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Fallout 4 Announced
An anonymous reader writes: After teasing gamers with a countdown timer yesterday, Bethesda has now announced Fallout 4 for PCs, the Xbox One, and the PS4. They've also released an official trailer (YouTube video). The game will be set in post-apocalyptic Boston, and the player character will apparently be accompanied on his adventures by a dog. The Guardian has a post cataloging the features they're hoping will be improved from previous games in the series: "The combat system in the last two Fallout games was not universally adored. It often felt you were shooting wildly and blindly, biding time before you could use the the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting (VAT) system, which allows players to focus in on specific parts of enemies with a percentage chance of hitting them. ... Well-written, hand-crafted quests are going to be vitally important. The Radiant Quest system used in Skyrim sounds brilliant on paper: infinite quests, randomly generated and a little different each time. But the reality was a lot of fetch quests in similar looking caves. Bethesda may be tempted to bring that system across to Fallout 4, but there's an argument for abandoning dynamic quests altogether and opting for a smaller range of authored challenges."
I saw the article linked with things some folks want, and hated most of it. Vehicles? Really?
Here's what I'd like;
- Companion characters & character development done by the Bioware teams (I'm gonna ignore the low-average quality from the Dragon Age Inquisition game). Bethesda Softworks does an admirable job with environment and atmosphere, but their NPC's are generally flat, with a few exceptions. Companions most of all. Multiple companions might be nice, Companion quests, idle-time squawking/interparty squawking, scenarios providing different options with different companions.
- Combat that always feels like a challenge, and not just in a ninja-monkey way where their stats scale to your level. Perhaps limit the character growth and equipment attributes in a D&D 5'th ed sort of way. Adjustable, though (see 'customization' below)
- They rock at allowing mods, but having a truly made-for-third-parties-without-a-debugger-running sort of script evaluation (profiling), execution, merging and management system would be swell. Knowing a module was going to crash - or even just which mod caused the crash - is a big help.
- Enough customization to allow different play styles, not just different difficulty levels. For example, the New Vegas optional 'hardcore' mode requiring food, drink and sleep, but perhaps with a checklist of 'collectables' and an easy combat or excessive loot for folks who are more interested in achievements than someone who wants to soak up the atmosphere. This includes any time a dev said "But that won't work on console" - make it an option. None of this dumbing things down just because it has to run on a console.
- That mod thing up there? I'm putting it here again because I like mods.
- Oh, and an easy way to add songs to a playlist rotation, not requiring a mod with a new radio station, necessarily.
Amusing but the truth is there was doubt if this franchise will be killed off due to legal issues.
The truth is loads of geeks want to know this and there was a bit of an interesting intellectual rights battle between Bethesda and Interplay.
So really, this is a little bit of a surprise ifyou think that my most beloved game series of all times was almost axed because of some failed MMO you insesitive clod!
Read more here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
After you play it through (assuming you are playing on a PC), check out nexusmods. I went out and bought the PC version just for the mods. They add an incredible amount of story an detail to an already rich universe.
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallo...?
That's not quite how it went down. Let's be clear: Interplay is a shadow of its former self, has been that way for a number of years, and any Fallout game they would make would be just as much a "true successor" to the series as one made by anyone else since all of the devs are gone. Just to review...
1) Interplay created Fallout, and their internal Black Isle team created Fallout 2, under the leadership of Brian Fargo and the creative direction of Jason Anderson.
2) Anderson left the company during Fallout 2's development, and Fargo was ousted by shareholders in 2001 in a corporate shakeup.
3) Black Isle Studios was closed in 2003 and the entire staff was laid off. Van Buren (i.e. the original Fallout 3), which they were working on, was cancelled. A lot of them ended up over at inXile Entertainment, which Fargo had founded after he was ousted. Many of the others went on to found Obsidian Entertainment. More on those guys later...
4) Despite cancelling Van Buren, Interplay did, however, manage to push out the rather craptastic Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel in 2004 (not to be confused with the similarly-named Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, which is a decent game with which Interplay had no involvement). It's so bad, diverges so far from the rest of the series, and sold so poorly that even Interplay and Bethesda can get on the same page in agreeing that it's not canon.
5) On the verge of bankruptcy in 2004, Interplay sold the rights to make three Fallout games to Bethesda Softworks (not to be confused with Bethesda Game Studios, which is the developer that makes The Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3, and now, Fallout 4, and which I love).
6) Still on the verge of bankruptcy, Interplay sold all of the rights to Bethesda Softworks in 2007, but licensed back the rights to a Fallout MMO, conditioned on their getting $30M in funding and meeting certain development goals by April 2009, as well as launching within four years of starting development.
7) Having failed to reach the necessary funding and with their "Project V13" Fallout Online game in development hell at a newly reopened Black Isle after Jason Anderson left yet again (who they had hired back on to handle creative direction), they tried to pull some eleventh hour crap on the day before their April 2009 deadline by announcing nonsense plans to partner with some Bulgarian company to make the game happen.
8) Bethesda Softworks sued them in April 2009 and then reached an out-of-court settlement in 2012 to get back the rights to the MMO, as well as the rights to the original games in the series. Project V13 continued development at the new Black Isle, with all Fallout references stripped.
9) Interplay pulled a "screw you" by making the original games in the series free on Steam, GOG, etc. for a week or two before the rights were set to transfer to Bethesda in 2013.
10) As for where we're at today...well, remember all of those original Interplay devs who left for Obsidian and inXile? They've gone on to make Fallout: New Vegas (which incorporated a number of ideas from Van Buren) and Wasteland 2 (a sequel to the game that was the spiritual predecessor to the original Fallout), respectively. Meanwhile, Project V13 remains vaporware, even though we're now two years beyond the launch date that their rights were conditioned on reaching.
TL;DR: Interplay failed at making the Fallout MMO even before Bethesda Softworks got involved (in fact, that's why they got involved), and they've continued to fail ever since, even though their former devs have gone on to great acclaim in making new games related in various ways to the franchise. Also worth mentioning: I'm no fan of Bethesda Softworks, since they've demonstrated that they're a legal troll (e.g. all