What do we know of project V13?

[DiddlePants]

Considering V13 was the Fallout MMO that was unfortunately canceled, did we ever get any information of the storyline/lore? If I recall correctly, it would have taken place in Seattle, and a variety of promo art for the game heavily focused on some kind of new Super Mutant army, along with one of the promo trailers having a desk with the engravings "The Master Lives"!
Although all of this is fruitless to discuss (considering we'll never see this game reach the light of day), I find it a interesting topic of discussion. What do you guys think? Could this "V13" have been a good Fallout game if it was properly finished?

 

[Risewild]

This was the description of the game:

Project V13 (PV13) is the first planned Black Isle Studios release in years, a post-apocalyptic strategy RPG. You will create a character to represent yourself within the game world. Your character will be a hardy adventurer from a variety of backgrounds; one of the last remaining humans, a new breed mutant, or a technologically advanced cyborg. The choice is yours.

Once you have determined your character's background, you will found your "colony". From a deserted city, a broken down military base, or even the ruins of an oil pumping station, the colony will be yours to rebuild and control. Attract non-player characters for guards, peons, scientists, and other activities. Or, if you are the type that so desires, shanghai the NPCs. Put them to work rebuilding your society and improving your colony.

Meanwhile, you will experience grand adventures to gather the resources and ancient technologies as well as fight back the enemy hordes. Your character will gain experience, advance skills, learn new talents and gain access to incredibly powerful equipment. Or die trying.

These are the relevant parts from an article about Project V13:

Jason D. Anderson said he’d aimed to realize a vision of Fallout that ‘90s game graphics couldn’t handle, influenced by things like Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow’s near-future noir comic Hard Boiled and Terry Gilliam’s retro-futuristic film Brazil.

Caleb Cleveland, who worked briefly on V13 in late 2007, describes the early conceptual style as a kind of elaborate urban retrofuturism, with less of the “big orange wasteland” found in earlier games. “[Anderson] wanted to create individual skylines for metropolitan areas so you would emerge from a tunnel, and you would go, ‘Oh, this is nuked New York,’ and there would be this giant crater you’d have to navigate,” he says. “Radio City Music Hall would be a quarter mile high — it would be gigantic. … There would be monorail tubes everywhere, just to make it look as ‘50s and crazy as possible.”

some fragmented public details suggested that the team had mapped out 65,500 square miles of terrain, designed and modeled many characters and creatures, and extensively outlined quests and dialogue, including a “game-worldwide meta-puzzle” that would encourage players to cooperate.

the already post-apocalyptic Fallout Online was going to start with another apocalypse. By the time Interplay started serious development, it had settled on an American West Coast setting that would span parts of Oregon, California, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, close to where Fallout and Fallout 2 took place. But around the beginning of Fallout Online, something would trigger an almost comically long series of disasters — potentially including asteroids, volcanoes, nukes, tsunamis, and a resurgence of the series’s powerful Forced Evolutionary Virus. “It wasn’t going to be completely torn down, but we were going to tear it up again a little bit,” says Mark O’Green.
The idea behind the apocalypses was partly to create a world that was still believably chaotic after 200 years and partly to set up new storylines, some of which pushed the series’ science fictional limits. “We had things that were happening in multiple timelines at once, particularly around the nuclear test sites in Nevada, where you actually would have potential almost for — we wouldn’t call it time travel, but something almost like that,” he says. Players might have been able to go back and experience moments from the earlier games, or old characters might have popped into the present.

O’Green elaborated on one tantalizing hint from the trailer: a graffiti reference to Fallout’s megalomaniacal final boss the Master. “We did a ‘Master returns’ thing. It wasn’t going to be right away, we wanted to open up some content as we went,” he says. (Sadly, he doesn’t remember how this was supposed to happen.) Interplay was also reviving some mutant humanoid raccoons that were cut from Fallout, in addition to designing new creatures like a group of creepy psychic children inspired by horror film Village of the Damned. Beyond the existing major Fallout races, subscribers could have played a crafty and powerful female version of the game’s usually dim-witted Super Mutants — “very large, very smart, not ugly at all.”

O’Green also explained the reference to a “meta-puzzle,” which he called a “superquest.” Fallout Online was supposed to feature server-wide quests that would unlock new game elements when solved, as well as “superteams” that players could join to solve them. If a team cracked a puzzle, its members would split a reward pool.

So I don't think there was ever a real storyline released to the public. That article mentions a few things, and I think that is the most information about what the game could have been, that I ever found.

 

[DiddlePants]

This was the description of the game:


These are the relevant parts from an article about Project V13:






So I don't think there was ever a real storyline released to the public. That article mentions a few things, and I think that is the most information about what the game could have been, that I ever found.

Thank you for this very informative post. From the looks of the quotes by the developers, I’m not sure how this would have turned out. Starting another apocalypse seems very redundant (must of been Chris “make Fallout post apocalyptic again” Avellone’s idea), and the thought of female super mutants and time travel sounds downright silly. Of course, these are just rough drafts, and these ideas could of been great with the proper writing and execution, but as it stands it seems extremely lore breaking and not wholeheartedly original.
I’m still interesting in this whole “return of The Master” thing they were going to do. I wonder how that would have went down. Nevertheless, thank you for this information.

 

[Octavian]

Thank you for this very informative post. From the looks of the quotes by the developers, I’m not sure how this would have turned out. Starting another apocalypse seems very redundant (must of been Chris “make Fallout post apocalyptic again” Avellone’s idea), and the thought of female super mutants and time travel sounds downright silly. Of course, these are just rough drafts, and these ideas could of been great with the proper writing and execution, but as it stands it seems extremely lore breaking and not wholeheartedly original.
I’m still interesting in this whole “return of The Master” thing they were going to do. I wonder how that would have went down. Nevertheless, thank you for this information.

Sounds like fallout 76 with more commitment to the MMO elements than the survival ones.