I hate Bethesda part 2

In 1993 Interplay released a collection of games from its ten year history in the business. At that time it was just about as long a pedigree as anyone in the industry. It's an amazing set of games; Castles and The Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars and Battle chess just to name a few.

I was 12 when that collection came out. I'm not sure when I actually got it but it was one of the very few PC games I had at the time so it could not have been long afterwards. It wasn't the first game I'd ever played on a computer, but it was one of the first that I got to play all by myself. It was also the first on CD, and with a mouse.

My parents had always loved games, and it was through them I'd first been introduced. We'd play adventure games together regularly, with me usually "driving" at the keyboard (before mice no less). For a time reference we got our first PC about the time that King's Quest III was released, in 1986. Per the US census ( https://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p23-207.pdf ) having a computer at that time put us in a relatively small percentage. Between about 9-15% of the population at the time had them. It was not a small investment, which is probably why we so rarely paid for any games. Most of our them were copied onto disks from my uncle, accompanied by a huge binder filled with instruction manuals for copy protection answers.

I played all of the games multiple times of course, even Tass Times at Tonetown, but the star was the ugliest game in the collection, Wasteland. No game before or since has done more with less. How they managed to give me an illusion of such freedom when I was reading half the game out of the instruction manual I'll never know. I tried SO MANY times to save that damn dog. I caught a glimpse of martian adventure in some of the paragraphs and spent hours trying to track down how to get off the planet. It was a masterwork in keeping you from seeing the edges.

In 2000 I took my PC to college. One day after a long day of waking up after my classes had ended and playing Everquest (i.e. at 4 in the morning the next day) I saw the old Interplay disc and it made me think of Wasteland and made me wonder if they'd ever made a sequel.

Well, they did, but luckily I never got to play it. I did find Fallout 2, however.

I played Fallout 2 a bit, then bought Fallout 1 and played through it, then went back and played 2 all the way through. It was Wasteland with actually interesting combat and a real meaty story. It did the same amazing job of hiding the edges while improving on Wasteland in every respect.

It may not be well known but by the early 2000s PC games were already pretty well ensnared by the cult of the FPS and online play. In fact, the E3 I went to in 2001 was the debut of Halo. The adventure game as I'd known it was long dead, parsers replaced by point and clickers replaced by Myst and Riven knockoffs. RPGs had diablo-ized. Only Civ-types really help on in the Turn-based sphere.

Fallout even then was a relic. Even 2 was nearly three years old at that point. So it was a haven for me in a world of increasingly twitched based gameplay.

I anxiously awaited a third game. I didn't bother with tactics. I was waiting for a mainline entry. And I waited. And waited. Then things got really bad for Interplay. They were essentially bought out by a French company and Brian Fargo went on his way. Then they released Brotherhood of Steel (worst Fallout ever? HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, well, probably it is, even still but it sure has more competition now). Probably a low point.

Finally a third game was announced. I remember hearing vague news about it and following up online only to find who was taking control.

Bethesda.

I was giddy with anticipation. Here was one of my favorite developers working on my hands-down favorite game series. With the nature of the industry and the much vaunted death of turn based games, I was a bit worried to see a primarily real-time combat developer take over the franchise, but I had a lot of respect for the team and was sure they'd make the right decision.

So, join me next time for how they made all the wrong decisions.

Part I: https://steemit.com/gaming/@fromage/where-in-i-reveal-my-deepest-bias-part-i