SlipperyBrick is a huge fan of the Fallout franchise. In fact, I would rank the Fallout series as my all time favorite right behind Planescape: Torment. I loved the Fallout humor. The music ,the fifties cartoon-ish illustrations and the ability to put a shiny metal ball through the eyes of a mutant at 50 yards with my Red Ryder BB gun.

Like many fans I have waited for the release of Fallout 3 with a great sense of expectation. Then as the game was sold by Interplay to Bethesda, I assumed that the game would just die. Apparantly, Bethesda has been developing the game since late 2004 and is now working on it with most of its resources.

According to Video Game News,

Speaking to Todd Howard (Executive producer of Oblivion, Morrowind and Fallout) with regard to Bethesda’s plans for 2007 and beyond, he told us; “We started work (on Fallout 3) in late 2004 with a few people. We only had about 10 people on it until Oblivion wrapped, but most of our staff is on it now.” Is it wishful thinking that Fallout 3 will eventually be released on Microsoft’s next-gen machine? With the game itself utilising the same Gamebryo engine as Oblivion, perhaps not. And promised to be as huge and open-ended as their multi-award winning 2006 effort, demand for Fallout 3 on the Xbox 360 would be huge.

“We have pretty long preproduction phases on our stuff,” continues Howard “doing concepts, design, building prototypes, and such. We should be ready soon to show it off, but we’ll see.”

So it looks like Xbox fans may even get some Fallout love. Hopefully Bethesda doesn’t sell out the Fallout franchise for a quick profit on the Xbox. I’m hopeful because games like Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel were Xbox games that played well on the PC also. I think the story of a game is what is important to RPG fans like myself. Hopefully Bethesda will give us something as good as or better than Oblivion.