Fallout fan page Vault13.net has posted an interview with Feargus Urquhart of Black Isle Studios. The interview is a must-read for fans of Fallout or any Black Isle series, as he talks about what went wrong with Fallout 2, the status of Fallout 3, what happened with TORN and their plans for their SPECIAL character system. Here's an excerpt where he talks about the inevitable (but still far off) Fallout 3.

Initially, I decided in March/April of 1999 that we needed to start working on project other than Fallout 3. This was for a number of reasons, however the top two were the following. 1) Interplay looked like it was still having financial problems and the development on Fallout 3 was not moving forward very quickly. So, to solve both problems I decided that the team should start working on the game that would become Icewind Dale 2. 2) We talked about sharing technology between the Stonekeep 2 project and Fallout 3. To make this possible we reassigned Chris Holland and the other programmer that we had brought over from another division around the beginning of the year to Stonekeep 2 to get that technology moving forward faster.

The next time we had the chance to start Fallout 3 was after the completion of Torment in late 1999. As I've talked about before, we had pretty much promised Fallout 3 to the team that went onto Icewind Dale, so I was not inclined to have the ex-Torment team work on that. Plus, the ex-Torment team was more interested in coming up with a Fantasy based game using SPECIAL - which was the game that became TORN. What that all meant is that there was no one to work on Fallout 3 at that point, because everyone from Torment either went to the project that would become TORN or onto Icewind Dale.