Fallout: New Vegas Message Board

I’m most distressed that I didn’t get a chance to say hello to Chris ‘Planescape Torment’ Avellone during my limited time at Rezzed. Especially because the only other time I’ve met him when was when I was blind drunk on French wine and couldn’t manage anything more than a witless reference to talking skulls. Still, they do say you should never meet you heroes, so at least I haven’t had to risk discovering he has bad breath or doesn’t like eye contact or fiddles with his nipples during conversation. Instead, I can live vicariously and safely through this video of his hour-long natter about Obisidian’s strange history, his work at Black Isle and plans for the upcoming mega-Kickstartered Project Eternity.(more…)

On paper, Fallout: Project Brazil sounds like the stuff irradiated, scorpion-coated dreams are made of. It’s a ridiculously ambitious, Black-Isle-inspired fan-made prequel mod for New Vegas spanning a new vault, an entire new wasteland the size of Fallout 3′s, and multiple story-driven, highly choice-oriented episodes. The team that assembled it, meanwhile, comes from various corners of the professional entertainment world, which is – in part – the reason it took so long to finally see the sepia toned light of day. But now it’s here, in the gnarled, glowing ghoulflesh. I am kind of maybe excited a little a lot. But what’s actually in this installment? Wellllll…

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Obsidian’s a company that’s always stricken me as bizarrely restless. Despite its near-legendary Black Isle legacy, the Project Eternity and South Park developer’s rarely had an easy time finding a comfortable place in the industry. But then, when you think about it, that’s not entirely surprising. Both RPGs and storytelling in games – Obsidian’s wheelhouses – have spent countless years in constant flux. And though recent times and a massively successful Kickstarter have given the developer some solid ground to stand on, the eager hands of change are once again threatening to yank the rug out from under it. Uncertainty’s permeated the entire industry as of late, but Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart has no intention of blindly following the future. His plan? To redefine the whole RPG genre. During the recent DICE Summit in Las Vegas, he and I chatted about that.

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I am sad. I am sad because Fallout: New Vegas’ Project Brazil mod isn’t available yet, which means I can only ogle its incredibly impressive-looking peaks and valleys from afar. So here’s the skinny: it doesn’t actually take place in Brazil. Instead, the story begins in California years before New Vegas’ courier ever began his promising career by being shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave. Your new main character’s goal? To reach Los Angeles. But the entire new wasteland of San Bernardino is rife with factional conflicts, and oh goodness also there is this: “The vision of Fallout 2 will be honoured by Project Brazil. Project Brazil is a quieter, more harsh and severe world than Fallout 3 or New Vegas. It feels like a real place spotted with rare moments of absurdity and fear, split between multiple rising civilizations all trying to fight for what they want or need in a world recovering from the Great War.” Yes. Yesssssss.

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Fallout: New Vegas was a glitch-ridden, unwieldy beast of a game, but it’s a testament to the wonderful (and very Black-Isle) world Obsidian crafted that – in spite of rampant instability and a fiddly engine – it still stands as one of my absolute favorite games. And in spite of the couple-hundred-some-odd hours I’ve put into it, I want more. Semi-recently, I had quite a joyous time with the harder-core-than-thou JSawyer mod, but now I’m getting ready to dig into an official-unofficial project that positively dwarfs it. In short, a modder by the name of “Moburma” went sifting through New Vegas’ code and excavated scrapped bits and bobs of all shapes and sizes. The end result? A restoration project that borders on insane.

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Let there much be rejoicing. Go on, rejoice. Well, at least smile. No? Well, how about a smiley instead? You won’t have to use your face at all. You only have to press two buttons. Come on, let’s do it together. On three. One, two, three : And again. One, two, three )

That wasn’t so hard, was it? The reason for this rejoicing is that Wasteland 2 just hit its latest crowdsourcing bonus target, $2.1 million – and as well as meaning it’s now accrued some 231% of its original target, it confirms that Chris Avellone and his comrades at Obsidian are coming onboard to co-develop Brian Fargo’s post-apocalyptic RPG.

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Sour news to kick off this morning, as Joystiq is reporting that Obsidian Entertainment, the role-playing game-focused developer of titles like Fallout: New Vegas and Neverwinter Nights 2, has been hit with a number of layoffs. Citing a tip received overnight, as well as a number of tweets and forum posts on the official Obsidian website, the report claims that as many as 20-30 employees from various divisions were cut loose, including an employee hired on as recently as this past Monday.

Many of the staffers apparently let go were working on an upcoming, as-yet-unannounced project that had been codenamed "Project North Carolina," which is now purportedly canceled. However, some were staffers that had been working on the upcoming South Park RPG, which will be published by THQ.

Those affected reportedly include lead programmer Frank Kowalkowski, who had been with the company for a little more than eight and a half years, as well as lead producer Jason Fader.

Obsidian has yet to release an official statement on the layoffs. We'll update this story if/when they do.