Cain O.C.

From Gamespot:

GS: Speaking of the creative, a lot of the Fallout fans were interested to hear that Tim Cain will be involved in the project. What has he been bringing to the game?

Jeremy Gaffney: Tim’s kind of a triple threat because he is a super nice, experienced guy to work with who’s seen all sorts of cool projects–from some of what I consider to be the best role-playing games of all time across a whole slew of genres. He’s also a killer programmer, and he’s also a top-notch designer. That’s like, three good hires in one for Tim. And he’s a friend of ours. He’s worked with a number of the studio’s founders before. So what he brings to the court is all of that. I think a lot of the same sensibilities led into the Fallout design and some of the neat aspects of that are making their way into this, especially as he codes systems that he coded in Fallout. On top of that, he’s a great manager. We probably underpay him, actually. We’ll go give him a raise after this talk.

The new development house of Tim Cain can be found here. <3 Tim!

Spotted at NMA.

Vault13: Timeline

From The Vault:

The timeline is one of the oldest released Fallout design documents, written by Scott Campbell. It was released on October 6, 2007 at The Vault, as part of Fallout’s 10th anniversary celebration. You can also download the timeline as a PDF file.

If you are interested in the changes that took place later, or in some Fallout/Vault13 speculation like me this is a must read, one example:

2077: Armageddon

• It is not known which country pressed the button first. On October 23, 2077, dozens of 20 kiloton warheads are on their way to their US targets.
• The Shelter Drill sirens begin to wail. Many US citizens ignore the warning believing it to be just another false alarm. The few that heed, are sealed within their sheltering vaults.
• The Americans, unable to stop all the incoming missiles with satellite defenses, launch a counterstrike at the offending country. Other countries, seeing the US’s missiles on their way, fire their warheads as well. What ensues is two hours of nuclear bombardment upon the earth’s surface.
• The effects are far worse than most imagined. The earth’s faults shift violently. California is ripped from the mainland. Mountain ranges thrust themselves through the soil. Whole lands are submerged under floods of water.
• A week after the initial blast, a black rain begins to fall. Plants and animals both go rapidly into extinction.
• But, it is the unexpected that has the greatest effect upon the world. The military base where experiments on the FEV-1 were underway was all but obliterated. But the canisters holding the virus were still within, and they lie cracked and spilling their contents into the air.
• As the virus is swept up upon the nuclear winds, the radiation causes the virus to thrive and multiply. Within a month, the virus is in every non sealed water supply around the world.
• The secret military base housing FEV-2 remains intact. The base itself doubles as a Vault, and the Soldiers and Scientists sealed inside go about their pre-apocalypse duties.

This was released as part of the Fallout 10th Anniversary celebrations, as usual great work Ausir.

The System

What is the system where people will play Fallout 3, since it’s going to be released on the PC, XBox360 and PS3? Matt “Gstaff” Grandstaff already knows:

I’ll likely play it on PC at some point, but once I get it home, I’d rather play it on the big tv with surround sound, plus I don’t even have a desk at my apartment right now.

Is that desk thing a veiled reference to the fact that he needs a raise?

Fallout 3 Atomic Ninjas part 6

In late August I reported that No Mutants Allowed got inside the Fallout 3 demo presentations and got a few Q&A sessions with Pete Hines. They went to the Bethesda Games Fallout 3 forum and replied to questions about their viewing of the Fallout 3 demo. This is the sixth of a series of blogposts with an edited version of those sessions. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 is here. So let’s roll:

Will AP become useless if you never use the V.A.T.S. system?

BN: It does not appear to have any function outside of VATS.

Sua: From what we saw, probably, yes.

I hope npc reactions are improved allot more in the final game. Like when you pick up the laser rifle from the soldier the BoS soldiers should force you to give it to them and give you one of their Chinese assault rifles instead.

Considering their excessively possessive nature in FO1/2 when it came to technology… well. Pretty unlikely they’d even let you near the laser rifle.
The lack of helmets is also unsettling I would rather have BoS soldiers wearing patched up helmets and marking their armor to show rank or identification. If the only reason they don’t wear helmets is so you can identify them. Then just have them remove their helmets to talk to the PC when no combat is going on.

Not to mention (grandfather) Maxson was killed, hit in the head during a raid because he wasn’t wearing his helmet. I’m pretty sure the BoS learnt their lesson after that…

But of course, a helmet doesn’t let you show much facial expression during dialog. I could understand the leader being helmetless for that purpose, but nearly the entire squad? Un-bloody-likely.

I’m more concerned about the disparity in rad counts between the too-ubiquitous mushroom clouds and the “tap” water… sure, one is ingested and that explains the rad count to an extent but… come on?

Probably just a demo thing, tho’

Relaxing? Or maybe tired of all the (endless) fighting? Like in war-weary and disenchanted by the whole mess? You know, like in the anti-war movies.

No, it’s definitely just bad/unfinished AI scripting, just like the soldier shouldering his gun the moment the bomb hits. They need to do some work there.
Which I think is the value here:

Remember how all those previewers were ecstatic about the improved RAI? Well, guess what, you don’t actually *see* improved RAI anywhere in the demo, all those previewers have to go on is the promise that RAI will be better. All the RAI I saw in the demo was *exactly* like it was in Oblivion (with the possible exception of combat AI)

Does this mean that mutants are only out to kill you or what?

Basically, Pete Hines was talking about dialogue as a valid option and then just threw out “obviously, that doesn’t go for supermutants.” Might’ve been a joke, might’ve been inaccurate, it didn’t sound very definitive to me. But supermutants are “the enemy”, that much is clear. Whether or not you can talk to them and how much backstory they have I don’t know.