Fallout 3, RE 5 in 2008, Final Fantasy 360 Never

In addition to the truly excellent trailer, yesterday Bethesda Softworks let slip the platforms on which Fallout 3 will be playable. CVG reports on an article in the upcoming issue of Game Informer magazine, which describes some of the gameplay and states the title will be on offer for the PC, 360, and PlayStation 3 sometime in Fall of 2008. Meanwhile, Eurogamer is reporting that Capcom won't be letting Resident Evil 5 out of the holding pen until at least April of next year. For now they're relying on the Wii port of the title and other offerings to see them through the year. Finally, if you were hoping to play Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360, you'll be waiting a long time. IGN has word that there are no plans for any FF games on Microsoft's console.

Comments

Fallout 3 Design Documents

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're into Fallout 3, don't miss the original Fallout 3 Van Buren design documents. Cool stuff. Going to be interesting to see if anything survives from there.

Re:Fallout 3 Design Documents

[Anthony Boyd]

I would note that in addition to the original design documents, the original Fallout 3 tech demo has been leaked. That's right, it's the playable game that the original team was working on 4 years ago. It doesn't have anything to do with the new game that Bethesda is trying to build. Bethesda only came into the picture when the original company folded.

FF Quote Not Entirely True

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2007/06 /06/busting-rumors-sonys-ps3-price-drop-and-square s-360-final-fantasy-plans

They explain that Square said the 360 was a "blank page", which isn't the same thing as a flat out "Not gonna happen".

Nathan

No FF on Xbox360

[Mortanius]

Does it really surprise anyone though? FF is huge (perhaps as an understatement) in Japan where Microsoft has a pretty tiny share. Releasing exclusively would be suicide, and though there is a large market in the US, I would expect there's enough PS3 owners and enough would-be PS3 owners on the fence that would pick up a PS3 because of FF that it wouldn't necessarily be worth the added effort to port to xbox.

And please God, don't let them contract out to another company to do a half-assed port. :-P

Re:No FF on Xbox360

[Araxen]

I agree, the 360 just doesn't have the foothold in Japan to warrant Square/Enix to develop for the 360. The PS3 has a larger player base in Japan than the 360 and eventually the price will come down enough that the Japanese and Americans will buy the system en mass. You can't say the same for the 360. America yes, but in Japan I doubt it.

But....I wouldn't be totally surprised to see Square/Enix to totally focus on the Nintendo systems. The Wii will have by far the larger player base of the 3 systems and the DS just has an enormous player base. We've seen the start of this focus with the next DragonQuest game coming on the DS and not on a next gen system(Wii/PS3/360). I think we are seeing Nintendo reclaiming the video game king throne.

Re:No FF on Xbox360

[Conception]

I think in general people forget something...

"Sony Invests in Square / Square Not Exclusive To Sony

Sony Corp it will invest 14.9 billion yen in capital to Square Co Ltd. The investment will give Sony an 18% stake in Square. Sony does not intend to prevent Square from contributing games to rival game makers such as Nintendo Co Ltd or Microsoft Corp, a SONY spokeswoman said. - Source Reuters.

"We are not exclusive to Sony, because of this deal." said Hisashi Suzuki, Square's president."

Sony owns a large part of Square. Sony needs to be doing -really- badly before Square starts helping out Sony's biggest game competitor.

Re:No FF on Xbox360

[badboy_tw2002]

I would. FF has always been about the glitz, and if anyone is going to push the limits of the PS3 and HD/BluRay it will be Square. It would be hard to call any FF a "casual" game, so they've got a solid core of hardcore fans on the PS3 waiting for the next installment. Look for the PS3 version as the lead platform, with a solid port to the Wii. (Using the Wiimote might actually liven up some of the battles, and would be an easy and great way to add something to the game without redesigning it from scratch.)

Re:No FF on Xbox360

[DrXym]

Yeah, because the Wii has -so- much more storage capacity than the 360.

The Wii has the luxury of being standard definition. Which means FMV is likely to consume 1/3 the space on disk that it would need for 720p on the 360. The same goes for textures, models etc. which invariably would have to be far more detailed on the 360 to suit its higher resolution and more capable graphics & CPU. The situation would be even worse if the 360 dared hope to support 1080. Assuming any FF title could be crammed onto a single disk for Wii then it's likely that it would require 3 or 4 disks to take advantage of the 360.

I have no idea if this was one of the reasons that FF is not going to the 360 but it's clear that that multiple disks are the ONLY way FF XIII or later could happen on the 360.

Re:No FF on Xbox360

[7Prime]

Actually it very much surprises me that Square will not port it to the Wii. People say that the Wii doesn't have the graphical power... but why does that matter?

Do you think anyone who owns a Wii is specifically NOT going to buy a game because it looks better on another system? No, that's just crazy talk. If you're a marketing person, you're going to look at what system is going to move the most amount of product. Wii owners aren't going to boycott the FF series just because the PS3 counterpart looks better.

Actually, it's not all that unrealistic. The GameCube was a good head & shoulders above the PS2 graphically, due to its builtin anti-aliasing and superior lighting effects. The Wiis hardware is about twice the power of the GC, and it has a lot more graphical goodies (bump mapping, a few more shaders, more lighting effects). So think about it. The last FF game released was FF12, which, at the very least, looked about the quality of an early GC game, but with more jaggies (no anti-aliasing). The next FF game on the Wii is going to look like A LOT better than FF12, much larger than the graphical difference between any of the other recent FF games (FF9 -> FFX for instance). It would actually be right about in line with the graphical progression of the rest of the series.

Secondly, while a lot of the recent Final Fantasy games have had graphical flash... that has NEVER stemmed from horsepower, but from the design teams having great design sense. For the past 2 generations, the FF games have been on the lower powered systems of their time, and still they never fail to amaze. This has nothing to do with horsepower, but with just making great stylistic decisions.

Re:No FF on Xbox360

[Cerium]

With RPGs, you're right -- the disc switching is more an annoyance than anything else, especially if done correctly (immediately following the death of a much loved female character, for instance).

The problem I see with it, however, is it becoming a standard and/or accepted "issue" with games. With the linear nature of RPGs, it tends not to pose much of an problem as the disc change is only once and you rarely (if ever) have to use a previous disc in the same play-through. If we start introducing this into other genres though, it may also impose this same progression limitations on them; and that's something I have a problem with.

Who cares about Final Fantasy anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

After the last two Final Fantasy games, it's obvious that at the very least Square-Enix doesn't care about Final Fantasy any more. (The "last two" by my definition being XI, an uninspired EverQuest clone with moogles, and XII, an offline version of an uninspired EverQuest clone with moogles and bunny-women.)

Seriously, after playing XII and discovering that the game really does play itself to the point where you're only there to guide the characters through the map, I really don't see any reason to get any more Final Fantasy games. Ever.

Add in that the wonderful "storytelling" in FFXII sees a story wherein every character they've introduced through the start of the *tutorial* dies by the end of the tutorial, randomly jumping to some characters you've never met and really don't care about, and you've got a game with no gameplay and one of the worst stories I've ever read.

Yeah, I know, there are some twists concerning that last statement in the story, but the concept of the first several minutes of a story is to hook the audience. Introducing a whole slew of characters and then *killing every last one of them* (even if it later turns out they miraculously survived) does not create a compelling story. Especially when the main character they randomly dump on you turns out to be, hands down, the most annoying Final Fantasy character I can recall.

So let the PS3 keep their Final Fantasy. It won't help sales. Final Fantasy is dead, Square-Enix has decided to kill it.

Re:Who cares about Final Fantasy anymore?

[dannycim]

Matter of opinion. Sure, FFXII's story was a bit light, but the combat system was the best ever seen of any jRPG. You could do everything manually or litterally program the AI of the party members with the gambit system.

I for one loved it, and most reviewers did too. SE's not about to "kill" FF any time soon, as you may think. It's their franchise, it's their cash-cow.

Re:Who cares about Final Fantasy anymore?

[blendo75.5]

I enjoyed FF XII but I'm not going to spend what will likely be $660 to play XIII, especially since there will be versions released on every other console ever made (except the 360, apparently). I think Square lost sight of what makes FF a good game, for me it was never about the graphics. Final Fantasy XII will no doubt have beautiful graphics but the chances of it being a good FF experience are slim to none, probably due to too much energy being put into the graphics.

In the PS1 era I think people were shocked by how far graphics had come and Squaresoft used this intelligently at the time. Good graphics just arent that much of a shock anymore. I saw someone playing 360 the other day, a basketball game, and at first I thought he was WATCHING basketball on TV. Wow!! Then a minute later I saw the pixels, the seams, it wasnt as impressive as it had been at first glance. I got over the jump in graphics from the original xbox in less than 5 minutes. The improvement is there, definitely, but it's just not as big a deal as it used to be.

Re:Who cares about Final Fantasy anymore?

[DrEldarion]

... and MMORPGs are just MUDs with graphics, and MUDs are just RPGs that are text-only and online, and then we're back to the single-player RPG again. It's all a big loop, and everything is derivative of everything else. Saying a game sucks because it's too similar to other games is like saying a story sucks because it's similar to stories that have been written hundreds of years ago. Sure, you may not LIKE it, but you can't judge something solely on originality, because there really is very little of it in anything.

Genre?

[aadvancedGIR]

I really wish they just won't make a STALKER with hookers but rather a RPG with rich content. Seeing NextGens in the platform list is not IMHO good omen.

Console Fallout 3 == Bad UI?

[dontthink]

I hope they don't mangle the PC Fallout 3 UI to match what would look good on a console (like they did in Oblivion) - or at least make the UI moddable. Inventory/spell management was a giant pain in vanilla Oblivion (huge icons/font). Off topic, but I have the same worries about how Bioshock will feel on a PC as well...

Sony owns 8.5% of Square Enix Duh.

[kabocox]

Follow this link http://www.square-enix.com/jp/ir/e/stock/stockhold er/ and look at entry number four. Sony owns 8.5% of Square Enix. I thought Nintendo had owned a part of Square at one point in time, but I don't recongize any of the others as being either Nintendo or MS related. If MS or Nintendo want to tell/force Square Enix to develop for their consoles, then they might want to buy a large share of that company.

Damn Final Fantasy Hypocrites!

[Prien715]

I agree.

What I don't understand is the GP's hypocrisy in saying "Square never innovates" and saying "I didn't like FFXII because it was too different" at the same time. Either you really do want another clone or you want originality. If you don't like something that's original (like the ability system in FF8), at least have respect for the developers for thinking out of the box rather than simply playing it safe. Whenever you innovate, you're going to come out with some things some people really like and some people really don't. I much prefer this to a game everyone thinks is mediocre.

Re:Damn Final Fantasy Hypocrites!

[Prien715]

The license grid gives you absolutely no reason to specialize.

I beg to differ. While you could make everyone the same, it definitely paid to specialize. There were several "physical attack damage increased" grids near at far ends of the license board. For my fighters, I made it a priority to go after those, while for my mages, I cared more about getting the "magic damage+" and "mana cost reduction" gambits, which were also near one another. I had two offensive mages, one of whom specialized in status ailments and wielded a bow while the other was a straight attack mage. With headhunter, channeling, and putting her on last priority to case healing magic, she was able to do large amounts of damage and maintain most of her MP. Later in the game, I gave her shades of black, which allowed her to cast spells for no mp (but allowed her to regain mp via headhunter). Also, the item bonuses stack so it pays to create on character who uses items. With all the "ether++" and "remedy++" spaces on the board, I'd put my "item user" in the party whenever someone needed mp or had 10 status ailments.

If you decided (as you did), just to get all the low-level stuff with everyone, you really miss out on some of the higher level (farther away from the center) gambits which are insanely useful.

As a caveat, at the end of the game I ended up having a few hundred LP left over with everyone and could probably just learn the whole board with everyone. Square should have made a few 1000 LP squares to provide for even further specialization and more end-game content.

I agree that the game didn't make as good use of summons as it could've.

Why the hell do they limit which gambits you have access to, and make you buy them all?

So you can't cast Fire3 on the first boss? So you don't make everyone a mage since it's cheaper? Not the greatest decision, granted, but there's reasons.

Mistwalker is the real Final Fantasy

[grapeape]

The heart and soul of Final Fantasy Hironobu Sakaguchi (The Co-Founder of square as well as the creator and executive producer of Final Fantasy 1-12) and Kensuke Tanaka (developer of Squares's online service and producer on many FF titles) are both gone and are with Mistwalker developing games exclusively for the 360. So dont worry 360 fans will get all the RPG goodness they can stand. Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey are all on the way, it will be interesting to see if Final Fantasy is more Sakaguchi or more Square-Enix. IMHO Final Fantasy without Sakaguchi is like Guitar Hero without Harmonix.

Looks great but

[sckeener]

Fallout came out in 1997 and Fallout 2 came out in 1998. Looks like fallout 3 is coming out for the 10th anniversary of Fallout 2. Who is the target market? 20 somethings that still have time to do solo gaming?

Looks great and I would love to play it.

I just do not have the time for solo games any more. The only time I have for myself is reading in the bathroom or on the bus. Maybe I could play it if it was on a handheld like a psp. Also, bonding with other would also help me justify the time, so co-op or multiplayer would be good too. My fiance and I love playing shades of gray type games...what better than Fallout!

Re:truly excellent?

[Nephilium]

Don't forget, you could also become a porn star, get married, and sell your spouse into slavery...

Something tells me if this goes to consoles, we'll have a brand new franchise for people to say how horrible it is, and how it corrupts 'teh children!'...

Nephilium

Re:truly excellent?

[Bigboote66]

The trailer's exciting to Fallout fans because it is in line with the intro movies from the first two Fallout games ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=WkBNKa2KXZE , http://youtube.com/watch?v=e3PXiV95kwA ). There's a lot of fear in the fan community that Bethesda will "ruin" the franchise; this trailer is Bethesda's way of saying that they're on the same page as the fans. Whether or not they follow through on the promise is another matter.

Also, the trailer is just plain good from a production/drama standpoint. It's a teaser trailer, which, pretty much by definition, is not meant to show you an MTV-style montage of game footage (those trailers are the most boring to me), but just let you know, "The game exists, we're working on it, here's something to let you know how excited we are about the movie." Compare this to teaser trailers from movies like "Strange Days" that featured nothing but an extreme closeup of Ralph Fiennes talking for 2 minutes.

-BbT

No FFXIII on 360 Is A Sales Disaster

[ddelella]

Someone for Square Enix is definately going to be fired over this mistake of not releasing FFXIII for the 360. XBOX 360 is the current next gen console who has sold the most and continues to gain speed. Don't believe it...check out the lovely sales statistics from Austrailia (1 million games sold in 14 months, a new record for any console). Sure FF has been mostly PS exclusivebut with FFXI and the new FF on 360 plus many releases for other portable consoles recently it makes it only the next best move to add it to the last untapped platform. And why not follow the other games and their reasoning, like Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Ace Combat, etc. All have made convincing cases for reasons to expand to XBOX 360. There are also conflicting reports from Square Enix President and the developers of FFXIII who claim that they would choose the 360 platform of Sony because of the ease of development and cost.

So when they release FFXIII and its numbers suck they can only blame themselves. I know that the millions of 360 user would love to enjoy FFXIII...and perhaps a re-release of FFI on the XBOX Live Arcade...hint hint!

Re:No FFXIII on 360 Is A Sales Disaster

[k_187]

two things

1. the PS3 is beating the pants off the 360 in Japan. 2. There are a large number of people who will buy a PS3 for a new final fantasy.

Re:No FFXIII on 360 Is A Sales Disaster

[Yosho]

Here's some statistics for you: http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm

This year alone, the Wii has sold over three times as many units as the PS3 in Japan. It's sold over fifteen times as many units as the Xbox 360. Why would Square-Enix, a Japanese company, want to release the next entry in their largest franchise for the weakest system? You should keep in mind that the rest of the world is a secondary concern for them.

Re:Fallout 3 Gameplay?

[Aladrin]

'Blank page' doesn't mean 'never', it just means 'no current plans'... That's about a minimum of a year, if they decide to do a port, or 3 years if they decide to innovate. Minimum, mind. Not average or mean.

Nintendo had been the sole Final Fantasy Console for years when Sony stepped in and took it. Now Nintendo has FF titles again (weak ones, but still...) so there's nothing stopping them from doing the 360. They are probably fishing for a big check from everyone's favorite monopoly first.

Re:truly excellent?

[Eideewt]

As a Fallout fan, I found it more worrying than exciting. The constant thing in the intro movies for Fallout, Fallout 2 and even Fallout Tactics was the human element, and this trailer here was the total opposite. The Fallout intro had the soldiers shooting the guy and laughing, followed by a soldier in front of the flag, commercials (buy war bonds!) and an account of the war. Fallout 2 had a film about leaving the vault, with short-sighted advice ("line up in an orderly fashion", "wear dark glasses") and, of course, vault dwellers going out to meet the rest of humanity and getting gunned down as they wave. Fallout Tactics had some BoS guys zooming across the desert in their truck, listening to music and stopping for a magazine. You saw this view of human nature throughout the games as well (Fallout Tactics less than the other two, but it was a different kind of game).

The Fallout 3 trailer was completely missing that human element. It had the old-timey music and the bombed out city, followed by scary music and a robotic guy in armor. Without the "this is what we are, and we'll be the same no matter what world we live in" attitude, I am not at all reassured that Fallout 3 will live up to its predecessors. I don't expect a game intro level of quality from a teaser trailer, but I did expect to see the above. If the armor suited guy had been doing something human (polishing his helmet or pissing, perhaps), and they had delayed the scary music and view of the city until after he had shown up, I would feel a lot better.

Re:truly excellent?

[Eideewt]

Not at all it doesn't. Look at the armored guys in the Fallout intro, then look at the guy in this teaser again. I'm afraid they've got all the incidentals right, but totally missed the soul.