Bethesda Announces New Fallout Game For 2010

On Monday Bethesda announced a new title in the popular Fallout series called New Vegas, set for release sometime in 2010. It's planned for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. They said it wasn't a sequel to the highly-acclaimed Fallout 3, but rather a brand new game set in the same universe, though they confirmed that it will be similar in style to Fallout 3. The new game will be developed by Obsidian Entertainment, a studio containing members of the original Fallout team, which Bethesda's Pete Hines discussed in an interview with Shacknews. The Fallout series also made headlines earlier this week when Bethesda trademarked the name for TV and film.

Comments

Great!

[G-forze]

As long as they remove the level cap.

Re:Great!

[FyRE666]

Good luck winning over the PS3 owners after shafting them with the "exclusive" 360 and PC downloadable content. Yeah, I want to go out and pay the same amount for a Bethesda game as another player, and then get less for my money.

Screw em.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind the level cap, what bothered me about Fallout 3 was the stupid, stupid fucking ending. They say one of the expansions is supposed to fix both problems.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

as opposed to paying 3-4 times as much (compared to the 360) for the games console itself? If "value for money" was your aim, you shouldnt have got the PS3 anyway.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

it just encourages this sort of short-term corporate money grubbing, and shows people Bethesda could really give a shit about their customers, they're in it for the money, and that's it.

Says the proud owner of a Sony product.

Re:Great!

[Narishma]

Troll much? The PS3 costs $100 more than the Xbox 360 (unless you pick the Arcade version which has no hard drive, and thus is of no use if you want to play the DLC of Fallout). In addition, if you want the DLC you'll have to subscribe to Xbox Live which is around $50 a year. Then if you need Wifi you'll have to pay an additional $90. All of these come free on the PS3, and you get a Blu-ray player as well. In the end you'll spend roughly the same whether you buy an Xbox 360 or a PS3.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition, if you want the DLC you'll have to subscribe to Xbox Live which is around $50 a year

You can purchase DLC with a free Xbox Live Silver account. Most people won't need WiFi for a system that's sitting in the same place all the time, and to my knowledge the PS3 lacks the 360's streaming movie service.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right there with ya, man. There's no business reason why Microsoft shouldn't go around one-upping Sony, but at least it would *feel* better to us gamers if it had been presented as "Buy this for Xbox to get exclusive content" instead of "Finished the game? Loved it? Well here, we'll give you some more of it -- unless you bought it for PS3, your game is over." The fact that we didn't find out until after we had bought the game that we had the inferior version made it feel like something that was done to us rather than something we chose to do.

Re:Great!

[Richard_at_work]

I'm sorry, are you entitled to any DLC? No, didn't think so. I lose count of the number of times Xbox360 owners have been 'shafted' because of exclusitivity agreements for the PS3...

Re:Great!

[KDR_11k]

Well, I got a pro for 200€ and didn't buy any extras for that (no mandatory ones at least, I got a 6€ or so HDMI cable but you can skip that since it makes no difference), just plugged it into the nearby switch (even came with a network cable for that), the other cable into the TV and it worked. Of course finding games for it is still proving difficult...

Then again FO3 has nothing to do with my 360 anyway because I got it for the PC where it's 20€ cheaper. Haven't upgraded the PC in a while (five years) but the game ran fine anyway.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, are you entitled to any DLC?

How come arguments like this always pop up when they have no relevance whatsoever? Where did he say that he was entitled to DLC?

No, didn't think so.

You pretentious twat.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, of all the complaints to make off fallout3 and that's all you could think of?

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically you get the same for your money.

If you buy the game for Xbox 360 or PS3 at retail, you end up with the same game.

Okay, you don't get the option of the content, but that costs extra money that you're not paying in the first place.

Re:Great!

[BakaHoushi]

[i]they're in it for the money, and that's it.[/i]

This just in: Company works for money, customers shocked.
Tune in for the details after our special investigative report "Water: It's wet."

Re:Great!

[ikkonoishi]

Yeah I think the one that will raise the level cap and change the ending is Broken Steel which is the one after The Pitt. Supposed to come out the end of this month or sometime next month. Personally I'm starting to suspect that they made the ending like that just to make you buy the expansions. I'm holding out for the gold version whenever it comes out.

Re:Great!

[AvitarX]

I am willing to bet the percentage of people with networking from their study/office to their TV room is smaller than you think.

The only people I know with ethernet near their TV are those with both a Den and a Living room, with the Den being a TV/Computer room.

I could run a wire semi-tastefully into the attic, come down the with the plumbing into the basement, and then drill hole in the floor, or if I were really motivated put a panel in the wall and pull the wire up.

But that is all a lot of work, suffice it to say, my consoles use wifi, and only the office in my house is wired.

Re:Great!

[Talderas]

This was my take on the ending....

The chamber is filled with radiation, oh noes!

I equip an advanced radiation suit and pop a Rad-X. Wewt I have 85% rad resist.

I go into the chamber, I'm taking in about 2-3 rads/sec. Cool, that gives me about 5.5 minutes without using any Radaway. I go in, it takes me about 30 seconds to enter the code and start project purity.

Oh no, I'm passing out from radiation. WTF? I have 4.5-5 minutes left before I DIE from radiation poisoning, and I haven't even suffered the first level of radiation poisoning. I'm incapable of taking the 10 seconds to turn around an walk back into the airlock so I can escape the chamber? WTF?

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

networking from their study/office to their TV room

oh look, the bourgeois has a special room for his tv. some people here are lucky to even have a meal or a roof over their heads, you posh bastard.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a gorram tool. You have no proof that Microsoft did this. Go ask for a press release from Bethesda if you want an answer that's not .

Re:Great!

[elrous0]

MS paid good money for that DLC (did you think it didn't cost money to produce it?). If Sony wants it for the PS3, let them pony up their share (or let Bethesda charge a lot more for the Ps3 version than for the 360 version). Until then, they have no reason to bitch. It's not Bethesda's fault that Sony are a bunch of cheapasses, or that the PS3 doesn't have the attach rate of the 360. MS has more players, MS gave them the money--wtf did you EXPECT them to do?

Re:Great!

[elrous0]

It was SUPER radiation.

Re:Great!

[il_diablo]

It's an RPG trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GameplayAndStorySegregation

Re:Great!

[elrous0]

That sounds like Browncoat talk.

Re:Great!

[FlexPlexico]

This was already discussed, but what's more bothering is that Fawkes is essentially immune to radiation, yet there is no way to let him do the deed.

Re:Great!

[HideyoshiJP]

What? You don't like wire fishing and getting covered in insulation? I thought EVERYBODY loved that. *itch*

Re:Great!

[SuiteSisterMary]

And isn't it handy that for people who *do* happen to want WiFi on their 360, they can then purchase a WiFi adaptor.

What if I want to purchase a PS3 without paying for any built-in wifi bits?

Re:Great!

[yankeessuck]

Who said anything about entitled? The PS3 version costs the same as the 360 version and yet you get a less capable product for no apparent reason. At least put on the box "DLC incompatible." That said, if it's really such a huge deal then just return the game and stick it to them.

Re:Great!

[SuiteSisterMary]

They failed only in that they did not respect one of the primary laws of RPGs; if it has stats, it can be defeated.

Rather than actually flooding that room with the 'radiated' property, which interacts with with, as many have noted, your rad resistance and what not, they should have created a new property; 'deadly radiation' or something. Upon entering the room, your radcounter should have been overridden to 'off the scale,' and here's the important part, regardless of radresistance or any other perk, skill, equipment, or anything. Your POV should have fallen instantly to the floor, and you should have had only the ability to crawl slowly to the keyboard. Your hands should have appeared in front of you, with a crawling animation, with the skin visibly cooking, peeling, sloughing off. This should also have acted as a timer for how long you have to actually get to the damn keyboard. It should have been possible to die on the way there (maybe it is at the moment, but I don't think so.)

Re:Great!

[morari]

PS3 owners obviously just need to buy a PC. They'd actually get some pretty darn good games then!

Re:Great!

[Talderas]

You mean like the microwave hallway ending to MGS4? I don't think you can die in there. I should play through the game again to see if you can.

Re:Great!

[AvitarX]

Heaven forbid I live in a 2 bed-room house with someone whom I can share a room with.

I understand it is better than billions of people's situations, but so is the ability to buy an Xbox 360, or a PS3.

Even internet access is a stretch for billions.

Re:Great!

[Fallingcow]

In addition to removing the level cap, I hope they re-do the whole leveling/skill system to be more Fallout-like. IMO it was the one thing that pushed F3 over the tipping point from "Fallout in a new skin" to "Oblivion with guns and some Fallout references". If they'd gotten that right, it would have been a content-starved but true Fallout game; as it is, I reluctantly have to side with the "Oblivion with guns" folks.

Hell, I wish they'd change it for the next Elder Scrolls game, too. The fact that you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game made sense in Morrowind for plot reasons, but IMO didn't in Oblivion. In Fallout 3 it was a complete break from the earlier games, in which you'd only have time to master a couple of skills (and be good at a handful of others) by the end of a normal game, unless you did a shitload of grinding.

You had to pick you skills that you wanted to excel at, and focus on those to the exclusion of most of the others. In Fallout 3 you will be a god and have stats at or near the top in every category, even if you don't try to (I didn't).

Re:Great!

[Gravatron]

Sony's offered downloadable video for some time now. Not sure if you can stream it, but you can rent and watch movies on it.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a better explanation. Project Purity was warmed up and read to go. You enter the control room (which is currently at a "standby" of 2-3 rads per seconds and enter the code. Purity starts up. An operating Purity starts generating a massive radcount of several hundred per second. You die before you can even turn to get to the door.

Of course, this is easily overridden by the fact that if you have the radiation immune Fawkes with you, he will refuse to go in because it is your destiny. That was lame.

Re:Great!

[SuiteSisterMary]

Woah woah, watch it! Haven't played MGS4 yet. Holding out for it on the 360.

Now, the whole FO3 ending bit is moot what with Broken Steel coming out in a month, which a) jumps the level cap to 30, and b) rewrites the ending so that you don't die. Or can send a companion. :-)

Re:Great!

[khchung]

PS3 owner are entitled to the option of buying any DLC for a game available on that platform. Yes, an option by itself do have value even if you do exercise it immediately.

I would say XBox360 owner are shafted because of exclusive agreements for PS3, so why not XBox owners go ahead and stop buying from game companies that shafted them while PS3 owners stop buying from Bethesda?

I would certainly hold back until I know if there DLC is going to be XBox exclusive. If so, I will just skip this one even though I like playing the FO series to save myself some disappointment.

Re:Great!

[Talderas]

When will you 360 owners realize that MGS4 is not coming out for the 360?

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It was never the ambient radiation that was the problem. Only when the machine starts up does it blast you to death with a massive, instantaneous overexposure--one that is far greater than your mitigation can handle.

This isn't the only place in the game with radiation of that scale. Try getting to the front door of Vault 87; you can't survive it, even with all the radiation protection in the game. The only way to even get there is to hotkey your RadAway and constantly pop them. Even then, you're gonna die.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

whaaaafuckingooooosh

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

The radiation itself did not particularly offend me. I could explain that away to myself by assuming that the door had a safety interlock of some sort, and that once you hit the button it would take hours to jaws-of-life you out of there.

But what killed the ending of Fallout 3 for me, even above and beyond the plot's being a bland and unsubtle mash of the first two games, was the false dichotomy of the ending.

No matter what, either you or the female lead had to go into the chamber. No choice. Had to be one of you.

Nevermind that when I arrived at that chamber, I had standing next to me a supermutant who bribed his way into my company by---wait for it---walking into a radiation filled chamber!

Yes, there I was, standing next to a radiation filled chamber with a radiation immune lummox whose sole raison d'etre was to walk into radiation filled chambers---and my only options were to inexplicably martyr myself or murder the bland and uninteresting woman I was ostensibly supposed to give a crap about.

It's as if I'd gotten a splinter in my thumb, and somehow could only choose to remove it with one of two chainsaws, while the tweezers looked on sadly and respected my sacrifice. Oh---and my entire life was to be judged entirely upon which chainsaw I picked, all previous actions and moral judgments I might have made being moot.

It's not as if the devs could simply have overlooked Fawkes in writing the ending---there are also a ghoul and three robotic party members.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game made sense in Morrowind for plot reasons, but IMO didn't in Oblivion.

Good thing that - I don't remember becoming godlike in Oblivion. I do, however, remember having to dump 100 arrows into every enemy by level 20. It seriously felt like I was leveling backwards.

Re:Great!

[ravenshrike]

The problem with that sarcasm you showed is that there are genuinely people who think like that.

Re:Great!

[mrdoogee]

While I was mad about no PS3 DLC, What I really realized was that I prefer the Mouse/KB control scheme for Bethesda games. I bought Morrowind for PC and Oblivion and Fallout for PS3. I loved both of them but I always felt that something was lacking on the console versions.

However in fairness, I also preferred Mass Effect on PC after having beaten it on 360.

  I now NEVER buy a multiport game on launch day, I wait until a few weeks later and the reports are in and buy the one with the features I want. I know I'm a self indulgent bastard for owning every mainstream game system, I also have a Wii. But Hey gaming IS my only real hobby and plenty of guys will spend waaaaay more on cars or boats or dirtbikes etc...

Re:Great!

[Dextrously]

Not to mention *OBSIDIAN* is designing this game instead of the original developers. The company that single handily ruined the sequel to Neverwinter Nights by creating the filth that was Neverwinter Nights 2. Obsidian has a track record of picking up games that other developers had worked on, and ruining them... Just check out their game list on Wikipedia.

Re:Great!

[Caboosian]

They failed only in that they did not respect one of the primary laws of RPGs; if it has stats, it can be defeated.

Rather than actually flooding that room with the 'radiated' property, which interacts with with, as many have noted, your rad resistance and what not, they should have created a new property; 'deadly radiation' or something. Upon entering the room, your radcounter should have been overridden to 'off the scale,' and here's the important part, regardless of radresistance or any other perk, skill, equipment, or anything. Your POV should have fallen instantly to the floor, and you should have had only the ability to crawl slowly to the keyboard. Your hands should have appeared in front of you, with a crawling animation, with the skin visibly cooking, peeling, sloughing off. This should also have acted as a timer for how long you have to actually get to the damn keyboard. It should have been possible to die on the way there (maybe it is at the moment, but I don't think so.)

Couple things. Firstly, while going into the room does make your rad counter go apeshit, its the ensuing explosion that kills you - not the radiation itself. That's not really that big of a deal, and it was stupid of them to do it like that... so non-Fallout, but I digress.

Secondly, with regards to your crawling idea, I very much so like it, however, its pretty foreign to the rest of the game. At no point is your control ever taken from you; its a conscious decision made by Bethesda. It really makes you feel as if you are the person in the game, not just the camera or what have you. It really limits Bethesda in some areas - conversations, for instance, all invariably suck (aside from the dialogue, which is often humorous, or realistic, etc.) as they are so rigid. Mass Effect, for instance, I feel did a much better job with their conversations - however, it's pretty clear that that's Shephard talking there, not YOU. So to remove the players control, and their sense of that person in the game being them, would probably never happen and would probably feel very forced.

That's not to say there aren't much better ways to have done it. Just wanted to point out a couple of things.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

and to my knowledge the PS3 lacks the 360's streaming movie service.

 
I'll have to remember that when I'm home streaming netflix and hulu on my PS3

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

'shafted'? What exclusive PS3 downloads are you talking about? The only example I can think of is Bioshock, which was only three challenge 'rooms.' Sony does not shell out for DLC, unlike Microsoft who loads dump trucks with greenbacks and covers companies in avalanches so they can lose millions on a subpar hardware product, RRoD E74, but eventually grab a large percentage of the market.

Yes, I know that's how you 'run' a business. I also know I do not agree with it and will not put up with it.

Re:Great!

[theaceoffire]

and to my knowledge the PS3 lacks the 360's streaming movie service.

We have www.youtube/tv from the browser, and youtube recently added movies and tv shows, although I am not sure they are allowing them to be shown on the PS3. If they do, we will have high-def video streaming of movies and tv shows in a format built for TV, as well as Hulu and so forth.

Also, don't underestimate how nice it is to be able to set up the PS3 in any room in the house, or to quickly set it up online at a friends house... I love the WiFi, and I am glad they added it. Less-trippy.

Re:Great!

[MemoryDragon]

so what get yourself a pc and be happy...
PS3 owners always geht shafted, the PC versions perform better mostly and cost 20$ less than the PS3 versions, you get what you pay for...

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention *OBSIDIAN* is designing this game instead of the original developers.
Uh, Obsidian ARE the original developers - they consist largely of the same talent that worked on Fallout 1 and 2.

Obsidian has a track record of picking up games that other developers had worked on, and ruining them.
Funny joke there. You're funny. Obsidian has a track record for taking Bioware's uninspired shit and laying some good writing on it.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the heck would you need more levels? Once you reach 20 lvl you're a semi-God in DaD parlance. What do you need more levels for? Munchkin much?..

Re:Great!

[shutdown -p now]

Secondly, with regards to your crawling idea, I very much so like it, however, its pretty foreign to the rest of the game. At no point is your control ever taken from you

Where did GP every say that control would be taken away from you? You're forced to crawl slowly, but you can crawl wherever you like - outside the chamber, to die there without fulfilling your mission, if you so desire.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck winning over the PS3 owners after shafting them with the "exclusive" 360 and PC downloadable content. Yeah, I want to go out and pay the same amount for a Bethesda game as another player, and then get less for my money.

Screw em.

If you don't want to purchase the PS3 version of the game over DLC, then go PC. PC version will have mods in addition to additional content.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I see the hand of the Grand Illuminati at work!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which was awful nice of them. Of course, it would have been nicer if they didn't release it for the PS3, either.

Re:Great!

[JosKarith]

Oh god, don't get me started on Auto Level Balancing. Worst idea evar... I mean seriously, at level 25 you walk into a goblin mound to find it totally full of chiefs and shamans. Where'd all the grunts go? A system of either having monster level being (Base + character level/2) or having most of the monsters in an area set level and just having the bosses level balance would be far better.

And as for the Oblivion with Guns thing - Funny, I don't remember Bethesda running a kill xp system since Arena. Oh I suppose Battlespire did but that hardly counts.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll consider it a fair trade for not having the DLC available on the PS3 for Fallout 3.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Bethesda as far as I'm concerned can go screw themselves. No PS3 DLC, NOT BUYING ANY MORE BETHESDA SOFTWARE!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and you can buy a XBox without a hard drive as well!

With the power of Microsoft and the XBox you are free to customize the shittyness of your gaming experience!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what i find funny about it. i love going on an anti-capitalist/consumerist tirade and then asking who wants McDonald's for dinner...

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like in COD 4 when you get rad poisoning after the bomb goes off. (except there you had no mission to complete)

Elder Scrolls?

[setagllib]

No more love for Elder Scrolls? I guess FPS will always win over RPG in raw popularity with Western audiences.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should had at least read the summary: "The new game will be developed by Obsidian Entertainment". So they're basically outsourcing this one to the company that made Never Winter Nights, while Bethesda is probably working on Elder Scrolls 5. Just a thought.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is being headed by Obsidian Entertainment, the company responsible for the sequel to Knights of the Old Republic, and which is the current home to some of the talent that worked on the first two Fallout games. Bethesda is working on a separate project, presumably The Elder Scrolls 5. I think I read somewhere about ZeniMax trademarking the name Skyrim, so I'm guessing that that will be the name/location of the next Elder Scrolls game.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bioware made Neverwinter Nights, Obsidian made Neverwinter Nights 2. Worth noting that Obsidian is essentially made up of people from Black Isle Studios, the makers of Fallout 1 and 2. It'll be nice to see Fallout back in the hands of (some of) its original creators.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Ifandbut]

Oblivion was more FPS then Fallout 3 because you did not have the turn-based rpg combat in Oblivion, you just swung your sword randomly and sometimes blocked. I dont know about you, but I never got tired of blowing a super-mutant's head off in slow-mo. I did get tired of Oblivion's swing 2 times and block once combat by about level 10.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and The Elder Scroll games felt like a single player MMO. Mindless questing for nothing. So did Fallout 3. The games that the guys from Obsidian has made in the past did not feel like that. So hey, no more love for Elder Scrolls is a good thing. Bethesda just can't make a decent RPG to save their lives. They only cater to OCDer's who can't stop questing for the sake of questing.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Kneo24]

Well, if you want more Oblivion with guns... Wait, what are you trying to say again?

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fallout: Las Vegas (as well as Fallout: Miami and Fallout: New York) are being made by an external studio.
Elder Scroll's V was announced by Bethseda a few week's before Fallout 3's release, they basically said they'd start on it when they'd finished Fallout's stuff, which the third and final announced DLC comes out in a few week's, So I would guess TESV has been at least in concept stages for a few month's and production will start in earnest over summer.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Xest]

No idea why that would be.

I like FPS', in fact, I love FPS' but I thought Fallout 3 was a little crap.

I did however love Oblivion. Fallout 3 just felt like a really poor attempt to mangle an FPS into Oblivion and the end result wasn't IMO all that good.

FPS' still seem better if they focus on being FPS' - see Bioshock and Deadspace for excellent examples. All that said though I did enjoy Mass Effect which was I suppose also a mangling of the FPS and RPG genre.

I think Fallout 3's biggest fault really was just that they'd borrowed too much of the codebase from Oblivion such that it was effectively just Oblivion with different art and story and guns instead of magic/bows. It just didn't feel quite right IMO, presumably because the engine was built for the fantasy RPG genre and not the FPS genre.

I'd definitely prefer another Oblivion over another Fallout even though I'm a big FPS fan because Bethesda just don't seem to be any good at making FPS' at leat nowadays - they should stick with what they truly excel at, RPGs.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

RPG nut here, just wanted to pop in to say that I loved Fallout 3, hated Oblivion and FPS games are about as appealing to me as your grandmother naked.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fallout 3 wasn't for people who play FPS. It was mainly a way to see the series in 3D for old school fans of series.

In order to take the approach they did turn based was the most logical and even then you didn't have to pause and take turns.

Fallout != Oblivion stop making the comparison. So what if they borrowed the codebase (if they did) doing so does not mean much of it was left. Fallout 3 was made in the heart as the original games. And many of the fans (including) myself enjoyed it greatly. Sure there were bugs as it was based on a 3D engine and most 3D engines have their quirks. I don't blame this on idea that somehow using the Oblivion codebase made this happen. The issue you have is somehow you keep thinking that Fallout was supposed to be some straight FPS and its not nor ever was. What Fallout 3 did do was bring the Fallout Franchise into the 3D realm and make it that more immersive which is what Bethesda tries to do with their games.

Oblivion was a full on RPG with magic, character creation with races, etc. Fallout has always been a hybrid of action/rpg. One thing to note also about the Elder Scroll series as far back as I can remember its always been a first person-esque game. Even hearkening back to the days when the game characters looked like they were paper thin in Arena or Daggerfall.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Worth noting that Obsidian is essentially made up of people from Black Isle Studios, the makers of Fallout 1 and 2. It'll be nice to see Fallout back in the hands of (some of) its original creators.

Do you really think that 10+ years later that the same people that worked on Fallouts 1 and 2 are still working there? Maybe 2 or 3 people, but that's it.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[geminidomino]

I'll wait until Fallout: Vice City.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[WoRLoKKeD]

Personally, I just want New Reno to feature somewhere again.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[moronoxyd]

Well, if these two people are Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone, then that's good enough for me to put "Fallout - New Vegas" on my wishlist.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to point this out, but FPS means 'first person shooter' (or shoot 'em up if you like), both Dead Space and Mass Effect are third person games.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Xest]

"Fallout != Oblivion stop making the comparison. So what if they borrowed the codebase (if they did) doing so does not mean much of it was left."

Quest system, physics system, inventory system, general gameplay feel, terrain/graphics engine. They're all fairly major parts of a game that have been kept from Oblivion. As you start state yourself, Fallout 3 is a somewhat different genre to Oblivion due to the action element. This is where my issue was with it, they'd used an engine perfectly purpose built for one genre, in a game of a fairly different genre and many things just didn't feel right.

Whilst they'd done a fantastic job on the storyline and an amazing job on art, it felt like they'd put very, very little effort in on the code side of things. I think for the most part Fallout 3 could even in fact largely have been created as an Oblivion mod.

It's hard not to draw comparisons when the games feel so similar and for the most part, all that's different is the art and text.

My issue is not with what genre I was looking for in Fallout either particularly, just that even the genre it was didn't feel too great. There were some poor game design choices too - the weapon breaking system was horifically bad and the main storyline was far too short. The game world was fantastic there's no doubting that, it was just the gameplay within the world that fell short of expectations for me. It could certainly have been much better with just a little work on the code side of things.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Xest]

Heh, that's a fair point ;) I suppose I should've just used the term shooter! FWIW, Fallout 3 can also be played 3rd person.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Hatta]

The Elder Scrolls are FPS. Of course, 'S' may stand for "Slasher" in some cases, but still the games have more in common with Heretic and Hexen than they do Ultima.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[elrous0]

By the time they're down to "Fallout: Des Moines" it will probably be about time to just let it go.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Fallingcow]

Quest system, physics system, inventory system, general gameplay feel, terrain/graphics engine.

Don't forget the leveling system, which let you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game without really trying to. That's 100% Oblivion, 0% Fallout.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Yunzil]

I think Fallout 3's biggest fault really was just that they'd borrowed too much of the codebase from Oblivion such that it was effectively just Oblivion with different art and story and guns instead of magic/bows.

See, I look at it the other way. Oblivion was Fallout 3, only lacking guns. I enjoyed Fallout 3 much more than Oblivion, mostly because of the atmosphere. Oblivion was Yet Another Fantasy Realm, of which I have seen plenty. Fallout 3 is more grounded in reality, and because I live near DC, I found it much more interesting.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Rayonic]

When I played Fallout 3, I thought "Wow, if they can make the next Elder Scrolls game this good, I'm sold."

Hell, they could probably bring over VATS but give it a less obtrusive interface (so as to fit into a fantasy setting.)

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Creepy]

Bethesda didn't actually write the engine - they took Gamebryo and built an RPG toolkit on top of it for both Oblivion and Fallout (before that they used NetImmerse, so they haven't really written an engine for a while... Redguard maybe?). The toolkit was customized for each game and after the interface was cleaned up, it was released to the public.

Funny that I think the storyline is the weakest part of both games (really, what Bethesda game has ever had a good story? - it's like asking id to write Halo or Bioshock). With Fallout 3 it is really all about the side questing and exploring. The main quest was even run by the developers in something like 90 minutes, and I was not impressed by it (I was railroaded!). Still, it was probably the best they've done, as it did have a tiny bit of character development (in the literary sense, not the point bash-sense).

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's like asking id to write Halo

You mean it's like asking a company known for their generic sci-fi stories to write a generic sci-fi story?

or Bioshock

Or asking them to ctrl+v some overrated Ayn Rand book?

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[iroll]

Or, you could try this: Play Fallout 3 straight through, story mode, ignoring side quests. Pick skills that look useful and interesting, but don't go online and theorycraft yourself into a god. You'll get to the end around level 12-13, and many fights will be a struggle, especially the escort missions and the Enclave battles. Just like Fallout 2, you'll end up with a couple strong skills (e.g. speech and small guns for my last guy) and a lot of weaknesses.

Now, load up Fallout 2, and spend all of your time fighting in the wasteland, ignoring the main questline. Or do just enough of the main quest to get your power armor. Go theorycraft on your skills. You can make yourself into an unstoppable juggernaut that one-shots every enemy with just a power fist.

That's 100% Fallout. You can go either way. You can be a scrappy underdog, or you can be the god of the wastes.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[MemoryDragon]

Yes I agree while Fallout3 overall was a good game, it definitely was not a Fallout, it felt more like a humorless fan game...
I hope the obsidian guys bring back the weird humor of the first two!

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Fallingcow]

Now, load up Fallout 2, and spend all of your time fighting in the wasteland, ignoring the main questline. Or do just enough of the main quest to get your power armor. Go theorycraft on your skills. You can make yourself into an unstoppable juggernaut that one-shots every enemy with just a power fist.

Yeah, but that same character probably won't have 250% Doctor and 230% Repair skills, right? I didn't play anywhere near all of the side-quests in F3 (well, I reloaded a save after I'd finished and did them, but not at first anyway) and I did zero power leveling, but by about 3/4 of the way through I was running out of places to put new skill boosts so I just started loading up on ones that I hadn't intended to level up at all in the beginning. I was pretty damn good at everything, which was something that was hard to do in Fallout 2, and certainly wasn't something you'd do by accident. You might be the best sniper/boxer in the wastes, but you weren't simultaneously going to be a quantum physicist/physician.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[richtaur]

I'm with you. I'm looking forward to the next Elder Scrolls game WAY more than the next Fallout ... both are good but Oblivion is medieval fantasy and therefore wins.

Plus it took me about twice as long to beat Oblivion so I got to enjoy it for longer: http://raptr.com/richtaur

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obsidian made NWN2 and KotOR2: two games that capitalized off of another company's IP to sell buggy, incomplete, and uncreative drivel. I'm guessing even though some of the original Fallout creators are there, New Vegas will be more of the same from Obsidian.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[default luser]

You missed the most important distinction between Oblivion and Fallout 3.

LEVELING-UP IN OBLIVION:

1. Decide which THREE attributes I want to level-up this time around.

2. For each attribute, analyze the THREE skills attached to it. Increases in your group of skills translates directly to an increase in the parent attribute when you level-up. The best-possible level-up for your attribute involves getting 10 points of skill-group increases.

3. Unfortunately, level-ups are driven by your "major skills," a small subset of all your skills. You get a level-up once you increase any of your "major skills" by a sum total of 10 points. You can get into situations where the attributes you want to level have too many attached skills that are also "major skills." Do the math in this situation: you can't get a good level for two different attributes at-once if the child skills are all "major skills" - you need 10 points per-group (20 total) to get the best level-up for each attribute, but you can only increase your major skills by 10 points before triggering a level-up. This means you really have to custom-build a character in order to get "major skill" combinations that are compatible with each other for leveling, to save you tearing your hair-out.

4. (No, we're not done yet!) While leveling one of your three selected attributes, god help you if you accidentally raise a skill belonging in an unrelated attribute - since you can only raise three attributes when you gain a level, any additional skill increases you get for other attributes are thrown-away when you level-up. You still get the skill increases, but your attributes do not increase. Since attributes determine all sorts of important things (like say, your magic, hitpoints, etc.), you don't benefit when the skills increase and your attributes don't.

LEVELING-UP IN FALLOUT 3

1. Get experience. When you level, pick the skills you want to increase, and pick your perk (if applicable).

I was amazed when I discovered just how much Fallout 3's leveling system was like Fallout 2. Sure, the stats and their distribution may be different, but Fallout 3 leveling is NOTHING LIKE Oblivion. And for that, I am ETERNALLY HAPPY.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

No more love for Elder Scrolls? I guess FPS will always win over RPG in raw popularity with Western audiences.

NO love here at all - those games are freaking boring, slow, and look like ass. F3 was the best application of the Bethesda engine they could have ever hoped for.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[setagllib]

The reason I like Oblivion is that problems like that are trivially patched away by installing an ESP into your Data directory. The simplest solution I've seen to the Oblivion problem is plus5always.esp, which just means you always get to pick +5 for each attribute if any skill was raised during that level. You still only get to raise 3 attributes, but at least you don't have to micro-manage the skills to do so. Do the math and you'll see you can max out your main attributes in about 10 levels (from ~50 starting to 100 max), and then the rest is for secondary attributes that still help game mechanics, and once those are maxed too, the rest goes into Luck at +1 per level.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[default luser]

Sure, and I use an even more elegant mod here that allows me to bypass the problem entirely, by upping attributes automatically when skills go up. Thus, levels mean absolutely nothing, except for level requirements for quests. Or, you can choose from several different solutions, as it is quite flexible.

Anyway, Fallout 3 has the same flexibility to be modded, and has exactly what you're looking for here. The mod linked reduces your skill points to 1 per INT, which means you can challenge yourself by adding more or less INT to your character at creation time. But even if you max-out INT, you'll still earn less than in the standard game.

I'm sure you can find a mod that similarly limits perks.

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[JosKarith]

"Bethesda just can't make a decent RPG to save their lives."

Wise move not pinning your Karma to _that_ statement...

Re:Elder Scrolls?

[Dan667]

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. All Bethesda has is that stupid 3D engine and everything they touch they try to force into it. It was Oblivion with guns.

Elder Scrolls ?

[Mornedhel]

So, what happened to the next Elder Scrolls ? Wasn't it supposed to be released in 2010 ?

Will they manage to release two large titles in the same year, or will they just postpone TES 5 ?

Re:Elder Scrolls ?

[oneirophrenos]

Don't know about Elder Scrolls, but since this project seems to have been outsourced to Obsidian, Bethesda probably has enough resources to develop another big game.

Re:Elder Scrolls ?

[Thanshin]

Will they manage to release two large titles in the same year, or will they just postpone TES 5 ?

They should create a common engine for a double release of Fallout 4 and TES 5.

Or even a triple release with WhateverTheyComeUpWith 1. I'll buy any instance of morrowind as long as they keep the total freedom part.

My vote goes to Space-Morrowind 1.

Re:Elder Scrolls ?

[AHuxley]

2 companies 1 cup?

Re:Elder Scrolls ?

[mrdoogee]

Well Underwater Morrowind is right out, thanks to Bioshock.

Re:Elder Scrolls ?

[noname444]

All newer bethesda games use the gamebryo engine. Did you think they wrote all their games from scratch, every time? :)

Original fallout team

[registered_after_8_y]

Well, this certainly bodes well, just have to hope that they emphasize the role-playing and not the action. I think this is a danger when they made the game 3d over isometric view, somehow many developers focus too much on the FPS parts when they do this. I have to admit that I was highly sceptical of F3, partially because of this, but they certainly won me over after a couple of minutes play. Just have to hope that Obsidian does their job and the game will be playable at launch and not after 5 patches...

Re:Original fallout team

[Thrymm]

I totally agree, although I sort of liked Fallout 3 , I still felt like I was playing Oblivion or FPS games. The quests were ok for the most part, but lacked the obscure humor that made Fallout and F2 so much fun.

Also the original two seemed more like being in a bleak unforgiving world, Fallout 3 didnt give me that at all. You sometimes could run around for 5+ minutes and not encounter an enemy. At least the travel menu in the originals you would encounter enemies. The companions did not impress me.... I hope with some of the original team, they can make a modernized game which pays homage to the originals much better this time around.

 

Re:Original fallout team

[praedictus]

New Vegas? wonder if you can continue your life as a porn star, or be relegated to fluffer. Or play the gang lords off against one another and knock up the mob lord's druggie daughter, after a fling with his wife.

Re:Original fallout team

[westlake]

The quests were ok for the most part, but lacked the obscure humor that made Fallout and F2 so much fun.

That "obscure humor" is for the most part the sci-fi nerd's trivia fest. You don't need that crutch when you something as distinctive and rich as the Fallout universe to build on.

Re:Original fallout team

[zwei2stein]

However that created distinctive feel of Fallout. 1950s Science Fiction. Remove that and it is yet another generic postap.

Re:Original fallout team

[Talderas]

Fallout 2 much?

Re:Original fallout team

[Hubbell]

I never even bothered with a companion, lockpick + energy weapons + science and just ground my way until I got my first laser pistol, and after that the game was easy as shit, especially with a plasma rifle or scoped 44 magnum.

Re:Original fallout team

[Steauengeglase]

Lets just hope that we don't need to use AP to walk more than 5 feet.

Re:Original fallout team

[revlayle]

In a way, yes.... but F2 overdid that. F2 was still fun, but F1 had the perfect balance of story, humor and easter eggs, while F2 was "let's see how much shit we can put in there!!"

Re:Original fallout team

[mqduck]

At least the travel menu in the originals you would encounter enemies.

If by that you mean random encounters while fast-traveling, there's a mod for that.

Re:Original fallout team

[ZosX]

I kind of agree. I loved the atmosphere of fallout 1, but by the time I got around to playing 2 it was too over the top. Don't get me wrong, fallout 2 had some pretty amazing parts and a whole lot of people to kill, but it didn't really add much new to the mix.

Re:Original fallout team

[Thrymm]

True it was sci-fi nerd stuff, but was entertaining too. The most you got out of anyone you talked to in Fallout 3 was an over abundance of F bombs. Granted I like seeing cursing in games and all, but it was way over done.

Also little side things were missing such as being a boxer, joining the various mafia crews in New Reno (or whatever city it was I cant think off the top of my head). Banging not only the one guy's wife but his daughter and if caught had the shotgun wedding.

Sure in 3 you could join the vampires, smugglers etc, but at a cost. Like I said I think after 10 years part 3 was enjoyable, outside of my issues of lock ups before using nHancer to help (and I run a rather high end rig). Alaska was fun too, and I will be checking out Pitt soon.

I guess what it comes down to is I miss the older games. Whether it is the 2 Fallouts, or even Lucasart's adventure games such as Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, etc, and even the old Tex Murphy games.

Re:Original fallout team

[Thrymm]

Thanks didnt know there was a mod for that. I'll check it out.... hoping its similar where you were all of a sudden smack in a camp of smugglers, or a bunch of mole rats etc....

er...

[Pvt_Ryan]

Fallout 3 was just "Oblivion with guns".

Hopefull the next one will be isometric & be van Buren updated with nicer gfx

Re:er...

[TitusC3v5]

Hardly. I'd much rather see another Elder Scrolls game than another Fallout.

Re:er...

[BakaHoushi]

Errr... WHY? I mean, what you're basically saying is "I want the exact same games I played years ago, but prettier."

Fallout 3 is fine in a 3D environment. It builds a more believable world. Being first person doesn't somehow diminish anything. Just look at the Metroid series when it jumped to a first person view. Neither are anything like the standard FPS du jour. They're both more open ended and exploration and detail oriented.

Stop viewing older games through the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and realize some change is good.

Re:er...

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr... WHY? I mean, what you're basically saying is "I want the exact same games I played years ago, but prettier."

There's a reason the Madden series is up to about its two dozenth release, and is a best seller every year.

Re:er...

[BakaHoushi]

Touche, anonymous, touche. I forgot the ever so important drunk frat boy demographic. And that "slight change" doesn't necessarily warrant a $50+ purchase.

Re:er...

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

no shit, i would pay $60 for another 12 hours of Jade Empire. they don't even have to update the damn graphics.

Re:er...

[Pvt_Ryan]

Change is good when it is worthwhile and there is a clear benefit, change for the sake of change is not good. In fact "If it ain't broke don't fix it".

rose-tinted nostalgia: Can't really call it that considering I still play FO & FO2 so it ain't like I am remembering something to be better than it was.

The FPS imho does ruin the game. Why? because instead of a true RPG it becomes just another fps with a few more character configurations. The voice acting is terrible & to top it off the whole UI is so obviously aimed at the console market as to make it the most fucking disgusing thing ever with its big retard buttons and press A or B.

No FO3 was just "Oblivion with Guns" dumbed down for console users.

Re:er...

[revlayle]

NO.... Oblivion is Fallout with swords and magic.

Re:er...

[Pvt_Ryan]

Not that it really matters, as happened with Doom 3, I will be stopping buying thir games.

Unless they redesign the game (look at diablo 3 ffs) then looks like I will be £30 better off.

/offtopic
Doom 3, I was really looking forward to (again on the back of the originals) what I bought was a glorified Flashlight simulator, had they just put the light on the end of the guns...

Re:er...

[Fallingcow]

Being first person doesn't somehow diminish anything.

Of course it does. F3 is tiny compared to F2, both in terms of total world area (duh) and, more importantly, the sheer number and size of (interesting) quests. The cause of that is a combination of the move to first-person 3D and using voice actors for practically every line in the game. It's a trade off, and not one I'm terribly happy with. I thought I wouldn't mind it and was really excited about the game, but after playing it and thinking about it for a few months, I don't think it was worth it.

Re:er...

[BakaHoushi]

Then, if I may ask you, what IS an RPG? Because Fallout 3 seems to be one in my book:
You play a character of a race, sex, appearance of your choosing, check.
You make decisions that make allies, enemies, etc. and ultimately define your character, check (You can argue that there wasn't enough choices, [I don't] but that is not a limit of the 3D environment, it was a limit of developer time/money)
You level up via experience and place statistics to mold your combat abilities, check.
You acquire, manage, and equip armor and weapons based on said skills and abilities, check.

You can't do ANY of those things in "just another FPS." Half-life 1 or 2, Crysis, No One Lives Forever, Painkiller... NONE of those games have ANY of those features. In fact, most of them are won by simply grabbing the biggest gun and shooting baddies who pop out of the woodwork. You can do SOME stealth, but that generally means using the silenced gun before attracting a mob. In fact, the only other FPS with these attributes is Deus Ex, which has many RPG attributes, was praised for it, and was a truly classic game.

So, please, explain to me how FO3 is not an RPG. Yes, it has guns. Yes, you can manually aim it. But you can also do turn based, statistics combat. And you can use melee weapons. So where is the RPG element lacking?

Re:er...

[Pvt_Ryan]

When I said "true" RPG i perhaps should have said traditional.

In fact, most of them are won by simply grabbing the biggest gun and shooting baddies who pop out of the woodwork.

And just being able to add a few perks and a few skills makes FO3 different from those FPS in a big way?

Re:er...

[Anonymous Coward]

But it scales well. I remember playing Fallout 2 on a fairly decent system when it came out and the load screens took a LONG time - sometimes a couple minutes when entering/exiting areas. FO3 is almost instantaneous on my machine now, which would be about the equivalent in specs. And if you look at the actual content I would say FO3 isn't that much smaller. In Fallout and Fallout 2, there were a lot less locations to visit, a lot less characters to interact with, and less quests.

Re:er...

[bonch]

Being 3D shrinks the world due to the increased hardware requirements, and it removes the amount of details that can be included. How many prefab broken down buildings were there in Fallout 3 that you couldn't go into? The reduced scale made it silly to know there was a town not too far from my own vault, and that the "wasteland" was something I could run across in real-time from one side of the other.

There was rarely a sense of an isolated wasteland like there was in the first game, where travel across the barren desert was portrayed as taking so long that it switched to an overhead map view with a dotted line showing your path. You could run out of water during the trip. Most of the tiles on the map were empty desert tiles with the occasional half-buried car tire or pile of debris.

More importantly than all of this is the fact that being in first-person 3D pretty much means the developers have to turn the game into a first-person shooter, which is what Bethesda did. They added a pointless, easy bullet-time feature to do headshots with, and now we get a bunch of stupid headshot videos on YouTube set to hip-hop music. None of this is what Fallout was about.

Re:er...

[rpillala]

There is also the story and the features of the game that make it art. Ebert says that games can't be artistic works of fiction since the user controls the outcome. While the user does control the outcome, there is something to be said for a game forcing you to choose between two unfavorable options or choose how your character presents him or herself (i.e. roleplaying.) See Mass Effect for some of this, or better yet Planescape: Torment. The gameplay mechanics should really be a relatively minor thing in a roleplaying game, but because the computer can crunch the numbers so well, they take a featured role in CRPG.

Re:er...

[mrdoogee]

Everything is just Zork with fancy pictures.

Re:er...

[Creepy]

um, last time I checked RPG meant Role Playing Game and has nothing to do with the character you play, and I think you missed the mark entirely. Let me elaborate before fixing that for you...

    Let's look at Unreal Tournament or most other shooters: Race? check. Sex? Check. Appearance? semi-check (with skinning tools). Make decisions that define your character? Sure - do I camp and snipe, or move up to cap the flag? Level up and experience? not really, but levels and experience are not needed to make an RPG (skill based systems don't have them) and you could say the ladder is the level and player skill is experience. Acquire, Manage, and equip armor and weapons based on said skill and abilities? Check - the better you know the maps, the faster you can get to the ones you need.

So by your criteria, a shooter is essentially an RPG. I could use a similar argument to say something like Guild Wars is essentially a shooter (in PvP).

So what REALLY is the difference? RPGs tell a story and you play a character in that story. RPGs differ from adventure games because the actions you take in the story change the story. In fact, you can really say the story is the game for an RPG, where you can't really say that for other genres. Some games are hybrids and Shooter RPGs - usually these have mostly linear plots and RPG elements like character development and story (for instance, Bioshock).

Re:er...

[Fallingcow]

In Fallout and Fallout 2, there were a lot less locations to visit, a lot less characters to interact with, and less quests.

Huh? No. How long has it been since you played Fallout 2? There may be more dots on the map in F3, but many of them aren't important, and I seriously doubt there were more sidequests. Further, nearly all of the quests in F3 were inconsequential, like the extended fetch-quest for Nuka Cola. I'm not against those, but they can hardly be considered a replacement for things like playing politics between NCR/New Reno/Vault City or any of the other major branching sidequest arcs in F2--hell, there was at least one in every city, and sometimes there were 2-3. I was very disappointed when I discovered that Megaton wasn't just the starting city, but also the most interesting one in the game. It was marginally better than The Den in F2, which was one of the minor cities in that game.

Aside from that, you had the stupid Towers with a moderately-interesting but stiflingly-limited quest (plus some more minor quests if you were evil, I suppose), the dull aircraft carrier with a couple of crappy quests, and a handful of gimmick towns (Republic of Dave, the one with the "super heroes") that were, I want to emphasize, fine, but not a replacement for the cities in F2. Big Town, oddly enough, was the best of the non-Megaton cities IMO, but it was still barely deeper than Klamath Falls. The bit with Harold was nice, too.

Re:er...

[shutdown -p now]

"I want the exact same games I played years ago, but prettier."

I, for one, can subscribe to that. When I look at sequels of great games of the past, that's precisely what I have in mind, and what is most often not delivered. Doom 3, Deus Ex 2, and, yes, Fallout 3 - and dozens more.

I'm glad that Blizzard for one understands that very well with Starcraft 2, by the looks of it.

Re:er...

[Dan667]

This was not good change. It you liked Oblivion it was a good change, but I hated Oblivion. Diablo III and Starcraft II show that something work best the way they were.

Re:er...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The FPS imho does ruin the game. Why? because instead of a true RPG it becomes just another fps with a few more character configurations."
Just like Might & Magic, right?.. Don't be ridiculous.

Re:er...

[Anonymous Coward]

"There was rarely a sense of an isolated wasteland like there was in the first game, where travel across the barren desert was portrayed as taking so long that it switched to an overhead map view with a dotted line showing your path"
Maybe because this time it was a densely populated area that is Washington, DC? Yes, it was small. So what?

"They added a pointless, easy bullet-time feature to do headshots with, and now we get a bunch of stupid headshot videos on YouTube set to hip-hop music."
It's not Bethesda's fault that you don't like hip-hop. Don't like bullet-time - don't use it. Nobody makes you, doesn't it?

In short, nobody cares for your subjective preferences so stop whinging.

If the don't change the gameplay...

[papabob]

I think I'll pass. Not that I didn't enjoed Fallout 3, simply Im getting bored of those RPG games in which the main plot is about 10-20 hours long, and the subplots about 200. Im tired of little missions as "give this letter to X" or "bring me a piece of Y and I get you a powerfull gun" without any connection with the real mission. I think the last game I played that got the point on that missions was Gothic 2, where you know the real story after a long gameplay and most little missions was backgrounded by the election of your classes.

Yes, I know creating plots its the hardest part of a game and you, as a developer, don't want to throw away the efforts you put on creating missions just to see the gamer picking up a path and ignoring 4/5 of the story. But that's the way if you want people replaying and enjoying again your game.

BTW, why in most games you're limited by what the writers consider is the "real story"? You alwasy have to make the election between being 'good' or 'bad' with other NPCs, but most of time if you chose the 'bad' way you lose many subplots and hence the posibility of level up.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's the same in real life. If you kill some bastard, then he won't be giving you any work. It's part of being evil, what are you expecting?

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Kneo24]

Last I checked, video games weren't real life. And last I checked, in the fantasy and sci-fi realm, the bad guys always seemed to have an opportunity to get a lot of work.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe evil geniuses can't get a job, and thus want to rule the world?

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Eskarel]

This is sort of the inherent problem.

A clever evil person takes nearly everything someone has, but leaves them enough to survive so they can make more stuff for them to take later.

In video games, evil basically translates to "killing everything I see for the pure psychopathic joy of it. There's almost never any real quality evil going on anymore, you either raze the village to the ground, or you save it from danger. There's no depth.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've finished Fallout 3 just yesterday night and I know what you're talking about. While I enjoyed the game I have to say that the main storyline seemed to me a little bit "disconnected" -- they just wanted to make a Fallout game and the story was only one of many aspects of the game development. Contrary to that, the game Witcher was imho perfect -- it was entirely driven by the main storyline, with only a few side quest.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Im getting bored of those RPG games in which the main plot is about 10-20 hours long, and the subplots about 200. Im tired of little missions as "give this letter to X" or "bring me a piece of Y and I get you a powerfull gun" without any connection with the real mission.

You're talking about two entirely separate types of design.

Fallout 2, which is one of the first games I ever played and to this date my favourite, didn't have very much in the way of main plot. The main plot wasn't the point, the world was. It was a tattered patchwork verse, held together (barely) by many different threads. The main plot was just a little thicker and longer than the rest. There really was several dozen times as much subplot content as there was main plot in that game. It wasn't difficult to complete the game without seeing the mentioned 4/5 of content. In fact, seeing even half of all the content in your first run would have been pretty hard, given all that's hidden.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[pandrijeczko]

Not that I didn't enjoed Fallout 3, simply Im getting bored of those RPG games in which the main plot is about 10-20 hours long, and the subplots about 200. Im tired of little missions as "give this letter to X" or "bring me a piece of Y and I get you a powerfull gun" without any connection with the real mission.

To me that's one of the main reasons that MAKES it an interesting game. I'm still playing it, I guess about 3/4 through the main plot, but I'm taking my time and exploring the game world as well. It makes a change from standard linear FPS games, although I'm a big fan of most FPS games anyway.

Just before starting Fallout 3 I finished Stalker which was a similar game structure (less RPG elements though) and thoroughly enjoyed that. I also used to be a fan of GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas until I played Fallout 3 and Stalker, at which point the GTA games now seem puerile and shallow. (Before reigning death on me, I'm a gamer in his mid-40s so I accept the GTA games probably aren't aimed at my age group).

But I am disappointed that they're announcing a sequel so quickly. I thought the idea was to buy DLC for Fallout 3 to expand it's play time a bit and I know two DLCs have been released already - but 2010 isn't that far off and I get the feeling that it's "business as usual" for Bethesda as a games company; namely, rush out a sequel to make money and stop patching and expanding the original game.

Where have I heard THAT ONE before???

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[homb]

I liked what Obsidian did with NWN2:SoZ, the second expansion.
It's significantly better at being more nuanced in abilities, good/evil, etc..
For example, you can be just a little evil in certain situations, behave in a less than nice way, get what you want, and not kill every poor guy. It's not just an intimidation roll, there's more to it than that.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[gEvil (beta)]

To me that's one of the main reasons that MAKES it an interesting game. I'm still playing it, I guess about 3/4 through the main plot, but I'm taking my time and exploring the game world as well. It makes a change from standard linear FPS games, although I'm a big fan of most FPS games anyway.

That's exactly what I'm enjoying about the game, too. I finished the main quest back in January and put the game down for a while. A few weeks ago, I fired it back up, loaded my last save, and headed back out into the wastelands. When I hit level 20, I took the "mark everything on the map" perk, so now I'm slowly going around and exploring all those places and doing those side quests. It's fun cos it breaks the game down into nice little 1-2 hour chunks to work on.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit, I just uninstalled that one yesterday, after the intro failed to impress me enough.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Take his fish away and tell him he's lucky just to be alive, and he'll figure out how to catch another one for you to take tomorrow (with tribute to Schlock)

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[CodeBuster]

Did you actually play Fallout 3 and do the side quests? The side quests were actually pretty well thought out, interesting, and fit well with the themed areas, NPC character motivations, and the game world in general. Could they have been better? Well, almost any part of any game *could* be made better, but they do have to release the game eventually in order to make a profit. I don't remember who said it first, but I have often heard the adage, "games are never finished, they just get shipped". Now, not ALL of the optional quests were worthwhile (i.e. there were get X and I will give you powerful item type quests of they type that you described), but there were also large optional quests that really did alter the game world and the future areas and quests available. If you didn't get everything out of Fallout 3 the first time then perhaps it is worth a re-play, there really is a lot of content to be discovered in that game.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Fallingcow]

Im getting bored of those RPG games in which the main plot is about 10-20 hours long, and the subplots about 200

In the first two Fallout games (especially the second one) the vast majority of your time was spent on sidequests. You could rush through the game, but each new town drew you in to its problems and made you want to fix them (or make them worse, or find their enemies and agree to help them destroy the town, etc.) and helped you to prepare for the next area.

IMO, the biggest single problem with F3 was the lack of interesting sidequests that matter. Any two major towns from F2 had at least as much meaningful, deep quest content as all of F3. F3 was starved for content, and that alone killed most of what I love about the series.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[someone1234]

IMO, SoZ is the best Aurora engine based game so far (among official campaigns).
It is still darn buggy like NWN2 games, but it is obvious the developers try and to some degree they are successful in creating a good single player game based on the AE.
If you don't get impressed by intros, simply skip through them!

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but some games even have very clear definitions of "evil people" and "good people". If you kill an evil person it's a good act and vice versa. Fable was a perfect example of this. Every time you killed a raider that was trying to kill you, the game rewarded you with good karma for basically not letting yourself get killed.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Dupedupeshakur]

FO 3 did tag some npcs with good and bad karma should you kill them.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[abigor]

I didn't like Fallout 3 either. I just didn't care about the side quests or any of the paper-thin characters. The game failed to involve me - I think I really need a strong central plot and a big mystery. Currently playing Dead Space, which is great.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yeah. The main char in Dead Space is sooo deeep... The game is practically a Dostoevsky meets James Joyce masterpiece of a plot... Pathetic...

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[Burning1]

I think I'll pass. Not that I didn't enjoed Fallout 3, simply Im getting bored of those RPG games in which the main plot is about 10-20 hours long, and the subplots about 200.

That's pretty much the essence of Fallout 2. Completing the main story in the intended order could easily chew up 80 hours of play time, but it was perfectly possible to run south to San Francisco, raid Navarro, set off with the tanker, and kill Horrigan in a few hours of play time.

The open ended morally ambiguous nature of the game is what made Fallout stand out compared to all the JRPGs I've played.

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[MobyTurbo]

In video games, evil basically translates to "killing everything I see for the pure psychopathic joy of it. There's almost never any real quality evil going on anymore, you either raze the village to the ground, or you save it from danger. There's no depth.

What about though if you destroy the village in order to save it? ;-)

Re:If the don't change the gameplay...

[all_the_names_are_ta]

Yeah, a truly evil character would have armed the bomb in Megaton, shot Burke, taken the detonation controls and spent the rest of the game shaking residents of the town down for caps.

Oh dear god...

[L4t3r4lu5]

The Fallout series also made headlines earlier this week when Bethesda trademarked the name for TV and film.

Please let that be so Uwe Boll can't get hold of it.

Re:Oh dear god...

[Theoboley]

No, he's busy laying complete and utter slaughter to the Bloodrayne Series... The rat bastard....

not Bethesda, Obsidian

[Anonymous Coward]

...and I'm sure we all know what a bang-up job they did with NWN 2...

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, yeah, they did do a bang-up job with it, or at least I thought so. According to Metacritic/Gamerankings/Gamefaqs, that seems to be the general consensus, as well.

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[SalaSSin]

Yeah, i was thinking the same thing...

I rather liked NWN, but NWN2 just didn't work for me (maybe it's just me that is tired of such gameplay).

I personally liked Fallout 3 a lot, and i just hope they will keep the same graphics, and not revert to something like the NWN series....

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[RogueyWon]

I liked NWN2. The original NWN felt like a toolkit with a (rather shoddy) sample campaign bolted on. NWN2 actually felt like a proper game, with a plot and everything. Some of the dialogue, particularly that between party members, was very well written. If it didn't quite ascend to the quotable highs of the Baldur's Gate games, it didn't fall far short. I'll grant you that, on launch, NWN2 had some serious bugs that rendered it near-unplayable in places, but these have been fixed and if you haven't looked at the game since then, you really should give it another go.

The expansions are also very interesting. I still don't think anybody has really made an epic-levels AD&D CRPG that actually really works and is interesting, but Mask of the Betrayer is certainly as close as it comes. For what it's worth, while I don't play the tabletop game myself, I have friends who do who are really contemptuous of epic-level games (too fiddly, too much micromanagement needed, too hard to make proper scenarios that are actually testing for characters who are supposed to be of near-godly power), so it might be that the CRPGs that try to emulate this (the BG2 expansion, the second NWN expansion and Mask of the Betrayer) are just tilting at windmills anyway.

Storm of Zehir, the second expansion, is really quite unusual and ambitious. It's a lot less linear than is the norm for these things and feels, in a weird way, like some of the old Gold Box games.

So yeah, I think Obsidian did a pretty good job on NWN2.

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's certainly a lot better than NWN1. And NWN2:MotB is the best single-player RPG released in the past 5 years.

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[NeoSkandranon]

To me NWN2 LOOKED fantastic.

I might never know though, since on release it was unplayable due to stability and gameplay bugs.

Consider me less than enthused about Obsidian's involvement.

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[hort_wort]

Obsidian Pros:
Good NPCs (with background more than "I'll pay you to follow me") who follow the PC around... something Bethesda has always lacked.
Lots of side quests.


Obsidian Cons:
"Oh look, a random broom closet! Surely no monsters are inside here!" Followed by 300 super mutants coming out of said broom closet....
Another annoyance is that their side quests tend to glitch or never end. If Obsidian made FO3, and you were planting the camera to watch the mirelurk activity for Moira, you'd probably find out that the game was released before the mirelurks were implemented.

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[Yunzil]

Yes. It was much, much better than NWN1.

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[bishiraver]

No epic-level CRPG that actually works and is interesting? I suppose Planescape:Torment wasn't quite epic levels, but it's pretty damn close - even going up against entities that the Lady of Pain had mazed. Yeah, you weren't level 40 with 400hp and massive destructive power... but really, when you're godlike, nothing is interesting..... except meddling in the lives of mortals.

Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian

[shutdown -p now]

To me NWN2 LOOKED fantastic.

I might never know though, since on release it was unplayable due to stability and gameplay bugs.

Consider me less than enthused about Obsidian's involvement.

Obsidian is a developer; they didn't decide when to release NWN2 - its publisher, Atari, did. And late Atari is notorious for its cheap practices of releasing half-baked games, before the developers themselves consider it ready. If you hang around on the NWN2 forums, you know the story (Obsidian developers won't say anything directly, of course, but it's obvious when reading between the lines).

By now, the major technical problems with NWN2 are long fixed, so you can actually enjoy the game.

Next step

[KDR_11k]

Fallout: San Andreas? Are they going to go the GTA route with that?

Re:Next step

[meringuoid]

Fallout: San Andreas? Are they going to go the GTA route with that?

What... a Fallout game set in and around the ruins of Los Angeles? What a novel idea!

Re:Next step

[internerdj]

I certainly am hoping there is no hot coffee involved: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Mutant_Master.jpg

A few other facts....

[Gauntt]

Found a few more bits of information in my searching today...

"J.E. Sawyer, who we last saw as the lead of BIS' last attempt at Fallout 3 (Van Buren), has confirmed he is lead on Fallout: New Vegas."

From NMA

Also Peter Hines has stated that they basically asked for an idea and that Obsidian pitched one to them.

"Pete Hines: I think we tried very hard not to put much in the way of parameters on them. To let them kind of come up with the idea. So we didn't go to them and say, we want a game that is set here, and--we didn't do that. We said, "What would you do with it? If we were going to do this, what would you guys like to do?""

From Shacknews interview

I think this is an amazing announcement and cant wait to see what they guys from Obsidian come up with!

Re:A few other facts....

[chrish]

Please, Obsidian, don't waste time "tweaking" the engine, just make the game. Spend your time doing what you do best... writing.

IMHO, with Neverwinter 2, they spent a huge amount of time working on the engine, and then had to rush together a game so they had something to ship. The writing and game design suffered for it.

With Knights of the Old Republic 2, they spent more time writing (until Lucasarts forced it out way too early) and it showed... the start of that game is completely awesome.

KOTOR II

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when BioWare had Obsidian develop the sequel to KOTOR and ended up with an unfinished clone of the original? It's been years since then so I hope it gets done right.

Re:KOTOR II

[Spovednik]

Not Bioware, LucasArts. And it is Lucas's fault for rushing the game like 6 months early. And for clone part, ok, so the protagonist has amnesia. but storywise kotor 2 runs circles around kotor 1. also, dialog system is better and karma/influence should play major part in dialogue. but again, LucasArts rushed the game and made all the major cuts (robot factory and such). all the resources are on the disc, and afaik there is a team of people restoring the content.

Re:KOTOR II

[meringuoid]

Remember when BioWare had Obsidian develop the sequel to KOTOR and ended up with an unfinished clone of the original?

It was more of an unfinished clone of Planescape: Torment IN SPAAAAAAAAACE. Which isn't such a bad thing. Soon enough we might even get to play through the HK-50 factory and see proper endings, too... although occasionally I wonder whether TSLRP or Duke Nukem Forever will actually release first.

Re:KOTOR II

[elrous0]

I actually liked KOTOR 2. It didn't have the cool twist ending of the original, but the gameplay was a lot better. And it didn't take so long to reach your Jedi potential. It did have a lot of bugs, though.

Editors, ASSEMBLE!

[EdZ]

The constant switching between past and future tense in the summary is most disorienting.

Re:Editors, ASSEMBLE!

[wjousts]

Yes, I find that was most disorienting.

TV / Movie

[Anonymous Coward]

A film version is fine, on one condition...

Ron Perlman as the narrator!

blah

[n3tcat]

I hope this game isn't brought down by bullshit polarized moral choices too. Kill woman in house, don't lose karma. Steal her toaster though, lose karma. Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.

Re:blah

[jollyreaper]

I hope this game isn't brought down by bullshit polarized moral choices too. Kill woman in house, don't lose karma. Steal her toaster though, lose karma. Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.

This is after the apocalypse. Nobody's making toasters anymore. Human life is cheap but toasters are priceless.

Re:blah

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this game isn't brought down by bullshit polarized moral choices too. Kill woman in house, don't lose karma. Steal her toaster though, lose karma. Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.

This is after the apocalypse. Nobody's making toasters anymore. Human life is cheap but toasters are priceless.

If making post-apocalyptic toast is more important than the repopulation of our species.

Re:blah

[oneirophrenos]

Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.

How ironic that you'd get modded Funny?

Re:blah

[wjousts]

Yeah, the morality part of FO 3 (and a lot of other RPGs) is cliched. The Fallout universe in particular should be ripe for the kind of complex moral gray areas that are sorely missing in most games. The only game I've seen do a really good job with this is The Witcher.

Re:blah

[elrous0]

Unbeknown to you, she was actually evil. Her toaster was innocent.

Re:blah

[Anonymous Coward]

You all know how the Wasteland ladies luvs them some hot buttered toast!

Re:blah

[uberjoe]

Frakking Toasters! They all deserve to die.

Re:blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Planescape: Torment. Easily the most well-written game ever made.

Re:blah

[MobyTurbo]

I hope this game isn't brought down by bullshit polarized moral choices too. Kill woman in house, don't lose karma. Steal her toaster though, lose karma. Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.

This is after the apocalypse. Nobody's making toasters anymore. Human life is cheap but toasters are priceless.

If making post-apocalyptic toast is more important than the repopulation of our species.

What's the difference? After a nuclear war, our species is toast!

The Older You Get

[kenp2002]

The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...

There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self

and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.

At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them. Thus it becomes an exercise in look at the decorations of a plot that makes the story enjoyable. The only thing remotely well written was the Dunwich building, the Wasteland Guide, and the android quests. The rest was damn near disposable but I'll give kudos to the Nuka-Cola Challenge walkthrough. The fake history was well written. The main quest was terrible....

Re:The Older You Get

[cjfs]

I was going to type a reply, but the older you get the more all words start to look the same.

Abstract anything far enough up and you can dismiss it. Takes all the fun out of it though.

Re:The Older You Get

[genw3st]

... the older you get, the better things USED to be... and present things suck worse and worse...

amirite?! AMIRITE?!

Re:The Older You Get

[Seakip18]

That Dunwich building still gives me the creeps. I stay far away from that building, and quadrant if possible.

I think the main quest mainly suffered from feeling the need to deliver some sort of final good in the game, among so much gone bad. It really lacked the evil choices that made the good all that much better. But in sense of disposable...I dunno.

Re:The Older You Get

[pkalkul]

The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...

There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self

You forgot Man vs. Civil War Era Cyborgs

Re:The Older You Get

[Altima(BoB)]

The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...

There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self

and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.

At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them.

This is not a question of getting older, it's been noticed as early as 2,000 years ago by Aristotle

Even though a study of story theory and realizing there are only 7 or so possible stories that exist, it would be a mistake to say that it diminishes the potential enjoyment of a story. In some ways, knowledge of it just makes a well executed story (Casablanca, Star Wars) that much more astonishing and enjoyable.

Personally, Fallout 3's appeal was not in the story, it was in the setting and world at large and getting the chance to exist and scavenge within it.

Re:The Older You Get

[Cautela]

Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self

Gay
Bestiality
Onanism

and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.

reading sex in everything

Re:The Older You Get

[GMFTatsujin]

You're giving up too soon, old man. Take comfort in the unplumbed depths of Nature Vs. Self, Nature vs. Tragedy, Nature vs. Comedy ... Some of the new Self Vs. Comedy work is really quite sublime.

And you can broaden the scope of stories even more if you use permutations instead of combinations! Why, that's at *least* 6000 more years of storytelling right there!

Re:The Older You Get

[GMFTatsujin]

Vladimir Propp, Russian folklorist, had a lot to say in this regard. He systemically broke down Russian folklore into fundamental narratemes that were shuffled, combined, and retold over and over. One might think from his work that all the stories that can be told have been told to one degree or another. People use this as some sort of mathematical proof that there's nothing new under the sun.

Personally, I think it's bunk: mental dross for the unimaginative.

A similar argument can be made about a finite deck of cards and playing poker. There are only so many combinations to go around. Yet a good game can be worth playing now and again.

And don't even get me started and that boring old periodic table. And hey! DNA only contains *4* molecular components! Talk about a shallow pool of possibilities! Why keep reproducing? It's all been done before...

Not sure.

[N4p4lm]

While FO3 was fun, it still doesn't feel like Fallout. RIP, I'll miss you Black Isle. I think I might skip this one.

Queasiness when playing

[digitalhermit]

I've played the original Fallout 1/2 and enjoyed them immensely. I got the F3, and after a disappointing few weeks before the patch, started really getting into it.. It's my first FPS that I've played extensively. I noticed that it makes me queasy though, almost nauseous. Though I'd love to continue playing the game, it's not possible. Any experienced FPS that have suggestions (yeah, besides taking Rad-X or Radaway)..

Re:Queasiness when playing

[FirstNoel]

Hit 'F' and put in it in 3rd person mode... It gives you head a break. I have to do that every so often otherwise I'll puke my brains out too.

Re:Queasiness when playing

[Aladrin]

Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with experience... You're just prone to motion-sickness.

You might ask a doctor what you can do to combat it.

Re:Queasiness when playing

[MWoody]

Try to train yourself to blink when your character turns, like you'd do when physically turning your head in real life. People prone to motion sickness in games often don't "put themselves in the game" enough to activate that reflex. I'm not positive if it's something you can train yourself to do, but it's worth a shot.

Re:Queasiness when playing

[Dunkirk]

You might install Fraps and check your framerate. Rates below about 30 wouldn't be helping anything. If you're not familiar with all of this, I recommend that you fiddle with lowering your resolution and graphical detail settings so that your framerate gets to at -least- the mid 40's.

Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[jollyreaper]

I'm intrigued by the premise of Fallout but I've heard bad things about broken elements in the game, bugged quests, stuff where you're left trying to read walkthroughs online to figure out how to fix what went wrong. Any patches for this stuff yet?

Re:Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they patched it and added some more new and exciting bugs. The 1.1 patch was the best VATS has lag issues and you can be standing on top of someone and have 0% chance to hit them in the head.

-- Dauvis (forgot my password)

Re:Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[drewvr6]

There were very few "bugs" that I found. A couple times I got stuck in rubble and had to reload my game in order to continue. But there was never a point where I "had" to do something which was impossible to accomplish. Such as a door that wouldn't open but you had to get inside. The only quest I just got pissed off about and read up on was Tranquility Lane. It is a required quest and the puzzle you had to solve in one of the houses was just a p.i.t.a. It's not that I didn't understand but the combination of actions needed left me thinking "no way". I'd give "Fallout 3" 9.5 out of 10 in worth of money spent. The number of quests, the depth, the size of the "universe" where all way up there. The only thing I really disliked was the scroll bar for the bartering and the talking. It was so small it was difficult to even use. Plus you always had to scroll to the bottom to exit the dialog so you had to dick with it every time you talked to someone.

Re:Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[drewvr6]

In replying to my own reply, I just wanted to ask people; do you remember where games were so buggy you could never even finish them? I remember playing on my C64 and basically having the game lock up or just crash at a certain point. I'd think how the hell could anyone ever have tested this all the way through? Then you'd have to wait and see if they re-issued a new version you picked up at Babbages. The good thing was that you could play a game all the way through and if you thought it was lame you could return it and trade it in for a new game. I guess that was our version of software piracy.

Re:Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[metzomagic]

I'm intrigued by the premise of Fallout but I've heard bad things about broken elements in the game... Any patches for this stuff yet?

jollyreaper, hi,

By 'the old one', I'm assuming you mean the original one produced in 1997? If so, yes there was a version 1.1 patch brought out very early on which fixed most of the serious bugs, and also removed a 500 day time limit for finishing the game. You can find it in quite a few places on the web (just google for 'fallout 1.1 patch').)

On my latest gaming rig, I couldn't get the Windows version of Fallout to work correctly, but the DOS version ran fine using DOSBox.

Regards,
MetzO'Magic

Re:Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[larry bagina]

PS3 version was full of bugs. Get stuck in rubble. VATS sometimes freezes. Sometimes I'd get stuck with people shooting at me, but I was unable to do anything. PS3 locks up completely. They issued a patch that seems to have fixed some of the problems, but at that point I was 99% done.

Re:Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[iroll]

All games have some bugs, and all of the people experiencing bugs are the ones who are going to post, not the ones who have zero issues.

My brother and I have probably put over 100 hrs each on the 360 version. I've had it crash several times, he's had it crash once. I've been stuck in terrain maybe 3 times, he's been stuck once. I'm pretty sure our "fail" rate is in line with most other modern video games. It sucks, but it's a fact of complexity. Your mileage may vary.

Re:Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet?

[Drone69]

Since the new Fallout setting will be Las Vegas, "bugs" should now be referred to as 'cooties'.

What about OSX ports?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fed up with dual-booting from OSX to Windoze to be able to play Fallout 3, come on Aspyr and MacSoft, get the rights to port the Fallout games!

Re:What about OSX ports?!

[LanMan04]

If you're the enterprising type, you can actually embed the PC application in the Cider "shell" and get it to run on a Mac. There are Mac ports of Portal, HalfLife 2, GTA IV, etc floating around that run in OS X.

Just check TPB!

Weak

[0xdeadbeef]

They should have called it Lost Vegas. They should have teamed up with Harmonix instead and made the awesomest video game evar.

Obsidian is Black

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to see what Obsidian can do with Fallout. I'm expecting plenty of Black Humor (no pun intended!)

Hey, it worked for GTA, right?

[mmalove]

I'm glad to see the FO franchise moving again (lets not forget how much crying happened for FO3 after the successful but unfollowed FO2). But isn't it kind of stifling to creativity to just push out a sequel 2 years later that already is promising to be more of the same?

Yea, I realise plot wise the game jumps the shark too early to really continue the story of that main character, and kudos for not trying (many a bad movie/game have been the result of thinking success = must need a sequel). But I really don't see myself playing another 10-20 hours of VATS. Unless they finally make a multiplayer option (and good luck incorporating VATS into that).

"Er" indeed

[nem75]

Fallout 3 was just "Oblivion with guns".

Being a big fan of the old Fallout games, I still don't get how a game being "just Oblivion with guns" can be considered a bad thing. I mean Oblivion was just what, the most successful CRPG of the last half decade?

Re:"Er" indeed

[Pvt_Ryan]

Personally I feel the elder scrolls went downhill after daggerfall.
Just because a game is "successful" doesn't mean it is good. It just means the marketing department did a good job building hype. I think the main reason it was so successful was that by making it FPS it opened it up to a larger market as well as being able to play on the Fallout brand thereby catching the older players thinking finally FO3 the game we have been waiting for. I was very dubious about it when I heard who was developing it, but I bought it on the back of 1 & 2 as they had been so good.
To me the major downfall of Morrowind/Oblivion was they stuck with the enemies level with the player. They really needed to use WoW's method of some areas are just too damn dangerous to go as a low lvl.

Re:"Er" indeed

[Fallingcow]

To me the major downfall of Morrowind/Oblivion was they stuck with the enemies level with the player.

Not in Morrowind. Go exploring in some of the tougher caves/ruins or run around inside the Ghost Fence for a while at level 1 and let me know how it works out for you :)

Re:"Er" indeed

[Pvt_Ryan]

I stand corrected.. I haven't played Morrowind in a few years and vaguely remembered that daggerfall was the same as oblivion leveling and just lumped Morrowind in with it.

Re:"Er" indeed

[bonch]

Oblivion isn't a CRPG. It's a first-person shooter with some RPG-lite elements tacked on.

It's pretty much one of the most overhyped, boring games released of the current decade. You can be a warrior and progress to the head of the Mage's Guild without casting a single spell, or become the master of the arena at level 1...the game is just a ridiculous graphics demo.

Re:"Er" indeed

[Fallingcow]

Agreed. Oblivion is dreadful without mods, which is why I can't fathom someone wanting to play it on the Xbox. It's even worse pre-mods than Morrowind was, and the vanilla version of that game sucked compared to a well-modded one, though at least it was playable. The fucked-up leveling system alone was enough to ruin vanilla Oblivion.

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more galling is if you picked up Fawkes, the Gentle Super Mutant as a follower (you know, the guy who is immune to and/or actually healed by radiation??!?) and you ask him to step inside and press the buttons:

"Sorry ol' chap, this is something you have to do for yourself. Destiny and all that rot, what ho?"

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[Talderas]

Super Mutants are just resistant to radiation. Ghouls are resistant and healed by it.

So let's look at all your companion, Fawkes is a Super Muttie and highly resistant to radiation, Sergeant RL-3 is a robot and unaffected by it. Charon is a ghoul and healed by it. Butch, Star Paladin Cross, and Jericho are all humans and reasonably so would not be willing to die. Clover is also a human and would die, but she has a slave collar so she should listen to your orders. Also, I like dogs too much to try to get Dogmeat to do it.

Fawkes: I'm sorry, my companion, but no. We all have our own destinies, and yours culminates here. I would not rob you of that.
Sergeant RL-3: Soldier, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. This is your fight! You gotta finish what your daddy started! Stand strong and get your ass in there!
Charon: You and I both know that's not going to happen. I've saved your sorry ass enough. This one's all you.
Butch: That chamber? Right there? With all the radiation? Man, no way. I'll end up dead. Or worse. I could be one of them Ghouls! Ain't gonna happen.
Star Paladin Cross: My friend... It's been my pleasure accompanying you, but we both know this is your fight to finish. Stay strong, and honor your father's memory.
Clover: Honey, you are out of your mind if you think I'm going in there. Find yourself another guinea pig.
Jericho: Fuck that. Do your own dirty work.

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[slaker]

She didn't look like it, but Fawkes was a lady super mutant.

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[pluther]

Yeah, that one annoyed me, too. A lot.

The first time through, I was there with Fawkes. Here's a character who's one most important trait, on which part of the story is dependent, is being able to survive very strong radiation.

He leaves you, and comes back right before the end game, when you end up facing very strong radiation.

It's like someone pulling Checkov's gun off the mantle then throwing it away and ending with a fistfight.

Star Paladin Cross, on the other hand, will go into the radiation for you and die. The game still ends, but the voiceover is slightly different.

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[Talderas]

No, Star Paladin Cross does not go in. You're thinking of Sentinel Lyons, who is not one of your companions.

Toaster Repair

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but any Wasteland veteran can tell you how important the Toaster Repair skill is.

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[pluther]

Ah, yes, you are correct. My mistake.

Debugging

[FrankDeath]

But will they spend the time debugging it?

I enjoyed Oblivion and Fallout 3 for the PS3 but they were the two buggiest games I've ever played (including PC games). I think the games froze for me about once per 8-10 hours of play on average.

I don't understand the problem

[Benfea]

Console makers frequently negotiate for exclusive content in an attempt to woo more customers. I thought this was standard practice in the console market.

Re:I don't understand the problem

[X0563511]

It is. Which is why I'm a happy console-free individual.

I'd like to see a new one...

[BlameItOngod]

...one that stop crashing every time you try to enter a building from the outside.

Fallout 3 crashes all the time; the tech support reply is usually "try the newest video drivers"; after 4-5 times and no better. Forums say you need to expend the whatcha-call-it pooled memory thing; did that up to 512MB per recommendation; still crashes...

I abandoned the game; talk about wasted 49$.
I can't say I'm acclaiming it; but I'm sure critical of it.

Re:I'd like to see a new one...

[Fallingcow]

Mine crashed shortly after I left the Vault on my desktop machine, every time I tried it. I ended up having to play it at super-low graphics settings on my laptop. What a buggy piece of shit. I mean, Bethesda's known for releasing games that are horrendously broken until the third patch or so, but I figured this time since they were just using an existing game system it would be different... NOPE. They still managed to screw it up, somehow.

designers

[Creepy]

Chris Avellone is head of Alpha Protocol, so it's doubtful he'd be able to join the team until later (AP is due in October). For those that don't know, Chris joined around the time the Troika team left (there were four people that left to form it as I recall, but the core were Tim Cain [Carbine], Leonard Boyarsky [Blizzard], and Jason D. Anderson [Interplay]) and is mostly known for creating the timeline and history published as the Fallout Bible. Feargus runs Obsidian, so I'm not sure how much time he has to work with the teams.

I've heard these three names:
John R. Gonzalez Lead Creative Designer
J. E. Sawyer Lead Designer (was Van Buren lead)
Scott Everts (did maps for Fallout 1 and 2)

Me Fa So La Te Do

[Drone69]

Bring back the crotch shot, plz.

Re:Me Fa So La Te Do

[iroll]

THIS!

Hahaha, I totally forgot about that =)

The cap is being fixed in 2 weeks

[TravisO]

The DLC that comes out May 5th changes the cap from lv20 to lv30. That's a pretty big increase and should make all the fanatics happy.

Also that new DLC also allows you to keep exploring the world after you finish the game, ala Oblivion.

Fallout, The TV Show

[Cruciform]

If Fallout actually made it to TV, I'd want David Milch (Deadwood) to helm it.

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[Anonymous Coward]

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fawkes

"Contrary to a comment about Fawkes' gender made by his voice actor, lead designer Emil Pagliarulo has confirmed "No, Fawkes was absolutely a male. This was a mistake. Wes gave an interview and he was mistaken. Trust me, Fawkes is and was male."

Have time will travel

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing I want from the new Fallout is limitless travel. Although F3 map was loaded with locations, it was too small. Give me an Arcanum-like continent. I want to roam from East to West to the Canadian north... Please?..

Re:Great! [SPOILER]

[LordofEntropy]

The absurdity is exacerbated by a line spoken by Fawkes after leaving the Vault. At one point he says somethings along the lines of "I wish there was a way to repay you for helping me." Note that this is after the first radiation run Fawkes will do for you. So the chance comes for Fawkes to repay you and he says fuck off. Made the ending even more asinine.

Let's hope

[buttfscking]

Let's hope that war never changes. I hope they stay as true to the franchise as possible.