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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."
Don't play games on a console, install bug fix packs on the PC. Problem solved.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
A good friend of mine bought the PC version of Skyrim even though he had the PS3 version just for the increased detail and the console.
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.
That said, I don't see much reason to support the PS3 or 360 since both platforms are in their twilight. I doubt sales would justify the effort of making the games run acceptably or the compromises that come to the game design from doing so.
Bethesda is not...exactly renowned...for their technical brilliance and dedication to software quality, so I wouldn't expect them to be on the bleeding edge of the possible for any given platform; but they'll still do a hell of a lot better on nearly-normal-x86s with 8GB of RAM than they will on two differently weird PPC boxes with 512MB, so I'd say that this counts as good news.
Frankly, though, Bethesda is one of the outfits that I just wouldn't touch on the console. Their specialty is bug-riddled-but-bursting-with-promise, and they've historically had good relations with modders, so you miss out on a whole lot on the console side, even if it isn't a total clusterfuck like Skyrim+expansions on PS3.
With some games you can expect reasonably complete polish and/or hostility to mods on the PC side, so consoles are more or less the same deal; but Bethesda RPGs are not those games.
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...
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Don't play games on a console, install bug fix packs on the PC. Problem solved.
I don't own a PC, you insensitive clod. And don't intend to, either.
But let me point out that a $450 PC built today will crush both consoles in terms of graphics alone
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.
Xbox One runs windows
and let you mod,
Yeah yeah, we all know PC gamers are cheap bastards and euro-pirates. Wasting money on hardware and not wanting pay for software. So they play some F2P FPS or MOBA and play a single map like de_dust or the Warehouse over and over and over or they mod some single player game and play that for 10 years and buy nothing else.
Modding has nothing to do with being cheap. This entire paragraph makes no sense at all in relation to modding.
play MP games, and not charge you for it.
Well since they give you other things besides the multiplayer, you're technically paying for those. I'd have a PS+ subscription even if I didn't play multiplayer the instant game collection is worth the $49.95 a year.
PS+ is really the same thing as Steam on the PC. Except you don't have to pay a yearly fee for the privileged of buying games online or playing multiplayer games. It doesn't come with a stack of crappy free games, but then again, it has real sales where you can get great games for very cheap.
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.
Yeah yeah, we all know PC gamers are cheap bastards and euro-pirates. Wasting money on hardware and not wanting pay for software. So they play some F2P FPS or MOBA and play a single map like de_dust or the Warehouse over and over and over or they mod some single player game and play that for 10 years and buy nothing else.
Yeah, since we know that console piracy is rampant, and we can buy exactly the same games at half the price. What? Did you miss the FO4 announcement, where consoles will be paying $59.99-79.99, and PC gamers can already get it at $40 or there about.
Well since they give you other things besides the multiplayer, you're technically paying for those. I'd have a PS+ subscription even if I didn't play multiplayer the instant game collection is worth the $49.95 a year.
Well, I guess the hundreds of free games on the PC are worthless then, and of course we can't forget the wide amount of emulation either, or thousands of abandonware titles out there. After all, you're paying $50/year, and likely going to be getting another credit card next week(just a guess), since Sony's security is at 1999 levels, but I guess if you have to spend 8 minutes searching for legal free games, that's too difficult.
Om, nomnomnom...
Really? Can you tell me where they pushed out the unofficial patch packs and so on. Well we already know they didn't, because there's no way to mod on consoles or fix problems like that. Then again, I suppose if you want to use a console and get taken to the cleaners it's all up to you. But let me point out that a $450 PC built today will crush both consoles in terms of graphics alone, and let you mod, play MP games, and not charge you for it.
Hey! You're that guy from the internet! http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
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.
This $470 dollar pc would blow your console out of the water.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Not too sure about that. It might compare to last gen, but that GTX 750 is middling, and would probably choke on some games coming out now (Witcher 3, e.g.), much less what's to come later in the current gen. It would probably play most games from 2014 back without blinking, though, kind of putting to lie the consolers' claim that you have to pay $1k+ for a gaming rig.
The old 660 Ti is starting to show its age, and I really wanted to play W3. =\ The damn video cards are still the beast of the cost, though. :P
...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.
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.
The game hasn't been released yet and I would be surprised that that the storm of negative feedback about crappy graphics hasn't taken them by surprise, meaning they will take another pass at it before its released. But it can't be a revolutionary change this close to release so at best will only result in marginal improvement,
There's also an expectation/myth that won't die floating around, no matter how retarded it actually is, that the latest consoles are now so powerful they should be able to run all games as good as a high-end gaming PC, even though a PC gaming rig would have a GPU that alone costs more than an entire console + startup kit.
On face value, the Fallout 4 demo seems to indicate its just another victim of some clueless management idiot forcing the developers to cheap out and reduce the graphics enough so one version can run on both PC and consoles, rather than have them invest a small amount of extra effort to make a separate PC version with better graphics. It seems obvious from the demo that they're also trying to get away with using the same tired old game engine from Fallout 3 so the profit motive combined with clueless management actually seems a credible explanation.
I say Clueless because as a software developer myself, I've seen may times that no matter how many times the approach blows up in their face, software management are always arrogant and naive enough to think that somehow they can get away with it this time and that fans/users won't notice when you cheap out on their favorite franchise/product. The same management mindset also refuses to acknowledge the existence of any possible risk from pushing out a rushed or sub-par product in terms of lost sales, let alone any longer term damage to brand reputation,
Of course It might also be politics such as Microsoft pushing them to shoot the PC version in the foot so it doesn't look substantially better than the console version, avoiding yet another indicator of how lame the XBone actually is compared to a good PC.