Obsidian CEO Dreams Of Fallout: Los Angeles

[Karloff]

Obsidian CEO Dreams Of Fallout: Los Angeles

Feargus Urquhart says one of the biggest stumbling blocks to a Fallout: LA isn't Bethesda, but consoles.

Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian, would love to do a Fallout: New Vegas 2 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/miracle-of-sound/3833-Trip-To-Vegas-Fallout-New-Vegas], except that it wouldn't necessarily be set in Vegas. He's looking a bit further west, at Los Angeles, and dreaming of what might have happened when the bombs started dropping.

"I think if we were to do Fallout: New Vegas 2 - or just a new Fallout - we would probably separate it from what the internal team at Bethesda's doing," Urquhart says. "We'd keep it on the West Coast, because we're West Coast people. They're East Coast, so it makes sense." Just a short distance away from Vegas is the City of Angels, a pleasant - and from Urquhart's perspective, usefully confined - spot for some mutated jollies. Urquhart sees it as a mix between Walking Dead survival-style horror and Fallout, thanks to all the radiation.

Urquhart acknowledges that his dream is just that, for the moment, but says that Obsidian's good working relationship with Bethesda means that there are fewer obstacles than there might otherwise be. The big problem, as he sees it, is "basically, what does all the console crap mean?" So long as there's an air of indecision about whether the next generation is actually coming out soon, developers won't be eager to dive headfirst into new projects. Add that to mobile and F2P, and you get a volatile mix that, Urquhart believes, is putting a lot of developers off new projects.

"So that's a lot of the conversation we've had with publishers," Urquhart says. "'OK, how do we get back to normal - whatever normal is going to be.' That's just the process right now."

Don't hold your breath, is the upshot of all that; but there's always a chance that, if the new normal emerges sometime soon, we may yet see what Obsidian could do with a mutant-infested La La Land.

Source: RockPaperShotgun [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/12/and-heres-obsidians-idea-for-fallout-new-vegas-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rockpapershotgun%2Fsteam+%28Rock%2C+Paper%2C+Shotgun%3A+Steam+RSS%29]


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[Canadamus Prime]

Um... one problem. You visit part of LA in the first Fallout. I don't suppose that will be a big issue, but will they be taking that into account when developing this? Will they include the Boneyard and the Gunrunners as visitable locations?

 

[Daystar Clarion]

More Obsidian Fallout is always a good thing.

I played the crap out of New Vegas, they created a brilliantly immersive world, with great characters.

 

[Bleidd Whitefalcon]

The guy may have noticed there's this device out there called a pc. You can play games on a pc. This means you don't need to rely on consoles to build games of a genre that really doesn't translate well to consoles.

Bethesda would probably have them make it a multiplatform release. Would make sense because both the 3D Fallouts have been. Besides, if it WASN'T, can you imagine the shitstorm it would kick up? So yeah, consoles ARE the issue here.

 

[Erttheking]

Oh boy. I sense a console vs PC flamewar on the horizon.

 

[Sack of Cheese]

I wish they'd make a Fallout: Australia game one day. Most of modern games are based on US locations... So jelly!

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

I wish they'd make a Fallout: Australia game one day. Most of modern games are based on US locations... So jelly!

You've gotta actually shoot a nuke at some other country to deserve a parody game like Fallout.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas really seemed like different games, and I was not a fan of New Vegas at first. I have come to appreciate both, and I'd be excited if Obsidian and Bethesda would keep the fork in the road distinct. New Vegas was much more social and less violent I daresay, whereas the true lonely dystopic sensation of the wasteland was far more apparent in Fallout 3.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

I wish they'd make a Fallout: Australia game one day. Most of modern games are based on US locations... So jelly!

Not that Fallout: Australia or Fallout: Any Other Place would be a bad idea but the setting of Fallout is SO soaked in Americana (and not just the somewhat irritating uber patriotic stuff in Fallout 3) that it'd be difficult. The whole "Futuristic 1950's based on Cheesy Sci-Fi" is so super American it's hard to separate let alone the proliferation of guns, the whole Cowboy aesthetic of New Vegas... yeah... very American.

Still I'd love to see Obsidian tackle another Fallout, I enjoyed New Vegas a lot more than Fallout 3 , but I'm pretty sure they're going to have to wait until Bethesda gives us Fallout 4 (which for the record I will still play and love, just probably not as much as Obsidian's next Fallout).

 

[Therumancer]

I have mixed opinions on the subject, the problem with moving the games around to a new location every installment is that it becomes increasingly un-apocolyptic as we're seeing far too much in the way of surviving people, buildings, etc. The more major locations surviving in any recognizable sense the worse it is for the game, if no place of note really got turned into a total crater, it wasn't much of a war. This is also the problem with going international with the series and showing other parts of the world surviving to some degree.

See, as the series goes right now chains of communication are pretty much cut, and information might not be the best. It could be argued that you only thought you visited an area in or around LA, and of course someone like Tenpenny could of course just be a lying con man (which seems likely, given how much the entire enviroment would have changed if he was telling the truth). You got your geography wrong (everyone did) and you have people spinning elaborate BS stories for their own benefit like in "The Postman" it works.

Being the most powerful nation to ever exist, especiallty militarily, it makes a degree of sense that the US might have survived to some extent. DC would probably be one of the most heavily protected areas by definition in terms of interception capabilities and any kind of hypothetical "Star Wars" program (we know there were orbital missles under US command). Las Vegas is kind of isolated and of little strategic value. The actual coasts on the other hand would likely be decimated given the way the US is based heavily around naval power. So many missles would have been condensed over the east and west coast and every major city LA, New York, San Fancisco, and even some minor ones like the New London/Groton/Waterford area for strategic reasons that it's doubtful there would locally be any ground left, never mind the skeletal remains of buildins. It's why so many hypothetical post-nuke worlds show the coast lines of the US literally pushed back/eroded because of the sheer number of bombs that would have been fired there to have any hope of beating the US and it's military because that's pretty much where our biggest and nastiest bases are for things like our Carriers, and Nuclear Submarines.

I get why someone might think a Post-Apocolyptic LA might be fun, and why Los Angelinos in paticular might want it (as people would want such games in their part of the world, showing survival, and of course the fun-factor of it just being their region) but some concepts just really don't work... if Fallout decides to go to some of these demanded locations it will be the end of what integrity the series as a whole has.

Truthfully if you were dealing with a non-nuclear apogolypse, caused by say some kind of a virus (not nessicarly a zombie one) or whatever, then you could have a slowly recovering population and set it pretty much anywhere, but the very concept of an intelligently guided nuclear exchange for purposes of war means that some things and places just wouldn't be there at all. In general the more densely populated the region your in, the more infrastructure you have, and the closer you are to any kind of military or emergency services, the less likely you are to have anything at all, even a decaying building, marking where you are. Especially on the coasts where by definition the military would be leaving through your back yard (comparitively speaking) to go elsewhere. If you have harbours/piers/warehouses/shipping guaranteed your doomed, your by definition a priority target if the country was ever on a full wartime footing.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Except, you know, Los Angeles was reduced to a smoking crater called the Boneyard that made the Capital Wasteland look like New Vegas in comparison.

 

[elvor0]

I wish they'd make a Fallout: Australia game one day. Most of modern games are based on US locations... So jelly!

You've gotta actually shoot a nuke at some other country to deserve a parody game like Fallout.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas really seemed like different games, and I was not a fan of New Vegas at first. I have come to appreciate both, and I'd be excited if Obsidian and Bethesda would keep the fork in the road distinct. New Vegas was much more social and less violent I daresay, whereas the true lonely dystopic sensation of the wasteland was far more apparent in Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 was certainly more desolate and wasted, I'll give you that, but it just felt... off given the lore. The Capital wasteland was in a worse state than the areas of FO 1/2. And given this is set quite a while after those games, it seems odd that people were /still/ scrabbling around in the dirt. Plus the whole thing with the water didn't make any sense.

I enjoyed 3, but New Vegas I enjoyed much much more, even not having played Fallout 1/2 until a short time before 3s release. I suspect you've heard the same point many times before, but vegas felt more "Fallout", wheras 3 felt like it took the theme, and just sort of did its own thing. Mind you, if they do staggered East and West coast games, with Bethesda on one side and Obsidian on the other then everyone's happy.

 

[Mr.Amakir]

Um... one problem. You visit part of LA in the first Fallout. I don't suppose that will be a big issue, but will they be taking that into account when developing this? Will they include the Boneyard and the Gunrunners as visitable locations?

Why don´t you read the original Rock Paper Shotgun article?

Spoiler

And we need an interesting confined area. So I mean, it could be LA. Fallout LA. That could be interesting. It?d probably be The Boneyard, which is from Fallout 1. It could be very different. It could be almost a Walking Dead meets Fallout-like thing because of all the radiation.?

 

[Legion]

You know, the idea of different developers creating different Fallout games in other locations is actually a pretty cool idea. I reckon they should give all teams the same tools to use (so the style/interface is the same) and get them making them all over the world.

Ignoring how it'd never work, how cool would that be?

 

[Adon Cabre]

[HEADING=1]fear driven industry [/HEADING]

Console speculation. This is very bad. Even developers and Publishers have no idea what's going on at SONY, Microsoft & Nintendo. That says a lot for transparency. Showing no secrets for fear of spec leaks keeps everyone in the dark. These giants are afraid of each other in what they see to be an increasingly competitive market. And seeing as how the Wii U couldn't meet its sales projection, only further causes caution in a market that needs risk and innovation.

[HEADING=2]An idea from 2006 (Wii) = backwards thinking[/HEADING]

We can't keep comparing the old generation of consoles launched in 2005 (Xbox360), 2006 (Wii), and 2007 (PS3) to an economy of 2013! The Market has grown. And just like any thriving market, expectations will and should be higher! Ask Apple. They broke records in sales last year, but their stock plummeted.


This Console driven Industry is sorely lacking in innovation. Does anybody realize that the PS3 and Xbox360 controller have undergone virtually no alterations in the last 10+ years? Meanwhile, the cellphone went from 9 press-buttons, to a qwerty keyboard, then resistance touchscreen, then LED, and finally full HD:Retina display capacity.

[HEADING=2]Mozilla Seabird Concept[/HEADING]

My parents love all of the new OS systems on their cell phones. But they despise using the clunky, awkward PS3 controller for Netflix. And I don't blame them. And what does Nintendo do? They go back to a handheld controller. Everyone wants to stay safe.

This industry is actually very traditional. No one wants to risk. But I blame consumers, who praise complacency in games and in tech with their $ while the rest of the world develops alternate, and more exciting methods of pleasure.

I want a vision, and I certainly don't want to be a dinosaur using the keyboard and mouse.

 

[rofltehcat]

Let me throw cold war Berlin as a location into the pool for a non-US Fallout title... It would probably have been one of the most "interesting" places to be, had the cuban missile crisis gone wrong.

Other than that: Give me more Fallout! LA would be great! I want to visit the boneyard again!

 

[GonzoGamer]

The guy may have noticed there's this device out there called a pc. You can play games on a pc. This means you don't need to rely on consoles to build games of a genre that really doesn't translate well to consoles.

Yea, and after playing New Vegas on the PS3, I would have to say that the only way I'd buy another Fallout game from them is for the PC. I've never had a game crash on me so many times...on any platform.