No Ashley

From Ashley Cheng Twitter comes this:

starcraft 2 looks great, wish blizzard deviated more, try ground control/battlezone first person gameplay. more thoughts on blog later.

I couldn’t disagree more. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. That way we can have the good old Starcraft gameplay in a new suit, with more bells and whistles but with all the things the fans loved about it intact. Instead go get the Battlezone franchise and make a new one, it’s a worthy series that could win with DX10 Shader 4.0 graphics and minimal changes in gameplay…

 

He added more thoughts about this on his blog, I still disagree with him though.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

Prepare the tomatoes, it’s time for Christiane H. K. “Maverique” Meister, a Character Animator for Fallout 3, to speak:

Ok, it’s Friday – time for this fish to take a break from styling hair…such an alpha picnic.

1) What’s your job at Bethesda?

Lead Character Animator on TES projects – currently taking a break with Fallout and doing whatever character stuff needs doing.

2) What prior projects have you worked on?

Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, Oblivion… Horse Armor (snort), Knights of the Nine, Shivering Isles

3) What have you drawn on for inspiration in developing Fallout 3? Books, movies, music, etc would be fine, if you don’t want to name any games.

MSFD makes me watch BAD 50’s sci-fi movies – wow everyone’s hair was PERFECT back then – except for the crazy old scientists I do like the old War of the Worlds flick, though. The literary version is the best.
Mad Max – how could you not look at that for inspiration?

4) How is the work-environment? Is it competitive or co-op? Do the different teams talk together?

It’s very co-op, sometimes you can’t hear all of the opinions that are being thrown around in the meetings! There’s also a lot of good-natured jibes and ribbing – especially at Jonah (Well he IS blond and so damn cheerful).

5) What is your favorite type of game to play (RTS,FPS,RPG etc)

I love me some old time UT! I’m looking forward to the new one. Hope it has the beautiful simplicity and gibs – gotta have that. I’m a dork and still play Oblivion from time to time (you’d think I would have had enough of that by now…) Never really got into RTS.

6) How long have you been playing Fallout, and how would you describe your feelings towards the franchise?
Well I know this will get a lot of tomatoes thrown at me. Good thing I like tomatoes. I haven’t played Fallout YET. But as a game, I really like the concept and I like where our team is going with Fallout 3.

7) Considering that much of the game will probably be in a wild wasteland, do any of you spend much time hiking, camping, etc, and if so where?

Uh, there’s no wasteland aound here – unless you consider the urban setting a wasteland… I do spend a lot of time riding my horses before work though.

8) What’s the last game you bought? Did you like it?

I don’t have too much time to play games, but I was so jazzed to get KOTOR 2 after the first one – what a let down… just didn’t have story I was looking for. Don’t get me wrong, I still like the mechanics and the system though.

9) What games are you looking forward to on the horizon?
Assassin’s Creed, UT 3, Fallout 3

9) Other than videogames, what are your interests? (Board games, reading, music, etc)

I love to play Scrabble – I even got this puzzle a day calendar – I have it stacked up – I keep promising myself that I’ll get through March one day.
I ride my horses (one 5 year old and one 25 year old). We’re about to move to a farm so that I can have the horse at home – that will be exciting – and scary.
Last book I read was Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Good read.
Just saw Lisa Gerrard in concert (known from Dead Can Dance). She’s an interesting person – not quite on this planet if you take my meaning – awesome voice though!

Respectfully,
Mav

*slips away quietly into the murky water all fish-like*

The part about KotoR II made me giggle, knowing how Fergus Urquhart and Chris Avellone love Oblivion and support Bethsoft doing Fallout 3 in their own vision. And I honestly could never send a tomato towards Maverique, since Steve “Mr.SmileyFaceDude” Meister would get me with his large sword…

Fallout Babies

From Sherman Shellman Leonard, that did a bunch of animations and cinematics for Fallout and Starcraft, we can read an excellent interview at No Mutants Allowed, from where I’ve taken this wonderful story:

Of course my favorite memory is the discovery of the Fallout Babies. It was about 2 months after Fallout shipped… I was over visiting Jason for lunch (Blizzard was only about a mile away from Interplay) and we were in Jason & Leonard’s office talking about something when Leonard came in all excited and says “Guess What?… Tracy’s Pregnant!” He was so excited and happy, it was so cool to see… so Jason piped in with “So is Sharon!”.

Samantha and Gwyneth were born 6 days apart. …Now we know what developers do when they get some downtime. 🙂

Yep, making babies beats playing Catan and developing your WoW character, you hear Bethesda folks?

Fallout: Between Good and Evil

I’ll bring you today a total conversion made by fans for fans:

As the name of the suggests, Fallout: Between Good & Evil is a modding effort which will bring a new life and ideas to the deserted wasteland of the Fallout universe. Professional development of Fallout 3 is (or seems to be) ceased, so few fellow volunteers are last hope of gamers who want to once again seek their destiny in a post-nuclear world. If you haven’t visited our web by mistake, you should generally know quite a lot about this wonderful game. Just to sum it up, Fallout is a post-apocalyptic RPG, first released in 1997 (Fallout 2 in 1998). It stunned the audience and we think it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten, at least because it changed us a lot.

Fortunately, there are many people who have received “high dose of radiation” and who just can’t live without dreaming how would the Earth look like the day after. More than 15 developers work in their free time on the project and most of them have previous game modding experience. Why should we succeed and finish the mod? Because we love our job! We don’t have any budget, we don’t need to sell a set amount of copies – no manager can ban our experiments.

You can imagine our enthusiasm in the beginning. Goals were pretty high and developers optimistic. As usually, not much was achieved yet, however, we continue to work as hard as possible. Even though the web page may not be updated every day, most team members live with BGE every day. Every person needs encouragement, so remember, even a short post in the discussion board may help us, either as inspiration, or just to prove that some gamers wait out there.

Everything takes its time. At some point, we will release Fallout: Between Good & Evil. I promise

Good luck to them, you can find their website here.