jjc

It's been four months.

Are you a sleepy little kitty

In the first Fallout, they're satirizing some of the attitudes of 1950s America in materials like the Vault-Tec ads but the actual visual design of a lot of the pre-war stuff in the world is rooted in the 30s and the 40s. Look at the ruined skyline in the opening video. Those buildings resemble the gothic deco cathedral the Children were using. The first two games indicate that the pre-apocalyptic world was a lot like Blade Runner or Brazil, which the team cite as major influences. You don't find the ruins of idyllic 50s TV suburbia because that's not what was there. It's why Tenpenny Tower doesn't look like anything you saw in the first game. Since Fallout 3 tossed a lot of the original design ideas in favor of a more prominent 50s theme, you can argue that referencing more 50s sci-fi movies is fair game. There's lots of territory that hasn't been mined, since Fallout 1 and 2 drew from 50s films far less frequently than they did those of the 60s through the 80s. If your choice is a laser battle against little green men, then your point of reference is probably something along the lines of Invasion of the Saucer Men and your goal is probably high camp. I would point to THQ's success with the Destroy All Humans! series as a validation of this approach.

I thought it was clear from stuff like the android quest that the approach in Fallout 3 was to treat the setting as a kind of generic genre backdrop into which you could insert any sci-fi story.

SECRETS OF FALLOUT REVEALED

Remember that the first two games are still sticking to the idea that the vaults were meant to preserve life and that the people inside were raised to be generally "with it," well-educated scientists. A lot of things stop making sense if you embrace the premise that the vaults were bizarre experiments that failed because residents were being dosed with psychotropic drugs or whatever.

Anytime you ask about a GECK in a conversation with someone who actually knows what one is, they tell you it's a bunch of seeds, fertilizer, and a water purifier. And who would that be? I can't seem to remember anyone in the game telling you that's what the thing actually is. I know that's what the Fallout Bible states, for all that's worth, but I'm talking in-game lore. Pretty sure you can ask around in Vault City for the GECK description. The reason the GECK is a super terraforming device in Fallout 3 is because that's what the Genesis Device in Wrath of Khan was, just like the radiation chamber scenes at the Jefferson Memorial that were taken from Wrath of Khan.

If you like RE4 and you have a PS2, get God Hand.

If it's a split ending based on an alignment check then they'll either kill the Paragon in a cutscene where he sacrifices himself, followed by his Wrath of Khan space funeral, or they'll kill the Renegade to punish the player for picking the nasty dialogue options.

There's also True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Let the Right One In and its remake, Thirst, Daybreakers, Blood: The Last Vampire, Bubba Nosferatu, an attempted Buffy the Vampire Slayer remake. Dorff and Norrington want to do a Deacon Frost Blade spinoff, Marvel themselves have mentioned making more Blade movies. One of the only potential new characters they've mentioned for Spider-Man 4 is Morbius the Living Vampire, and I doubt Twilight's success discourages the idea. There's the Wolfman remake later this year, there's an announced American Werewolf in London remake, and once New Moon is out don't be surprised if they start dusting off everything from Teen Wolf to The Howling. For as long as these Twilight movies are coming out and making loads of money, you're going to see more vampire and werewolf stuff everywhere.

World of Darkness would make a lot of sense with all this Twilight/vampire stuff in development right now.

Speaking of the Infinity Engine, what's keeping those games out of the download shops?

"Show don't tell" is an axiom you hear most commonly in the world of film and screenwriting. When you work in an interactive medium, especially when you make a 3D first-person game, you abandon the tools of cinema. Composition, movement, montage are out of your hands and the control ceded to the player is not equivalent to the control you would possess as a filmmaker crafting a linear visual sequence. The low-res worlds of Fallout and Fallout 2 were abstract, but I don't see Fallout 3's as significantly less so. These are still modular dollhouses made from the same few pieces of furniture and architecture that you'll see copy-pasted with great frequency everywhere. I can see objects sitting on a shelf instead of "examining" a shelf to open a separate window; I still understand that I can't interact with the shelf in any other meaningful way. It won't tip over, it can't be destroyed, it looks identical to every other shelf of its specific type in the world. It's no less a "symbol" of a shelf than Fallout's isometric shelf sprite. If the text box was a necessity before, it still is now. The black humor and irony in Fallout were conveyed through text, and not just the text in the dialogue screen. It was a pervasive presence that colored every location and encounter, prompting the player to apply imagination in order to "see" details that would not be depicted visually. It takes no less imagination to "see" a living world in Fallout 3's wilderness of randomly spawning robots, samey industrial areas, or its stiff, patrolling NPCs. Abstaining from flavor text in favor of an "invisible" interface only removes the ability to supply additional detail, additional context, or a unique voice behind the narrative.

It used to take magazine subscriptions to keep informed on upcoming game releases. Now you're a couple seconds on Google away from a release calendar for the next several months and profiles on the games, developers, and publishers therein. I'm not denying that there are people who'll pass over a game because they don't like the box, I'm saying that trying to predict and manipulate what those people will actually respond to will drag you into profoundly weird territory: high-level Cola Wars sorcery. The AP cover here looks informative enough in that it evokes Bourne or any of the other spy stuff from this decade. Someone might see it and think "I like this genre of fiction, I did not know there would be an RPG of this kind. I MUST INVESTIGATE THIS." If anything stands out, it's the glowing text in the middle with the title and the "RPG" description. I don't know how you would visually depict the idea that it's an RPG, apart from pinning a character sheet to Thornton's back and showing him machine gunning a group of thugs who are bleeding negative red HP floats. Going with a subdued image in the hopes that people will focus on the words seems like a reasonable decision. There was clearly a thought process behind this. This isn't the Planescape: Torment cover, which communicates that "the blue man is angry."

Those completely ruled. A very annoying thing about RPGs being designed for consoles is the removal of the little scrolling text windows. It would make a huge difference if they left one in for a game like Fallout 3 and triggered flavor text while you walked around certain locations. You could actually say something specific about Office #2 in Ruined Factory #30 without trying to imply it through dramatically arranged skeletons and diary entries on computer terminals. Everyone should explore ideas for visual storytelling in games, but you've got to admit your limitations when the building blocks of your story are restricted to the same desk, metal box, and rubble pile we already saw dozens of times in Ruined Factories #1-29.

I think I was five years old the first and only time I bought a game based on what the box looked like. I honestly doubt that anyone who thinks box art is a deal breaker in a purchase would even know what the acronym "RPG" means in this context.

Playable char. races are human, mutant, ghoul, centaur, floater.

New Vegas should be run by The Summit, a cross between The Road Warrior's marauders and the Rat Pack.

Thank you.

The reasons I've been wondering are that they haven't confirmed which engine it uses and the announcement described it as a "spinoff" in the "same style." Is "same style" just reassurance that it's an RPG (as opposed to some kind of action game,) or was "same style" intended to mean that it's built in Fallout 3's Gamebryo? Given the short dev time, it would be pretty handy to re-use every possible asset from Fallout 3. Gamebryo seems like the plausible option.

We're talking about them as a publisher. One of their first new titles announced after Fallout 3 was something as intriguing as New Vegas. In what conditions are they open to publishing externally developed RPGs? Oblivion was supported by DLC from its release in 2006 to the release of Shivering Isles one year later. The release of Mothership Zeta will raise the total cost of acquiring all Fallout 3 DLC nearly to the final cost of Oblivion's, with still a few months to go before the one year anniversary of the title and probably a year on top of that before New Vegas. How much further will Fallout 3 DLC go? As long as it still sells? This year has been pretty dry for major RPG releases, but in a few months everyone gets hammered with Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol, and Bioshock 2, then Mass Effect 2 some time after that. I think a major question is whether New Vegas or any other hypothetical title developed by an outside party is intended to be followed by DLC in the way that their internally developed titles are. I don't imagine they'd want to cut off New Vegas' lifespan with the release of, say, Elder Scrolls 5, but it's a non-issue if New Vegas is more self-contained. It would also mean that they could elect to approach external developers to produce such self-contained titles during any major season when no big Bethesda RPG is slated for release or enjoying ongoing DLC support. Since they probably aren't interested in letting anyone else touch Elder Scrolls, that would imply titles based either on Fallout or presently unknown IP. This is all speculation that supposes Bethesda have any interest in becoming more prolific as an RPG publisher beyond New Vegas.

That's the most interesting theory.

Rogue Warrior is supposed to be out in October and they haven't shown any gameplay footage yet. Casting Mickey Rourke is about as cool as getting Ironside for Sam Fisher, though. Anyway: there's an interview with Aaron Guy from Rebellion where he talks about changing the game's setting to the 80s and trying to capture an 80s action movie vibe. He specifically cites John Carpenter, Michael Mann, the movie WarGames. Combine that with the Grindhouse stuff in Wet and all the celebrity voices. Are they consciously modeling themselves on Rockstar?

More demo videos will help more people realize that this is an RPG. I've seen posters complaining that it doesn't look "as good as the new Splinter Cell," which means they're trying to interpret what they're seeing as if it's actually a Splinter Cell game. It's unfortunate that the "real-world" setting is raising so many complaints about the "evasion" skill, even though no one cares when abstractions like that show up in any other genre. It seems like lots of people are dying to play an RPG that doesn't have space marines or elves, though.

If EA weren't happy with the results they got from Warhammer, they might sidestep fantasy and try another genre for their next attempt at an MMORPG. Competing with Blizzard for exactly the same audience as WoW doesn't seem like a safe idea. Once The Old Republic is out, there will already be a major space adventure-themed title from another publisher. Mass Effect Online would push two Bioware online space RPGs into the same space, which sounds highly implausible. Maybe they'll try to develop an original "IP" for the project. They could get another movie or TV license, but EA have cooled off on licenses lately.