screwed them over for Fallout New Vegas for the bonus money but this court shit is unreal.
I have no love for Herve Caen and how he took over Interplay, but Bethesda was arguably worse with how they led Interplay on for years, only to pull the rug under them at the last minute, proving they had no intention of letting Fallout Online happen.
You should look up the development of Prey 2 and how Bethesda mistreated Human Head Studios. Bethesda seems to make a habit of screwing over anyone doing contract work for them.
I first found out about it through Civvie 11's video on Prey, but there are other videos that go more in depth.
New Vegas devs have said they were never screwed over with the bonus money
Look at what Altman was up to before getting in to games and none of it is a surprise.
@@randeli7785 Yeah but if you tell them that then they have less of a reason to hate on Bethesda. Which is what a lot of fallout fan boys love to do.
This video flew by too quickly.
You make the best documentaries. Awesome as always!
That's great to hear. Usually means the pacing and editing is up to snuff. Glad you enjoyed!
Even just the game review snippets sound like they're from a better era, like wtf.
There have been occasional bad reviews since games existed, but in general, we usually got more from a review than the identity of the characters on-screen, the graphic fidelity, and how amazing the latest gooey scoop of Call of Duty is.
I've never even heard about Fallout having tv show spin-off, but statement of Howard being creator of the game/franchise/whatever is an insult and spit in the face of original creators and IP.
I'm surprised you didn't! It was everywhere a few months ago. I know that Emil, Todd and a couple others who worked on F3/F4 were executive producers on the show, and that usually comes with a credit, but heavily implying that Todd was somehow the mastermind behind it all when he hadn't touched the franchise until well after all its creators had been fired/quit from the company they bought it from, felt so wrong.
As someone who just started playing the franchise through, from Fallout 1 to currently New Vegas, it's still insane to me just how well they nailed down the aesthetic in just the very first game, a top down rpg from the 90s no less.
I was recently recording a director's commentary on my old Fallout video and praising the insane care and detail they put into simple things like the wall around Junktown. Unmatched!
I've been saying this since 2008. It's good someone was able to articulate thoughts I've had for half a life time. The paltry amount they paid for Fallout, just to creater Oblivion With Guns- the thing we all said was going to happen before the first screenshot even released- and now we've been watching this corpse shamble around for half its life.
Even Elder Scrolls isn’t what it used to be at Bethesda, with games being more in depth than what we got with Skyrim in Morrowind and Oblivion. I say this because The Elder Scrolls is an original Bethesda IP.
If you haven't already, you should try the ATOM games. They're pretty similar to fallout and have a pretty good story.
Streamed it a while back, I want to get back into it one day, along with Underrail.
@@Indigo_Gaming The expansion for it, Trudograd, also has power armor. And it's probably the best power armor I've seen in a game with how they handled it.
atom games are mid. you want actually fairly decent russian fallout? try nevada and sonora
What makes me happy is that the best, most beloved modern Fallout game is Fallout: New Vegas, made by the original devs. And it's not even close.
I met Steve Jackson last year at a convention, and he's still upset at the Fallout GURPS fallout... what a shame.
Yeah that sucks. I'm sure it would have helped him and his company a lot to be attached to Fallout, but at some point, when a licensor for a GENERIC ruleset keeps wanting to make changes to your setting and story, you gotta draw a line somewhere.
As a brand, I'd love for more companies to take a swing with Fallout. London is proof of concept in that it sure would be really sweet to get some Fallout from the perspectives of other countries. Also, a throw back to a traditional CRPG would be welcome too. I'd love to see what a Larian Fallout would look like.
Larian did to BG what Bethesda did to FO.
No thank you.
@@esteemedyamslmao
Everybody at interplay probably started yelling like Kirk in star trek every time they heard what khan did
Technically Caen is pronounced "cohh" (very French), but I don't want to fumble a foreign language so I went with the nearest anglicization of it. But yes, I get your joke, lol.
Really hope one day someone puts black hound online, a shame all of it has gone to waste. It sounds so interesting
Sawyer once tried to recreate it using the toolkit made for Neverwinter Nights, but I think it got abandoned as he got busy with paid projects.
Interesting, never heard about this!
I know is a cliche to hate on Bethesda now, but boy, they truly are scummy...
Fallout was art