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Fallout 3 Gets Leaked, Goes Gold
Fallout 3 is due to be released in a few weeks, and Bethesda recently announced that all versions of the game have gone gold. They provided the systems specs for the PC release as well. Unfortunately for them, the Xbox 360 version was leaked onto torrent sites almost three weeks early. Bethesda is "looking into" how the game was distributed. In preparation for the launch, game director Todd Howard spoke at length with Gamasutra about the scope of the project, and the differences from their previous games, such as Oblivion. CrispyGamer recently ran a three-part series detailing their four hours of hands-on time with the game. We've previously looked at some gameplay videos for Fallout 3, and discussed the fact that no mod tools will ship with the game.
Maybe from Sony's perspective, Blu-ray was an extra hurdle to help reduce piracy. There are a lot more DVD burners than Blu-ray burners, for now.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
In fairness, the number of people who actually download and run the Xbox 360 leak will be tiny compared to what the effect would have been with a PC-version leak. Getting pirated games running on a 360 involves the kind of hardware modification that is beyond the level of the average user and, in any event, makes the machine unusable on Xbox Live.
The impact of this leak will be fairly tiny in terms of lost sales. Plot spoilers etc are going to be more of a concern.
Parents start shopping for the holiday season starting in late October, early Novemeber. They are more likely to choose to buy the game that is most prominantly displayed. During the holiday rush, dozens of games are release and games don't get to have the massive display for long before it is pushed out by some other game. Therefore, it can be extremely advantagous to wait until the holiday rush has begun to release your game.
Marketing and timing can make a huge difference in a games success, especially for games released for the holiday season. To be fair, I don't think it would matter as much for games such as Fallout 3, it is targeted to an older, already attached audience. If this were a title like LittleBigPlanet (new audience, younger target) for instance, releasing a couple of weeks early could be devastating.
I refuse to be saddled with morals regarding video games while the publishers are doing their very best to strip me of the right of first sale.
Good-bye
I've played both Fallout 2 and Oblivion and I sincerely hope Fallout 3 will be nothing like Oblivion.
The autoscaling of everything was pretty much the worst thing in O3.
It meant that you could go and beat the Big Bad Guy with a total wimp. It meant that if chose your skills wrong, you'd get slaughtered just by traveling along the main road when you were on a high enough level.
I meant that there was almost no point in exploring. You could search the most remote ruins and only find broken knives if you were on low level and once you had enough levels under your belt, every damn critter dropped stuff worth a fortune.
Lots of side quests? Sure. Your choices make a difference? Oh really...
Sure you could choose if you wanted to join the mage guild or the fighter guild or thief's guild or save the world or just do all of these. None of it mattered except within that quest. Sure you just saved the world, became the top fighter on arena and became the leader of the mage's guild - but when you decide to join the fighter's guild, no one has even heard of you. Hey, if it had been more like 'Oh, you may think you're the big hero, but in here you're a nobody' I'd have been overjoyed but the harsh reality was that all the quests were totally separate.
And did you have actual choices? What if you wanted to be the good guy and actually arrest the notorious thieves guild leader? Nope, as soon as you joined the thief's guild, even your journal assumed you had become a bad guy. And the only options were to complete the quests as a bad guy or to totally ignore them. I've heard one of the last quests even involved a 'traitor' who was basically trying to get the thief's guild leader arrested - and you could not actually leave the room unless you killed him. Choices indeed...
I don't even want to talk about combat except to say that compared to the highly tactical, engaging battles in Fallout 2, Oblivion was just totally boring.
Now Fallout 3 may turn out to be a good game, but after Oblivion I have serious doubts about it.