Fallout 3 - OXM Podcast Notes

Dhruin

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Briosafreak's Fallout 3 Blog is reporting the latest OXM Podcast features Bethesda's Todd Howard. In case you don't want to listen to it all, Briosafreak has put together a few notes including the information that the game is complete and they are aggressively playtesting and polishing, that it is twice as big as originally planned and some other interesting stuff about NPC followers and more. Well worth a glance for FO3 watchers.
More information.
 
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That's good news. I actually expected them to repeat Oblivion's pattern and delay it half a year after the initial release date.
 
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That's good news. I actually expected them to repeat Oblivion's pattern and delay it half a year after the initial release date.

That could still well happen and, IMO, can be a very good thing. A big developer can (sometimes) withstand the pressure to release-no-matter-what thus avoiding the sometimes horrible original releases the industry is plagued with.
 
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The original quote made it sound like there were up to 200 different quest consequence slides at the end.

This quote makes it sound like theres maybe 5 different slides, each with 2 or 3 different options, and A * B * C * D * E = 200.

I'd call that A + B + C + D + E = 12 endings (or whatever it adds up to). But 200 sounds more impressive.
 
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This quote makes it sound like theres maybe 5 different slides, each with 2 or 3 different options, and A * B * C * D * E = 200.

I think that's the case, yip. They're not being very clear, but they said something like that before

And that's not nearly as impressive as "200 endings" sounds. per gave some permutation numbers for Fallout 1 and 2 and they were way over 200. Wish I could dig 'em up but NMA is broken right now.

EDIT: here's Per's explanation
Fo1 has 19 different endings, with 360 possible permutations. Fo2 has 47 endings with 1,105,920 permutations. If 200 is the number of permutations for Fo3, they are seriously behind. That would correspond to maybe 10-20 endings. But I'm assuming they'd have to be talking about permutations since you should know when designing a game whether you'll have ~12 or ~200 endings. You don't accidentally hop from 12 to 200 endings late in the development process and send in an order for 188 additional voiceovers from Ron Perlman (because he will KILL YOU). With permutations it would be thinkable, at least.
 
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What really all that meant really, how many endings are there?
200 endings with minor variations?, or in other words a dozen endings with significant different ending movies?
 
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Here's Todd Howard answer to that question Remus, taken from the podcast:

Todd Howard said:
OXM: Have the number of endings been finalized…..how’s that coming along?

Todd Howard: Being that we are Bethesda…everything gets a bit big. So as of last week we’re over 200 endings. That is not an exaggeration, but it deserves some description. 200 endings…that’s a lot. So originally when we started, we had various iterations of the ending. The ending is kind of cinematic, that’s dynamic based on the things you’ve done.

When we started, it was kind of fuzzy, it was like “well there’s like 9 maybe 12″ and we started adding things to it. So if you had done this or not this, you’d get this other tweak to the ending. And we kept doing that. And you know even just two weeks ago someone had this idea, “Oh we should add this idea to the ending” (sorry I’m not going to spoil what that is). And I said, “oh that’s a genius idea, we have to do that.” But then it became, “oh, but there’s four versions of that.” So i was like, “okay there’s like four different versions of that part,” and that multiplies by, at the time we were at about 60 endings…so now there’s four versions of that, so now there are around 240 versions.”

The games on paper when we get started…they’re alot smaller, and then as we go they get bigger…we can’t stop ourselves. We’re have tons of people with good ideas here, and if they’re good and fit the tone, we’re going to try to jam as much into the game as possible. Fallout is probably twice the size of what we originally had on paper…it’s pretty big, so that’s what’s happened with the endings.

So some of that stuff is the big things of what you do very late in the game, some of those are things like your karma — how you’ve lived your life from the beginning of the game — you get certain scenes based on your karma. But we kind of like the ending as much as like the game itself at the beginning is you tailoring your character and then you play throughout this game, and unlike Elder Scrolls, where it’s a game where you can keep playing, Fallout 3 has a definite ending. So we wanted to go to efforts to make sure that the actual ending you get when you finish and get the ending, and make that ending reflect and make it individual to the user’s experience. We’ve definitely gone a little overboard.
 
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I still think that shouting '200+ endings' is disingenuous PR BS. But two things I got from it that were positive:
- There are genuine multiple endings based on real choices you get to make.
- The game ends with a real ending.
 
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Todd Howard was always good at selling his games with big numbers.

I still remember how he talked about everything being hand-placed in Morrowind, and how every dungeon had been hand-made (with something like 300 of them there), and he made that sound absolutely incredible. He also mentioned the thousands of unique NPCs.

The reason he pointed that bit about dungeons out was because of the major criticisms directed at Daggerfall, and how the dungeons were horribly put together by a random generator.

We've all witnessed the unique NPCs and hand-made dungeons of both Morrowind and Oblivion, so I'm not expecting much :)
 
Well, what I figured would happen, happened ... folks are seeing '200 endings' and drooling all over themselves ... like Kotaku:

It seems Bethesda's changed plans for Fallout 3 quite a bit since I first got a glimpse of the game in action back in June of last year. When they originally stated they were going for 9-12 endings, I was seriously impressed, imagining the sort of replay value that would generate. Now Bethesda's Todd Howard has appeared in the latest OXM podcast, saying that the game now has more than 200 different endings as of last week. 200 endings? That doesn't even seem like a real number, does it? Considering he's also saying the game is twice as long as they initially estimated (40 hours with side quests), I am pretty sure you could play the game forever. Todd says the game is finished and on track for Fall 2008, but needs a ton of testing and polishing. Hit up OXM below for the full story while I try to wrap my head around the whole 200 ending thing.
 
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Yeah, hence the quick "no wait guys this is what they actually mean" correction on Briosafreak's blog, as well as the ones I posted on NMA and GB.

The whole thing is a mess and I don't think Bethesda is actually too happy about it. I mean, nobody actually likes 200 endings. Most either don't finish the game or want all Xbox achievements, and 200 achievements = too much.

And yes, saying "200+ endings" instead of "200+ permutations" is sorta disingenuous.

Destructoid already did a retraction based on the F3:APNB info.
 
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The whole thing is a mess and I don't think Bethesda is actually too happy about it. I mean, nobody actually likes 200 endings. Most either don't finish the game or want all Xbox achievements, and 200 achievements = too much.

But yet something has to be ticking at Bethesda ... if they could get people thinking that they could play through in ~20 hours and see the main stuff for one ending, yet still have a near infinite set of other possibilities ... like printin' money ...
 
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