Obsidian hires on original Fallout lead designer

After a four-year-long wait, NCsoft and Carbine Studios in August took the lid off their latest massively multiplayer online role-playing game, WildStar, from Fallout lead designer Tim Cain and City of Heroes executive producer Jeremy Gaffney. Cain, for one, won't be sticking around to see that game to its completion.

As first spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun, Cain has taken a position at Obsidian Entertainment as senior programmer. The information comes by way of the developer's LinkedIn profile, which also indicates that he departed Carbine in July 2011, one month shy of his six-year anniversary at the company.

Cain's arrival at Obsidian is a homecoming of sorts. The veteran designer made his name in the late '90s as lead developer on Interplay's lauded postapocalyptic role-playing game Fallout. After an extended hiatus, the franchise returned in 2008 with Bethesda Softworks' critically acclaimed release of Fallout 3.

Bethesda, which purchased the Fallout IP from Interplay in 2007, subsequently handed off that game's follow-up to Obsidian for Fallout: New Vegas, which received a positive critical reception upon its release last fall. Obsidian, of course, formed out of the remnants of Black Isle Studios, which developed Fallout 2.

Unfortunately, there is as yet no indication whether Cain will return to the franchise he once led development on. Currently, Obsidian's only known project is an adaptation of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time fantasy novels. However, CEO Feargus Urquhart has also indicated that the studio is working on a project for downloadable platforms.