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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."

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  1. Re:Presumably the bug count... by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't play games on a console, install bug fix packs on the PC. Problem solved.

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  2. PC is the only one that counts by Karmashock · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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  3. No surprise by RogueyWon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. PC only is for the better. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Good! by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sigh...are you really gonna use number sold as a gauge of quality? Because by that metric they should have given a pile of Oscars to the Twilight series and Nicki Minaj should be in the hall of fame.

    But if you were to actually look at the white paper on the Jaguar that powers the PS4/XB1 then you would know its a netbook APU which means a 6 year old Phenom X4 or C2Q paired with a sub $180 GPU like the R9 280 3GB should just slaughter the thing both on detail and FPS. Hell last I checked neither console can even do native 1080P above 30 FPS consistently and 1080P has been the standard resolution for how long now?

    Lets face it thanks to day 1 patches, beta level bugs, and the "we'll patch it later" attitude this gen they've made the consoles into weak PCs with none of the PC upsides.

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  6. Re:Presumably the bug count... by Dorianny · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know you're a master-race sort of guy and are thusly severly biased but not for $450 it won't, and it it will run Windows, which comes with it's own issues.

    Yeah, actually it will. What? You're shocked that consoles built on hardware that's already two years out of date will be beat by a previous hardware generation? It'll run windows? Gee, why do all those builds have no OS as a requirement. I mean it's like a mac where you can't install another OS unless you pay them to do it right? And of course forget about modifying the OS on your console.

    The builds ignore the fact that the PS4 uses DDR5 as main memory and the XBOX 360 has 32MB of on-die ESRAM. They also ignore the dedicated sound cards, video-decoders and other chips to offload the CPU's. On the software side of things, the standardized hardware and low level API's allow for performance optimizations that would simply be unthinkable in the PC world, allowing developers to squeeze every bit of theoretical performance out of the systems. Something else to take into consideration is that cross-platform games are almost always developed for the consoles and then (often badly) ported to PC. The hardware requirements for similar levels of performance are usually much higher than the hardware on the consoles would suggest is needed.

  7. Re:Presumably the bug count... by KingMotley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But... That 750 will still put any current gen consoles to shame. You just have to turn all the visual goodies down to what you would see on a current gen console and witcher 3 will play just fine.