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 29)
 * Nursery
 * Reservation
 * New Canaan (Jericho)
 * Maxson's Bunker
 * Fort Abandon
 * Mesa Verde
 * Oroborus
 * Hangdog Village (Blackfoot Village)
 * Burham Springs
 * Bloomfield Airbase
 * Ballistic Orbital Missile Base 001

Places cut from the final version of the game:
 * Circle Junction (Iron Lines)
 * The Crater
 * Moletown
 * Caesar's Legion

Plot
The game would begin with the player in a prison cell. Because of this the player was given a choice. He could be an innocent that was imprisoned because of some misunderstanding, or he could choose to be a criminal and take bonus traits that would bolster some of his skills.

The player would awaken in a prison cell, but not the one he remembered falling asleep in. Suddenly the floor rocks violently from an explosion and the player is knocked unconscious. When he awakens he finds his cell door open and a hole in the wall leading outside. Leaving the prison, he is under attack by some unknown assailant. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, the player flees into the night to explore his new world.

Unfortunately, his new found freedom may be short lived. The player is relentlessly pursued by robots who want to return him to the prison. As he explores the world and tries to outwit his pursuers, he begins to uncover an underlying plot. Why was he in a different prison than the one he fell asleep in? Why can't he remember being transferred? What was the attack on the prison about in the first place? Then he finds out about NCR's problems, and a few things don't add up....

Tech demo
A tech demo of Van Buren exists. Several screenshots and one video of the tech demo have been released at No Mutants Allowed.

The plot of the tech demo is not connected to the main storyline. It takes place in the United States during the Great War, somewhere in the Great Midwest Commonwealth. The Player Character in the demo is referred to only as Citizen. His parents were communists and were reduced to ash, as they didn't believe the government's bombing raid sirens. He made his way to the relocation center and is escorted to a Vault by corporal Armstrong of the 4th Armored Infantry Division. To reach the Vault, they must fight Communist Insurgents. The demo ends with the citizen entering a Vault.

When asked about the demo, Bethesda's Pete Hines replied: "(...) releasing someone else's unfinished product, or assets from it, is not something we intend to do."

Character system
This game used a highly modified version of SPECIAL, the character system used in previous Fallout games. The changes were introduced mostly by J.E. Sawyer. Some of his changes were accepted well in the Fallout community, while some, such as merging combat skills and dividing Speech into Deception and Persuasion, were quite controversial.

See: Van Buren SPECIAL for more details.