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So I keep getting these psychic emanations that suggest that F:NV will feature Caesar's Legion as the main baddies and the PC will be an escaped slave of some sort. Confirm / deny my psychic readings.

yesh.

NDA, dude. Don't get butthurt if nobody responds. There were differences? Original design was Giger's, and it changed every iteration of the franchise, becoming more buglike in Aliens (both drone and queen were Cameron's design) and so on.

It's getting to early 2010, which (supposedly) means the unannounced game will be revealed soon. Also! Joshtwit - "weekend cool guy club at obsidian. alvin's doing some AP stuff. fnv ppl doing whatever it is they do. menze doing... secret things." Menze on the case?

Sega was in a bad spot financially. Also apparently milestones were not being hit when they should have been. Obsidz is under a gag order until sometime next year about the specifics of what happened and also what the game was, exactly. I'll still hold the torch for it coming back at some point. I thought Obsidz would never get its hands on Fallout again and look what happened. But I can't say it's a great loss if it never does materialize. On to bigger things. I distinctly remember sometime 2 years ago when Josh and a couple of other people (remember Monty?) were marveling at the build of Aliens that they had made, and how thrilled they were with how a scenario they had set up turned out differently each time they ran through it. Right now I'm wondering if this is that scenario.

If it is, I'm wondering how it will work, given that the unannounced game is (purportedly) fantasy. Speaking of the unannounced game, pretty sure one of the devs (Alvin?) said that it would be announced in the early part of the year. So we should expect that soon.

If you show up to this thread and can't find a video, here's what it is: Third person over the shoulder-camera, we see the PC. On the lower left of the UI is the party, which is made up of 4 hexagons. Presumably it's 5 characters per party, as apparently the PC is not represented in this layout. Lower right is the PC information, and what is clearly an Aliens pulse rifle. At present the party is made up of just the PC, a bald black guy (the dude from the Onyx renderings maybe? Hard to tell) and a blonde woman. The video starts out with what seems to be footage from Aliens - hazy video footage of Hadley's Hope? Then it cuts to the gameplay. PC presses buttons on a console in a hallway. Uh oh, lights go out. There are dim lights on either side of a hallway the party is entering. Lighting (and everything else, really - geometry, models, animation, sound) is fairly rudimentary. PC turns on a flashlight and looks around the area (which appears now to be a T-junction, not a hallway), finds another console, and turns the lights back on. Hissing and lo-fi pulse rifle sounds are heard, the PC rushes back to his team. Aliens are popping up from down the hallway and are being picked off by the team (this is all hard to see, for obvious reasons) Then a lull in the action. PC backs up to a different hallway in the T-junction where his party is hanging out, and backs up facing the female member of the party. He's obviously anticipating something. Lo and behold, an alien appears from the ceiling, stabs the lady in the back as she yells and drags her into the ceiling vent. End video. In the very (VERY) unfinished state it's in it bears more than a passing resemblance to the famously awful Xbox version of The Thing. But then, it's a snippet of combat that's not even at the tech demo stage yet, and there would be, presumably, much more to the game than this. With another year and a half of development I think this could have been really something.

Just ran across that myself. It's definitely a very early Alpha, but we get an idea of what the core experience of Onyx is like... it's sort of like a real-time KOTOR, if this is any indication. With another year and a half of polish I think it could have really been something. But I'm generally a bitter person about these things. Plenty of stuff to look forward to without this one. Your link's been taken down by Sega Europe so it's definitely legit. It'll probably be here for another hot minute.

I remember playing that mod and it actually changed the game far more drastically than you suggest. I stopped playing when I couldn't get past a pack of 2+ dozen dogs at the beginning of the game, since stealth was basically eliminated from the game. I tried to hide in one of the added vehicles only to find it had the mass and weight of very thin paper - the pack of dogs lifted me up and I "surfed" on the pack for a ways down the road. It was fun, but also ridiculous. STALKER is not a Bethsoft game, it's precariously balanced as it is and the further you take it away from its vanilla experience the more dissonant it becomes.

There are a number of things I really liked about Van Buren, enough that I attempted to recreate it on pen and paper (let it be said now that the vanilla Fallout system is really hard to get right in a tabletop setting. SIMPLE looked promising but even with some help from Josh it was unfinished and difficult to navigate.) Some of the things - 1. The aforementioned "Science/Combat/Speech Boy" character system - Where different character archetypes had relatively distinct playthrough experiences. Like how a Doctor / Science character could cure jet addiction and augment himself with bionic plates in Fallout 2, but on a wider scale. The design documents of the game areas make clear that this was something that the game was designed around. 2. The planned reactivity of the game world and the general design centered around a "rival group" - This is the thing that would've been hardest to implement, but it sounds cool. Basically the villain and his cronies are not sitting at the end of the game waiting for you as they do in most games. Presper and his dudes have their own agenda (several steps ahead of yours, by necessity) and depending on where you are in the critical path, they will be at different stages of implementation of that agenda. For example, I believe they started out in Boulder. If you traveled to Boulder before a certain point you could actually meet Presper, although you wouldn't know he's the Big Bad at that point. If you show up in Boulder later, or first arrive there after a certain point, he's not there anymore. As well there were certain far-reaching consequences to your actions, particularly as they related to certain in-game factions like the Daughters of Hecate or the Reservation Ghouls. 3. Interesting villain - I liked the idea of Presper a lot. Even though he was more outlandish (Fallout 2-ish?) in his original incarnation before he was adapted by MCA - Presper was originally a prewar scientist awoken from cryostasis after the war, and in MCA's version he was an advisor to NCR President Tandi who goes rogue as the NCR dissolves. ULYSSES and ARGOS were interesting as well, and the Limit 15 virus angle, while left fairly mysterious in the design documents, was a pretty good twist in the story. 4. Locations, locations, locations - There were 2 design documents that creeped the **** out of me, Reservation and Boulder, particularly Reservation. Some of them I didn't like (Jericho / New Canaan, specifically) but most had interesting areas and questlines. The idea of infiltrating the waterlogged depths of the Hoover Dam was really interesting. 5. Odds and Ends - There were just little planned cool things that were neat, but not really "awesome game material" on their own. For instance there were numerous ways by which the player could "give up" and end the game early ala Fallout 1. I'm not expecting a lot of it to show up again in New Vegas - I'm expecting it to be more or less its own game, and besides there were some things from Van Buren that I think ended up being recycled into existing Obsidz games (specifically, there were some nods to the VB endgame at the beginning of KOTORII, and the whole Telos thing was sort of reminiscent of the Nursery. All that could just be me, though.)

Really? You've never run into MMO players who run with female characters (despite frequent sexual overtures from other players) because they'd rather stare at a female model's ass? People pay attention to these things. That's why the most popular mods are flesh mods.

FYP If Fallout: New Vegas were a variety of fruit, what would it taste like?

Break for Obsidz ended this week.

Really though, with Alpha Protocol and the complexity of dialogue and all that stuff, why even let people attempt to put their own stuff in? Like maybe a Shifter mod would be cool but otherwise nay.

They're in Mart's Mutant Mod, along with a dozen other Fallout 1/2 creatures.

That depends on two things, 1) If Josh and the gang want to radically overhaul the basic structure of character creation 2) If Bethsoft would be willing to let that slide. I can't speak to either of those things, but even if in terms of stats, skills and perks NV progresses in the same way as F3 there will still be significant changes. We know for a fact that the mechanics of armor and weapons are getting some pretty involved changes. I'd be happy if they just worked out the kinks in the current system. As fan-made mods have proven, it's certainly possible to do so.

30 is the sweet spot for me, really. 40 would be nice as well. 60 and above is excessive. Below 20 is kind of disappointing. Maybe it's not so bad if you're going through the critical path as fast as possible.

So basically you vote and say what you voted, and when the final release date does indeed get announced, those who guessed the correct month will be put in some sort of raffle and get some sort of prize! Possibly through Steam, or something. If it comes out after July, well, nobody wins! Who wants to make a guess? I'm guessing March.

It kind of serves a purpose though, no? I mean consider that you probably won't get 100% of a dossier in a single playthrough. That you end the game with less than a full dossier means that there's something new that you can find in a new playthrough.

Lots of sites listing June as the release date all of a sudden. Seems like bull**** but I'm going to laugh if it's true and it turns out to be a 15 hour game or something like that.

I'm wondering where the NV forum will be, here or on the Bethsoft forums. Right now there's a link to Bethsoft but it's general Fallout discussion. I can't imagine they'd leave it like that as the game is released. It was certainly interesting having so many espionage / Bond / Bourne geeks flood the forums 'round the time AP first showed up.

You know I did enjoy the faster pace of activity in general when we thought we had info on the game. It's going to be nice when these forums aren't rheumatic anymore.

If I was making it rain on a regular basis like ol' Todd I'd be busting out the Royal We's too.

I think fewer and more involved sidequests.