Fallout Three Times Informer

Screenshot Tanhauser/NMA

GameInformer had the privilege of placing three diferent guys playing Fallout 3 and now shows their exchange of experiences:

During E3, Bethesda gave us the opportunity to get our hands on Fallout 3, the company’s long-anticipated post-apocalyptic RPG. While we had a great time in our allotted 30 minutes, we were left craving more. Much more. Well, at Leipzig’s German Games Convention, we got another stab at it. Three of us (Game Informer Online’s Nick Ahrens and Jeff Cork, along with Game Informer Magazine’s Bryan Vore) got an hour with the game, starting with our character leaving the vault for the first time in his life.

As we sat at our Xbox 360 stations, we decided to make the most of our relatively limited time with the game and go in different directions. Afterward, we chatted about our experiences. Surprisingly, even in that short span of time we walked away with unique encounters, observations and more.

Nick Ahrens: I went left out of the vault. Left and backward. I should have looked at the compass, but I was too excited and just ran off. It was like being a kid

Jeff Cork: I kind of meandered straight and ended up running into the ruins of Washington D.C. Since we only had an hour, I wasn’t able to get to the Washington Monument; because of the way it’s laid out, there’s a lot of stuff that’s blocked off. You probably have to go through the ruins a specific way to get there, unless there’s some sneaky path I wasn’t able to find in the time I had. I really wanted to check it out, but I couldn’t do it.

Bryan Vore: I went straight south, and I ended up in Megaton, then I proceeded to some abandoned city that didn’t have any recognizable landmarks. There were a lot of scavengers in there.[...]

Bryan: Yeah, it felt like we’d just sat down when time ran out. The crappy thing is, right when we were about done, I’d just beaten this guy with a flamethrower and a rocket launcher, and I was looting his shop and taking his sporks and potato chips and was getting ready to use his weapons. Then it was, “Sorry, time to get up.”

Nick: People said, “Oh, it’s just going to be Oblivion and Fallout,” but a lot of the stuff was already in Fallout. The looting, the bartering and all that crazy stuff. The thing is, Bethesda basically transitioned it into an Oblivion-style view, which is really just a first-person view. It’s not so much that they blended the two, it’s just that the Elder Scroll games matched the Fallout games so well to begin with. It wasn’t anything that they needed to force, really.

Jeff: Did you stick with the default view?

Nick: I worked with a couple of them. I did a lot of first-person stuff with my shooting, but if you hold the right bumper down on the Xbox 360—and I assume it’s going to be L1 on the PS3—you can go to a third-person view, much like RE4 or Gears of War. The cool thing is that you can actually zoom in and out and go around your character. Unlike Oblivion, where you’d let go and it would disappear, it’ll stay there now, so you can have your character way out there if you want, almost like in the original game.

Jeff: So what did you think overall?

Nick: An hour was not enough. It’s awesome.

Spotted by Marusia on the BGS Fallout 3 Forum.

Kotaku Talks Fallout 3 at PAX

Picture Kotaku at PAX

The good and the bad from the impressing Fallout 3 display at Penny Arcade Expo for Kotaku:

Hands-down the best booth on the Penny Arcade Expo show floor is Bethesda’s Fallout 3 homage.

The central booth features kiosks of playable Fallout 3, singed mannequins, and an honest to god Airstream motor home on a patch of faux grass surrounded by white picket fences.

The Bethesda folks tell me that the Airstream is an authentic, not a replica, that the company purchased and then paid someone to clean-up and retro fit. Inside the refrigerated air of the mobile home is a wealth of retro goodies touched-up with a Fallout ambiance.

There are, for instance, old Life magazines, a refrigerator packed with ice cold Nuka Colas, a wood panel framed flat screen television and a waffle iron of the future. You can tell it’s from the future by the mini radar dish protruding from the top griddle.

But there were a few problems too:

The Fallout demo was schedule to run in the Main Theater at 2:30 –the exact same time as the Harmonix: The Rockening panel ended. The demo would also run over the Warhammer Online demo by a good half hour, ending at 3:30.

I ducked out of Hamronix 45 minutes early mostly due to technical issues, but also because I wanted to head off a huge line for Fallout. My plan failed as I encountered well over 200 hundred people ahead of me. Dutifully, I waited in line, suffering through all the misery of yesterday all over again.

But 2:30 came and went and still the line didn’t move. It was nearly 2:50 by the time the big partition blocking off the Main Theater from the line-waiting room was parted, admitting the first of well over 1000 people that wanted to see this game. I was fairly hopeful because I was in the first third of the line – but when I was within 10 people of the opening, the line stopped.

After some muddled arguments and confused muttering, a meek marketing chick was sent out with little cardboard consolation prize. We were subsequently turned away. Or not even turned away since no one said “go away.” They just stood there, staring at us as we stared at them, not letting us into the demo. The passive-aggressive shun, if you will.

That’s the trouble with mega-huge game expos – there just isn’t enough room for everybody. Looks like PAX has succumbed to E3 syndrome.

You can see a small gallery of the retro and falloutish stuff in there here.

Pete Hines Shrugs Negativity

screenshot Tanhauser/NMA

Speaking to Videogaming247 Hines shrugged of a few post E3 negative comments:

“Everybody has their reasons why they do or don’t like something, so it’s not really for me to say, ‘That’s a good reason not to like it,’ or, ‘That’s not a good reason not to like it,’” said Hines when asked if some negativity surrounding the game after the show surprised him.

“You play the game and you see what you think. At E3 we let people play the game for a half hour, and if in a half hour you can make up your mind one way or the other, OK. I don’t really get into judging the rightness or wrongness of it. I just give people a chance to play it and they draw their own conclusions.”

Breaking News: New Gameplay Videos

Screenshot Tanhauser/NMA

Five new Gameplay Videos are online on the Fallout 3 official site now. Very revealing and interesting ones too, go grab them while they’re hot:

Can’t make it to PAX to play Fallout 3? Here is the next best thing. We’ve released FIVE gameplay videos – basically one long demo — narrated (and also played) by Todd Howard. The demo has been split into five parts:

• Escape
• Megaton
• The Wasteland
• Super Duper Mart
• Tenpenny Tower

You can download them in HD from the official Fallout 3 website. These videos will also be available on Xbox Live soon, too.

Thanks Gstaff.

Gametrailers.com – Fallout 3 – GC 2008: Post-Apocalyptic Interview

Pete Hines talks to Gametrailers.

more about “Gametrailers.com – Fallout 3 – GC 200…“, posted with vodpod

You Can Play Fallout 3 At PAX

From the BethBlog:

We will have a booth at the show, and we’re planning to allow the public their first opportunity to play Fallout 3. That’s right, hands-on. Now, there’s gonna be 50,000 people or more at this show so they don’t get to sit down and play it for an hour, but we’ll have six kiosks setup in our booth for folks to come by and have a chance to take it for a spin.

We’ll also be handing out handy Vault Dweller Survival Guides to everyone that stops by the booth. These things are a must have, I love them. Really well done. Plus you have to come by and checkout the Airstream.

We’ll also be giving a new Fallout 3 demo in the Main Theatre on Saturday at 2:30pm. This is right after the Main Theatre session where Gabe and Tycho draw a strip, so I’m sure lots of people will already be over that way. It’s a pretty lengthy demo and I’ll be there along with Todd, Emil, and Istvan. We may have a chance to do a short Q&A with folks, I don’t know. Between the demo and what we have planned after the demo, we may be pretty short on time. If you like schwag, I wouldn’t leave early…that’s all I’m sayin’.

They also promisse a new gameplay video on Friday. You can check the PAX schedule here.

Australians Go All Fallout 3 In Europe

Another piece about Fallout 3 from Leipzig, this time from Ausgamers:

I didn’t get enough combat time to determine if this is definitely the case, but I certainly found it harder to finish fights without using V.A.T.S. – even with all my leet FPS skills I struggled to take out some of the opponents. Using V.A.T.S. made it pretty simple, although there’s some initial weirdness because of the disconnect flipping between the free-flowing FPS mode and the cinematic V.A.T.S. mode.

The V.A.T.S. thing looks cool – some of the deaths are particularly spectacular and satisfying – but I’m not sure about the long term appeal. I found I couldn’t skip some of the death animations, which I wanted to, after some casual engagements.
I also would have liked the ability to move the camera around during these engagements – at least once in close-quarters fighting the automatically selected camera angles were up way too close against the character and very awkward. [...]

There are some freaky random things that happen to keep you on your toes – I had a woman run up to me in the middle of nowhere begging for help because she was strapped with explosives. She ran off, not really giving me any opportunity to help her (bug?) and then exploded. Weird.

When I first saw video footage of Fallout 3, I was a bit disappointed with the movement. It really looked like you were just gliding across the landscape, with no sense of true movement at all. Playing it though felt nothing like that and even though there’s the normal bobbing gun animation (indicating movement), overall it felt pretty cool.

One thing that did bug me though was the jumping – it’s like slow motion moon jumping or something; you just bounce in the air and can actually move through the air as well (dislike because it’s just a bit of a disconnect from the gritty realism of the surrounding environment).

Inside The Vault: Ricky “socrates200x” Gonzalez

On today’s Inside the Vault at the Bethblog we have one of the most quoted devs in this blog, UI programmer Ricardo Gonzalez:

What’s your job at Bethesda?
I’m almost positive that what they pay me for here is “interface programming”. That is, I create, maintain, and polish that thin, delicate membrane that resides between the game world and the real one. There’s a glut of information and goings-on in our games that I’m told is very important and it’s my job to see that it gets presented to the player in some semblance of order. I also get bonus points if it looks pretty and if it doesn’t crash the game. To date, I think I have 3 bonus points.
What other games have you worked on?
This would be the first professional game I’ve worked on. As a kid, I invented a whole bunch of the single-player variety to keep myself, how did my parents put it?  “Occupied far, far away from the house”.  Old favorites like “Run There and Back Again” or “Spin in a Circle Really Fast”. I also had a lot of fun burying things in the sand and trying to find them again. I only lost that one once, and afterwards my mom made me promise to stay out of her medicine cabinet.[...]

What games are you looking forward to?
Fallout 3 for one. It’s one thing to constantly debug and playtest it; I really want to take it home and have my way with it for a hundred hours or so. Also Mass Effect for PC, although that’s more because I’d need to upgrade my rig to be able to run it comfortably and I want to have a reason to spend cash money upgrading my rig.

And this is his opinion on what is the best thing about the classic Fallout RPGs:

That I could dynamite the entrance to the Shady Sands Radscorpion cave instead having to kill anything. That I could hack my way into the depths of the Glow without firing a shot. That I could join the Skulz gang, double-cross them in the middle of a gun fight, and still get credit for it. In essence, Fallout is one of the best games I’ve played in allowing you to play the character you want, as you want, and still have a meaningful game experience.

In too many other RPGs, I just can’t play the lazy, self-centered intellectual that I so enjoy playing. Because I have to save my village. Or avenge my village. Or gather happy, glowing stones for my village. You don’t want to? Tough. Take this sword. Or twin daggers. Or talking hauberk. Or whatever. Fallout gives you the exact same opportunity to be the hero, go slay the bad guys, finish that main quest line, but then lets you say, “Screw this. I’m going to go get laid and play chess with my super-computer friend.”

Prepare To The Future New Video

The Protectron - taken from the video

You can find it here. The Protectron looks really cool.

Fallout 3 Changes in Germany

Not for Germany

Eurogamer.de and NMA are reporting that Fallout 3 will have content cut from the release version in Germany:

Eurogamer.de reports that PR man Sam Brace (representing Bethesda for PR agency Lunch) stated at the LGC that the level of violence in Fallout 3 will have to be lowered in the German release. Says German person Lexx:

It still isn’t clear how much will be cut out, but shooting heads and body parts off will definitely NOT be possible. The explanation for this was to make the age classification easier for the USK and to not risk indexing of the game (which would mean that it is not allowed to advertise the game in the media).

I’ve been expecting this for quite some time now, we’re expecting more info on this situation soon.

Infinite Angles

A bit off topic but I’ve been so busy with the coming release of Fallout 3 and work that I’ve stopped for too long to take a look on whatelse is happening.

So this time I’ll bring you the interview of Vince D. Weller to the excelent Alley of Infinite Angles blog:

4. What made you go for turn-based combat in Age of Decadence, and what do you have to say to those who believe that it is a relic of the past?

Real time and first-person view are as old as turn-based and isometric. Probably even older. See Diablo 3 “OMG! Why is it isometric?!” drama for more info:

“Camera is not technology,” says Wilson [Diablo 3 lead designer], clearly somewhat frustrated. “People associate the camera with isometric and say: ‘Oh, why didn’t you update the tech?’ Well, we did update the tech. The camera has nothing to do with tech, the camera is all about gameplay. Isometric gameplay is very different from FPS or over-the-shoulder third person – which is pretty much what the entire industry is moving towards. But then some of the biggest hits of the last year were Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and those were not high-tech games. Gameplay is what matters; it’s what’s always mattered to us.”

Similarly, turn-based isn’t about tech, it’s about gameplay. It can’t be a relic because games like Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic still exist and aint going nowhere. To understand what TB offers, let’s imagine RT Civ. Imagined? Well, there you go.

Turn-based gameplay is about thinking, considering your options, and using tactical advantages. Real-time gameplay is about clicking really, really fast (hence the twitch gameplay name). The fact that when developers want to offer you a bit more depth in your RT cereal they pause it, should tell you everything you need to know.

Why AoD is turn-based? Because we like TB games and we spit on your RT crap. What? The mike is still on. Oh, shit! Now we’d have to issue a press-release stating that RT games are as good as TB games and that we are all huge RT fans. Thanks a lot!

I love his interviews, and the Alley needs more exposure, it’s one of my favorite places from those that take a serious look on gaming culture in general.

A Bit Late For Leipzig

Enclave Soldier

There’s a lot of catching up to do by this blog regarding Fallout 3 in Leipzig, so let’s start, with the help of NMA’s Leipzig news coverage.

First the spoiler heavy UGO Gamesblog Vault 106 walkthrough:

In no time I had my task: deliver a letter from a Megaton denizen to her relatives in Arefu, a nearby settlement built in the middle of a raised section of the DC highway. And so I was off, setting my waypoint on my pipboy and heading straight for it. A few giant moles and rabid dogs pestered me along the way, but for the most part, things were going smooth, until…

Until I got distracted. You’re a man with purpose, and suddenly something pings on your map, and you just have to check it out. The phenomenon happened all the time in Morrowind and Oblivion (and even in Fallout 1 and 2), so it’s not a big shock that it happened. I was just more surprised as to how easy it was for the game to take me off course.

What drew my attention was a sign pointing to a nearby fallout shelter. Not Vault 101, mind you…I was quite a ways from my old home. No, this was Vault 106. I made my way into a cave dug into a large cliff and quickly discovered the telltale massive vault door. A switch in front of it blinked expectantly and, much to my surprise, the vault door clanged open the moment I touched it, gears and levers sliding out of place like the day it was built.

Next up is Gamespot:

We encountered some new enemies after leaving the house: huge insects such as the bloatfly, as well as new armoured human characters called raiders. We used the VATS system (see previous coverage) to take out most of the enemies that we came across, and then played around with stealing more of the things that were left behind. One of the raiders was wearing a hockey mask for protection, and we were able to remove it from the dead body and wear it ourselves. You can press the left bumper to switch to a third-person view, and you can then use the right analog stick to tilt around your character to check out the view from the front.

After making it through the Meresti Trainyard and its abandoned train wrecks, we came across the outskirts of a small settlement. The problem was that it was protected, and we were immediately shot at by a sniper upon entering. We spun around and tried to use the VATS system to hone in on the sniper, but we couldn’t see them, and they’d soon incapacitated us via our arms and legs. When we reloaded the game, we decided to head back and check out the school that was not too far from the starting bunker. The building had been torn apart, but a number of books and chalkboards remained complete, with writing from children and teachers. Underneath the school, a small dungeon with a number of raiders awaited, and we were able to pick up a sawed-off shotgun as a reward for heading inside.

And now MTV Multiplayer Blog:

During press demos, I like to try things I don’t think the developers are expecting. So when I stepped my character out of the vault and fumbled with the buttons on my Xbox 360 controller, I wasn’t just reacquainting myself with the mechanics of a game I hadn’t played since a pre-E3 event in June. I was also trying to find surprises. Hitting the 360 controller’s back button, I got my wish. Tapping the button brings up the option to make time pass more quickly. I jumped the game’s clock 12 hours. I would roam the D.C. outskirts at night. I bet the E3 gamers didn’t do that either![...]

I chose a different path, a path that left me securing my very own house in Megaton with my very own robot butler. I could get a haircut from this butler. Or I could get amusement. That’s what I selected, and he/she/it told me a joke. It was about two electrons walking into a bar. One saying it lost an electron. The other asking: “Are you sure?” Response: “I’m positive.”

I asked my robot butler to tell me another joke. The robot butler replied: “My humor emitter ray needs recharging.”

And finnally GameSpy:

Killing enemies in Fallout 3 is very satisfying, and not just because of the finely blended real-time first-person shooting and the tactics-heavy strategy of the VATS system. It’s also fun because of all the loot. You’ll literally strip your victims down to their underwear when you loot their armor, steal their guns, and empty their pockets of valuable bottlecaps, the currency of the wasteland.

The itemization abounds, with many different kinds of food (like delicious dog meat, squirrel-on-a-stick, and Fancy Lads snack cakes), drink (dirty water, Nuka Cola, all kinds of booze), weapons, armor, and drugs. You may want to indulge in some recreational drug abuse to fight off the effects of radiation or to give yourself a little performance-enhancing boost, but the dangers of addiction are very real.

Again thanks to NMA.

Fallout 3 Release Dates

This time it’s official:

August 20, 2008 (Rockville, MD) – Bethesda Softworks®, a ZeniMax Media company, announced today that its highly anticipated title, Fallout® 3, will be available on store shelves and online in North America on October 28, 2008 and in Europe on October 31, 2008. Developed at Bethesda Game Studios – creators of the 2006 Game of the Year, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® – Fallout 3 is slated for release on the Xbox 360®video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, and Games for Windows.

“We are very excited to let gamers get their hands on Fallout 3, the latest chapter in this beloved and highly acclaimed franchise,” said Vlatko Andonov, president of Bethesda Softworks. “To meet the huge demand for this title by our fans worldwide, we are planning one of the biggest launches of any game released this year.”

Fallout 3 features one of the most realized game worlds ever created. Set more than 200 years following a nuclear war, you can create any kind of character you want and explore the open wastes of Washington, D.C. however you choose. Every minute is a fight for survival as you encounter Super Mutants, Ghouls, Raiders, and other dangers of the Wasteland.

Hailed as one of the most anticipated games for 2008, Fallout 3 has already won numerous awards including Best of Show from the official Game Critics Awards at E3 2008, a selection voted on by an independent group of journalists from 36 leading North American media outlets that cover the videogame industry.

Fallout® 3 has not yet been rated by the ESRB.

So yeah folks, Fallout 3 will be available on stores in North America on October 28, 2008 and in Europe on October 31, 2008.

IGN Leipzig Fallout 3 Hands On

SuperMutants guarding the Police Station

From IGN, also with the PC version:

Outside the doctor’s quarters I ran into a man named Flash who was eager to brag about the amazing gun he was carrying. He also informed me that Big Town is constantly raided by Slavers and Super Mutants and that the former had just taken a few people hostage in German Town. I picked up the quest Big Trouble in Big Town when I offered to help out with the hostage crisis and had German Town added to my map.

Heading toward the waypoint I accessed my Pip Boy to get an overhead view of the terrain and see how long the walk would take. I only had to kill a few Raiders under a glowing moon before arriving at the German Town police station where I really got to put VATS to the test.

In my previous encounter I had dispatched of my enemies quickly without running out of the necessary action points required to queue up more attacks. The Super Mutants guarding the police station were a completely different story. I was able to land a few shots with my new rifle before one of the mutants barreled toward me to lay on some damaging blows. I had to change my grenade hot key to stimpacks and took to running away instead of charging forward. Unfortunately it was here that my time with the game ended, though I could’ve easily spent the rest of the afternoon entranced by Bethesda’s latest.

So far the only apparent differences between the two games, besides the controls are that the PC version is slightly superior in the graphics department. Both versions were running well and suffered from none of the hang-ups that usually bog down unfinished games. You can be sure we’ll have more on this game in coming months.

Gamersglobal Plays Fallout 3 PC

From Gamersglobal in Leipzig:

Now, at GC in Leipzig, we spent about an hour with the PC version of Fallout 3 (which is supposed to have the same gameplay) and could verify most of what Pete told us. V.A.T.S. no longer felt too mighty, and in fact, we were able to cripple the limbs of a super mutant without killing him, as it should be. Still, a successful V.A.T.S. shot can instantly kill an opponent if the damage to the limb brings his overall hitpoints to zero. For example, we shot 2 times at the left arm of a raider; the first shot hit and made him lose his weapon, the second shot crippled his arm, at the same time killing him. We are STILL not quite convinced about V.A.T.S., because our standard tactic was to try to get very near the opponents, who didn’t seem to hit us much better than over a greater distance, and than entering V.A.T.S.: With this tactic, the relative low range of our pistol or hunting rifle didn’t count, and we could hit our target with a to-hit probability of 80 to 95 % percent. The opponents, on the other hand, do not have V.A.T.S.[...]

Overall, we liked the PC interface better than the Xbox interface, for obvious reasons: You don’t need to scroll to get to a specific weapon in your PIPboy (which you acticvate by pressing TAB), you simply click on it. Most actions like V.A.T.S. are confirmed with “E”, which is also used for “use something”. There are specific graphical settings (sliders) for the distance actors (npcs), items, objects (whatever the difference is), grass, shadows, light, specularities fade. You can also chose the level-of-detail distance for objcts and trees. Of course, most buttons Fallout 3 uses on the console gamepads are mapped to the keyboard. For example, you can apply Stimpacks by pressing “2″ or switch to the world map by pressing “F3″.

There’s more info there, and I’m sure I know the screenshot they use from somewhere

GC is Starting

Image PcGames

The Leipzig Games Convention is finally starting, you can see here the giant Fallout 3 booth.

Shacknews got some new pictures in Leipzig too, worth to check them out.

Spotted this at the Bethsoft Fallout 3 Forum, more news on this in a moment.

Crossover Games Support

Codeweavers makes Crossover Games, a commercial version of Wine that allows you to play various Windows games on Mac and Linux:

Based on the latest Wine Games development work, CrossOver Games allows Mac and Linux users to run their favorite Windows games in the environment of their choice. No rebooting, no switching to a virtual machine, and no Windows Operating System license required; CrossOver gives you the best performance possible if you’re not running on Windows.

Now they have a page where their registered users can vote for them to arrange Fallout 3 support on the application. Thanks Patrick.