[Black Isle Studios] Jefferson to nie Fallout!
Jefferson to wewnętrzna nazwa gry, nad którą pracują ludzie z Black Isle. Przez długi czas byłem przekonany, że Jefferson=Fallout 3. Pierwsze wątpliwości pojawiły się po wypowiedziach Chrisa Avellone'a [chodzi o słynne Fallout 3 is not in production], które można było potraktować jako żart. Niestety, dzisiaj jestem pewnien, że pod nazwą "Jefferson" nie kryje się FO3, ale zupełnie nowa i miejmy nadzieję wnosząca "swieży powiew" gra cRPG. Dowód pojawił się na forum Black Isle - fragment wypowiedzi pracownika BIS [J.E. Sawyer] na kanale IRC #blackisle:

<BIS_JESawyer> We really aren't working on Fallout 3. Really. As Feargus said in an interview a while back, a different team started on FO3 designs before IWD, but that got scrapped.

[Naprawdę nie pracujemy na FO3. Naprawdę. Jak już Feargus jakiś czas temu powiedział w wywiadzie inna grupa rozpoczęła tworzenie FO3, ale prace zostały zarzucone na rzecz Icewind Dale]

<BIS_JESawyer> Jefferson will make some people happy, some people sad. It's not Fallout 3, as we've already said.
<Rhombus> So Josh... Is Jefferson an IE game?.. or can't you answer that?
<BIS_JESawyer> I think I can safely say that, whether you like or dislike the rules and setting for Jefferson, it is going to be a ROLEPLAYING GAME.
<BIS_JESawyer> Emphasis on ROLEPLAYING.
<Rhombus> So, Josh.. Can you comment on when you'll announce Jefferson?
<BIS_JESawyer> With Jefferson, I hope that we will make a game that focuses a great deal on character development, mature character interactions, and really engrossing roleplaying environments.
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a najbardziej dziwi mnie plan wydawniczy CD Projekt, w którym nadal widzimy pozycję Fallout 3 [producent: Interplay, w sklepach: dalej w 2002]

[Fallout 3] ...is not in production
W wywiadzie z RPGVault dotyczącym Icewind Dale II Chris Avellone z Black Isle Studios wielokrotnie powiedział, że Fallout 3 nie jest na razie w produkcji:

"ALT key: The ALT key is the greatest hotkey in the game. Just hold it down, and ALL doors and containers and ground items in the area are highlighted. Fallout 3 is not in production. You should always keep your left pinky hovering over the ALT key and stab it occasionally while playing to see if you've missed anything."

i

"Combat: The space bar is your friend. When you see an enemy, hit it, and then drag your cursor over your opponents to see what you're up against. Fallout 3 is not in production...."

1) I think it should be 3D, because I think the effects that we can do with lighting and particles will make mini-guns look really freakin cool. We will also be able to have a whole lot more varied types of people by being able to swap out body parts. We'll be able to represent the actual weapons on people instead of just using the same pistol for every kind of pistol in the game.

2) I would like for us to come up with a game system that is detailed and quick. I don't have an answer for how we are going to do that yet, but that is what I'd like to see us come up with. The detailed part because that is what I think most of us felt was the joy of Fallout, the quick part because I think big battles are fun - but the time it took to go through them in the Fallouts was soul numbing.

3) I'd like there to be changes to the game system that make skill points mean more and not seem so arbitrary sometimes. We need to come up with something concerning skills that make it fun to get your Small Guns to 23,000, but is also balanced in the game. Ramping up the cost per skill point in Fallout 2 worked, but was kind of lame as well.

4) We need to come up with other things for the skills to do. This could help non-combat characters be more viable and less likely to get dropped - or just used as pack mules.

5) The Companion systems needs to be thought about and balance made between how much they act independently and how much the player has control over them. I liked the fact that you could get shot in the back by one of your party members, however if you have to re-load the game 40 times because of that then it's not so cool.

6) The colors of the wasteland have to remain what they were in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. Since the game no longer has to be palatted (256 colors) we might be tempted to go in a different direction. This might make sense for certain new types of areas, however areas like the Hub should still be a dry, dilapidated place.

7) We need to use a real world place located somewhere in the US. This connects it to the past events of Fallout, and gives us context for the creation of what is new over what is old.

8) We need to make absolutely sure that we balance all of the character types. If we have melee characters they need to be no more, and no less viable than small guns, big guns, or sniper type characters.

9) The different power groups developed in Fallout 1 and 2 should not be forgotten. These really helped give the wasteland flavor.

10) The player should be able to be naughty or nice and still get to the end of game. However, a lot of decisions people can make shouldn't be clear when it comes to which is the nice way and which is the naughty way.

11) The one thing I'm not totally sold on is allowing people to talk their way through the whole game. This is probably something Chris Avellone and I might disagree on - but this is more a personal opinion, which I'll probably keep to myself when we start really deciding on things.

I'll think of other things and post those as well.

[Fallout 3] Dlaczego jeszcze nie powstał?
Takie pytanie padło ostatnio na forum Black Isle Studios. Bardzo często sam sobie je zadawałem, tym bardziej ucieszyła mnie zaskakująco szczera odpowiedź Feargusa Urquharta. Odpowiedź przytoczyłem tutaj w całości:

Fallout 3 not Starting : This is sort of long, so you'll need to bear with me. We actually did begin in early 1999, a couple months right after we shipped Fallout 2. Things were not coming together very quickly, which we were working on to figure out why. At the same time, I was very concerned about not being able to ship a title in 2000, because of what was happening across the rest of Interplay. Interplay seemed to be having a lot of problem deciding products to ship that would actually make money, and I didn't want to have to lay off anyone else (we had gone through a lay off in late 1998).

So, I thought about using the Infinity Engine to make a dungeon crawl game that was initially called Dungeon Crawler, then Dragonspine (I think), and then finally Icewind Dale when the team thought that the snowy look would help differentiate the game even further from Baldur's Gate. So in essence, the Fallout 3 team became the Icewind Dale team.

About eight months later, the Torment team finished Torment and we decided to have them go onto work on the project that would become TORN. That decision was made for two reasons. The first was that I didn't want to take Fallout 3 away from the Fallout 3 team that was currently working on Icewind Dale. The second reason was that a lot of the people on Torment wanted to go work on something new and different - not a Fallout game.

So, after patches and localizations the Icewind Dale team was ready to work on something in July of 2000. The problem at that point was that Chris Parker and I needed to put all of our effort into getting Baldur's Gate 2 to ship, so that Interplay could make money in September of that year. We couldn't really focus on launching another title right then, because of the time crunch and because of the resources in the division. At that time, we really did not have any programmers that could go onto Fallout 3 or an engine that we could use to develop it. I also knew, that the company was in no condition to hire people for a full third internal team in Black Isle. So, I decided for us for most of the Icewind Dale team to go onto Heart of Winter and the rest of the team to round out the TORN team.

So, everyone in the division was working on titles until about March of 2001, which was when Heart of Winter shipped. During that time, we had also cancelled Stonekeep 2 for a number of reasons, and lost most of the programming staff from that project. However, we did launch a new title in October or November of that year for the remains of the Stonekeep 2 team and started hiring people. Now, I probably shouldn't say this, but I will anyway. We chose to not have that be Fallout 3, because we had promised the people on Heart of Winter that many of them would be the core team on Fallout 3. Also at the time, the person who would and will be the Lead Designer on Fallout 3 was helping Snowblind out with the design of Dark Alliance. All of that and the feedback we received about Heart of Winter being too short led to our decision to develop Trials of the Luremaster.

That brings us to June of 2001. We then tried to ramp up TORN, because it was obviously in trouble and pretty much everyone that wasn't working on the new game went to work on that project. Then with Interplay's financial problems, we layed some people off and cancelled TORN. So that I could retain as much of Black Isle as I could, I had to come up with a project that could be finished relatively quickly and was a slam dunk with very little to no risk of it getting done on time. That project is the Monroe project which we are announcing within the week.

As I said that is a long winded explanation of what happened. I'm not sure if that explains why Fallout 3 hasn't happened to you. But those are the reasons and the decisions that were made that have taken us from right after Fallout 2 to today.

Przegląd wydarzeń tygodnia:)
W mijającym tygodniu wydarzyło się wiele rzeczy, które mają jakiś związek z Fallout [dziwne, że wcześniej nikt Was o tym nie poinformował]:
przede wszystkim serwis RPG Vault przedstawił drugą część wywiadu z szefem Black Isle Studios, czyli Feargusem Urquhartem. Bardzo ciekawa lektura, gorąco zapraszam! Najważniejsze pytanie [moim zdaniem] dotyczyło Fallout 3, tzn. czy realne jest stworzenie F3 w ciągu dwóch następnych lat?

Jonric: How does Black Isle fit in this picture, and what are your plans and key goals for the next two or three years? How realistic would it be to expect Fallout 3 within this time? Is it likely you'll make more D&D-based games?

Feargus Urquhart: Over the next two or three years, the goals of the division are really to keep on creating and producing the CRPGs that people have been buying over the last five years. I hope that we can evolve what we do in such a way that we can keep on making these games with enough newness in them that people will enjoy each one without us having to write a new engine every single time. This will really let us continue to make games quickly and hopefully not have to let people wait years for the sequels to some of our games like Fallout.

As for the timeline of Fallout 3, since we are not currently working on it, it's hard to say when it is going to come out. I hope that we can start production on it within the next six months or so, and then get it out within a two-year time frame from that. I don't want anyone to take that as a promise, because as I said, we are not currently working on it. Now for D&D games, most of us still really enjoy working with the D&D system and the Forgotten Realms, so there really would be no reason other than business ones where we would stop making those kinds of games as well.

Feargus Urquhart powiedział, że obecnie nie trwają żadne prace nad Fallout 3. Ma jednak nadzieję, że w ciągu sześciu miesięcy uda się rozpocząć proces tworzenia Fallout 3.
źródło: RPG Vault

Lista PC Gamer
Jedno z najlepszym czasopism dla graczy [PC Gamer] stworzyło listę najbardziej oczekiwanych gier. Na czwartm miejscu znalazł sie Fallout 3.
źródło: DAC