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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.
As long as they remove the level cap.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
No more love for Elder Scrolls? I guess FPS will always win over RPG in raw popularity with Western audiences.
Sam ty sig.
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 ?
This
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...
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.
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.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Fallout: San Andreas? Are they going to go the GTA route with that?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"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!
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....
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
Hardly. I'd much rather see another Elder Scrolls game than another Fallout.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
The constant switching between past and future tense in the summary is most disorienting.
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.
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.
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.
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....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
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.
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)..
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?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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!
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.
They should have called it Lost Vegas. They should have teamed up with Harmonix instead and made the awesomest video game evar.
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.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Touche, anonymous, touche. I forgot the ever so important drunk frat boy demographic. And that "slight change" doesn't necessarily warrant a $50+ purchase.
no shit, i would pay $60 for another 12 hours of Jade Empire. they don't even have to update the damn graphics.
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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).
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
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?
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.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
NO.... Oblivion is Fallout with swords and magic.
She didn't look like it, but Fawkes was a lady super mutant.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Not that it really matters, as happened with Doom 3, I will be stopping buying thir games.
/offtopic
Unless they redesign the game (look at diablo 3 ffs) then looks like I will be £30 better off.
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...
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
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.
No, Star Paladin Cross does not go in. You're thinking of Sentinel Lyons, who is not one of your companions.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Ah, yes, you are correct. My mistake.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
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.
Console makers frequently negotiate for exclusive content in an attempt to woo more customers. I thought this was standard practice in the console market.
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.
Yes. It was much, much better than NWN1.
...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.
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?
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?
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)
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.
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.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Everything is just Zork with fancy pictures.
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.
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.
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).
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.
THIS!
Hahaha, I totally forgot about that =)
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
If Fallout actually made it to TV, I'd want David Milch (Deadwood) to helm it.
"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.
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.
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.
Entropy just isn't what it used to be.
Let's hope that war never changes. I hope they stay as true to the franchise as possible.
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.