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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.
Ahh, good old torrent leaks. This brings me back to ought 4 when the French released Halo 2 weeks before the official release date. Those were good times...
One man with a gun can control 100 without one
Speaking of leaking, Fallout 3 also comes with the limited edition piss-bucket so the truly hardcore gamers can play 24/7 without interruption.
Going with Bethesda? Bethesda BOUGHT the Fallout franchise from Interplay (which has gone down the shitter near 100%) 3-4 years ago. In fact, the IP Interplay is using for the Fallout MMO (that they are supposedly working on) had to be licensed from Bethesda to use after the sale of said IP.
Ready means they are ready for the packaging and distribution process. When something goes GOLD doesn't mean, it's ready to be on the shelf the next day. It means it is ready to duplicate CDs, make packaging (luckily the packaging aspect may have a bit of lead time), send to distributors and retailers. Also when GOLD, any online distributing (which may not be available for F3) deals can be finalized. Even if online distribution was an option, there is no way they would break the release date online and step on the retail outlets toes, as most sales still come from brick and mortar locations (or locations that ship physical product to your door).
Better for everyone because it makes them come out with the game sooner!
What boggles my mind is why sit on the game until some arbitrary release date and why not sell it sooner?
I noticed a crapload of games slated for end of oct/begining of nov. Stuff like Fallout 3, gears of war 2, wow: lich king. Who's great idea was it to flood the market at some seemingly random time?
Sell the damn game when it's ready!
Unless it's some marketing ploy that's sold as a "Fire your employees before the game comes out so you can cash in on it's success even better(TM)".
Isn't there some big holiday soon after that where a lot of people spend a lot of money on consumer stuff... Jeese... It is right on the tip of my tung...
Simply put, marketing. It's alot easier to compete with no other AAA title the week of release. The upcoming weeks are pretty crammed with titles bringing alot of hype. Dead Space (this week), Fable II (next week), Gears of War 2 (11/7), etc. And that's just on the 360
Instead, their biggest competition will be Guitar Hero World Tour, which I don't really seeing big competition to Fallout.
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!
The leaked 360 version isn't retail, but is a review copy. The interwebs have given a lot of flack to SEED4ME about their releases.
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.
Interplay WAS working on a Fallout 3 back in 2003. Then the project was canceled and the entire Black Isle Studio team was laid off. In addition, most of those employees had to legally fight to get their pay that they were owed. Most employees didn't get a settlement until a few years later. Interplay went bankrupt (chapter 7 style). Basically, Herver Caen (the CEO), since he took over the company in the early 2000 (do I have that right) basically took the company for a Titanic like ride and pretty much gutted it for anything worthwhile. The Fallout franchise sale was a probably a way to liquid assets it had to cover legal and back-pay costs they were racking up. While Beth may not make the best F3 game in the world, honestly, could have been a lot of worse companies to give it to (I'm sure a few better ones could have been thought, also).
bethesda have said the only drm will b something small, like oblivions, i.e. a cd in the drive check
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
Either this is the greatest troll of all time, or you really missed out. Go and play Fallout. Then play Fallout 2. You'll realise why the rest of us pretty much gave Tactics a miss.
Now, I give it ten minutes before some old bugger with a three-digit ID comes along and tells me to play Wasteland.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Will a four digit ID do?
I played Wasteland on a C64.
I can remember swapping disks around to get a full inventory to the shop in Las Vegas..
And killing that massive bot at the intersection.. What was it some sort of Scorpion bot?
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.
Well you see, Bethesda, as a downloader downloads parts of the file, they also upload the parts they have to other downloaders, and so on from peer to peer...
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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 dealing with the other component of the the complaint-- I'm not sure Bethesda won't do a good job here. Oblivion had a few problems, but IMO it showed at least a technical competence to make a good Fallout game. The writing and voice acting in Oblivion need to be improved, and I can definitely see lots of things that could be refined. I also hope that, in Fallout, they don't level enemies throughout the game.
In case anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, in Oblivion, enemies everywhere become more difficult as you level up. That means you can pretty much go anywhere and do anything early in the game, but there is less payoff for leveling up. The old Fallout games took a different approach, making enemies harder in certain areas, those areas being places that you shouldn't really get to until later in the game.
But with Oblivion, Bethesda has succeeded in making a big and open world that feels relatively organic. You can find lots of little side-quests and explore on your own, and your choices make at least a little bit of a difference in what happens. Plus, you can really specialize your character, and what kind of character you build has a substantial effect on how you can approach problems, as well as how people react to you. Take all that and mix in a little Fallout style, and you have a game that I'll play. It might not be everything that I've always imagined Fallout 3 might be, but it should be interesting.
I disagree. Once you've made the single hardware modification, you never need to jump through that hoop ever again. Also, the people who sell the hardware to you provide enough instructions so that even a 10 year-old who has played with legos can successfully mod their xbox. Anyone who knows how to torrent a game is going to have the mental capacity to successfully modify their xbox.
PC games, on the other hand, require a different software patch depending on the copy protection scheme that you need to get around. This can be something simple like copy-pasting a crack, or you may have to install other software packages. And this needs to be done for EVERY game.
Pirating an xbox game is just as easy as pirating a PC game the first time. After that, pirating an xbox game is MUCH EASIER than pirating PC games. The people who think otherwise have never actually tried both.
Diablo was a Nethack clone (or at least a rogue-alike), not a Gauntlet clone. This was more obvious in the frst Diablo where everything moved at the same speed. D1 was turn-based in early development, really just Nethack with graphics, but at some point the devs saw the light. (Then the devs went on to found Flagship Studios and become the laughing stock of the industry, but that's a different story.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, you have to open the case. There are add-ons like the Xeno Top Gear that insure you only have to open the case once, but open it you must to flash the firmware on the 360.
Contrary to what you're being told, Microsoft DOES ban consoles with modded firmware on Xbox LIVE. Not all consoles all of the time (certain older consoles are unblockable). However, my understanding is they'll kill your Xbox Live Gold account (cancel it with no refund), so you'll want to keep the modded hardware off XBOX Live. This means, as a practical measure, many people will need 2 360s and if you want to play games online, you're probably going to have to buy them.
BTW, The are reasons for banning other than piracy. Some people use firmware hacks to cheat in online games, notably Halo 3.
Sigh.. Yes, i miss Black Isle. And their Fallout 3 (which was codenamed Van Buren, btw). I tried it, the tech demo has been released on the internet. And it seemed REALLY promising. And to think they was to release Baldurs Gate 3 on the same engine? Incredible engine. Well, i dont remember where i got the tech demo, but here's a youtube of Van Buren: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uuDKrY7eW0 I do not believe Bethesda will be as true to the source as the Van Buren engine got...
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.