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I very highly doubt they can scrap VATS altogether and have good combat. Combat without VATS was just like ranged Oblivion combat, which is to say it was completely dull, because of animation but also because characters had so much health and weapons did so little damage. Combat was attrition. Tweak, don't dump.

Noooooooooo text wall

I agree with Lucian, swing music would be a good idea.

Was Ferg the project lead on F2? Am I misremembering things? Huh, I didn't think Ferg had much outside of administrative duties. I wonder!

Pretty sure the publisher shells out for licenses. So cost is no object, really.

I do not believe Aliens was formally announced. Huh, I didn't think Ferg had much outside of administrative duties. I wonder!

Huh, I didn't think Ferg had much outside of administrative duties. I wonder!

So let's brainstorm a bit on possibilities, yes? Things that can possibly get play - - Vegas' past w/r/t the Mafia. This seems like an obvious choice. - Water. Las Vegas is a ****ing huge consumer of water, way out in the desert where there is very little. It plays into a lot of regional tension regarding the shipping of water over state lines. A nice tie-in to F3 in some ways. - Power. All that neon signage has gotta be juiced by something. The obvious thing would be to tie it into the oil crisis faced by the world prior to the war in the Fallout Universe, but that seems unlikely to me as America stopped burning oil for non-auto purposes in the 1970's, if I remember correctly, and the FO the Bible has the official timeline diverging sometime after that (in the 90's I think?) But Obsidz can get creative if they wanted to. - CSI Anybody got anything else?

Fallout 2 didn't have any time constraints.

Mass Effect doesn't really have much of a sense of scale, I think partly because of how small the main quest maps tended to be on foot (Virmire and the planet that came after it did pretty well mixing on-foot with MAKO rides and that helped, actually), but mostly because of the sense players got that they were landing on the same planet with different skins over and over in sidequests. Did anyone feel they were actually going places in that game outside of the main quest? Huh, I thought Fallout 3 had that in abundance, even with its dungeon hack tendencies. And now that we're going into the desert around Las Vegas how can we avoid that in any case? The biggest thing for me is the diversity of locales. Van Buren had that coming out of its ears (pretty much every location was inherently unique) and I loved it. I don't really feel like Fallout 3 had enough of that, but then I didn't really like the designs of Rivet City and Megaton even though they were relatively distinctive. Fallout 2 had a fair bit of diversity, with Arroyo and Vault City and Gecko and New Reno and NCR and Navarro and San Fran all having a fair bit of personality just in the way they looked (Den / Modoc / Redding / Broken Hills, not so much) with F3, with the exception of Oasis, there was DC, and then there was the wasteland outside of DC, and then there were steel corridors. I hope I'll be proven wrong but I feel like the seamless nature of the Gamebryo engine prevents a lot of smoothly separated variation in visual design. Compound that with a total map size that will probably be much smaller than F3's and I've got myself worried.

I have no doubt that F:NV will be different in terms of (some) game mechanics than vanilla F3. I just can't see Josh refraining from tinkering as Lead Designer. He knows his ****.

Fallout 3 was obviously a much smaller area than the (virtual) maps of Fallouts 1 and 2. The cardinal difference was that every square foot of Fallout 3 was mapped out and you had to traverse all space in real time from point A to point B to travel, whereas most of the (virtual) space of the first two games was a handful of recycled encounter maps and fast-forwarded overland travel. So getting from Vault 101 to Capitol Hill took more time than it took to get from Arroyo to New Reno, even though the distance from Vault 101 to Capitol Hill in F2 terms was probably about the distance from Arroyo to the Den. So Fallout 3 was bigger even though it was smaller (how's that for doublespeak?) and it required, what, 4 or 5 years of development? Contrasted with Fallout 2's relatively short development time (I remember MCA talking about how amazed he was that most of it worked at the end) and pseudo-"epic" scope, at least in comparison to Fallout 3. Fallout 2 made like a camper facing a bear and made itself look a lot bigger than it actually was. Which is what I'd like to see out of F:NV, obviously. I very highly doubt that it would be terribly "epic" if it was made in the Fallout 3 mold of WYSIWYG. There's just too much stuff. I would, again, hope for a synthesis. Perhaps even a Hegelian synthesis.

At this point I'm hoping for a synthesis of 1/2 map travel with the gameplay of 3. There's no other way I can see this game coming out without it being abbreviated and/or unbelievably buggy.

I don't expect a lot of difference in the way they're portrayed, is the thing. They don't call it "Sin City" for nothing. The city as a giant tacky tourist town does not seem terribly interesting. Also, one of the things I really liked about Van Buren was the particulars of its 50's sci-fi bent, introducing more Twilight Zone-esque weird science into Fallout than there already was (the CODE Project, for example, or the Gehennas) I'm hoping some of that can be revisited.

*edit - Sawyer tweerted about looking up Rat Pack stuff. Expect that. So yeah, I'm trying to get real excited about this, and I am pretty excited, don't get me wrong, this is something I'd never thought I'd see again. But. The late '10 release date is really very troubling. I hope Bethsoft will be willing to push it back into '11. As it stands I'm wary of it being an Assault on Dark Athena to Fallout 3's Escape From Butcher Bay, if that makes any sense. A short excursion, in other words. In a year and a half I'm not sure how much content Obsidz can hammer out. That's an xpac development window, even with up-to-date and implementable tech. What captured my imagination w/r/t Van Buren was the diversity of locations - The Boulder Dome, the Reservation, Denver, and The Nursery in particular. They were highly distinct and had incredible depth in each in their (potential) look, history and quest design. I'd never been as eager to play a game as I was when I read the Boulder Dome design doc, and it spurred me to attempt a pen and paper game (I just started it again, actually). My fear with this game is that Obsidz won't be able to make that sort of game. Three things in my mind would contribute to that - One is time, which I referred to earlier. How many in-depth locations can you really make in a year, which should be about as much time as they've got? Second is the format of Fallout 3. If New Vegas is tied down to the Bethesda open-world format they are at a serious disadvantage with regard to making interesting locations, mainly because a great amount of effort has to go into making "ligament areas" interesting for the player, and also because it makes the game space necessary limited. The kind of scope that the Fallout games achieved is impossible without the map travel they used. Making every square foot of the map explorable shrinks the gameworld considerably. Which leads me to three. The third, unfortunately, is the setting. Las Vegas. I loved New Reno, I really did, but I don't want that experience again, that weird loopy post-apocalyptic Godfather game. The fact that the city's in the name leads me to believe it will take place either entirely in Vegas or the bulk of it will. I want variety. Necropolis was only one of many places in Fallout 1. New Reno was one of many places in Fallout 2. DC was almost the entirety of Fallout 3. I don't like it.

The simplicity of the SAWII songs only indicts Morgan further. It's not that ****in' hard to come up with a distinctive ambient piece. Morgan did it. ****, I've done it. That doesn't really excuse the blatant recreation. And it is blatant. On at least 2 songs. Which is unacceptable. But he probably won't do it again, so why not ask him back?

I like Mark Morgan (Starship!) but truth be told I'm skeptical he could bring much to F:NV now that he can't reasonably rip off Selected Ambient Works Vol. II (just listen to that clip)

I would really prefer the Onyx engine, personally. Rorie (or was it a dev?) had said outright that all new games would be made with Onyx with the exception of AP sequels, but this seems like a special case. Bethsoft is taking a big enough risk having Obsidz run with their property with them using Gamebryo, and Fallout 3 was made too soon for a huge overhaul in look and feel. But I hope I'm wrong. I don't much like Gamebryo's look or the mechanics of it. Maybe we'll find out for sure on the morrow!

I think Josh was alluding to the trees around Vegas.

There wasn't an Enclave city? You're thinking of Vault City. That outcome was completely consistent. You were an outsider, who has no rights, in a fight with a citizen. Of course they're going to be on you like white on rice.

Rorie, tell us things.

It's a realistic sort of response, though. It's better than getting in a fight and everyone magically knowing you weren't at fault, or all NPCs cowing to your aggression and scorn.

That might be true, but you can't honestly think people don't take it that way. Point is there are a lot of things that influence perception of a product or artwork. Actual quality is but one of those things. For the record I think that Fallout is a great game objectively, and I don't think that it's institutionally promoted. It never sold enough to be in the Pantheon. Oblivion or Fallout 3, on the other hand...

I'm saying it doesn't matter how good Citizen Kane is. Citizen Kane is in the Pantheon. "Best film of all time" is an inherent quality it has, not a status given to it by virtue of its other qualities. Once you put that idea in peoples' heads the onus is on naysayers to prove otherwise. That's not how analysis ought to work. I mean have you read any Rolling Stone best of lists over the years? You'd think good music began in 1960 and ended in 1979. The institution of Rolling Stone is caught up in the idea that the era of psychedelic and classic rock was a Unique and Unparalleled Period of Time in History. Spin thinks the same of the Alternative craze of the 90s. What gets into someone's head that convinces them that Sgt. Peppers is the best album recorded anywhere anytime by anyone ever? I would argue that it's mainly being inundated by just how HOLY **** IT'S IMPORTANT Sgt. Peppers is. You could call that nostalgia, I would call it the natural inclination of institutions to create idols. Raise your hand if you've ever met someone who said Oblivion was one of the best games in years without being able to name any specific qualities it had that made it that way. *hand* Now ask yourself how such an idea became so prevalent. It's not simply that people played it and liked it. (Abbey Road was better anyway)

I would disagree with you there. Institutions and cultures maintain sacred cows often without any active championing by anyone in particular. All you need is a person in a place of esteem telling others how important something is for long enough and soon enough it has its own momentum, that one person can die and it wouldn't matter. You're implicitly acknowledging this when you say Citizen Kane is on so many "best of" lists "because of the type of film it is". What sets Citizen Kane apart, exactly? A lot of people will say it's one of the best films ever made without ever having seen it, because it has the reputation of being one of the best films ever made. And it has that reputation because critics, in the AMA and other institutions (who may or may not have a vested interest in branding things American Classics) have endorsed it as such. Bill Shakespeare is the best writer the English language has ever produced. People know this, but very few of them have read his work extensively. Why is that notion so widely held? Because we're taught it in school. Most children read his worst work, actually. (Romeo and Juliet) I could go on.