Depressing. Very Depressing.

[A Black Falcon]

http://forums.interplay.com/viewtopic.php?t=35771

Read the first post. Makes complete sense to me, and I agree...

Oh fine. You're all lazy.

"Being a member of the team I can tell you what they were thinking. The new head honcho doesn't like PC games and has even stated that in the past. Its pretty obvious he was responsible for the death of BIS. There was alot of bad feelings between BIS and the rest of the company since BIS actually produced titles on a regular basis instead of dicking around like everyone else. It was all politics.

So now they have bet the future of the company on 2 unproven projects. Fallout BOS2 (the first hasn't shipped and everyone knows its going to tank) and a console game based on the Exalted license. So instead of supporting the team working on Fallout 3 which has a proven record and was FAR along in development, they rest the future on the unknown.

You can be sure Interplay will sell the Fallout license to someone else. They've made short-sighted quick money decisions in the past (Hunter license is an example). They figure they can sell it off for a quick buck and save all the development money while losing any long term profit. Brilliant.

They will survive for awhile since Vivendi is stupid enough to keep giving them money. Also when BGDA2 ships that will give them a big stack of money so they will screw around all next year on these dead end titles until the money finally dries up and they go under. They might survive until the end of next year if they don't lose all of development. No one trusts them now so everyone still there is actively searching for jobs."

BTW, InXile is making that new Bard's Tale game that has been mentioned before (after obtaining the liscence to the classic Interplay RPG series "The Bard's Tale"), and Obsidian has a a working agreement with Bioware (makes sense, since it's got like 15 people from Black Isle there and Bioware and Black Isle worked together on the BG games for at least five years...) and might be doing KOTOR 2.

I hope that those two Interplay-successors get the (best of) this new talent that was laid off...

Oh OB1, there is "good" news there -- as makes sense, Interplay will likely sell off Fallout at some time in the next year or two, or at least liscence it out to some other company for PC games. If that goes to a decent company, we may even get a new Fallout game... but it won't be quite the same as Fallout 3.

It's really tragic. Not just becaus BIS died, but because Fallout 3 was WELL into development and sounded like it was great... and if they were part of a more healthy company they'd also have the very cool sounding Baldur's Gate III... two games that sound so awesome, dead forever... :(