As promised and/or threatened, depending on your perspective, open world game Fallout 4 has gotten some new graphics tweaks and bug fixes to smooth out the bumps caused by its previous “next gen update”. The update broke a bunch of mods, delayed a few interesting overhaul projects like Fallout London, and generally made everyone shake their fists at the sky and shout “Howaaaard!” Remember folks: auteur theory unduly credits a single creative for a group effort - the dice that Todd rolls every time he decides whether or not to break the game are also clearly to blame here.
]]>What is it Wendy Cope wrote? “Bloody Fallout 4 patches are like bloody buses. You wait half a decade for one, and as soon as that one breaks everything, Bethesda releases another just days later.” Yeah, pretty sure that’s it. Anyway, Fallout 4 will get another patch for the near decade-old game next week, presumably to help fix a lot of the problems its long-awaited “next-gen update” introduced two weeks ago.
]]>Sundays are for sleep. Nothing else. Just sleep. Before I sleep, then sleep a bit more, and maybe get up to read RPS’ new! mystery! column! later, but then immediately go back to sleep, here’s this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)
]]>Looking for the best Power Armor in Fallout 4? Power Armor in Fallout 4 not only provides optimal style when exploring the massive RPG, but also makes you stronger, able to carry more weight, land without fall damage and gives you more protection against the dreaded RADS.
As such an intrinsic part of the Fallout 4 experience, we've gathered a list of the best Power Armor sets you can find both early and late game. We've also provided the Power Armor locations and a rundown of how to repair your armor set to help set you on your way to success.
]]>The Fallout TV show effect continues. This time, it’s popular mod site Nexus Mods on the receiving end of the double-edged Shishkebab, as its servers struggle under the weight of people rushing to play through the series again - and mod its latter entries into games worth playing, presumably.
]]>Here at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we're nothing if not ready to jump on a bandwagon, and the hottest wagon in town right now is the Fallout TV show. We've watched varying amounts of Amazon's new adaptation of Bethesda's favourite post-apocalyptic RPG baby, so there are some mild (but not total) spoilers within, as we talk about the show, the show biffing the leaving-the-vault-moment, the best things about the games, the Righteous Gemstones, and how good Walton Goggins is just, like, in general.
]]>I sort of reject that the Fallout TV show has Easter eggs hidden in it because it, as a whole, is the equivalent of one of those fancy Hotel Chocolat ostrich-sized patisserie collection bastards that cost 40 quid. However. Eagle-eyed viewers of the Fallout show noted that episode 6 gives you a number for Valt-Tec that you can actually get in touch with - 213-25-VAULT (or, 213-258-2858). Charges apply, as well as international codes if you're outside the US, which makes it 001-213-258-2858.
If you text the number you get a reply from Vault-Tec saying "The next available appointment is 33 weeks from now, please stand by!" (handily captured by X user FanaticalGuy cos my response hasn't come through yet). And then the significantly less immersive "Reply Y to get recurring marketing and other texts from FallOut", which is quite funny. There is speculation that this is just a reference to Vault 33, the vault where main character Lucy was born and raised. On the other hand, 33 weeks from now is November, the month when both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 came out.
]]>Fallout: London, the Fallout 4 mod set in a post-apocalyptic English capital that’s large enough to effectively be its own game, has been hit by an indefinite delay just two weeks from its planned release date. The reason? Fallout 4’s long-in-the-works next-gen update is now due to drop just two days after London’s planned launch date, which its fan devs say will “simply break” the ambitious project.
]]>Crawl out through the fallout, baby! I've watched two episodes of Amazon's recently released Fallout TV show, a series for and about Walton Goggins' rizz (a thing the kids say). I've been on the Goggins hype train for over a decade at this point, and it's great that - oh sorry, I'm being told that the Fallout TV show is in fact about Bethesda's post-nukepocalypse RPG series of video games, and as such has given a massive player bump to said video games on Steam.
Posted on Xitter by SteamDB yesterday (HT to our pals at Eurogamer), it appears Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam since the show dumped all its episodes last week.
]]>Likely to capitalise on the hype generated by BezosTech’s (by many accounts, pretty entertaining) Fallout TV show, Bethesda are spiffing up Fallout 4 with a new update, including widescreen and ultra-widescreen support, fixes to Creation Kit, and a “variety of quest updates.”
The update is slated for this month, April 25th. A new quest, “Echoes of the Past,” sees you going up against the Enclave. Alongside this are new workshop items including previously released Creation Club content, such as Enclave uniforms, weapons and armor skins, new power armour, a Tesla Cannon, and a Heavy incinerator. Here are a few more additions, via the update:
]]>Fallout: London has been in the works for five years now, culminating in a seriously impressive mod for Fallout 4 that’s essentially a brand new game set in a radiated England rather than North America. After missing its planned release window in 2023, it now has a full release date - and it’s only a few months away.
]]>Fallout 4’s “next-gen update”, announced just over a year ago as part of the series’ 25th anniversary celebrations, has seen its release date pushed back into next year - meaning it will arrive close to a decade after the last major entry in the franchise.
]]>Perhaps the Last Of Us TV show on HBO getting it right was the dawn of a new era of good TV based on video games, but I still approach each adaptation with trepidation. That includes Amazon's Fallout series from Westworld and Person Of Interest writer/director Jonathan Nolan, which just got its first trailer.
]]>Having already surpassed Skyrim and Fallout by becoming Bethesda’s biggest launch to date - with over six million players, according to the developer - Starfield has now smashed another of its predecessor’s records.
]]>Look at any image of heavy metal horror game The Axis Unseen and you’ll recognise an archetype: the stealth archer. For a certain sort of Elder Scrolls player, it’s the only way to travel through a fantasy open world - perma-crouched, bow stretched lazily across the lower third of the screen. And it’s an appeal that creator Nate Purkeypile understands perfectly, having spent the larger portion of his career working on Bethesda’s RPGs, from Fallout 3 and Skyrim all the way through to Fallout 76.
“It’s probably not the best idea for most people to do a solo open world,” he says. “But at the same time, this is like my sixth one. I’m pretty sure what goes into these.”
]]>Sneaky new photos taken of the set of Amazon’s Fallout TV adaptation have been shared on Twitter that show one of the retro-futuristic series’ Red Rocket gas stations being built. While the chain’s distinctive rocket doesn’t feature in any of the snaps, all taken by J. Carson in New York state, you can clearly make out the Red Rocket branding on its sign and bright red atomic fuel pumps. The whole look is very post-apocalyptic, dilapidated with beaten up 1950s-style American cars parked around the forecourt.
]]>Starfield’s lead quest designer Will Shen has fielded some questions from players in a second video in Bethesda’s Constellation Questions series. Among the morsels that Shen reveals about the upcoming sci-fi RPG were some details about how the game’s faction system will work compared to Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. You can watch Shen talk about Starfield’s factions, companions, and quests in the video below.
]]>Romance has never been Bethesda's strong suit, from Skyrim's barebones marriage system to Fallout 4's bonus-XP-granting fade-to-black cutscenes. Starfield will be a little more nuanced than that, suggests executive producer Todd Howard, offering more complex romance options than Fallout's.
That's just one detail from a nearly 3 hour-long interview Howard gave on the Lex Fridman podcast, where he also talks scrapping space strandings, and (gasp) why he prefers to play on consoles to PC.
]]>To celebrate Fallout's 25th anniversary this week, Amazon Prime Video have released the first official glimpse of their upcoming Fallout TV show. Amazon posted a screengrab from the show on Twitter last night, depicting three Vault 33 dwellers staring at a silhouette coming in or out of the Vault - and what appears to be a body lying on the ground beside them. This is the first and only proper look we've had at the adaptation since August’s leaked set images mysteriously disappeared from the internet, but that hasn’t stopped fans from wildly theorising about what's going on.
]]>It’s been months since we’ve heard much from Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield, but studio director Todd Howard has been answering some questions about the game in a new video series. You can watch Howard chatting about the make-believe space programme below, where he covers if Starfield is hard sci-fi (not really), the game's traits system, and dialogue. It seems that Starfield RPG's are incredibly chatty, with many times more dialogue than Fallout 4 and Skyrim.
]]>New set images have leaked from the production of Amazon’s Fallout TV show, and they appear to show the inside of Vault 32. There’s also a nice bit of propaganda that reads “The outside world can never hurt you” and shows a superheroic Vault Boy deflecting nukes with a shield. How very Fallout. Read on to take a look at some of the images below.
]]>Amazon’s upcoming TV adaptation of post-apocalyptic RPG series Fallout has cast veteran sci-fi actor Kyle MacLachlan in an undisclosed role as a series regular. You may remember him from such roles as future emperor of the universe Paul Atriedes in David Lynch’s Dune, cafficionado Special Agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and for his turn in David Lynch's Oscar-nominated Blue Velvet. Please tell me David Lynch will at least direct the pilot.
]]>Post-apocalyptic mod Fallout: London will arrive next year, the development team have announced with a new video released as part of the Fallout For Hope charity initiative. It’s a DLC-sized mod for Fallout 4 that’s bringing the unchanging nuclear war across the pond. Doff your bowler hat out of respect for all the nuked chippies, and watch the trailer below.
]]>One of my favourite things about the Fallout series is learning what weird and wonderful experiments took place in its vaults. There was the one where everyone lived in a VR simulation, another testing cryosleep, as well as one where a panther was let loose. The developers had more plans for these bomb-proof bunkers that never quite made it into the games though. Bethesda director Todd Howard revealed last night that Fallout 4 almost had an underwater vault with a giant octopus, which sounds slightly terrifying.
]]>What happens in New Vegas stays in New Vegas, they say, though New Vegas itself will not stay in Fallout: New Vegas. A new mod named Project Mojave is attempting to recreate a lot of the post-apocalyptic Sin City and surrounding areas as a Fallout 4 mod, and you can play the first slice now. But to manage your expectations: it is not an attempt to recreate Obsidian Entertainment's game Fallout: New Vegas inside Fallout 4.
]]>A few months ago we reported on Fallout: London, an impressive-looking Fallout 4 mod project that will bring the post-apocalyptic RPG to England. It looks like a huge undertaking, pulling parts out of the US-centric game to make a UK-based, DLC-sized mod campaign, and for one modder it's led to a job at Bethesda. Stephanie Zachariadis, former head writer on Fallout: London, is now an associate quest designer at the studio.
]]>Before we get to the meat of this article, I need to establish something important: I love violent videogames. Ever since Nintendo enabled my very specific childhood fantasy of being a mustachioed Italian plumber happy slapping random reptiles, I’ve been hooked. I was one of the original pixel-addled kids The Mail warned you about. When Mortal Kombat came out, with its hyper-realistic gore and enticing BBFC age rating, I went to extreme measures to secure a copy (asking my mum really nicely). Videogame writers may be stereotyped as a bunch of soft, hippy peaceniks, but not me. I was raised on the mean streets of Peterborough and I’m hard. Like, Ross Kemp hard.
So please keep that in mind when I say that I really want videogame developers to stop making me kill guard dogs. I absolutely abhor it. They come bounding up to you, like they just want to give you a big, sloppy kiss, and they always make a sad little yelp when they die. Always. What kind of monster thinks that’s a good time?
]]>River, the gorgeous German Shepherd who played Dogmeat in Fallout 4, has died. She was owned by Joel Burgess, former lead level designer on the game, who would bring River into the studio so the developers could learn from her behaviour. In a lovely Twitter thread that's made me a bit teary, he talks about River's role and how she wasn't just Dogmeat's in-game model, but a companion to both the player and team.
]]>Yet another giant Fallout 4 modding project has released a trailer for an ambitious expansion-sized campaign. Fallout: London is planning to take players to see how the war affected things in the UK. London may change, but war doesn't. Things look just as irradiated, divided, and gritty as you'd expect from a major Fallout 4 mod project. There's no release date yet, and it's certainly looking like there will be plenty of infighting between its new, British factions. No Enclave or Brotherhood of Steel here.
]]>If I remember correctly, one of the bigger complaints against Fallout 4 on release was that it wasn't Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian's spin-off is seen by many as the series' last stab at proper, old-school RPG'ing before Bethesda turned the post-apocalypse into a playful sandbox. Naturally, a group of modders have been hard at work bringing New Vegas' guns 'n' graphics up to date with a total recreation inside Fallout 4, showing off their spit-shined spurs in a new progress trailer this week.
]]>Nexus Mods, a site hosting mods for squillions of PC games, have temporarily banned people from uploading mods related to socio-political issues of the USA. This came after a flurry of "provocative and troll mods" doing things like renaming Fallout 4's raiders to "Antifa", "Trump Supporter", or "BLM 'Protester'", some being uploaded with photographs of corpses.
"Most of these mods are being uploaded by cowards with sock puppet accounts deliberately to try and cause a stir," the site's admins say. So if people can't behave, they'll allow no US politics on the Nexus until the presidential election is well and truly settled.
]]>These ghouls certainly don't need any more sun, but perhaps your Vault 111 escapee could use a bit of heat to even out those dweller tan lines. Biggo modding project Fallout Miami recently put out a new trailer for their "DLC-sized" addition to Fallout 4 showing some of the toasty new locales you'll be able to explore when it launches.
]]>All dogs go to heaven, we have heard it said. But what about videogame dogs? By the virtue of their non-existence you may suspect they are refused entry. However, after contemplating the issue for some time, our finest minds in the listicle archives have concluded that, yes, even videogame dogs go to heaven. What a relief. Here are the 10 goodest boys in PC games, all approved for divine ascendence.
]]>War never changes, but prestige TV sure can. Today, Bethesda announced that Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of HBO's Westworld, are taking their cinematic lens to Fallout, working with Amazon Studios to create a post-apocalyptic telly show based on the long-running nuke 'em up RPG. Hold on, though - a darkly comic show about robot cowboys, deserts and conspiracies? Sounds quite a leap for the folks behind Westworld.
]]>Everyone’s a cook now, is that it? A few weeks in lockdown and you’re all suddenly artisan bakers and Bon Appétit Kitchen presenters? Sorry, I don’t buy it. Put the chickpeas down, Jeff. We all know what happens when you let things “simmer”. However, there is a world in which your cooking really does impress. Where it comes out of the pot scrumptious and hot and more flavourful than a generous bite from a big round onion. That world is videogames. Did you think I was going to say something else? I never say anything else. It’s videogames. Here are the 9 most delicious dinners in videogames.
]]>Awesome Games Done Quick (aka AGDQ) has started yet again, and just four days in has already blessed us with some unforgettable moments and absolute must-watch PC speedruns. The clips I offer up to you today involve one speedrunner whacking out a real life model to explain a glitch, one speedrun where everything went wrong but everyone had a fabulous time anyway, and one game developer exclaiming "frick cancer in the bum."
]]>Right now, there’s a room in Buffalo Grove, Illinois that's as quiet as a grave. The power is off, the robotic limbs are becalmed, and the once thumping presses are depressed. The Steam Controller assembly room is assembling no more, and with the recent Steam sale clearing out all the stock, the grand experiment is over.
It’s the final part of Valve’s great Steam Machines undertaking to be shut down. They’d hoped to convince you to have a PC in the living room, or a small box for you to stream your library from your main PC. The Steam Machines never took off, the Steam Link box was discontinued a year ago, and now the Steam Controller will no longer be made. Gone, but not forgotten.
]]>Despite the return of trusty companion Dogmeat, Fallout 4 didn't ship with the ability to handle any hounds. Shocking, I know. In a world where dog-rating Twitter accounts are tangibly changing the shape of games, who can afford to take any chances?
Like so many things in Fallout, mods have arrived to fix this injustice.
]]>Usually after the Steam summer sale horror show, the Steam Charts offer us some respite in the lull between AAA releases and allow us to celebrate the successful release of a bunch of indie games. But as you'll have noticed if you've looked at 2019, nothing follows the rules of sense and decorum any longer. So it is that last week and this, we've had charts that feature only a single recently released game.
So this week we're taking a trip!
]]>It's never a good sign when Skyrim's back in the Charts. It means mischief is afoot. And not the good kind. In this case, it's Bethesda's Quakecon sale, meaning a whole bunch of the dreariest of usual suspects return to droop our eyelids and weary our souls. And Nier and Flibble Glibble Pants are both on sale yet again. In fact, this week's top 10 features precisely one game released in the last TWO YEARS.
So this week I think I shall describe to you the feelings I feel when I see these games appearing once more.
]]>Sometimes a skeleton is just a skeleton. They're bloody everywhere in the Fallout games, so you could easily overlook just one more. Sometimes, however -- like in the Fallout 4 instance above -- it's a clever multi-layered nod to a friend. Earlier today, former Bethesda level designer Joel Burgess shared a few of his stories and favourite hidden creations via Twitter. It's some good insight, good advice for level designers, and highlights a few things you might have otherwise missed.
]]>You don't need to play Fallout 4 for a vision of the USA as a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with wacky characters and deadly critters; you can experience it for real with a visit to Florida. But a vision of post-apocalyptic Florida, oh boy, are you sure you can handle that? Best you ease yourself in slowly, perhaps with the newly-released early slice of the mod Fallout: Miami. It's a wee walking simulator at the moment, with no quests or NPCs, but do you really think you're ready to meet a post-apocalyptic Floridian? Take it slow, hit the beach, enjoy the palms, then see how you feel about confronting an irradiated Florida Man.
]]>To this day, the jaunty static of the opening jingle to Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town brings me back to a simpler time. Summer evenings spent hunched over my Game Boy SP, a pane of glass between me and nature’s suburban bounty as I tilled my little squares of land, pet my happy little chickens, and bribed a town’s worth of reticent heartthrobs into falling for my little blonde avatar, Pepper, with an onslaught of ores, animal products, and various culinary delights (but never cucumbers, ya’ gummy-mouthed fish-man).
Harvest Moon was about as wholesome as wholesome gets, my first videogame love, but as the days turned to years, we grew apart. Since then, I’ve filled the hole in my heart with the usual suspects, (Stardew Valley, Rune Factory, and so on) until there was only one thing left to do: make my own Harvest Moon. And so began my ongoing personal quest to turn every game I own that is unfortunate enough to not be Harvest Moon into the farming simulation game they were always meant to be. Here, in true naturalist fashion, I present my field notes in the hope that we may go on to tame this new frontier together.
]]>Way back in the forgotten times of glossy paper games magazines, I remember my first exposure to what would become Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game. Early previews said Fallout was going to be a PC showcase of the GURPS pen-and-paper RPG system, but it grew into its own thing. Now, tabletop studio Modiphius have announced the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare Roleplaying Game, a freeform RPG expansion for their tabletop miniature tactics game. Curiously, there's yet another, more traditionally pen-and-paper version based on Modiphus's 2d20 RPG rule-set due next year.
]]>I'm not big into numberwang. Vast numbers of people playing a game might indicate that it's fun, or it might indicate that it's Ark: Survival Evolved. (I haven't played Ark and it could be amazing, this is irresponsible journalism and I will hand in my badge and gun shortly.) Point being, it's more interesting to write about what has made a game popular than the fact that it is so.
Right. Now I have to convince you this animated graph of the most played Steam games from the past four years is fascinating.
]]>Obisdian's Fallout: New Vegas might be the best of the Bethesda-era Fallout games, but it still got dragged through the ugly hedge backwards a dozen times over. There's no higher resolution, sharpened texture pack or post-process filter in the world that can save this pudding-faced monstrosity from its blobby brown fate.
Time for extreme measures. E.g. getting a neural net to re-texture the entire game with feverish new auto-generated assets, devised by insane software after it was fed a broad selection of real-world paintings. I have never wanted to play a latter-day Fallout game more than this.
]]>Having halted development in 2018 due to legal concerns, the team behind Capital Wasteland have resumed work on remaking Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4 as a mod - with a wild plan to sidestep the legal issue. Having previously intended to edit Fallout 3's sound files to work with Fallout 4, which was a no-no, they now plan to record the 45,000 lines of the game's script with new voices themselves. It's a huge undertaking to remake a game inside a marginally fancier shell but hey, puzzling personal passions are the heart of modding.
]]>Cyber Monday is, of course, a pure and honest celebration of all things cyber. We hack the planet as one, united against corporations, capitalism and the class divide. Then we all burn our 4K televisions and go off to have a massive rave-orgy in an abandoned sewer. Such is the way of the Cyber Monday Warrior.
But it's not all talking in C++ and overthrowing distant tyranny. Cyber Monday is also a time to remember the sacrifices made in the name of the hacking. None of these are quite so tragic as otherwise great games laid low by poorly-judged hacking minigames, forcibly inserted by executive pressure to pad out the running time. Today, let us honour the fallen.
]]>“Every character you see is a real person,” said Todd Howard at E3, explaining the lack of traditional NPCs in Fallout 76. But I’m not so sure. Does Howard really expect me to believe that ‘CocktimusPrime’ isn’t waiting to greet everyone outside their vault? He’s there as I step into the light, his big, dumb name floating in front of a horizon that’s meant to elicit awe. And there’s no reason it shouldn’t. That sea of autumnal trees and distant storm clouds are lovely. Having winced at the wonky footage of the Xbox One beta last week I’m genuinely surprised at how pretty West Virginia is. Well, the bits of it that aren’t CocktimusPrime.
]]>Please check to see if your cats are laying down with dogs, and if your downs are presently up, because it'll only further confirm this week's Steam Charts' signs of the end times. SEVEN new or re-entries, no GTA, no Counter-Strike, no Witcher 3 - and please, look, sit down, make sure a relative or loved one is close by - Plunkbat is at #6. With literally nothing making sense any more, let's just try to get through this - however much "this" there is left - together.
]]>Now that Fallout 4 is in its third year and the DLC has dried up, is there any point in returning to the Commonwealth Wasteland? Yes! There are loads, largely thanks to the still-growing list of mods, overhauls and user tweaks. Here, I’ve gathered over 50 of my favourites, ranging from weird weapons to wild weather.
Before we start, a couple of things to remember: some mods will require some or all of the DLC expansions, as well as additional mods, while others don’t play nicely with each other. The mod descriptions on Nexus will usually tell you, so keep an eye out.
]]>The radioactive wasteland of any Fallout game is a dangerous place, and twice as deadly for those who go in early. Those who pre-ordered Bethesda's multiplayer spinoff Fallout 76 on PC (or PS4), can dive into post-apocalyptic West Virginia on October 30th, two weeks ahead of its November 14th launch date. Expect bugs, server issues and occasional nuclear explosions - par for any beta, really. Below, Fallout 76's intro doing double duty as a new trailer.
]]>Fallout 4 just got a massive new sector for explorin' and craftin' and murderin'. As is the new normal for the industry, this stunning new bit of world and its storyline are all thanks to fan labour. A mod called Northern Springs, which is billed as being larger than any of the game's official expansions, is available now on Nexus Mods. I'd been so obsessed with raiding post-war Seattle that I completely failed to notice this huge undertaking was coming down the Nexus pipeline. I'll be rectifying my oversight tonight by entering this frozen hellscape.
]]>For a game that never released and a Playstation-only demo for said game that now un-exists, there's been a sudden rush of (mostly) good news regarding Silent Hills on PC. No, not for the game itself, because that ship has long since sailed. But if you were enraptured by the spirit of the whole hullabaloo, there's a lot of neat bonus projects suddenly at your disposal.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>Hallo! Me again, filling in (slightly late) while John is handcuffed to a steering wheel for other duties. The Steam Charts were all shook up (mm mm mmh!) last week by the launch of Steam's summer sale, including propelling a lump of hardware into the top ten for the first time in ages. A number of older games have rocketed back too, boosted by sale discounts, and displaced several games from their near-permanent spots in the hit parade. Let's stroll down it and see.
]]>Mod support will indeed be coming to multiplayer survival sandbox Fallout 76, Bethesda have said, though not in time for its November launch. Mods are a standard feature for Bethesda's RPGs, of course, filling in all the holes Bethesda leave and adding so many wonderful new things, but the always-online nature of 76 left that in question. Not to mention that some spectators have been concerned that the Creation Club DLC microtransaction store popping up in Bethesda's recent games might shove plain ol' mods out. But nah, Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard has said, "We love mods, and so we are 100% committed to doing that in 76 as well."
]]>Well then! The rumours were true: Fallout 76 is indeed a multiplayer game, one described by Bethesda's Todd Howard as "softcore survival". Huh. Weird. The online sandbox will send Vault dwellers out to rebuild America, 25 years after the nuclear apocalypse, and all these dwellers will be other players. Howard said that folks will be able to play solo, questing on their tod, but the focus is clearly on teaming up with other survivors to build bases, murder monsters, and fight for control of nuclear missile silos. It will launch on November 14th but, for now, he's the E3 deet-o-rama.
]]>Well, there we go: Fallout 76 is the answer you were looking for. Not Fallout 5, not Fallout 3 remastered, but 'Fallout 76', which on the face of things implies a sort Fallout 4.5, much like New Vegas was to FO3. It might not be that simple, however - more on which below.
'76' refers, it seems, both to the number of the Vault you'll start off in this time, and to the year 2076 (that being the year Vault 76 was built, and the year before the bombs dropped in the Falloutverse). I'm hoping it also proves an excuse to use more of a 70s than 50s aesthetic for this particular take on the end of the world, which may be backed up by the use of John Denver's '71 country classic, Take Me Home, Country Roads. That song's reference to West Virginia probably ain't no coinky-dink either.
Below: the trailer, and my best educated guesses about the timeline, setting, theme and release date of this new Fallout.
]]>"War," Ron Perlman will almost certainly growl during Bethesda's E3 press conference. "War never changes," he'll likely continue. Then he'll go on about some past wars, which were bad, and tell us about fictional future wars which are also bad. Bethesda are teasing some sort of Fallout announcement, see. New or old, original or remaster... we don't know. But at some point soon we'll get to see some marketing for a new Fallout thing. E3, E3 never changes.
]]>The mod community is doing, what I think we can all agree on, better work in their fan expansions to the game Fallout 4 than maybe the game itself. We've seen so many great additions, including the recent mod to add Dead Space's plasma cutter and limb dismemberment -- two great tastes that taste great together! Now, we have a trailer for a long running mod that aims to bring the Fallout 4 to Seattle. And boy, does Fallout: Cascadia look great.
]]>Democracy is on the brink of collapse. Caesar's Legion, the authoritarian slave state across the Colorado River, has launched a massive assault on the last, best chance for freedom in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout. It's a grim certainty in Old World Blues that the New California Republic will fight Caesar's Legion: they're the wasteland's two superpowers, diametrically opposed ideologically, each expanding towards the other. I just thought I was better prepared. While Caesar was annihilating every ill-defended tribe to the west, I was rearming, inviting new states into the republic, and admittedly annexing a few tribes myself. With the game paused, I assess my options, reorganise my armies and ask, finally, does democracy die in 2279?
Old World Blues is a mod for Hearts of Iron IV which transports the World War II grand strategy game hundreds of years forward into the post-apocalyptic American west coast of the Fallout series. Players select a faction in the year 2275 and attempt to survive and thrive in the west coast wasteland. Structurally, it's similar to Hearts of Iron IV, but the content and style has been transformed. Old World Blues is tremendously fun, comparable in quality to the standard Hearts of Iron IV game, and it does a terrific job of translating Fallout to grand strategy.
]]>Though Fallout 4 will let you fiddle with all manner of aspects of your character's visage, creating your very own post-apocalyptic mumsona or dadatar, the words coming out their mouths always sound the same. That can change with the Player Voice Frequency Slider mod by "CDante", which adds options to fiddle with the pitch of your character's avatar and make them sound different. Obviously it's not as good as having lines recorded with wholly different voices--such as the delightful mockney accent option of Saints Row--but it seems to allow some decent variety in personality. It's pretty good too; listen to this teenager.
]]>We've previously covered the exciting-looking Capital Wasteland mod for Fallout 4. Planned as a full remake of Fallout 3 in the later game's engine, one prerequisite for such a project would be to port over the voice audio files from the original game, a legally grey move that could potentially earn the project a cease-and-desist or other legal threat.
Wanting to preempt such issues, the Capital Wasteland team got in contact with Bethesda, seeking official blessing for such a move. Unfortunately, the studio weren't willing or able to offer such support. With little option beyond assembling a massive voice cast of their own, they're officially calling it quits on the project after a full year in development, although there may yet still be some hope for it.
]]>Raiders on giant armoured dogs ride out across the Commonwealth Wasteland in a new mod for Fallout 4, which bears the remarkable name of Ruff Riders. I do like post-apocalyptic wastelands to be weird and horrible B movie oddities, and murderers atop wardogs clad in scrap armour including metal shades and a horn, yup, that'll do for me. The mod scatters a few dozen Ruff Riders around the place, and if you off 'em you can make your own regular-sized dog buddy dress up like the big nasties. You'll need a different mod if you want to ride dogs yourself but one does actually exist so...
]]>US President Donald Trump yesterday held a private meeting to discuss the issue of violence in video games, having suggested after February's murders at a school in Parkland, Florida that it "is really shaping young people's thoughts." This would clearly amount to nothing productive, given mostly industry representatives and conservative pressure groups were attending, but it is a surprise that Trump showed attendees a short video montage of video game deaths. The White House have released this publicly, so we can all see a sloppy montage of deaths from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Fallout 4, and more. Somehow it isn't a surprise that some clips are clearly ripped from YouTubers - watermarks and all.
]]>Last time we looked at Capital Wasteland, the Fallout 4 mod unofficially recreating Fallout 3 inside the newer game, the team behind it were showing off a montage of environments. That's nice and all, but it's a stage many remake mods for many games have reached before fizzling out. Now they're showing: no, look, we really are doing it. A new gameplay video shows a 12-minute chunk of Fallout 3's main quest with NPCs, action, dialogue, scripted events, quest progression, and other things that make the game tick. It does indeed look a lot like Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4. Observe:
]]>Going anywhere nice this weekend? Have you considered the irradiated ruins of post-apocalyptic Boston? You might fancy a crack at Fallout 4, as this weekend Bethesda will hold yet another days-long free trial of the full game. The speedrun record is under one hour so you certainly could 'complete it' in one weekend, but myself I like the sound of wandering aimlessly. While I find Bethesda's open-world RPGs quite flat and have never finished the main quest of a single one, I do always enjoy spending a while pottering and seeing sights. That's my weekend sorted.
]]>One of the few certainties in this ever-changing world is: right now, someone, somewhere, is remaking an old Bethesda open-world RPG inside a newer game from that series. Fans are working on bringing several Elder Scrolls games to several newer Elder Scrolls games, while others are trying to put Fallout 3 and Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas inside Fallout 4. The teams behind the Fallout 3 and New Vegas mods have both recently shown more of their work so coo go on, let's have a look.
]]>Though stealth has always been an element of the Fallout games, it's never been interesting stealth. It's been powerful at times, sure, but always a bit bland and never explored in much depth (hey, it's an RPG, not a sneak 'em up). A new mod for Fallout 4 attempts to shake this up a little by introducing two Metal Gear Solid-ish sneaky tricks: whistling and throwing bolts to lure and distract enemies. It's not quite on the same level as walking around wearing a cardboard box with a picture of a sexy lady on to distract horny guards, but the Tactical Distraction System mod does sound neat.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>Fallout 4 VR is almost exactly what the phrase 'Fallout 4 VR' implies. Which is to say, the entirety of Fallout 4 rendered in giant-scale gogglevision. It's funny - for some time there was this expectation that VR needed a full-fat mainstream game to truly get its wings, but now that's finally happened, it just feels like the most normal thing in the world.
]]>The world ended on September, 30 1997. Or, rather, that was the day we were first shown what would become gaming's enduring definition of the end of the world. Interplay's Fallout, a very different game from Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 (not that this seems to bother anyone; no sirree, not a soul), was and is a landmark roleplaying game. It disrupted ideas that RPGs meant elves and kobolds; it disrupted ideas that RPGs were a straight march to the finish line; it disrupted ideas that RPG heroes should be heroic.
War never changes, but Fallout changed most everything else.
]]>A couple of weeks back - when I also went hands-on with both Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2 - I goggled up and gave the upcoming VR version of 2016's Doom a spin, as well as bearing witness to other folks' flailing and giggling in Skyrim VR and Fallout VR. Bethesda's triptych of 3D ultravision spin-offs are due before the year is out, with Skyrim only available on PSVR at least initially and Fallout and Doom only officially supporting HTC Vive, for obvious reasons. Their arrival is a pretty big event for a technology that so far has leaned far more heavily on brand new things rather than established names.
Curious about what this means for the technology and for Doom, Skyrim and Fallout, I picked Bethesda VP Pete Hine's brains about the whys and wherefores, and what it might imply for the future of their own VR efforts. Also below: my own quick impressions of Doom VFR [official site].
]]>All social problems can be solved by data, any naive tech company can tell you, which is why Valve are attempting to solve Steam 'review bombing' by adding graphs to its player reviews. Review bombing is the practice of players organising to leave negative reviews that drive down a game's rating in an attempt to punish or manipulate developers by damaging their future sales prospects. Games bombed over the past month range from Firewatch to Grand Theft Auto V. This is a known and old problem with Steam's reviews, and one Valve aren't happy with. So, to counterattack disproportionate bursts of negative reviews, Valve have added unusual activity warnings to Steam store pages with histograms tracking reviews over time.
]]>As you may have spotted, Humble has been running an 'End of Summer Sale' over the past few days to ring in the Autumn and, well, discount a bunch of games. The sale only has a few days left to run and the final wave of titles has been added as of today. This batch is entirely from Bethesda and features some of the company's best stuff - from Doom to Wolfenstein to Call of Cthulu. Just me on that last one? (it did sneak into our list of best horror games! - ed).
You have a few days left to pick up this range or any number of discounts (like Hitman's entire first season) before the sale is gone for good.
]]>Bethesda VP Pete Hines strikes me as a man grown weary of discussing mod controversies, like 2015's paid Skyrim mods hullabaloo. In less than a week since its release, Bethesda’s Creation Club, which lets you buy mods for Fallout 4 [official site] with credits that cost real cash, has drummed up a fair amount of them. Hines, however, not only seeks to assuage fears that these premium mods were heralding something terrible, but also disputes the very idea that the Creation Club constitutes 'paid mods'.
]]>The first digital fruits of Bethesda's new kinda-sorta-paid-mods programme, the Creation Club, arrive today in Fallout 4 [official site]. It'll then hit Skyrim in September. Unlike Bethesda's disastrous first flirtation with paid mods for Skyrim in 2015, which was quickly abandoned, the Creation Club is more like a DLC microtransaction store partially outsourced to modders. It's a selection of new content Bethesda are approving and commissioning themselves rather than Steam's failed free-for-all marketplace where anyone could upload anything, see. The initial Creation Club lineup is pretty bland, mind, just odds and ends.
]]>As the Steam Summer Sale closes, here's the last of the charts influenced by the discounts, before they return to being exactly the same as they were before the sale, and indeed during it.
So this week we're going to dig into the history of these familiar names, revealing some secrets of their pasts that many may not already know.
]]>As we learnt last week, the Steam Summer Sale feels like the sort of thing that should enliven the charts. Nothing can enliven the charts...
Apart from me!
]]>The Steam Summer Sale is here to rescue us from the same old games! Hooray! Hooray! Hoo-whatnow? Oh for crying out loud, the usual games are all on sale too, aren't they?
]]>Hurr hurr. Inspired by the name of Bethesda’s upcoming method for selling bespoke mods, the ‘Creation Club’ is a weapon mod for Fallout 4 in the form of a golf club that spawns random items, enemies and NPCs when you swing it. It’s a silly jape taken to its logical conclusion – one that the golf club’s creator says isn’t intended as a criticism of Bethesda’s plan. “This mod is based on a pun,” he says, “A wordplay… It's just a simple joke.”
]]>For a few horrible minutes during E3, it looked like Bethesda might seriously claim that The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were part of the same universe. Thankfully, not. Despite this being an era where Sony wants a Ghostbusters universe and Universal thinks demeaning the Universal Monsters by linking them with a top-sekrit monstah hunting group led by Dr Jekyll is anything other than schoolboy fan-fiction, Bethesda's Pete Hines has been quick to go "What? No. No! No..." Phew! Honestly, it's bad enough that Daggerfall has six endings, ranging from the villain becoming a god to orcs being either defeated or victorious, and canonically all of them are true.
But at a time when we're seriously asked to pretend that "Dark Universe" is a thing we should want to see, that unholy union really wasn't impossible...
]]>The promised VR version of Fallout 4 [official site] will arrive in October for Vive cybergoggs, Bethesda announced during last night's E3-o-rama. Curiously, Fallout 4 VR [official site] is a separate game rather than an update or add-on - one which will cost twice as much as regular Fallout 4 does.
Bethesda also formally announced Doom VFR [official site], a standalone Doom game made expressly for VR. This is a new game rather than a refit of 2016's game, a new Doom first-person monster-mash. Have a look in this trailer:
]]>In among the game announcements at E3 2017 Bethesda also announced Creation Club, "a collection of new game content for Skyrim and Fallout 4." That content includes new weapons, armour, crafting and housing features, and changes to core systems, and you buy all of it in-game with 'credits' purchased for real money through Steam. Is this a new paid mods system? No, says the FAQ, "Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like."
]]>Hello. I've had this brilliant new idea! Each week I shall tell you which are the top 10 selling games on the PC gaming outlet Steam. No, no, this is nothing like Alec's idea that he had - he did it on a Tuesday. This is entirely different.
]]>For thirty-eight long years, you people have looked to me to inform you which ten games sold best on Steam over the past week. That time is now at an end.
But evil never dies.
]]>Post-apocalyptic packrat simulator Fallout 4 [official site] will be free to play in full this weekend. The free weekend on Steam will start at 6pm today (10am Pacific) and run until 9pm (1pm Pacific), letting all and sundry and play the base game and poke at mods. (Expansions not included.)
If you dig it and want it for keepsies, the game will be on sale until Monday evening. And for those who already have it, the DLC is going on sale too.
]]>Hannah just wanted to be a farmer. Not a male farmer. Not a female farmer. Just a farmer that didn't have to suffer NPC after NPC lumping them into one gender or the other. Hannah's hopes rose with the release of Stardew Valley, but after jumping into the farming sim they discovered it offered only male and female gender identities, with he/she pronouns to match. As someone who identifies as non-binary, Hannah couldn't help but be disappointed.
"I’ve almost come to expect little to no representation," says Hannah. "Being able to play a character that is different from myself is fun and interesting, but playing one true to myself I find is often more fun. It feels more real if you are in the world rather than just an observer playing a person in that world."
Unwilling to sit idly by, Hannah took it upon themselves to broaden Stardew Valley's gender diversity, modding the game so that NPCs referred to the protagonist with gender-neutral pronouns and replacing the gender symbols in the character creator with ungendered body-type indicators.
The response from other players was overwhelming.
]]>About a year ago, I bought myself a HTC Vive. Since then, it's gathered a fair bit of dust. I swear, it's not that I'm a VR skeptic, so much as someone without a whole lot of space to play with who prefers being able to go to the toilet at night without tripping over what I'm going to call 'a Maplin' of expensive cabling. Of late though, I've been feeling the urge to go back in, largely I must say inspired by stuff I can't actually play, like the intro to I Expect You To Die (Vive version is coming, I can't be arsed with Revive) and watching the new Psychonauts and Arkham VR experiences from the PSVR.
So, I did. And I had some fun playing around with some new stuff.
My RPG based dreams though feel further away than ever.
]]>Blood for the blood god, it's only the weekly Steam charts! These are the ten games which sold best on Steam last week.
The debate has raged for an eternity. The infinite dilemma that has defeated even humanity's greatest minds.
Which is best: guns or swords? Today, I have a definitive answer for you.
]]>As promised, Bethesda have released an official high-resolution texture pack for Fallout 4 [official site]. If your pigrig is ripped full of beef with chops to spare, you can download the pack for free to admire post-apocalyptic cups and corpses like never before. It doesn't massively change how the game looks but does make it look... more like itself? Good-o! If you don't fancy rifling through fan-made packs to figure out which changes least/most in a way you like, hey, install this and Fallout 4 will look better.
]]>The official Fallout 4 [official site] high-resolution texture pack is coming free next week, Bethesda have announced. You'll need a computer far beyond Fallout 4's original recommend spec to make good use of the pack, mind. Can your box blast bonny Boston? Is your rig ready for the roof felt? Can your hog handle HD hats? Is your silicon-snorting framecrusher pumped for 60 reps of sand a second? Will your deck deck the decking? Read on for the system requirements.
]]>'Project Louisiana' is the name of oft-revered RPG studio Obsidian's next game, they've revealed, along with a graphic implying farmlands and a quote about facing up to some grim reality. Now, last summer rumours flew that a 'Fallout: New Orleans' was in the offing, based on an unverified and subsequently removed European trademark registration.
A whole mess of people looked at Obsidian expectantly, given that they were behind - don't mention the war - well-received Fallout 3 spin-off New Vegas. They all but shot down the idea - but now they've pointedly codenamed their new'un after New Orleans' home state.
]]>The new Fallout 4 mod Revolted [Nexus page] combines past and present in an impressive yet horrifying combination by adding a rude 'tude '90s FPS to the apocalyptoworld as an in-game video game. The checklist:
A growling protagonist? ☑ With politeness issues? ☑ And a cigar welded to his teeth? ☑ Crates? ☑ Barrels? ☑ Colour-coded locked doors? ☑ First-person platforming? ☑
The nuked-out world of tomorrow is more grim than ever before.
]]>Valve capped off 2016 by revealing the year's 100 highest-grossing games on Steam, which is a pretty interesting list. If you've been following Alec's prolonged breakdown over the weekly charts you'll not be shocked by revelations that Grand Theft Auto V and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are near the top, but you might not expect them to be joined by the likes of No Man's Sky or the free-to-play Dota 2.
When I asked Alec if he fancied writing up this chart too, he began hissing "The Venga Bus is coming the Venga Bus IS coming the Venga Bus is coming to take me away ho-ho hee-hee ha-haaa" so you get me and my GIFs instead.
]]>Out with the old, in with the new. By which I mean 'and our weekly Steam Charts, showing the ten games which sold best over the previous week, returns - replete with most of the same names as last year.'
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT AND NEVER BROUGHT TO MIND?
Welcome back.
]]>As mentioned last week, it's been one of those years. Lots of the biggest RPGs that we were expecting decided to spend a few more months in bed, or simply skip 2016. Can't blame them! It'll mean an awesome 2017, even if looking back there's only been a few big names to pick from. Still, tradition is tradition! This week, another year marks another set of the RPG genre's most fiercely fought-over fictional awards.
(Disclaimer: Actual fighting may also be fictional, all awards are based on the incredibly scientific principle of Wot I Think, awards cannot be exchanged for money, goods or services unless they too are entirely fictional. Please write all questions or complaints onto the back of a Myst CD using a Sharpie, break it into four pieces and bury them in interesting points around the globe for future treasure hunters to encounter, reforge, and then gag "Oh, god, Myst..." Or indeed, not. Completely your choice!)
]]>DOOM, Skyrim and Fallout have been recreated as Pinball FX2 [official site] tables. Because nobody else at RPS has the flippin' guts to take on such a massive task, I've spent a couple of hours with each, and have now judged them. Short version, I like them about as much as I like the games they're based on, which means one is great, and the other two are a bit of a ballache. To find out precisely what I mean by that, join me below.
]]>I've been playing a fair bit of actual physical pinball lately, having discovered a half-dozen machines across nearby pubs. My favourites put their themes into motion, like the NBA table where I get to launch the ball at a hoop (aided by mystical magnetism). The selection isn't ideal, mind; I'm not much into basketball and Monopoly is so undesirable. No, digital pinball is a far better way to #engage with your favourite modern #brands in #brandball. Look, here come three new Bethesda-y DLC tables for Pinball FX2 [official site], plinging balls into Skyrim, Fallout, and Doom. Come see!
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