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Feargus Urquhart on the History of BIS

Posted by Rendelius @ Thursday - January 31, 2002 - 15:40 - Top

Now, this is an interesting one, spotted over at Duck & Cover: Feargus Urquhart from Black Isle Studios on why there is no Fallout 3, about the cancellation of Torn and other things. This is what he has to say about Fallout 3, and it contains some interesting background info on how things went at BIS. It's long, but well worth the time spent reading:

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.