Fallout 3 - Official Site Launched

Dhruin

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Bethsoft has replaced their Fallout 3 teaser site with a full offering, featuring a game overview, screens, the E3 trailer and a diary from Todd Howard titled Welcome Back to Fallout, which makes for interesting reading:
When we started Fallout 3 in 2004, we obviously had big ideas of what we could do with it, and I talked to a lot of outside people, from ex-developers to press folks to fans. What made it special? What are the key things you'd want out of a new one? The opinions, and I'll put this mildly…varied. A lot. But they would all end the same, like a stern father, pausing for affect – "but do not…screw it up." Gulp. Let me write that last one down a few times.
I'm going to assume that if you're reading this, you've probably read between 1 and 50 previews of Fallout 3 already (they're linked on this site). There's already too much info out there, in different forms and in conflicting ways, for me to cover or correct it all here. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that the information never gets out 100% correctly, and you will certainly never be quoted correctly. For the record, I never compared the violence in Fallout to Jackass, I compared it to Kill Bill…big difference. I also never said "fantasy is riding a horse and killing things," but oh well. Ultimately the game speaks for itself (certainly better than I do). The other thing to keep in mind is that preview comments often circle around the small-footprint sensational elements (Fat Man, toilet drinking, bobbleheads, etc), while sometimes missing the key points of the hour-long demo we give, which are: player choice, consequence, sacrifice, and survival. [more...]
More information.
 
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For the record, I never compared the violence in Fallout to Jackass, I compared it to Kill Bill…big difference. I also never said "fantasy is riding a horse and killing things," but oh well.

I'm not sure if Jackass to Kill Bill is that big a difference. Kill Bill, as hard as it tries, isn't violence as a form of art.

Love how he never said "fantasy is riding a horse and killing things," the opening quote of the Codex Oblivion review. Why do I love it? Because that quote is from GameInformer., which got the exclusive first look at both of Bethesda's last titles. You'd think you could trust someone you go exclusive with twice, no?
 
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I feel bad for the guy. All he is doing is giving the most people what they want. Millions of people loved and played Oblivion that didn't play Morrowind, who didn't play Daggerfall. If any of us where in his shoes in would be our duty to do exactly what he is doing, which is making a game that the most amount of people will buy and enjoy. I'm not one of those people, and it sucks that Fall Out has to be raped to achieve that goal. But let's face it, I like games that will now, and always, only be made by independant developers from now on out. Getting mad at a business for making good business decisions is childish.

And reading through this, and other sites, and seeing people make comments such as "too bad Obsidian didn't get Fall out, blah blah blah." The only three people that could've and would've made a real, honest for goodness, true to the series, not dumbed down or stupid Fall Out 3 worked at a company whose name meant Three (usually horses, but could also mean people and nations), and one of them is actually selling houses now. We have a certifiable RPG genius who, instead of making games, is selling houses to illegal immigrants in California to support his crack habbit, which he should be supporting by making Fall Out 3 and Arcanum 6 and Bloodlines 4, and ToEE 5. But us, the "rpg" fans, screwed them over. We pirated their games, or bought them after the closed, or cried and whinned like girls.

This is what we get. It is our punishment for having poor taste and putting way to much value and weight into graphics and nonsense, instead of content and gameplay. We are reaping what we sowed. We can do it like we have some sort of male genitalia between our legs and take it like a man, or we can cry like girls who are sad that their cute little fuzzy teddy-bear was torn apart. Any hope for a real Fall Out 3 died with Troika, we can let the masses have a good time and enjoy the franchise we handed to them on a platter, that will provide the sucky game play we made a mraket for, or we could b a bunch of hate mongering babies, pouting because we are being forced to lie in the bed we made.

I'm Billy and I don't cry and pout. I salute you Mr. Todd Howard and I hope you sell billions of copies and put many smiles on the faces of the superficial people that buy your childish games. No offense meant to either party if that came off harsh. I just learning Engrish so please excuse my communication abilities. Billy signing off, good night and God bless.
 
Sometimes I'm certain Todd Howard makes posts at forums like these using pseudonyms.
 
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I'd say the chances of this being Roqua in disguise are much higher actually :) . This one here is 100% Roqua:
This is what we get. It is our punishment for having poor taste and putting way to much value and weight into graphics and nonsense

... and this one is 120% Roqua...

We can do it like we have some sort of male genitalia between our legs and take it like a man, or we can cry like girls who are sad that their cute little fuzzy teddy-bear was torn apart.
 
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and what do we get on the first page? The shot of the guy who's head is blown up. *sigh*.
 
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Truth be told, it is hard to blame someone for being successful. I know he might not make the games we want, but there are far worse developers out there.
 
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Afaik, the reason they were successful with the previous title was Controlled Media Misrepresentation, not becasue they delivered what they claimed, just as they are currently doing with F3.
I certinaly don't want F3 to suck, but since they are using the same team to make F3, hardly seems like much hope they can actually make an RPG, let alone a good one.
 
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Yeah, I want one of those T shirts!! :)
 
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I'm not sure if Jackass to Kill Bill is that big a difference. Kill Bill, as hard as it tries, isn't violence as a form of art.

Then again, neither is Fallout (1 or 2). All three are violence as a form of entertainment.
 
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but since they are using the same team to make F3, hardly seems like much hope they can actually make an RPG, let alone a good one.

It's not the exact same team. Different team lead and several new developers (some from the Oblivion mod community) were recruited.
 
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If I had to focus on one small point, what bothers me most at the moment is the trivial presentation of nuclear weapons. For the sake of Fallout, the developers should hire some physicist who knows what a critical mass is and more importantly who can calculate blast radiuses and the actual radiation effects on human tissue we now know about (or have one of the team who has some background in physics read up on this himself - using textbooks and not wikipedia alone).

Nuclear crossbows might make some people go "wow", but most will probably just lose immersion and wonder why a good story would have to rely on unrealistic superweapons. If they really have to, they should add the mad science where it was used in previous Fallouts - at the very end. And even there it was not completely over the top like it seems to be the case in the third iteration of the series.
 
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Because it is based on what people in the 50s thought the future would be like and then destroyed. They thought everything was going to be nuclear powered and didn't know the consequences of that.

Controlled media and misrepresentation only go so far and those games still end up failing if they are bad. The Xbox 360 version of Oblivion is still on the top ten list on gamefaqs and has been since it came out so that means people are still playing the game.
 
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@guenthar: good point, but even in the 50s people would have laughed (cynically) at the idea of a nuclear powered crossbow.

Let me be a know-it-all for a minute: while small yield nuclear fission does exist (Davy Crockett) even for a minimal power nuclear device it will be lethal to be less then around 200 meters away from it when it detonates (which is a low estimate). Critical masses are around 10 kg, the bomb at least 20 kg, the initial velocity to get 500 m away around 80 m/s => to shoot this thing, you will accelerate from 0 mph to 45 mph in the time you fire the bomb and probably kill yourself when the crossbow hits you from recoil. This is a bad joke and I only had to use school level physics for it!

@kalniel: I really agree with you there, but I always found that I like stories better where it was apparent that the author made at least an effort to be plausible, by researching the subject thoroughly. Take Joe Haldeman, Assimov, Card or most other notable scifi authors as an example.
 
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@coyote -- I disagree. Since you mention Asimov, have you read the quintessential 1950's sci-fi book _Foundation_? That has atomic-powered everything: flashlights, matter transmuters, blasters, cars, spaceships... there's even a plot twist centered on a society devolving back to coal and oil to the point that they don't realize that "plutonium" is a laughably primitive way of producing atomic power.

I've read another sci-fi story from around the same time where the hero used nuclear hand grenades where you could dial in the yield you wanted, from 100 grams to about a kiloton of TNT equivalent. I'm afraid I don't remember who it was by; there was just a cool scene where he dialed in about two tons and dropped it down a ventilation shaft.

I still think the hand-held nuclear catapult sounds a bit dumb, but not for that reason.
 
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Has anyone got the exact details of this "hand-held nuclear catapult"? Sounds a little bit dumb to me as well and I'm hoping it's like a metaphor.....
 
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@Prime Junta: I admit that I did not read the Foundation series by Asimov, so I can not comment on whether I would have liked the style. I was not really bothered by the idea of using hand-held nuclear weapons in Heinlein's Starship Troopers, although those at least were missiles. Also some books, e.g. Alice in Wonderland, are absurdly unrealistic, but still excellent. So is realism overrated? I think it strongly depends on the setting.

I am guessing here, but at the time Foundation was written, Asimov probably did not think of more realistic forms of highly advanced power supplies, so using nuclear powered everything was necessary for him to show an advanced state of technological development. On top of it, he was an excellent writer and people are used to reading his stories as science fiction stories and allegories to contemporary and past history as well, so he could easily get away with some unrealistic technology. Alice in Wonderland was never meant to be realistic and derives much of its humor from absurd yet interesting sitations.

Fallout however is supposed to be a science fiction story in a postapocalyptic alternate future starting off from an alternate past in the 50s. It is not supposed to be completely absurd, so while a hand-held nuclear catapult will certainly get some laughs, the obvious absurdity of it would harm immersion. It could certainly be worse, but I just think it goes too far.

Edit: if the catapult fires a missile half a mile and the explosion destroys everything in a 50 m radius, than my argument becomes invalid. This does not seem to be the case, however.
 
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I certinaly don't want F3 to suck, but since they are using the same team to make F3, hardly seems like much hope they can actually make an RPG, let alone a good one.

Since you are apparently so much smarter than all the rest of us explain why F3 is not going to be a cRPG? Better yet, define what a cRPG is.
 
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