Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Roguey]

Everything Black Isle has done was a megahit, and remains a megahit 20 years later.

Whether it made profit? I don't give a shit.

You can only be in the position Todd Howard is in when you deliver megahits. Black Isle certainly tried and failed with TORN.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

You can only be in the position Todd Howard is in when you buy someone else's IP.

Fixed.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Obsidian made three undeniably great RPGs (MOTB, F:NV, and KOTOR2), a nouveau Infinity Engine and a well-regarded (even on the Codex!) RPG in it, and several other titles that at least some people seem to like. It did so while remaining independent from giants like EA, and in so doing, nurtured a lot of great talent and paid a lot of people a lot of money doing jobs they loved, even if some of them stopped loving those jobs in the process. Hard to see why you would hate on them.

I think the sentiment here isn't whether Obsidian have been good for RPGs or not (they have). It's more aboutt whether they underperformed given their potential. I mean, we're talking about of a core group of developers from arguably the most accomplished RPG developer in the West, who started their own company and had full control to do things their way. They've had level of know-how and expertise far beyond the level available to anyone else in the industry, and by a mile. They were all still basically young adults with room to grow into even better versions of themselves. That's the thing that always amazes me by the way, these fucking guys have made original Fallouts and PST while still in mid 20s.

So with all of that potential, 15 years later. Should they still be a struggling company that has to worry about the future, while Todd Howards of the world are driving around in different limo every day of the week?

That's what always bugs me about Bethesda made Fallouts, by the way. It's like George Lucas making the New Hope only to get bought up by a studio and forced to hunt down random contracts just to pay the bills, or Pink Floyd going bankrupt and being forced to play Lady Gaga pop covers on prom nights. All while some talentless hack is laughing all the way to the bank with a creation that isn't his.

Just because they had the potential to make incredible RPGs doesn't mean they had the potential to make commercially successful ones, and, unfortunately, without commercial success you'll never have the freedom to make something like PS:T (the late 90s being kind of an aberration since Interplay could just sell stock to raise money and everyone would lap it up--no coincidence that the RPG renaissance ended not long after the dotcom bubble). Like any other medium, the most popular things are rarely the best ones. The stunning success of Bethesda is all the evidence you need that commercial success actually has an inverse relationship with quality--the masses have bad taste. I love Obsidian, but if I had to invest my own money in an independent game studio, I'd give it to Bethesda/Zenimax, not Feargus. Todd Howard is a plague on the industry; he's also a good earner. The shit he makes will always be more popular than legitimate RPGs.

The original Fallouts and PS:T are arguably the best RPGs of all time, maybe the best video games of all time, but they weren't phenomenal sellers. The Fallouts did okay, PS:T was pretty disappointing. None of them came close to Baldur's Gate, which came out at roughly the same time and was much, much worse.

Early Obsidian had many of the same problems as Troika, which makes sense when you consider it's a similar group of guys during an overlapping time period. Sure, they had a ton of amazing creative talent, but did they have anyone who could run a business? In a way, it's incredible that the company coasted for as long as it did before having an existential crisis. And it's just as incredible that they've been able to bounce back.

You can only be in the position Todd Howard is in when you deliver megahits. Black Isle certainly tried and failed with TORN.

Wow, I'm glad I never knew this existed or I would've been very sad when it was cancelled. Of course, Interplay was sliding inexorably towards bankruptcy at the time so I'm not sure how much of proto-Obsidian's failure here should be attributed to Feargus and the gang.

 

[Roguey]

Fixed.

During the great bidding war for the Fallout license, they were up against Activision, Troika, and Obsidian. They had Morrowind money, the others did not (Well, Activision technically had the money, they just didn't want to part with more than what they offered).

Of course, Interplay was sliding inexorably towards bankruptcy at the time so I'm not sure how much of proto-Obsidian's failure here should be attributed to Feargus and the gang.

They made a huge mistake going with Lithtech.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Early Obsidian had many of the same problems as Troika, which makes sense when you consider it's a similar group of guys during an overlapping time period. Sure, they had a ton of amazing creative talent, but did they have anyone who could run a business?

The two are mutually exclusive. You either run a business and make money or you make interesting, creatively free & rich artistic projects.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Fixed.

During the great bidding war for the Fallout license, they were up against Activision, Troika, and Obsidian. They had Morrowind money, the others did not (Well, Activision technically had the money, they just didn't want to part with more than what they offered).

Surely you must be mistaken. 4 different companies went into bidding war over an IP from a developer that never had a megahit? That cannot be right. Why does Todd have to spend millions on something that wasn't even that succesful, when he has that unmatched ability to deliver commercial success?

Try to pick a narrative you're trying to push and stick to it, because you're running in circles of your own making right now.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Of course, Interplay was sliding inexorably towards bankruptcy at the time so I'm not sure how much of proto-Obsidian's failure here should be attributed to Feargus and the gang.

They made a huge mistake going with Lithtech.

I don't dispute that, but two or three years earlier they would've been able to recover from picking the wrong engine. It looks like they started work on Torn in January of 2000, two months before the NASDAQ peaked, which was a totally different world from the summer of 2001 when it was cancelled. When they made the plans for Torn, Interplay appeared to be a viable company. They never would've tried to make anything ambitious if they'd known what dire straits the business would be in a year-and-a-half later. But that's not Black Isle's fuckup, it was just one of the many perils of being part of a publicly traded tech company in 2000-2003. Also, wasn't this cancelled right around the time Titus Software acquired a controlling interest in Interplay? Even if it happened before Titus came in, the board never would've let that happen if the business hadn't been totally on the ropes.

Surely you must be mistaken. 4 different companies went into bidding war over an IP from a developer that never had a megahit? That cannot be right. Why does Todd have to spend millions on something that wasn't even that succesful, when he has that unmatched ability to deliver commercial success?

Try to pick a narrative you're trying to push and stick to it, because you're running in circles of your own making right now.

Bethesda paid $5.75 million for the whole Fallout IP in 2007, after they'd already gotten the deal to make Fallout 3. That's not what you pay for a mega hit franchise. The fact that broke ass outfits like Obsidian and Troika were even in the running tells you this was not considered a super valuable IP.

 

[Fairfax]

Obsidian made three undeniably great RPGs (MOTB, F:NV, and KOTOR2), a nouveau Infinity Engine and a well-regarded (even on the Codex!) RPG in it, and several other titles that at least some people seem to like. It did so while remaining independent from giants like EA, and in so doing, nurtured a lot of great talent and paid a lot of people a lot of money doing jobs they loved, even if some of them stopped loving those jobs in the process. Hard to see why you would hate on them.

I don't hate them at all. I wish they hadn't wasted so many opportunities and made even more great RPGs. Still, Obsidian's fans tend romanticize the studio's record and blame it all on the "evil publishers", and the reality is quite different.

The two are mutually exclusive. You either run a business and make money or you make interesting, creatively free & rich artistic projects.

I disagree. DA:O was in a good middle-ground between the mainstream and traditional RPG crowds. The actual content and systems could've been far better, of course, but I thought it had an acceptable amount of depth for a AAA production. BioWare didn't have to dumb their games down afterwards. They could've kept making games as deep as DA:O and ME1 forever and they would've done just fine. Same goes for Bethesda and Morrowind, really.

I don't dispute that, but two or three years earlier they would've been able to recover from picking the wrong engine. It looks like they started work on Torn in January of 2000, two months before the NASDAQ peaked, which was a totally different world from the summer of 2001 when it was cancelled. When they made the plans for Torn, Interplay appeared to be a viable company. They never would've tried to make anything ambitious if they'd known what dire straits the business would be in a year-and-a-half later. But that's not Black Isle's fuckup, it was just one of the many perils of being part of a publicly traded tech company in 2000-2003. Also, wasn't this cancelled right around the time Titus Software acquired a controlling interest in Interplay? Even if it happened before Titus came in, the board never would've let that happen if the business hadn't been totally on the ropes.

BIS itself wasn't in trouble, but Interplay was in deep shit already, so they had to cut their losses. Even FO3 was put on hold twice because of it, and the whole point of the IWD games was to make a quick buck. Also, even if they'd kept working on TORN, it would've been a disaster. They actually dodged a bullet, as I explained here.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Bethesda paid $5.75 million for the whole Fallout IP in 2007, after they'd already gotten the deal to make Fallout 3. That's not what you pay for a mega hit franchise. The fact that broke ass outfits like Obsidian and Troika were even in the running tells you this was not considered a super valuable IP.

$5.75 million is enough money to create a new IP of your own, and then develop and market a meaty AA game with high production values. And that's 2017 dollars. You don't pay that kind of cash for what was at the time an 8-year old PC-only franchise, unless you're convinced it will allow you to jump butt naked into a vault full of gold, Scrudge McDuck style.

Black Isle have created properties that went on to make billions for Zenimax, continue to sell well to this very day, and spawned Beamdog and resurrected Inxile. Black Isle association also played a critical part in saving Obsidian from bankruptcy. Pillars Kickstarter would have never gotten off the ground, if it wasn't for their association with Black Isle. What are the first things you see in PoE Kickstarter pitch? Is it KOTOR? Is it NWN? No, the first thing you see, is: we've made Fallout and PS:T, and we still have people who made Fallout and PS:T. Why do people still throw millions at Brian Fargo when all he has delivered is despair and disappointment? His name is first thing you see in the Fallout intro.

That's 4 different companies for you. Four. Who continue laughing to the bank on the back of a studio that shut down 20 years ago. Let that sink in for a minute.

I'd say it's quite a legacy for a company that never had a megahit.

And why were Obsidian and Troika in the running for the Fallout IP? Well let's think. Oh right, it was theirs to begin with.

 

[MRY]

IHaveHugeNick and Fairfax I guess it just seems like people's expectations are a little utopian here. "Underperformed for their potential" / "wasted so many great opportunities" just seems like a weird way to describe a company that made the games Obsidian made, and has lasted as long.

I guess they could've done even better, but what RPG studio do you think did better along the metrics the Codex cares about? Black Isle certainly made great games, but (a) it was a division of a larger company and (b) it only lasted 7 years, and only released games the Codex cares about over a four-year span ('98 to '02). Troika made even fewer games over an even shorter span -- I certainly think they made good stuff, but they didn't last. Bioware made some games that I like a lot, but it hypertrophied and was consumed by EA.

Obsidian has been operating for 14 years -- twice as long as Black Isle -- without the wealth of Interplay propping it up. While its games might not be quite as great as the best of Interplay (Fallout), Black Isle (PS:T), Troika (Bloodlines, IMO, but I know it's debatable), they have put out three all-time classics, which puts them in the same class as BI and Troika, and they've survived. To me, the assumption that they should've done even better is just naively optimistic.

For instance, if The New World is amazing, I will be ecstatic. But if Iron Tower runs into an iceberg, you can't cry, "Shame!" at them for doing something remarkable. Same think with Obsidian in my opinion. They hit a few out of the park, they've gone the distance, they remain close with the community, they've been quite nimble, and they've both created tools and nurtured developers that have yielded additional RPGs.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

MRY I wasn't really taking an aim at them. They've done decent job, all things considered, and they continue to do so. But there's certainly questions to be had, how does a company that created 3 all-time classics in their 4 first attempts, ended up becoming a bit of a black sheep in terms of attracting big money publishers. I've actually seen IGN dude ask Feargus the same question and he gave some long-winded and contrived answer about RPGs being a hard sell. And in the world where Skyrim SmartWatch Edition will probably launch next year and sell another 20 million, I just don't buy that explanation.

 

[MRY]

I can think of lots of reasons. Innocent ones would include not being good at managing upward or self-selling, being unable to conceive of RPGs in blockbuster rather than niche terms, developing a reputation as a supporting actor rather than a star after doing so many licensed sequels. More blameworthy ones would be irresponsibility about deadlines and budgets, being prickly (i.e., the next tier down of not managing upward well -- not only being lousy at the glad-handing/reporting aspect, but being affirmatively hostile or unresponsive when someone tries to manage down), having dodgy financial health such that publishers were worried about studio longevity.

But if Obsidian had succeeded in the way you want, in all likelihood they'd be a Biowarean cinematic RPG maker subsumed by a larger company. How is that better?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

But if Obsidian had succeeded in the way you want, in all likelihood they'd be a Biowarean cinematic RPG maker subsumed by a larger company. How is that better?

This is going to sound so unCodexian, DU will ban my ass if he ever reads it. But I don't believe for a second that 99% of gamers are dumb lazy fratboys who only want to be spoonfed cheap entertainment. If Christopher Nolan can consistently print money making 4 hour movies with barely any action in them, the gaming market also has a place for quality intelligent games with high budget and production values.

Whether there's a Nolan in the room, here's hoping.

 

[MRY]

Now you want Obsidian to add not just better business acumen but also unwavering artistic integrity in the face of publisher/mega-developer enticements? Utopian, indeed.

 

[Flou]

AP, Aliens, Stormlands, DS3 = 4 out of 6. FNV was a major success, yes, but it also cemented their Bugsidian reputation and had the metacritic bonus fiasco.

The fact they made DS3 with a small budget ($8 million IIRC?) is remarkable, but nothing about the game itself or its reception is. It effectively killed the series, and SE has yet to work with them again.

They game had to be delayed multiple times. It would've been considerably worse if they hadn't.

Yes, it was a blessing in disguise, but still a wasted opportunity, and you can add SEGA to the list of publishers which never worked with them again.

The stuff they've shown confirms it was all on Obsidian.

They lost 2/3 of the people who made their most successful and popular game. Also, if you consider writing is supposed to be their wheelhouse, the damage was even worse. They lost all FNV writers (MCA, John Gonzalez, Travis Stout, Eric Fenstermaker) + George Ziets. Now look at their writing.

FNV metacritic fiasco was started by MCA. Something I bet didn't go well in the company with the other partners. In my opinion the media was unfair about the bugs in FNV when compared to FO3, Skyrim and any other Bethesda made games on that engine. It felt they like had to outperform Bethesda when it comes to bug crunching and let's not forget a lot of the Q&A is on the publisher. Casual twats will ofc blame the bugs on Obsidian so I give you that it did hurt their reputation in that sense.

DS3 didn't kill their relationship with SE. They almost got to work on Deus Ex, but then Thief did badly and SE gave that game to their internal team.

AP - Yes it got delayed multiple times which cost them Aliens. SEGA went with Gearbox and their Aliens game which got destroyed in the reviews, so not that good decision on their part.

Didn't SEGA's strategy move towards internal projects after AP and those two Aliens games? At least I can't think of many/any AAA games that were funded by SEGA that weren't by their internal teams since then.

Stormlands - Yes. It is on Obsidian and I think Feargus admitted it himself as well. Still, Microsoft expectations were out of this world considering who they hired. The concept still sounds like something you can't even create, not in such scope anyways.

Isn't that your normal day in the gaming industry. People come, go and come back all the time. You have your core group of people who are just happy to stay and work on games that Obsidian makes, then you have the people who took the job as stepping stone to get into a better position / to work on games they are more enthusiastic about. Yes, the layoffs have hurt them few times very badly and they lost few great people due to those for sure.
As I said, it's way too soon to judge the present day writers at Obsidian. Most of them have 1 game under their belt. Let's see after PoE2 and Project Indiana where they are at when it comes to writing.

They didn't completely lose Fenstermaker since he is still willing to work for them, just not fulltime due to taking care of the baby/child.

Certainly you don't expect them to be able to hang onto every Lead Writer quality writer they had back then or will have in the future? Both Gonzalez and Stout got a Lead Writer position after working at Obsidian. There was a huge demand for quality writers in the gaming industry when more AAA games started to have a proper narrative design. Naturally the competition will poach writers from a company widely known to nurture a lot of talented writers. Who in their right mind would want to poach Bethesda's "Have you seen my dad, he's a middle-aged man" -level of "talent" to work for them.

 

[Flou]

Bethesda did shaft them, but IIRC Feargus said it wasn't a lot of money and that they didn't even ask for the bonus.

Obsidian's financial troubles came down to the fact they lived from contract to contract. They didn't own anything they created and didn't make money from sales. They depended entirely on publishers, and after a while, none of them were interested anymore. RPGs are inherently more expensive than most games, and Obsidian had become too risky of a gamble. If you pay Obsidian to make a game for you, you never know what you'll get. You hope you'll get a FNV, but it could be a NWN2, a DS3, or a Stormlands. PoE restored some of their reputation, which made Paradox gamble on them with Tyranny, but look at how that went. In short, the most reliable thing about Obsidian is the fact they're unreliable.

I think the bonus was one million dollars. It's a shame the present day deals don't involve royalties if the game sells great. Back in the day, pretty much every deal involved royalties based on copies sold.

Paradox didn't gamble much, the game was cheap and marketing was as cheap if not even cheaper and they made profit with it. Not just those PoE numbers they were expecting which of course had way bigger/broader marketing thanks to Kickstarter frenzy.

 

[Flou]

I think the sentiment here isn't whether Obsidian have been good for RPGs or not (they have). It's more aboutt whether they underperformed given their potential. I mean, we're talking about of a core group of developers from arguably the most accomplished RPG developer in the West, who started their own company and had full control to do things their way. They've had level of know-how and expertise far beyond the level available to anyone else in the industry, and by a mile. They were all still basically young adults with room to grow into even better versions of themselves. That's the thing that always amazes me by the way, these fucking guys have made original Fallouts and PST while still in mid 20s.

So with all of that potential, 15 years later. Should they still be a struggling company that has to worry about the future, while Todd Howards of the world are driving around in different limo every day of the week?

Much of it comes down to the changes in gaming industry. The industry has gone a lot of changes since the early Black Isle days.

Games were cheaper to develop back then and due to that publishers took more risks. Contracts between developers and publishers were more fair when there wasn't as much money involved. You would get to keep the IP, you would get royalties if your game sold millions and millions of copies.
Their expertise was working with a publisher (Interplay during Fargo years) that kept their promises without signed contracts and who actually cared about the company. They had to learn to work as a independent company, and not as a division of Interplay. Those mistakes and learning years did cost them.

The economic crisis and changing of platforms didn't help them either later on. Economic crisis shut down funding and most publishers stopped doing external projects as costs kept creeping up. No one seemed to want to fund a cheaper crpg either. It's either huge hit or a huge bust (too much of a risk to even fund such game), there was no middle ground for smaller budget games in the publisher world.
Console generation changing hurt their chances of getting work as well. Most publishers didn't want to take a risk when it was uncertain that whether or not gamers would stick to their old consoles or buy the new ones.

Naturally these are issues that hit every independent developer out there, not just Obsidian and even without looking at the number of developers left, it's almost a miracle they are still working. Most of the bigger independent companies got bought out (and got shut down later on) or had to shut down.

 

[Flou]

Black Isle have created properties that went on to make billions for Zenimax, continue to sell well to this very day, and spawned Beamdog and resurrected Inxile. Black Isle association also played a critical part in saving Obsidian from bankruptcy. Pillars Kickstarter would have never gotten off the ground, if it wasn't for their association with Black Isle. What are the first things you see in PoE Kickstarter pitch? Is it KOTOR? Is it NWN? No, the first thing you see, is: we've made Fallout and PS:T, and we still have people who made Fallout and PS:T. Why do people still throw millions at Brian Fargo when all he has delivered is despair and disappointment? His name is first thing you see in the Fallout intro.

That's 4 different companies for you. Four. Who continue laughing to the bank on the back of a studio that shut down 20 years ago. Let that sink in for a minute.

I'd say it's quite a legacy for a company that never had a megahit.

And why were Obsidian and Troika in the running for the Fallout IP? Well let's think. Oh right, it was theirs to begin with.

Part of the lack of megahits is due to rampant piracy during those years. If your game wasn't multiple CD's it would get pirated. Especially in the Eastern Europe piracy made it almost impossible to get any revenue from those markets and Europe is a big market for crpgs. Even in the Nordic countries piracy was huge if compared to present day or even to time when Morrowind came out. I knew around 10 people in my small hometown that would play Fallout and none of them bought the game from a store. That money went to some pirate who sold games to kids.
I don't remember these kids talking about Baldur's Gate, it was always Fallout or occasionaly Diablo. It would fun/sad to see just how many people actually played Fallouts but never actually paid anything for it to the actual developers.

 

[Infinitron]

I'd never considered the idea that Fallout became more of a popular phenomenon than Baldur's Gate in Russia and other Eastern European countries because it was on a single CD and thus easier to pirate. That's amusing.

 

[Luckmann]

I'm not sure how it is in the states, but verbal agreements are still agreements. The issue is the burden of proof when verbal agreements are broken. Why they don't record all conversations like this is completely beyond me.

Even if they could've enforced the agreement, suing their very first partner over a deadline would've been a terrible look, especially given how lucky they were to get the project in the first place.

Yeah, but it might've not come to that at all, if they'd had more meat on their bones. Leverage and mild-mannered insinuations are often more powerful than an immediate and direct threat of legal action. I doubt that Lucasarts would've wanted it to go that far, had the conversation been recorded or an agreement written down. If anything, the guy that promised the extra time is the one that would've been slapped on the fingers, not Obsidian for leveraging the promise they were given.

Black Isle have created properties that went on to make billions for Zenimax, continue to sell well to this very day, and spawned Beamdog and resurrected Inxile. Black Isle association also played a critical part in saving Obsidian from bankruptcy. Pillars Kickstarter would have never gotten off the ground, if it wasn't for their association with Black Isle. What are the first things you see in PoE Kickstarter pitch? Is it KOTOR? Is it NWN? No, the first thing you see, is: we've made Fallout and PS:T, and we still have people who made Fallout and PS:T. Why do people still throw millions at Brian Fargo when all he has delivered is despair and disappointment? His name is first thing you see in the Fallout intro.

That's 4 different companies for you. Four. Who continue laughing to the bank on the back of a studio that shut down 20 years ago. Let that sink in for a minute.

I'd say it's quite a legacy for a company that never had a megahit.

And why were Obsidian and Troika in the running for the Fallout IP? Well let's think. Oh right, it was theirs to begin with.

Part of the lack of megahits is due to rampant piracy during those years. If your game wasn't multiple CD's it would get pirated. Especially in the Eastern Europe piracy made it almost impossible to get any revenue from those markets and Europe is a big market for crpgs. Even in the Nordic countries piracy was huge if compared to present day or even to time when Morrowind came out. I knew around 10 people in my small hometown that would play Fallout and none of them bought the game from a store. That money went to some pirate who sold games to kids.
I don't remember these kids talking about Baldur's Gate, it was always Fallout or occasionaly Diablo. It would fun/sad to see just how many people actually played Fallouts but never actually paid anything for it to the actual developers.

Yeah, I realize that this is a bit of a "You can't eat exposure"-moment, but I always find it amusing when huge corporations cry about piracy when the medium on which they depend had never gotten as big as it is today without piracy. When I was a kid, most of us wouldn't have been able to convince our parents to get us games (and surely not multiple) in a million years, and piracy was absolutely rampant. Certain types of games could even be hard to find, and sometimes it was the fact that they were niched that made people buy at all (whereas I literally do not know a single person that ever paid for Doom).

Piracy was a huge part of popularizing gaming as a hobby, and it would've been incredibly stunted without it.

 

[Efe]

of course it may just be that business acumen and artistic integrity are alien concepts to someone with heavy involvement in numenera

 

[Lhynn]

Obsidian made three undeniably great RPGs (MOTB, F:NV, and KOTOR2)

#NotThisObsidian

Boring and pointless, because we can't make a remotely accurate assesment until at least POE2 and Indiana come out.

You know whats getting boring, stale, repetitive, tiresome. This shit about "we cant make an accurate assesment until [next game] gets released".

 

[Flou]

I'd never considered the idea that Fallout became more of a popular phenomenon than Baldur's Gate in Russia and other Eastern European countries because it was on a single CD and thus easier to pirate. That's amusing.

Not just easier, but a lot cheaper as well. I can't remember what the prices were for pirated games per CD back then, but the price went up the bigger the game was both in Finland (sold by some teenagers) and in Russia ( sold in public ).
You couldn't shove something like Baldur's Gate onto a CD with 10-20 games on it.

 

[mbv123]

I'd never considered the idea that Fallout became more of a popular phenomenon than Baldur's Gate in Russia and other Eastern European countries because it was on a single CD and thus easier to pirate. That's amusing.

Eastern euros and Russians always prefer the dark post-apocalyptic settings to fantasy ones, mostly because they live(d) in grim commie-blocks and can relate to the despair and depression.

 

[Roguey]

Surely you must be mistaken. 4 different companies went into bidding war over an IP from a developer that never had a megahit? That cannot be right. Why does Todd have to spend millions on something that wasn't even that succesful, when he has that unmatched ability to deliver commercial success?

Try to pick a narrative you're trying to push and stick to it, because you're running in circles of your own making right now.

Really more like three because Activision was only there on behalf of Troika.

They all wanted it because they're RPG nerds who wanted to make the next Fallout, not because it was already some incredibly successful property. Here's a thing Sawyer said back in the early/mid-00s:

I'd certainly love to play more Fallout games. I'd like to be a part of a future Fallout team. Hopefully it will one day wind up with a publisher who understands the potential that it has. That is to say that its potential, while not huge, occupies a very specific niche that can still do very well commercially without jacking up the elements that make it what it is.