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Fallout 4 Will Be Skipping Xbox 360 and PS3
An anonymous reader writes: There's some sad news for those of you looking forward to playing Fallout 4 on your Xbox 360 or your PS3. Bethesda has announced that Fallout 4 will be a current-gen and PC exclusive game and that there will be no last-gen releases in the future. Bethesda global community manager Matt Grandstaff says of the old consoles, "the stuff we're doing will never work there."
... will be as large as ever. I've rather had it Bethesda since I couldn't complete the main quest on Skyrim due to a major bug (dragon call failed to work). You expect the odd glitch and minor issue in any large piece of software but not a complete show stopper that should be been spotted in even basic testing. Maybe they've fixed it by now, who knows. Frankly I stopped caring a long time ago but I won't buy any game with the Bethesda name on it any more.
It's bad enough that the game will be crippled by design thanks to compatibility with the underpowered "next get" train wrecks. No need to add even more ballast to waste resources.
Next gen game, announced for PC/PS4/XBone, not coming out on last gen shock. Was anyone really expecting a 360 version?
With respect to the hundreds of millions of people with a PS3/XBox 360, those systems are now 10 years old and have been holding back open world game design.
Yes, games like GTA V are on those systems and work, but that is perhaps the extreme limit of what those systems can do.
Given the jump from less than 1GB of RAM to 8GB of RAM, so much more of the game world can be left in memory, the "tricks" of FO3 no longer have to be used as much, where some items were "sort of" in the game world, but once out of sight, weren't kept track of.
There of course has to be an end to it, there are tons and tons of games for the PS3 and XBox 360, and more will come, but there has to be an end to it.
The Bethesda games are crap unless you can install mods on them. And you can only do that on the PC versions.
QED... play the PC version or don't play.
Some games are great on the console. Bethesda games are not amongst them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"The stuff we're doing" is just a bit of eye candy then? Aka, a demo.
still look and play as shit as a console game?
There's been solid data for over a year now showing that the majority of games sales have shifted away from the PS3/360 and towards the PS4/Xbox One/PC. We've seen plenty of current-gen-only releases do just fine (Witcher 3 just had the most successful launch so far in 2015) and plenty of games which spanned both generations have sold a lot more copies on the newer platforms. Meanwhile, developers/publishers who stuck with the older platforms have paid a commercial price for it - the initial release of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (which was limited to PC, 360 and PS3) bombed commercially and shifted only a fraction of the copies at launch that Borderlands 2 managed.
The last console generation was the longest we've ever seen and there was a clear appetite among both developers and consumers to move on from it quickly. A lot of the money-men preferred to hedge their bets, not least because the installed bases for the PS3 and 360 were so huge. But what happened in practice was fairly predictable. Core gamers - the people who buy a lot of games - moved to the new platforms quickly and shifted their spending to those platforms. While the installed base of the older consoles remained larger, most of that base was made up of occasional and casual gamers, who don't spend a significant portion of their disposable income on gaming.
The caution in betting on the new generation wasn't entirely irrational. The new platform launches in the years leading up to it had not gone well. EA got burned hard by the Vita's launch flop. Ubisoft got burned even harder when they spent a lot of money supporting the Wii-U launch only for the platform to bomb. But with the PS4 and Xbox One, the developers who could get titles to market fairly soon after launch were generally rewarded (even when those games stunk, as with Watch_Dogs).
The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot. The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched. But for major launches, there's no longer any point in targeting anything but PS4, Xbox One and PC.
WOW. That is a ton of money they're shrugging off by not accommodating consoles. Don't get me wrong, I'm a PC gamer and this will be great for me. I just hope they dont kill themselves doing this. It's a ton of money making a AAA title and I wonder how they plan to make it back with a PC only release.
It would have been a love letter and a great act of goodwill towards the PlayStation enthusiast community if Sony allowed running Linux on it again.
I own one, but I use it only as a media player.
This is 2015 and we're supposed to be surprised that a new game won't be compatible with ancient last gen consoles?
I guess readers are too young to remember when the NES, Master System, N64, etc, all were dropped like hot potatoes by the manufacturers once the new ones were released...
PC only would be the way to go as a lot of the fun has been taken out of games to make them playable on console.
The PC market has been so held back by consoles that i've kept games ticking over with a shocking underpowered machine.
For later games I dropped the res down to 720p and spent the graphics card money on beer. Game still looks great and the beer helps smooth over the awful console level game play.
Yellow Dog Linux, or any OS version isn't going to be available for PS3. Just get that out of your head right now! It's been rehashed to death, Sony took flak, and they didn't back down. Unless there are a few units that haven't had their firmware updated already, it ain't ever gonna happen! Firmware killed by design.
Life is not for the lazy.
It won't run on anything I have either. According to marketing, everything I have is either "old hardware" or "next-gen" No current-gen at all.
Unless there are a few units that haven't had their firmware updated already, it ain't ever gonna happen! Firmware killed by design.
It is possible, though arduous, to reflash your PS3 with any firmware you like.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I thought the need to hold it back for last-gen consoles explained the trailer.
But if there's no 360/PS3 version, why does the trailer look like ass?
It's a trailer. It should be the prettiest the game can be, rendered on high-end hardware, with their best bullshots.
The dog looks good, I'll admit, but in general in-game footage from The Witcher 3 looks better than the FO4 trailer.
Perhaps they started to build assets before giving up on the old consoles? The Vault Dweller is especially unimpressive.
It would have been a love letter and a great act of goodwill towards the PlayStation enthusiast community if Sony allowed running Linux on it again.
Well yes, that would be nice, but I doubt they're going to do it.
I do miss having Linux on mine, it was a better music player under Linux than it is GameOS (for video it's vice versa), and it was nice having a better web browser on it than the pre-webkit versions of Netfront the PS3 had. And of course it runs a fairly standard Linux distro rather than that wacky Kondara-ized Red Hat the PS2 has. Then again, Linux has pretty much full access to the hardware on a PS2, and doesn't on a PS3. X11 has hardware acceleration on the PS2, it doesn't on the PS3, pure framebuffer. E17 is actually MORE responsive on a PS2 than it is on a PS3.
on the target systems either. yay for not QA'd debug builds as releases
With respect to the hundreds of millions of people with a PS3/XBox 360, those systems are now 10 years old and have been holding back open world game design.
Translation, Fallout 4 is going to guzzle up RAM.
...since that is the only material we have available: The graphic fidelity is downright embarrassing for a AAA title in 2015. My current install of a lightly modded FO3 has better texture clarity. I never got past the opening mission on New Vegas, as I lost interest after realizing that this was the same exact game as FO3, only in a brown place instead of green place. I couldn't understand why the texture on my characters hands looked like a lizard's. I thank my sense of skepticism for telling me to wait for NV to go on sale (got it for $4) Did they record this trailer with ALL the eyecandy turned OFF? I cannot justify spending full price on a game that looks identical to the last 2 (3 and NV), just in a different city. I understand the world will be "more open" but without cleaner graphics and the tactical and strategic gameplay which has been absent since the release of fallout 3, it will just be another TES with guns. Spam VATS, run, spam VATS, run, rinse repeat.
Seriously, those consoles are 10 years old. Nobody in their right mind would support 10 year old gaming PCs, why the shock about the consoles that have already been succeeded two years ago?
> There's some sad news for those of you looking forward to playing Fallout 4 on your Xbox 360 or your PS3.
"There's some good news and some sad news. The good news: it won't be released on PS3 and XB360. The bad news: It will be still released on PS4 and XBOne".
FTFY.
Since aiming a gun with the precision required by Fallout games is impossible with a joystick, they should have skipped consoles altogether. I felt the same about skyrim and everyone that played it told me that archery is impossible on the console version. Joysticks are for racing and flying games, not gun aiming.
I have played every Bethesda game since Morrowind via a console, and I loved every one of them. Not everyone cares about mods, I like to enjoy the games as Bethesda intended them.
QED play what you enjoy and don't make assumptions on what other people may or may not enjoy based on your own enjoyment.
I had to switch from UGLY XBOX360 version to PC version usig hi-res NEXUS modes. Oooooh, Fallout3 and NV got soooooo beautiful after such treatment!
I skimmed "skipping" as "shipping"
Would the modding interface look like the Super MakerMatic in Nintendo's WarioWare: DIY?
They were having real, real problems getting the kind of game they wanted in to the very limited memory of the last gen consoles. Cutting down graphics only goes so far, there are just limits to how large a world you can easily have, and how many things you can keep track of at once. They did a lot of creative things to manage that, but it was causing issues and they were reaching their limit.
Some games scale more easily but the big open world types that Bethesda likes do not do as well. Hence it makes sense to target only the current gen stuff.
I've not tried GTA 5 yet but the GTA world is generally very limited to do what it does. A great example would be GTA 3 and Vice City. Open world games that ran on PS2 hardware. Amazing... However they did it by tracking very little. Only things in your FOV and relevant to what was happening (quest NPCs, police chasing you) were handled. Everything else was not there. Turn around and then around again, and traffic would be totally different because it was not tracked off screen. Drops/pickups disappear when you go slightly out of range. Most objects couldn't be interacted with past them being damaged, which would fix offscreen.. Stuff like that.
Fallout/Skyrim track quite a bit, some of it in a very permanent fashion. Granted not all of it is in memory or simulated at one time (there are a certain number of grids simulated at once) but it is still pretty complex. You can go in to an area, interact with things, pick them up drop them off move them around, travel far away, come back and they'll be in the same state you left them.
Not saying clever optimization can't fix some thing, but there's limits. Also there are limits to how much time it is worth spending. Say you can engineer a clever system that uses all kinds of hacks and tricks to reduce what is tracked and how it is tracked, and then you optimize the shit out of it to reduce the space it takes... great but how many man-hours did that take? Is it worth it? Time is money in games, and you don't want to spend it on things unless it is needed.
So if projected sales from the older consoles aren't enough to justify the development costs and/or offset the cuts that have to be made, you don't do it.