>Bethesda now owns all of the rights, in full, for Fallout
There goes the last shred of hope for the Fallout series.

The series was originally developed by, I'm not sure, either, Interplay or Black-Isle, but Interplay held the rights to it, but was in a bit of a legal fight with Bethesda after some problems with a deal they'd made. tl;dr, Bethesda bought the rights to control development on three games in the series, (2 of which they've already done so, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas)

Now let me point out, one of the things that Fallout 1 and 2 focused on was player interaction with an interesting setting and how said interaction affected story outcome.

3 was directly developed in house by Bethesda. It was a linear story in a game that pretended to give freedom in an 'open world', and the morality was stupid black and white bullshit where you could either be the second coming of Christ or the ruler of hell himself. There was no moral ambiguity, and when there was, it was shoved in your face and poorly written. It's world was also empty, and while it was immersive, it's atmosphere pushed the 'Oh, look, it's all dead' angle too far, to the point the game was empty and barren to a level of boredom.

New Vegas on the other hand, was developed differently. They gave the development to Obsidian (which is a company made up of many ex-Interplay employees). It actually lets the player matter, as they can influence what happens, not just follow one set story path, since there are 4 major outcomes and various outcomes for a multitude of factions. There's much more ambiguity to the morals of your actions in general too, as there's less of a focus on good/bad karma and more of a focus on how each faction treats you depending on THEIR morals. It also took an interesting angle with the post-apocalypse setting. Instead of going with the cheap "War is bad, mmm-kay?", it actually took the time to show that, even after something devestating, humans are powerful and resilient enough that they reform, almost naturally, the society that was there before - with democracy, business, currency, law etc. all in effect. It also made the gameplay ACTUALLY FUN by adding decent diversity of weapons and make pretty much all skills useful.

 tl;dr 3 was a poorly written piece of shit (and it shows that it's by Bethesda)
 New Vegas was a great example of how an RPG should be written.

Also, some nice trivia

Fun fact: The biggest flaw, and probably only major flaw, New Vegas had was it's engine and glitches. It had other flaws, but none were that big.
Fun fact 2: Bethesda's only resonsibility during the development of New Vegas was QA and bug checking.
Fun fact 3: Obsidian had less than a year, and were told so before they began development, to develop New Vegas, in full. This was decided by Bethesda. It was decided because Bethesda had chosen a release date for New Vegas before they'd even told Obsidian they'd be making it.