Van Buren

Van Buren was the project name Black Isle Studios assigned to their version of Fallout 3.

The game was going to use an engine that Black Isle had made for Baldur's Gate 3, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Engine. It was fully 3D.

Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose real time or turn-based combat, due to Interplay's demands, though Josh Sawyer had stated that the emphasis would be on the turn-based version. Co-operative multiplayer was also going to be included in the game, again because of publisher requirements.

In 2004, the game was cancelled and the Black Isle employees were laid off. At that time the engine was about 95% done. You could create characters, use skills, perform both ranged and melee combat, save/load games, and travel across maps. A tutorial level was done that would let the designers do all of the above. All areas but one had been designed. About 75% of the dialogs were done and at least 50% of the maps. BIS already had many of the character models and monster models.

Setting
Van Buren took place in the American southwest (Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah). The westernmost sites on the game map are the easternmost borders of New California Republic, and problems with NCR have a lot to do with what's going on in the game. According to Sean K. Reynolds it was set "almost 250 years in the future", which places it in the 2250s, only 10 years after the end of Fallout 2.

Some places that appeared in Van Buren:
 * Tibbets Facility (the prison)
 * Dog Town (Denver)
 * Boulder Dome
 * Hoover Dam (NCR)
 * Grand Canyon
 * Twin Mothers (Vault 31)
 * Nursery
 * Reservation
 * New Canaan (Jericho)
 * Maxson's Bunker
 * Fort Abandon
 * Mesa Verde
 * Oroborus
 * Hangdog Village
 * Burham Springs
 * Bloomfield Airbase
 * Ballistic Orbital Missile Base 001

Plot
You're a prisoner who gets busted out, you don't really know where you are or why you were imprisoned. You wander around trying to find a place for yourself and a way to keep the prison robots from tracking you down. You keep running into some of the guys who busted you out of the prison. You find out that returning the other escaped prisoners is the way to get the robots off your back. You find out about NCR's problems, and a few things don't add up....