Almost Over

The Fallout 10th Anniversary Contest is about to end, you have until midnight Rockville-Md time to send your Perks.

Go on, not much time left.

Update: It’s over now, good luck to everyone that participated.

The Smiley Connection

Gstaff talks again about community made emoticons:

Yep, just to reiterate, we’re asking you guys if you want to make them:)

I like the Oblivion Gate one stomper…not sure when it would be relevant, but that’s the idea…we’re looking for ones that are unique to Elder Scrolls and Fallout…which means you guys would probably be the best candidates to make them

There are a few already made that look good, do check them.

Over Two Long 1Up Hours

From the Bethesda Blog:

This week there’s some more coverage out there on Fallout 3 you can read/listen to at your leisure. The 1Up Yours podcast, which goes up on every Friday, includes a segment early on where Shane Bettenhausen and James Mielke share their impressions upon watching the “E3 Demo” last week. The podcast is a long one at over two and a half hours, so if you’re just looking for the Fallout discussion, join in on the podcast about twenty minutes in. Download it here, or subscribe via iTunes.

Two and a half hours?…Geez…

TVG does Fallout 3

Pete Hines continues his roundup showing the Fallout 3 demo, this time he met Gwynne Dixon from TVG:

Pete Hines: The original Fallout games are primarily what we’re trying to replicate as much as we can, and we’re trying to bring as much of that as possible into Fallout 3 to make it a true Fallout game. The kinds of things we’ve focused on are the tone, theme, settings, characters, story, dialogue and the kind of humor they had; things like that.

There are lots of little things like homages to the sort of furniture they had, or the vents on the walls. We did everything we could to try and make the game as realistic and as true to Fallout as possible.[...]

It’s really a game where if you want to see and do everything then you have to play through multiple times to see it all. If you blow up Megaton, for example, all of those quests are gone forever. You can’t go back there and do any of the quests; it’s just a big gaping hole in the ground. So, there’s a lot more emphasis on player choice and how we deal with the choices that you make.

The quest system is actually very different. Rather than having lots and lots of quests where you can do any of them that you want without being locked out, Fallout has a much smaller number of quests and how you do one may lock you out of doing other stuff.

Gwynne Dixon: Roll-on autumn 2008. We literally can’t wait to get our hands on more Bethesda related fun, particularly when it revolves around one of our favorite post-nuclear war game worlds, the Fallout universe.

There are a few mistakes in that piece, the exp progression isn’t like Oblivion, for instance.

Brief and Nuclear Roundup

Just some brief notes before we start a new week:

Matt “Gstaff” Grandstaff asked the Bethesda Fallout 3 forum community to help him out:

So between the moderators and some of you guys, I’ve gotten some requests that we update our emoticons (or smileys, or whatever you want to call them). Pete and I talked about it, and decided it would be fun t to see what you guys have to offer. As long as they’re in good taste (nothing to rude, lewd, crude or nude), we’ll consider them. If you come up with an idea, send me a PM with a link (feel free to share the links here). Not sure how many we’ll add, but if we get some feedback on the more popular ones, we’ll probably have to use them
So get your BoS, Vault Boy, or whatever else seems relevant ready.

—X—

He also is warning that it will take a while until we find out the results of the Design a Perk Fallout 10th Anniversary Contest:

Almost closing time, yes…but we definitely have plenty to look over and go through before we can start handing out any prizes.

—X—

Fallout: A Post Nuclear Internet Union is the latest gathering of Fallout fans to appear, in this case from the Gamespot grounds.

—X—

Sorry for the off topic but if you are in my position, you really should read this thing from the Digital Hedonist:

On September 5th of last year I became the husband to my wonderful wife. We share a lot of things in common, but one of those things is not a passion for gaming. She’ll play a game occasionally, she kicked my behind the first time we boxed on Wii Sports.For the first six months or so of our lives together my gaming was a major source of conflict between us. But together we evolved, compromised and I can happily say we haven’t had a serious arguement about my gaming for many months now. It wasn’t easy, but we got there, so heres a few tips for you married gamers out there on how to make the transition from single gamer to married gamer.

—X—

And finally there are some changes to this blog coming out, I’ll just paste what I wrote earlier today from here:

I’m going to open the blog to outside contributors, people that find something interesting and can make a blogpost of their own, with me editing the final version. I’ll open it to the large majority of people that made comments, with no strings attached, if you never want to write you won’t. It’s one of the new things I’m going to make, together with a new theme (I want to try some new stuff, this place also exists for me to learn to function with WordPress) and a couple of articles and interviews.All coming in November.

Picture by Michail Zey.

4 Days Until the End!

Only four days until the end of the Design a Perk Fallout 10th Anniversary Contest, time to send your last entries!

Here is the list of prizes:

	PC Grand Prize: Your choice of an ATI or NVIDIA video card Logitech G15 keyboard Logitech G9 mouse Logitech G51 Gaming Speakers Vault Boy bobblehead Vault Tec lunchbox Fallout 3 t-shirt Vault Boy decal
OR
	Console Grand Prize: Xbox 360 Pro Logitech G51 Gaming Speakers Vault Boy bobblehead Vault Tec lunchbox Fallout 3 t-shirt Vault Boy decal

Assassin Kills Fallout 3

The Golden Joystick Awards are out, Fallout 3 didn’t win:

• 02 Ultimate Game of the Year 2007 – Gears of War
• Sonopress Xbox Game of the Year 2007 – Gears of War
• PC Game of the Year 2007 (sponsored by PC Gamer) – The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar
• PlayStation Game of the Year 2007 (sponsored by Official PlayStation Magazine UK) – God of War II
• Nintendo Game of the Year 2007 (sponsored by Official Nintendo Magazine) – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Editor’s Choice – Gears of War
• The Publisher of the Year 2007 (sponsored by Future) – Nintendo
• The Vivendi Retailer of the Year 2007 – Game
• The One to Watch (sponsored by Total Film) – Assassin’s Creed
• Next-Gen.biz UK Developer of the Year – Codemasters
• The GameTribe Online Game of the Year 2007 – World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
• Nuts All-Nighter – Gears of War
• The 1Xtra Soundtrack of the Year – Guitar Hero II
• The Innovation of the Year 2007 (sponsored by T3) – Nintendo Wii
• 4Talent Mobile Game of the Year 2007 – Final Fantasy
• Games Radar Handheld Game of the Year – GTA Vice City Stories
• The Sun Family Game of the Year 2007 – Wii Sports
• The Bliss Girls’ Choice Game of the Year 2007 – Guitar Hero II

Spotted at Joystick.

Zenimax in the News

From NMA:

ZeniMax Media Receives $300 Million Investment from Providence Equity Partners

Rockville, MD, October 25, 2007 – ZeniMax Media Inc. today announced the closing of a $300 million investment by Providence Equity Partners Inc. for convertible preferred stock of the Company. The proceeds of the investment will be used to fund future growth, increase game development and publishing, facilitate acquisitions, and finance massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

ZeniMax Media was founded in 1999 by Robert A. Altman, its Chairman and CEO, and through wholly owned subsidiaries creates and publishes original interactive entertainment content for gaming consoles (including the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, and the Nintendo DS and Wii), the PC, handheld/wireless devices, and online gaming. Last year its wholly owned subsidiary, Bethesda Softworks, released The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® which was voted Best Game of 2006. Bethesda’s upcoming title, Fallout® 3, has already been featured on the cover of more than 20 magazines worldwide and has won accolades as one of most anticipated games for 2008.

It makes sense to expand internationally the publishing side of the company with a high Euro allowing for better margins, and in a moment of consolidation on the gaming scene it gives them some extra breathing air.

But this is mostly about MMORPG’s. That’s my bet.

Mad Max 4

From Moviehole:

After several false starts, one major budget blowout and a thrillion chuckles, George Miller’s “Mad Max 4 : Fury Road” is finally juiced and ready to go. Its production quarters re-opened at Fox Studios in Sydney this week.

One of Moviehole’s longest – not as in length (well not that we know of) but in terms of how good he has been to us over the years (setting up set visits.. basically giving us access to things we normally couldn’t have gotten) – friends called today from the lot to let us know that “Fury Road” has finally got a greenlight, with pre-production commencing immediately.

Goody, spotted this at NMA.

Pete and the Milkman

From the Bethesda Blog:

Pete Hines: So I’m back out on the road for the first of two trips over the next three weeks following up with folks who didn’t get a chance to see Fallout 3 at E3 or Leipzig. We really aren’t doing it for more coverage, but to make sure folks at different sites and publications have had a chance to see it. Often times a given publication may only have one or two folks come by to see the demo during a trade show like E3, which is fine for the purpose of a particular preview or article. However, as you go forward you work with a variety of folks on feature articles, stories, and so forth, and it’s important for them to have seen the game for themselves. So this week I’m in San Fran to see a number of folks.

James Mielke over at 1Up put up a post on his blog talking about seeing the Fallout demo for the first time.

A few snippets from 1Up:

Being the busy bee that I am, I don’t usually get to play too many games at E3, and that being the case, I definitely didn’t get to see Bethesda‘s stunning Fallout 3 in action. Well, today Bethesda’s VP of PR came through the offices and gave us a very articulate walkthrough of the new game’s features and mechanics. I asked a lot of questions and got a lot of answers, and as someone who has had a hard time getting into Oblivion, I have to say, Fallout 3 really blew me away.[...]

Shooting an enemy in the leg slows him down, hit him in the head and blind him, shoot his weapon and it will become inaccurate and possibly break, etc. It’s seriously looking awesome, the replay factor will be high, and there’s so much visual and gameplay detail built in it’s almost ridiculous. It won’t be nearly as long as something like Oblivion, but I’m OK with that.

Hanging out with Fallout 3

On the Game Scoop! Episode 55 podcast at IGN you can listen to Pete Hines talking about Fallout 3.

Update: There’s a very small transcript at NMA, together with some comments from Brother None. Still it’s better to listen to the thing, it’s not that big.

Fallout 3: Creating the PipBoy3000

Finally a new Developer Diary! Istvan Pely brings us an insight into the creation and implementation of the new Pip-Boy 3000:

The basic parameters for the industrial design of this piece of hardware were simple. It was decided early on that the device would be worn on the player character’s arm and feature a display of some sort. Along with the design of the Vault Suit, the Pip-Boy was one of the first things that our resident conceptual artist and creative genius, Adam Adamowicz, began to sketch. We went through pages and pages of drawings, iterating every little detail, in order to lock onto something that looked interesting and also seemed plausible from a realism point-of-view.

Inspiration came from both commercial product design and military industrial design of the 1950’s to early 1960’s. Elements from items such as old portable television sets and army field radios were studied and incorporated in some fashion along the way. As with all of Fallout 3’s industrial design, a careful balance of realism, future-retro-style and practicality was sought in the final product. In terms of realism, it’s not an essential factor, but a sense of believability within the rules as defined in the Fallout universe is important.

Read the rest here, a great read, and by the way that Adam fellow is good.

Fallout3: Now in a lot of flavors

The Fallout 3 official site is now available in French, Italian, German,Spanish,UK English, American English and Australian English.

The place still needs a Polish and Russian versions though, the following in those countries is huge. And Chinese. And Czech. And all the Nordic countries. And Portuguese. And why are the UK, USA and Ozzy versions exactly the same? Shouldn’t they just put an En sign? Who are we? Where are we going? Shall I thank BN for the tip?

No Demo Allowed

So what Matt “Gstaff” Grandstaff has to say about game demos, particularly on the Fallout 3 context:

One thing to consider about demos though. For certain kinds of games, I’d say its not as easy to just break off a piece, and say, here’s the demo. Sure you can take a game of Madden, let someone choose between two teams, and then make it one quarter. Or as of yesterday, just release a few songs for Guitar Hero III.

For a game like Fallout (or Oblivion), there’s a lot of details that have to go into it since the game plays as a sandbox…where do you cut the user off. You might bring up that we have a playable demo that we’ve shown at events, but from the previews you read, you’ll notice that the G.O.A.T exam is never taken, we never decided to save Megaton instead of blowing it up, and so on. Part of the reason for this is that for the purpose of showing the game, they didn’t need to flesh out those details.
If we were doing a demo, there’d be a lot of time spent on deciding where a user could go, what quests to include, etc. For Fallout 3, we’d rather commit the time that can be used for delivering a demo into spending more time working on the final product.
Of course, it’s always nice when you can get a demo. I enjoyed the Bioshock one, and I played Guitar Hero III’s last night, but as a gamer myself, I don’t always expect one.

Well no playable demo for us, that seems clear by now. You can always enjoy the original Fallout demo though, if you are able to run it, that is.

Fallout 3 at GameBanshee

Gamebanshee has a new Fallout 3 preview, made by Brother None:

Fallout 3, the sequel to the 90′s RPG classics Fallout 1 and 2, has been in pre-production since Bethesda Softworks purchased the rights to work on the title in July of 2004. The latest sequel has had a bumpy ride even before Bethesda started with its latest production after finishing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The media reception has been nothing short of ecstatic, while discussion across the web shows that there are some doubts among consumers.

All said and done, the game surely has captivated the interest of many. There have already been many previews based on the same demo, but you can never have too much information. So I sat down, pen at the ready, as Pete Hines took control of the demo at the 2007 Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany to show us around Bethesda’s imagining of Interplay’s classics.[...]

Did you like Oblivion? Well, Fallout 3 is promised to be a much-improved version of that game, and with no significantly different design approach is almost guaranteed to be at least enjoyable by fans of the previous Bethesda game.
Are you a big fan of the recent evolution of RPGs? Well, the sand-box action-filled Fallout 3 might be right up your alley, though this will depend on how well the combat system plays out and how much Bethesda is able to fix its own vision of the game.
Are you a big fan of Fallout and did you expect a sequel to hold close to the originals design in both setting and gameplay? Set it and forget it.

Bn the game isn’t set on the West Coast. Please fix.

Afterworld

Thanks to the Slakinator for pointing me out in the direction of Afterworld, a post apoc series available on MySpace:

Afterworld is a fully immersive sci-fi series. A new kind of computer-animated entertainment that blends video games, graphic novels and anime into one dynamic experience.Afterworld is about life on Earth after an inexplicable global event renders technology useless and more than 99.9% of the population missing.

The story follows the adventures of Russell Shoemaker, who wakes up in New York after this event and is compelled to walk to Seattle in the faint hope that his wife and child have survived.

Russell’s own harrowing journey, from technological dependence to total self-reliance, mirrors the world he discovers along the way, where other survivors are rebuilding society in strange and surprising ways. Piecing together the complex mystery of what caused the global event, Russell eventually paves the way for the bold new future of mankind.

One note though:

INTERNATIONAL VIEWERS: Please register at http://www.afterworld.spti.com to receive an email when Afterworld is available in your country!

Again thanks Slakinator.

Fallout 3: Still No Mac Allowed

Jay “RadHamster” Woodward from Bethsoft shares his thoughts on the state of Mac gaming:

Until Steve Jobs allows John “I’m a PC” Hodgman to speak the forbidden word “game,” I would not want to see anything happen that might endanger Mac users’ ability to enjoy the pocket universe Apple has created for them, in which PCs are serious and dull, and Macs are fun because they’ve got the best version of Adobe Illustrator.

Near as I can tell, in that universe, games simply don’t exist.

Regarding Fallout 3 and the Mac platform things remain like they were a few months ago.

Update: It’s clear that the quote from Jay shows his own views, nothing more, still here’s a message I got:

RadHamster’s opinion should not be construed as any official comment from Bethesda.

Right.