Fallout 3: A Post Nuclear Blog

There’s a large interview with Emil Pagliarulo at Gamereactor, some points from it compiled at Duck and Cover:

*New example for choices and consequences: you meet a little kid in the wasteland, the question is what do you do with the kid?*Everytime you fire a gun, the shots are determined by your skills.

*Emil says he`s very proud of the rad scorpions in Fallout 3.

*The game will feature old robots (Mr. Handy etc.) and a bunch of new ones.

*He says the Deathclaw definitely won`t be a furry Deathclaw.

*”Flaming sword” with gasoline

You should watch it for yourself, the kid part is intriguing.

Spotted at Duck and Cover.

Ross Atherton on PCGamer “This is hardcore” section:

‘Some disgruntled forum inhabitants at www.nma-fallout.com have been wallowing in their own misery since finding out details of Bethesda’s plans for Fallout 3. They’re moaning about not being able to kill children and whether drinking from toilet bowls should be a feature. The subtext seems to be that because Fallout 3 doesn’t look like the first two games then it is somehow evil. Here’s an example of the posts on the forums.
“If half of the previers had any Fallout experience, we would’ve seen the occasional negative preview. As it stands, there isn’t one. Not one from anyone that was there to witness the demo.” Speaking as someone with plenty of Fallout experience, I loved what I saw. No conspiracy: a great demo of a promising RPG.
Fortunately for anyone who’s determined that RPGs must not progress into first-person 3D, there are still games like Age of Decadence (pictured). It’s post-apoclauptic, it eschews magic and it’s indie. It’s a game predicated on social interactions, cause and effect and plenty of dialogue options; it’s pretty low-tech, but has plenty of features, such as the action-point based combat, that old school roleplayers will probably find comfortingly familiar. Try www.irontowerstudio.com for more.’

Spotted this not very well thought piece on RPGCodex (thanks BUMBUMBOOMBOOM, nice nick) and thanks to Brother None at NMA.

Age of Decadence is indeed looking good.

There’s a new Portuguese magazine called Hype! , with columns by Kotaku’s Brian Crecente and Brian Ahcsraft, former main editor of Edge Magazine João Diniz Sanches (he’s from the city I live in) and our well known Kieron Gillen that had this comment:

I just wrote my first column for a Portuguese gaming magazine. Poor Portugal.

Ok…

Anyway they have a small blurb about Fallout 3:

The post-apocalyptic environments and the complex narrative of the Fallout series games granted them a faithful foundation of fans. They are players that fill Internet for, with their almost philosophical discussions about the first two chapters. Bethesda is playing with gamers anxiety and keeping the details of the game in secret[sic].

They just announced that the game will take place on the East Coast of the U.S., and will keep the somber atmosphere that characterizes the series. About gameplay, the authors already warned that it will be different from the previous games.

Ok then, good luck to Hype!, I bring this here mostly because they dedicated the first issue to a group of readers from their previous magazine and forum, and on that list you can find RPGCodex and Ludonauta’s Role Player and megascore.biz Morbus, both readers and commentators on this blog. Força na verga aos dois, those are my wishes.

Bruce Nesmith is next developer featured on the Bethesda Blog Inside the Vault series:

What’s your job at Bethesda?

I am the Director of Design, and a Senior Game Designer. It sounds cooler than it is.

You’ve worked in the industry for a while now.

I actually started out doing computer games for the TRS-80 and Apple II+. Ah, those were the days. 64K of memory, 5 ¼ inch floppy disks, four color video. They didn’t even have a mouse! It wasn’t long before I moved into pen and paper roleplaying games and board games for TSR, which I did for about 12 years. Then in 1985 I was hired by Bethesda Softworks. They were working on a little game called Daggerfall. I did a lot of work on that title. I also contributed to Terminator: Skynet, Redguard, Battlespire, PBA Bowling, X-Car, and eventually Morrowind.

What pen and paper RPGs did you work on?

I’ve lost count of the games I made while at TSR. I did work with Marvel Superheroes, D&D, AD&D (1st and 2nd edition), Gamma World, and Buck Rogers. I’m probably best known as the author of the original Ravenloft boxed set. For quite a while I was the lead for that product line. I also did work with Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Mystara. I was the designer of the Dragonstrike board game, and worked heavily on the Spellfire collectible card game.[…]

What is your favorite part about working on Fallout?

I’ve always loved the post-apocalyptic setting. I did a lot of work with Gamma World while at TSR and really loved it. It was one of my favorite non-traditional roleplaying games. In particular, the work we’re doing with multiple paths through a quest and the moral choices the player has to make are very cool.

It also doesn’t suck to empty a clip into a Supermutant and watch him dissolve into a gory mess.

Now that’s a resume! Wow!

Funny thing though Ashley Cheng stopped asking if the devs played Fallout, I wonder why...

Update: Replying to the question by pritaygrafixd00d “May I ask why was the “Did you play the Fallout 1/2 games?” question not asked?” Pete Hines had this to say:

Sure you can ask. You can go back through the Inside the Vaults and note that we try not to always ask the same questions to everyone each time. Otherwise we feel like it gets stale and boring.

Hmmmm….

More news from the Leipzig GC, first for those that can read French there’s a Fallout 3 piece on Gamekult, and GamePro.com also has a small feature about what they saw of the game:

Upon leaving the vault, you emerge into the shattered, ruined corpse of Washington, D.C. Vile “super mutants” prowl the sewers and giant ants skitter around the nearby foothills. As in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3’s action takes place primarily through a first-person perspective (an over-the-shoulder camera is also available). And though you’ll tote a variety of shotguns, rifles, and laser carbines, Fallout 3 isn’t a first-person shooter…at least, not exactly. Strategy and skill selection play a vital role in your success, as does targeting enemy body parts to cripple them in various ways. Fallout 3 is first and foremost a role-playing game. Action counts, but this ain’t no Halo.

Spotted at Fallout 3 Nucléar and No Mutants Allowed.

Another off topic post, this time about public relations, marketing and gaming. I just wanted to point out this article on the Hollywood Reporter about how the BioShok crew created and handled successfully the buzz around the game:

“The game was so good we knew how much it would benefit from word-of-mouth,” explains Tom Bass, 2K’s director of marketing. “We needed to get that big first day so gamers would tell their friends about it and it would work exponentially in our favor from thereon in.”[…]

“As with, say, science fiction movies or other genres that are considered ‘cool,’ fans tend to look at marketers as ‘clueless suits’ who hype everything,” says Bass. “We knew we needed to be careful to do things in a way that was cool … not to build hype but to build buzz. Especially when we started marketing the game two years before it was finished. I mean, how do you go out on the E3 floor and say you’ve got one of the greatest games ever made when there’s nothing for anyone to see or play?”

Rather than label “BioShock” as “the next big thing,” Bass decided to create a Web site into which he could keep releasing assets to show — not to tell — how good the game would be.

“We created as an offshoot of the main BioShock.com Web site a community site called The Cult Of Rapture, named after the city in the game, that we updated every single day,” he recalls. “We started feeding information out to the gamers, the kind of information we normally reserve just for the press — details on the game, release dates, videos, and other content that would foster discussion. Instead of making these grand comments about the game, we gave people material that they could discuss among themselves.”[…]

“If you saw the description of ‘BioShock’ on paper, you’d never say that its success was going to be a slam-dunk,” admits Bass. “This was a risky game if ever there was one. I mean, this wasn’t just a shooter that had you firing at aliens. This is a game about an industrialist in the 1940s who builds an underwater society that begins breaking down because a discovery is made about the peoples’ DNA that causes them to go insane and they begin splicing their bodies and … well, try distilling that down into a 30-second elevator pitch.”
In addition, notes Anderson, it’s not based on a movie, there are no celebrities attached to it, it has a stylized art deco look, and its soundtrack consists of period pieces, like “Beyond The Sea” and “God Bless The Child.”[…]

Rather than merely release screen shots, the marketing team created 25-30 videos over the course of 18 months to show off the game’s unique look. The centerpiece of the campaign was the first commercial, which the team never referred to as a “commercial” but a “trailer,” borrowing the movie marketing term.
“We turned the debut of the trailer into an event, pre-promoting it as a world premiere on Spike TV,” says Bass. “It embraces everything that’s cool about the game … and it’s set to Bobby Darin’s ‘Beyond The Sea.’ How many video game commercials can say that?”

While there are no celebrities in the game, the marketers treated the development team of “BioShock” as celebrities of a sort, sending Ken Levine, the game’s creative director, out to talk it up with the press.[…]2K’s marketing team calls its “BioShock” marketing campaign quite a learning experience. From Bass’ standpoint, its unorthodoxy was precisely what the triple-A game called for. And he is already looking at titles a couple of years out and planning “community marketing efforts,” especially for some of 2K’s more high-profile products.

“In my mind, it’s all about involving your fans,” he says. “We value that community and we value their feedback and, especially in this case, we think we were able to make the game that much better by putting that feedback to work.”

If only in Maryland they had a mindset a bit more like this…

Well slow day for news and gossip, so it seems. Still let me point you to Gameswelt.de demo Fallout 3 demo article, in case you know how to read German (thanks RPGWatch).

Also the No Mutants Allowed Steam community was opened to the public today (thanks Mikael Grizzly), and there’s a new 1Up Fallout 3 club created by Unknowndrifter, with some fanmade stuff:

Also Gstaff had this anouncement on the Bethblog:

On June 5th — three months ago today — fans may recall seeing the above image on our website - that is, when our servers weren’t crashing in anticipation of the teaser trailer.

Well, everyone’s seen the above trailer now, or so it seems. Today I got word that the trailer has been viewed more than 2 million times off our website (over 1.8 million downloads) and through Xbox Live (over 250K downloads). That doesn’t include YouTube views or downloads off of all the other sites that hosted the trailer.

To put it in context, in the first five months that we hosted the Oblivion teaser trailer, 800,000 views took place. So the Fallout 3 trailer has been viewed more than twice as many times in about half the time. Impressive…most impressive.

More than impressive, visceral!

Well at least that’s the opinion of Ricardo “socrates200x” Gonzalez:

Does anyone want to identify some of the unknown devs? Or just give them a funny name for frank to put on the picture?

I’ll leave that to the picturees. For some odd reason, not everyone is keen on being visually identifiable by the Fallout community at-large…hmm…

Bunch of pussies.

Fallout 3 questions and answers on Gametap, featuring Emil Pagliarulo:

I honestly think there’s room for both types of games. I mean, in the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion, you really don’t have a choice. There’s no moral dilemma. You’re evil. And that’s part of the fun–not having to compromise, not having to worry about what you’re doing is right or wrong. It’s wrong, and you’re going to do it anyway. In Fallout 3, it’s the complete opposite–a big part of the fun is deciding whether to do the right thing, the wrong thing…or not caring if it’s right or wrong, but doing it anyway.[…]

Of course, of course. The more serious you try to make your game, the more realistic the situations, the more realistic the situations, the larger the bullseye you paint on your back. I’ve always maintained that it’s a matter of context, though. Using film as an example, an obscure movie like The Basketball Diaries gets picked on because it has a school shooting sequence. Whereas Kill Bill, which is more violent by a factor of 10, doesn’t receive the same sort of criticism…because it’s so over-the-top, so comedically unrealistic, it doesn’t strike the same nerves.Fallout 3 definitely falls into that latter category.[…]

You never want the player to feel ambushed or cheated. That’s the bottom line. Everybody knows how much it sucks to have something bad unexpectedly happen in a game, and have no way to recover. With Megaton, it’s such an extreme thing; it’s pretty hard not to know what’s going to happen. I mean, if you nuke the place, it’s gone.Generally speaking, though, the world of Fallout 3 is pretty harsh. People can die. Places can become inaccessible. So throughout every part of the game, the player will make choices that matter, and will have to live with the consequences of those choices.

All of that said, we still won’t allow the player to break his or her game. Getting cut off from a quest path or location is acceptable; allowing the player to get the game into a state where he or she can’t move forward or finish the game isn’t. We worry about that stuff, and handle it, so the player doesn’t have to.[…]

Now, as far as mechanics are concerned, Fallout 3 definitely is a lot different than the previous games. In that regard, it’s much more accessible. It’s first- and third-person, and it will be pretty easy to pick up and play, whether on the console or the PC. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things about the game. I mean, if you’ve played a game in the last 10 years, playing Fallout 3 will be second nature.[…]

Melee combat is going through extensive balancing right now, so I’ll tell you what we do know–we don’t want any weapon to become useless. We don’t want any melee or unarmed skill to become useless. If I can reach my opponent while I’m armed with a combat knife, I damn well better be able to kill him with it. So yeah, we’re giving melee a lot of love. I mean, yeah, it’s such a huge part of Fallout. If I can’t whack a guy in the gut with a super sledge, or explode his head with my power fist, what’s the point?[…]

OK, let’s assume for a second that there is an end boss. And I’m a master of verbal manipulation. Will I be able to use these skills to my advantage, to maybe defeat my opponent without lifting a finger? You can count on it.

Now, that’s not to say you can talk your way through the entire game without ever engaging in combat. The Capital Wasteland’s a dangerous place, so you’re going to have to defend yourself at some point. But within the quests, and several other places, yeah–you can talk your way through, if you’ve got the skill.[…]

Why can’t I wander around as some sort of nuclear cro-magnon?

It really all comes down to the best way to balance our resources and our time, and concentrate on the things that really matter. Throughout the game, the player has so many choices, so many ways to define their character, we don’t want to get hung up on something like that.

There’s so much in there, go read it and take a close look in what he says and when does he say it, an interesting exercise.

There are a few places where questions about Megatron have been asked, after reports like this one, from the NMA Fallout 3 demo review:

“Megaton was built in the crater of an unexploded nuclear bomb” raises the question of how an unexploded bomb would leave a crater.

Now PCGamer Desslock explains what’s up with that:

It doesn’t. The town was created around the impact crater of an unexploded bomb (which is in the center of the town) - the town isn’t IN the crater.

This game is too far away if this is all there is to talk about.

I don’t understand why Bethesda doesn’t send some notes explaining these small issues, it would really help.