Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
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.
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
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.