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There seems to be a lot of bellyachin' out there regarding whether New Vegas is going to be just Fallout 3 in a new location. It doesn't look like it will be.

Oh yeah MCA had this to say earlier today So yeah, time to get pumped bitches.

We should just hold our horses till next week.

Still wouldn't explain all the working lights but then, Fallout's always kind of taken creative license when it came to power.

You'd think so, but no wargame ever goes perfectly. The idea that a nuke got calibrated wrong and missed its target by a long shot isn't implausible. Or maybe it's as others have suggested, and the hotzone is livable several hundred years after the fact. We'll find out next week, I assume.

What references were there to Vegas, outside of Cassidy? Given that Avellone wrote Cassidy, I'm wondering how much of this game was planned out before the possibility of its existence ever came up.

Also the cowboy is this guy

Here's a random Fallout question - did the NCR use a GECK sometime between Fallouts 1 and 2?

You tell 'em, Rorie.

Blabby Bethsoft developer go! So we know the art direction is more "Western".

How much of that time was engine building, though? The engine must've been functional by 2006 at the very latest. Obsidz has a fully established toolset from go. Also keep in mind we don't know how long Obsidz had been doing concept stuff pre-signing. There's some evidence to suggest they knew the deal was happening some time before it did.

KotOR 2 only had 13 months. And when did Obsidian sign the deal with Beth? That was April 2009 I think. That makes 16-17 months development time. April 20th. I remember it well. My temperament at the time could be described as "ffffffffffffffffffff", for a number of reasons. But Obsidz knew it was gonna make a Fallout game February at the latest - that's when Josh started logging mad Fallout 3 hours.

If I've got my info straight, F3 had about a year and a half of development time - principal production started when Oblivion was fully wrapped. Oblivion dropped in April 2007, Fallout 3 in late October 2008.

I guess this is all y'alls chance to maybe grab MCA's attention, since he's making a rare appearance from under his rock.

Considering the shallow grave I'ma go ahead and guess Vegas still has strong mob elements post-apocalypse.

Well either they've got an NCR flag out in the middle of a shallow graveyard in the desert just to let folks know who they are, or the ranger dude is carrying the flag, indicating that he's going to claim Vegas for the NCR. I think that's more plausible.

See! See!

So here's a question - Is Vegas completely surrounded by mountains? Because if I didn't know any better (and I don't) I'd guess the graveyard is in the bed of Lake Mead and the NCR guy is coming from the East, just looking at aerial shots of the city. That can't be right.

So, uh, the dude's got a "7" on his helmet and an "A7" on the back of his cape. Totally random, or meaningful info? You decide.

So Rorie, have you played the build of the game? You do QA stuff as well as PR stuff yeah?

The Giant Bomb folks gripe about the AP situation. And you also get some comments about how AP will inevitably be compared to ME2, which was more or less inevitable.

"Look at the rest of this ****" has never really been an effective defense of a game.

You don't know how to use biotics, apparently.

Really the problem with combat that Jade Empire had, which is the same problem that ME1 had, was that the rhythm was weird and it didn't work very well. I attribute ME1's failure to the weapon heat system and the long power recharges, which created awkward pauses, and in JE's case the very simple mechanics and the abysmal AI created, as has been said, enemies who block all the time and enemies who just mash the attack button. The actual ideas behind JE's combat were actually pretty interesting, they just had piss poor implementation. JE's defensive / offensive concept, for example, was replicated in Shale's abilities in DA, to better effect.