Fallout 76 already had faced immense player backlash upon launch, owing to a bevy of problems that simply seem to be getting worse with time, and game that seems singularly ill-suited to what the Fallout brand had originally been known for. And then came Obsidian’s reveal trailer for The Outer Worlds, their upcoming RPG which seems a lot like what fans would want from a modern Fallout game, and which cheekily said “from the creators of the original Fallout and Fallout New Vegas”, the best received games in the series yet (from fans, at the very least).
But the statement wasn’t meant as a jab at Bethesda, nor does Obsidian like people using The Outer Worlds to hate on them, or on Fallout 76. Speaking to Game Informer, Obsidian’s CEO Feargus Urquhart said that Obsidian hadn’t even known Fallout 76 was in development when they started work on The Outer Worlds, and also said that Bethesda’s choice of direction for the series is every bit valid.
“People even said things about our trailer: ‘Oh man, just slamming it home to Bethesda!’ because we said the original creators of Fallout and makers of Fallout: New Vegas. We have storyboards from July that said that,” he said. “I have no ill will for Bethesda, I love playing Fallout games… We’re not fighting for the same dollars.”
“This isn’t meant to be negative – it can probably be taken as negative. We really enjoyed making Fallout: New Vegas and people really enjoy Fallout: New Vegas,” Urquhart continued. “Bethesda is looking to take the Fallout brand in a different direction. There’s nothing right or wrong about that. That’s their choice. They own it, they get to do what they want with it. But in our mind, there are people that enjoy where Fallout was. That is what we wanted to do with The Outer Worlds, to give people that. And you know what? Maybe that’s a bad decision from the standpoint of the number of people that will buy it. I don’t know… People seem to really enjoy what Fallout: New Vegas was, so let’s give them an experience that’s as similar as we can to that.”
It is, on the whole, a good reminder that fans can sometimes read too much into things, and get extremely vicious with their comparisons. While Fallout 76 continues to have its fair share of problems, hopefully Bethesda will keep at it, and bring it to whatever their original vision for it was intended to be.