14 DAY TRIAL // Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment has shared its thoughts about possible new entries in the series and believes that the franchise can easily go the massively multiplayer online (MMO) route, while exploring locations like Los Angeles, New Orleans, and more.
Bethesda currently owns the Fallout franchise, and after developing Fallout 3, it called in Obsidian Entertainment to handle Fallout: New Vegas, with the studio's Josh Sawyer leading it as game director.
Now, while working on Obsidian's own Pillars of Eternity project, Sawyer has talked with IGN about possible spinoffs of the Fallout franchise and where it might take place.
According to the developer, other West coast locations would be great, since Obsidian is situated in that area, but he's not ruling out other ideas like New Orleans.
"It’s a really fun setting and intellectual property to work with, I love doing rules and mechanics stuff and then expanding the setting is a lot of fun," he says. "I like doing stuff on the West coast because we’re close by, and that’s kind of been a tradition for the West coast developers of that stuff."
"I think going back to the Boneyard, LA, would be pretty cool but another area that I think Nathanial Chapman who used to work at Obsidian, he thought New Orleans would be a really cool setting for a Fallout game and I think that’d be really cool as well."
However, Sawyer also believes that a Fallout MMO would work wonders, no matter the location, as there's quite a bit of interest from fans of the series who even created their own unofficial projects.
"Personally, I think there are some interesting things that could happen with Fallout in an MMO environment. There are some folks who kind of cobbled together all the Fallout 2 resources into kind of a makeshift MMO, made by fans," he says.
"It was pretty cool but insane. It’s like if you take all of the most brutal aspects of Ultima Online and multiply them by five, you have that game. So I think there’s interesting potential for an online version of Fallout."
Bethesda, for its part, isn't ready to confirm whether or not it's working on the highly rumored Fallout 4, but previous reports have mentioned a Boston location and no multiplayer aspects.
Considering that the publisher is still experiencing problems with The Elder Scrolls Online, the MMO take on its medieval fantasy series, it's unlikely that a Fallout Online will appear anytime soon.