Fallout 3 - No Demo Planned

I think most of us knew there wouldn't be a demo for Fallout 3 down the track but it's a topic worth revisiting. Matt Grandstaff had this to say on the FO3 forums:

One thing to consider about demos though. For certain kinds of games, I’d say its not as easy to just break off a piece, and say, here’s the demo. Sure you can take a game of Madden, let someone choose between two teams, and then make it one quarter. Or as of yesterday, just release a few songs for Guitar Hero III.
For a game like Fallout (or Oblivion), there’s a lot of details that have to go into it since the game plays as a sandbox…where do you cut the user off. You might bring up that we have a playable demo that we’ve shown at events, but from the previews you read, you’ll notice that the G.O.A.T exam is never taken, we never decided to save Megaton instead of blowing it up, and so on. Part of the reason for this is that for the purpose of showing the game, they didn’t need to flesh out those details.
If we were doing a demo, there’d be a lot of time spent on deciding where a user could go, what quests to include, etc. For Fallout 3, we’d rather commit the time that can be used for delivering a demo into spending more time working on the final product.
Of course, it’s always nice when you can get a demo. I enjoyed the Bioshock one, and I played Guitar Hero III’s last night, but as a gamer myself, I don’t always expect one.

More information.

Daggerfall had a demo. I don't see why a simpler game can't have it…

Booo! … Lets hope they make a digital download version. We have stupid regulations on "eeeebil violence" here, and I'd had to see only an uber censored version.

Anyone knows if a digital download version is planned??

Originally Posted by elikal
Anyone knows if a digital download version is planned??

By the time Fallout 3 is released, you will be able to play it in a holodeck. Serioiusly though, the answer is yes.

Oblivion is available for digital download. Most games are these days. It is the future of distribution.

That's not to say the digital version won't also be censored where you live. Where do you live exactly? Sounds like the US o' A *cough*.

If he is talking about the previous Fallouts it would be europe since Interplay was forced to remove children from the games for european releases.

Originally Posted by guenthar
If he is talking about the previous Fallouts it would be europe since Interplay was forced to remove children from the games for european releases.

Not on Europe, just the UK because of concerns after the Dumblane massacre, and there was some content cut from the German version too.

A few countries had local versions made from the UK master (silver version), so they got screwed. Newer versions used the US one though.

Incase of fallout the cut content was patchable. So it was no biggie.

Matt G is full of crap. An RPG demo limited to say the tutorial or the first dungeon would work just fine to show basic game mechanics, and has been done countless times in the past. Oblivion's (way too long) intro dungeon would for instance had been perfect for this.

The problem is that rpg games are just gigantic (in file size) these days. Releasing one dungeon of the game as a tutorial may seem a good idea, but who knows how huge download it would be at the end. Also he is right..i rather have devs polishing the game to the last moment with full team effort than making a demo.

The excuse of "our game is too big and interconnected to make a demo" is the stock response from most developers when trying to explain why they cannot be arsed to release a demo.
The simple answer to the apparent conundrum of where to cut the player off is to apply a reasonable time limit.

I tend to find that games pushed on massive waves of hype (see Bethesda) do not have demos released.

How much effort that goes into a demo depends on the games data structure. Often the bulk of a game's size comes from data such as textures, music, and video, and you hardly need all of that for a demo dungeon. Game mechanics themselves should be localized to the exe and some dll-s. In principle it shouldnt be very hard to extract the core engine together with the datafiles needed for one dungeon, and a limited subset of the music files. Of course its tougher in practice, particularly if you dont have a very modular design to begin with. Such a (bad) design however also means that polishing the game becomes a much tougher process…

I freequently download demo versions to see how well the game runs on my hardware, and how I like the mechanics. There are even games I never would have bought without trying the demos, as I outside a select few website cant find reviewers that agree with me worht a damn…

I'm fairly sure that Bethesda has reasonable technical reasons for not releasing a demo. If they could use a demo to market the game they would as marketing has never been one of their weak spots.

@Gallifrey: A time limit is very insecure since computers calculate time based on CPU clock cycles. Hackers can interfere with the calculation of time by writing code that fools both the software and the CPU into "thinking" that either more or less time has passed since the last transferred signal.
BTW, that's also why a lot of online games have speed hacks available. Speed hacks are essentially just code fragments that disrupt the CPU cycle-based time calculation (or time sync) between the server and the client. Computers are generally very vulnerable in that regard.