It's been a while, but wasn't Jefferson supposed to be
TORN? How much time and money did Interplay waste on that thing? They licensed Lithtech for it. Fucked around for a few years, and ended up scrapping it. I don't even think any of those assets were able to be used in anything else they made, nor was the Lithtech engine they licensed. The whole reason they were doing TORN was because "RPGs needed to be Fantasy setting to sell", which was another trope from the early 2000s. Interplay followed a lot of these tropes down the shitter. It's kind of funny they decided to do Fallout 3 only afterwards.
Nah, Jefferson Engine was Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound. TORN was before that.
Yeah they definitively wasted a bunch of money on it, for fuck-all result. TORN was definitively part of the beginning of the end for Interplay.
Interplay also lost the D&D license for PCs in 2003. Which pretty much killed BIS' BG3 and led to Avellone's resignation. Because of that, The Black Hound was cancelled and they put all the work into making Fallout 3 using Jefferson.
Good call on the "RPGs need to be fantasy to sell". Highly ironic that in the end, they ran to Fallout, one of their own's the biggest denials of that trope.
AFAIK the timeline goes like this:
- 1997: Fallout released. Planescape Torment development begins, using the Infinity Engine
- 1998: FO2 released. Interplay decides that the next Fallout should be 3D.
- 1999: Planescape Torment released. Work on the first iteration of Fallout 3 starts, using the NDL engine. Cancelled because Interplay was inexperienced with 3D game engines, moved over development to what would be Icewind Dale.
- 2000: Icewind Dale Released. After the cancellation of the first FO3 iteration, Avellone started working on a Fallout tabletop game in his spare time, and ran his two legendary tabletop games which spawned much of Van Buren.
- 2001: TORN announced, developed by the same team behind Planescape Torment, then cancelled not long after. Development on Jefferson AKA Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound begins. Fallout Tactics released.
- 2002: BGIII is announced to be in-development. Uses their newly-created Jefferson Engine, which takes a lot of inspiration from Neverwinter Nights' Aurora Engine.
- 2003: Interplay loses the D&D License on computers (but not consoles). The Black Hound is cancelled. BIS is told to use Jefferson to make Fallout 3.
- Mid-2003: Work on Van Buren begins. According to Josh Sawyer, Van Buren had six months of development in it. Seeing as it was cancelled in December 2003, I think its reasonable to assume it began somewhere between May-June of 2003. According to Josh Sawyer, he kept asking Interplay to evaluate their work, but they never did it. "Interplay either had no interest or care for what we are doing." Sawyer resigns after they pull one of their remaining character designer artists to another project. Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader is released around this time.
- December 2003: Van Buren cancelled sometime after Josh Sawyer resigned. BIS closed. Focus shifted to
The Burned Game because Titus wanted to focus on console releases. We all know how that ended.
- 2004: The Game Which Shall Not Be Named was released. Bauldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II released.
According to Chris Avellone, Interplay lost its vision with Brian Fargo gone.
Yeah, Fallout 3 was definitively a Hail Mary for Black Isle.
I have a feeling that the kill-shot was the loss of the D&D rights. Had Interplay retained the D&D rights, BGIII would have probably been released in 2003. Had it done well, Interplay may have gotten enough money to not pull the plug and consider console crap was where it is at. BIS' Fallout 3 might even have been finished.
The one thing I remember from news posting as much as I did back in the early 2000s was pretty much everything AAA was either a Diablo clone or a Baldur's Gate clone, with the notable exception of Oblivion which annoyed the piss out of Vault Dweller. And honestly, the only BG-likes I remember that I actually liked were the ones from China, like Prince of Qin. In fact, I don't even recall any of the others by name. I do remember a whole slew of Diablo clones that sucked, and it wasn't until Divine Divinity and Sacred that something worth playing was released.
Oh yeah, that was definitively a thing. Everyone and his mother was making Diablo and BG clones. Except Bethesda, they were going full Consoletard with Oblivion.
Not to mention that it took developers forever to figure out decent control schemes for a controller, even though the PSX, N64, etc. had close to the layout and features modern controllers have. Even with the finalized XBox controller that's a standard these days, it still took them years to figure out a decent way of controlling things for each genre.
True, there was a lot of experimentation at the time, because a lot of genres were new to consoles.
The PSX controller was pretty damn good from what I remember right, and it was pretty "modern" as controllers go.
It's funny, I remember the N64 was a huge ungodly and ungainly heavy thing. However, a few years ago I did play some N64 games at a party in a bar, and it wasn't that bad. Either my memory is fucking with me or I remember it being heavy because I was a pre-teen with little kid hands.