Speaking to RPS regular Jeremy Peel in a new feature about RPG design, Amazon's Fallout TV show and his time working on Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has reflected a bit on what Fallout: New Vegas owes to Black Isle and Interplay's very first Fallout from 1997. "A lot of the philosophy that I approached New Vegas with was the philosophy of Fallout 1, or how I interpreted it," Sawyer observed. "Fallout 1 was foundational for me in understanding how role-playing games should be made."
]]>What’s it like to watch a smash hit TV show set in the backyard of a game you’ve made? It’s a question which Fallout: New Vegas project director Josh Sawyer is uniquely qualified to answer.
“The show really does capture the aesthetic of Fallout 4 and 76, while also feeling like it is set on the West Coast,” he says. “If you’re a fan, then you can see where the plot elements have been pulled from in previous entries. And if you’re new to it, thankfully, those plot elements are fairly straightforward. So I think it’s a good show for fans and a good show if you’re new to it, even though there’s a lot of stuff going on. I’m certainly interested to see where they’re going in the second season.”
]]>Bethesda's very own Mr Handy (director and executive producer) Todd Howard has addressed the controversy surrounding the Fallout TV show's treatment of Fallout backstory, reaffirming the canonicity of Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas and promising that Bethesda and Amazon are being "careful" to maintain consistency between the games and the TV series. Are you new to this latest lore scandal? Watch out for Fallout Season 1 spoilers ahead, then.
]]>Friends, there is trouble a-brewing down the radioactive watering hole. While Amazon's Fallout TV adaptation has launched to pretty positive verdicts, a contingent of Fallout players are up in arms over its portrayal of the Fallout timeline. In particular, it's being claimed that the show has written the events of Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas out of the canon, despite reassurances from Bethesda Game Studios design director Emil Pagliarulo. Dare you read on? Let me just load up my Junk Jet with piping, hot Fallout Season 1 spoilers...
]]>Cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer have highlighed a heartwarming story of lost media becoming found again. A mod for Matthew Perry career high and/or nuclear apocalypse RPG sidequest Fallout: New Vegas, which was thought lost since some time around 2016, has been found by chance on someone's hard drive. The content of this mod, you ask? It adds a companion who looks like redoubtable nu-metal pioneer Fred Durst. I was trying to come up with a pun to do with "nookie" or that modders will "keep rollin'", but I respect you too much for that (also it's Monday and I'm very tired - give me something to break, am I right?).
]]>If 2023 is remembered for one thing, it's that it was a 100% critical success year for the RPG. Role-players across the land have been feasting exceedingly well these past few months, what with the stonking success of Baldur's Gate 3 (and to lesser extents, Starfield and Diablo 4), so we thought it was about time to celebrate your favourite RPGs of all time. Your votes have been counted, your comments have been sorted, and the cream of the RPG crop has been assembled. But which of the many excellent RPGs have risen above all others? Come and find out below as we count down your top 25 favourite RPGs of all time.
]]>One recent Fallout: New Vegas mod adds a murderous psychic tumbleweed called Windy to your party, further cementing the game as the best in the series. ‘Wait a second, that doesn’t make any sense,’ you might be saying about a game where people don’t use bedsheets to sleep. But the mod is only accessible with the Wild Wasteland trait turned on, which allows all manner of silly and unrealistic things to happen in-game.
]]>Every week, the Epic Games Store gives away one free game for everyone. This week that freebie is Fallout: New Vegas - Ultimate Edition, available to keep forever from now until June 1st. So, if you somehow missed Obsidian’s post-apocalyptic postal service sim, now’s the time to get stuck in the wasteland. Just hop over to the Epic Games Store to add the game to your account. The giveaway ends at 4pm BST on June 1st, at which point New Vegas will be replaced with another mysterious free game.
]]>Welcome to The RPS Time Capsule, a new monthly feature we're putting together where every member of the RPS editorial team picks their favourite, bestest best game from a specific year and tells us why that game above all else deserves to be preserved in our freshly minted time pod. It might be that it's the best example of its genre, or it contains a valuable lesson for future generations. This month, we're travelling back to rescue eight games from 2010, and cor, what a good year that was. Too bad almost all of them will end up in the lava bin by the time we're done.
]]>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.
]]>With QuakeCon 2021 set to take place in a virtual fashion next week - and already being in the headlines thanks to an errant schedule listed a 'revitalized' Quake - GOG are offering some deep discounts on some of the best-known ZeniMax franchises including Fallout, Dishonored, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein.
It's a great chance to pick up some fantastic shooters and roleplaying games at bargain basement prices, from recent releases to all-time classics. Here are my personal highlights, plus a big link to the sale itself.
]]>Whenever I get the urge to play a Fallout game, any Fallout game, I end up crossing the Mojave Desert in search of revenge. Fallout: New Vegas’ half-life is longer than the rest of the series to me, because it starts with a simple concept: a bullet to the brain, and a hunt for whodunnit. No vault to escape, no good intentions to follow. Just a desert to wander and a headache to cure. It’s a great RPG that's also over a decade old, and it’s built to be replayed. So let’s do that with mods.
]]>Last week, the creators of the huge Fallout New: Vegas mod The Frontier made it unavailable to download after discovering one developer allegedly posted "animated pedophillic content" on their personal art accounts. Players also criticised innapropriate content in the mod itself, and the devs have now made it availble again with some of the dodgier parts removed. Some contributors have also requested their music and voice lines be removed from the mod too, because they no longer want to be associated with the project.
]]>Fallout: The Frontier, an enormous mod for Fallout: New Vegas, has been years in development and launched just last week. It has now been taken offline by its own creators, because one developer is alleged to have "posted animated pedophillic content" on their personal artist accounts.
]]>Fallout: The Frontier is a huge expansion-sized mod for Fallout: New Vegas that's been in the works for years now. It adds an entirely new map zone and storyline to New Vegas set in the wasteland of snowy Portland where three new factions are at war. The big project is launching today and it sure sounds like folks are excited to play it.
]]>Whether you like wizards, sword-and-board warriors, the irradiated wasteland, vampires, or isometric text-heavy stories, the RPG is the genre that will never let you down. Accross the dizzing number of games available where you can play a role, there's something for everyone - and we've tried to reflect that in our list of the best RPGs on PC. The past couple of years have been great for RPGs, so there are some absolute classics as well as brand spanking new games on this list. And there's more to look forwards to, with rumblings of Dragon Age: Dread Wolf finally on the horizon, and space epic Starfield in our rear view mirror. Whatever else may happen, though, this list will provide you with the 50 best RPGs that you can download and play on PC right now.
]]>Fallout: New Vegas celebrated its 10th birthday last week. Can you believe the best Fallout game came out on October 19th 2010? 2010! To honour an entire decade of Obsidian's brilliant-but-buggy RPG, the game's director Josh Sawyer did a couple of charity streams to raise money for the California Wildlife Relief Fund.
Over the weekend, he managed to raise just under $24,000 (around £18,000) for the cause, all while beating up hordes of radscorpions with dynamite and answering questions about the game's development.
]]>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.
]]>Regicide is once again a topic at dinner, thanks to the release of Crusader Kings III. Your aunt passes you the gravy, and asks about council matters. Your mother comments on the rise in guillotine stocks. Your father, the king, chews his mutton with a rueful and distant glare, probably thinking about war. A cloaked advisor enters and hands you a note on parchment. “The ten worft kingf and queenf in gamef,” it reads. You cough politely, put it in your pocket for later, and continue pushing poisoned food around as if you are eating it.
]]>If you've played Fallout: New Vegas a handful of times you've almost certainly done a double take once or twice when you recognise the voice of a character. Wait, didn't I meet you already? You had a different face then. The voice talent in New Vegas can be spread a bit thin at times, with some actors portraying quite a few characters. This overhaul mod several years in the making is now available to fix that by adding a heck of a lot of new voice talent to the western wasteland.
]]>Death Stranding, the walking simulator about the sad Deliveroo man, is finally out on PC, allowing thousands of keyboard clackers to decode the complex metaphors embedded within such characters as “Mama”, a woman with a baby, and “Heartman”, a man with a pacemaker, played here by an aging and tired Danny Wallace. Look beyond the sub-textual nuance of such masterful creations, however, and you will find a half-decent delivery ‘em up. But is reliable postboy Sam Porter Bridges (a transporter who builds bridges) one of the 7 best couriers in PC games? You can find out by reading closely between the lines of this list.
]]>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.
]]>Kick the tires, whistle at the paint job, spin the keys on your finger like a revolver and then shoot the car with the little laser of unlocking. It’s time to get back on the road. What’s that? Entire country in a state of unprecedented lockdown? I see. Well, lucky for you, we concern ourselves here only with pretend cars, the indoor joy of fictional journeys on virtual roads. Here, my housebound friends, are the 9 best road trips in PC games. Seatbelts on, please.
]]>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."
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>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.
]]>“Truth is the first casualty of first-person shooters,” said the philosopher Ian Videogames. Time has proven him correct. Not a game is developed without some use of smoke and/or mirror. But this week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, we shall not be lying to you. We are journalists and we stand for the Truth with a big 'T'. No more tricksy use of code and polygon, we say. No more lying!
Unless it makes us go really, really fast.
]]>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.
]]>Fallout 76 might have turned out a faintly radioactive dud, but Fallout fans after a fresh serving of post-apocalyptic roleplaying and big choices could do a lot worse than Fallout: New California. It's practically a whole new Fallout game, and free to boot. Here's how you can get it, Wot I Thunk of it, and some tips on extra mods to make this return trip to the desert a memorable one.
]]>Fallout 76 may be on the horizon, with Bethesda preemptively warning players of 'spectacular' bugs, but fans hungry for a more traditional, solo apocalypse are well served today. Fallout: New California might technically be a mod for Fallout: New Vegas, but it's closer to a whole new game. Set out in the New California Republic twenty years before The Courier got shot in the face, there's a new map two thirds the size of New Vegas, and a branching, voiced story that developers Radian-Helix Media reckon can take between six and thirty hours to finish. Below, the trailer.
]]>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.
]]>Listen up, you’re drumming on my time now. What’s the tune? It’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show of course. This week we are talking about music in games, and what makes a good game soundtrack. The bleeps and bloops of Pac Man? Or the orchestral panache of Oblivion? A lot of people requested this topic, so we’ve also done something special – a music quiz! Can you guess the game based on a few seconds of music? Even if you can, I doubt you’ll score higher than Katharine, who it turns out is, uh, quite interested in videogame music.
]]>While Fallout 76 isn't out until November, you can experience a taste of post-apocalyptic multiplayer survival today in a new mod for Fallout: New Vegas. Modder "funkySwadling" has blessed the Mojave Wasteland with the sort of folks you might meet online: jerks camping newbies, jerks spamming terrible sounds and shouting hateful epithets, and groups of players geared to the nines who'll be tickled by your puny weapons. The Fallout 76 Experience continues the fine tradition of mods for old games parodying newer games in the series, and I... hated the bit I played, in the way I'm supposed to?
]]>It is looking like a very fine year indeed to be a Fallout fan. Even if you're not on board with Fallout 76 taking the series online, we've got two full-game-length mods on the way, both due out before the end of 2018. Fallout: The Frontier is an unofficial expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, and has you heading to the frozen north to aid a crew of New California Republic deserters in a massive new map (as big as the editor allows) against a well equipped enemy force. Check out the dramatic and explosion-filled new trailer within.
]]>While the recently announced Fallout 76 might be diverging from series standards, it looks like fans of traditional dialogue and roleplaying-heavy Fallout adventures won't be entirely left out this year. Originally announced in 2010 as Project Brazil, Fallout: New California is effectively a whole new Fallout game built on top of the New Vegas engine by modding crew Radian-Helix Media, and it's due for release on October 23rd. Within, a quite dramatic announcement trailer featuring some decent enough amateur voice-work and a whole lot of shooting.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Since its foundation in 2003, Obsidian Entertainment has worked with seven different publishers. Commencing with LucasArts on Knights of the Old Republic II, Obsidian has since signed contracts with Atari, SEGA, Bethesda, Square Enix, Ubisoft and most recently, Paradox Interactive. In fact, up until Pillars of Eternity [official site], every single game Obsidian had made was funded and distributed by a different publisher.
This is a highly unusual state of affairs, and has proved precarious more than once in the company's history. But it has also provided Obsidian with a unique insight into how the world of publishing works, and how the relationship between developer and publisher has changed in the last couple of decades. This topic is especially pertinent today, as new methods of funding and distributing games have seen a significant shift in the power dynamic between developers and publishers.
I spoke to CEO Feargus Urquhart about how it all works (and doesn't).
]]>Crumbs, four years since we last posted about wildly ambitious Fallout: New Vegas prequel mod Project Brazil [ModDB page] and it's still not finished. It is a mighty big project, adding a fully-voiced new campaign in a new wasteland. But hold strong! "We are beginning our final approach to releasing this gargantuan mod," developers Radian-Helix Media said today, repeating that they expect to launch it later this year. They also revealed that it'll actually be named Fallout: New California.
]]>Video games always come with an expectation that the player will suspend disbelief to some extent. Genetically engineered super-soldier clones don’t exist, radiation has never and will never work like that, and overweight Italian plumbers could never make that jump. In most cases, if we are unwilling or unable to suspend our disbelief, we may well struggle to enjoy the game and our questioning of the basics of its ‘reality’ would probably make us insufferable to be around.
There are some games however, where the realities of our world are key to enjoying the game. These are the builders like City Skylines, simulators and sports games like Prison Architect and FIFA, and even crime games like Grand Theft Auto. One genre has a particular problem when it comes to maintaining a foot in the real world yet still creating a setting where one can have fun without becoming mired in morally questionable events and choices: historically based games. And among historical games, few subjects are as complex to represent as slavery. Many have tried, from Europa Universalis IV and Victoria II to Civilization and Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, and in this article I'll investigate the portrayal and use of slavery in these games and more to explore what they get right, what they get wrong, and how games could do better in future.
]]>One of the main reasons I got into RPGs back in the day was that if you bought one, you were getting a lot of game for your money. That was important when there was only one birthday and one Christmas a year, and not much chance that some relative might pop their clogs in sync with Ultima VI coming out. Years later I no longer need the Grim Reaper's help to fill my collection, and other genres have done their best to replace scouring maps for objectives with, y'know, game, but there's still few that can match it in terms of raw Stuff. It takes a lot of content to fill an RPG.
This week then, I'm turning the spotlight on a few small bits and pieces from various games that I think back on fondly. Not entire games. Just a few ideas and moments from them that stuck with me, whether I liked the actual game they were in at all. Add yours in the comments, yadda yadda, you know the drill. Also, I thought I'd try and pick a few things that aren't brought up that often, hence the lack of, say, Heather Poe from Vampire: Bloodlines or any of The Witcher III's awesome stuff. Got that? Cool.
Note: you can browse through the list using the arrows alongside the image at the top of the page, or using the left and right arrows on your very own keyboard.
]]>I must confess, since finishing Siege of Dragonspear the other week, I've not actually fired up any RPGs. It's not for want of them to play. I'm particularly looking forward to finally trying Final Fantasy IX, which I missed back in the day, and Beamdog's recently announced interquel, Planescape Torment: The Nameless One And A Half. (It's very similar to the original, only now whenever someone asks "What can change the nature of a man?" a furious little goblin pops onto the screen to yell "#notallmen!")
The problem has simply been timing - not having a nice satisfying chunk of time to really settle down for an epic experience. So instead, I thought I'd take a look at a few speed-runs, and see how fifty hours suddenly becomes a minute and a half... provided you don't include the hundreds of hours to get to that point. Here's a few of them I dug up to make your completion times look like crap, from RPGs old and new.
]]>The times change, and we change with the times. Or in the case of RPGs, not. I've always felt this a bit of a shame, especially in games like World of Warcraft, where your character is officially hanging around long enough to see the leaves fall off the trees and the snow to cover up the capital cities. That's why I was quite keen on both Fallout 4 taking the time to redecorate Diamond City a little for at least Halloween and Christmas, and last week, to see a mod take the next step and give the Commonwealth a makeover for all seasons in a way that nobody's really tried since Lords of Midnight 3 way back in the 90s. Whole minutes of fun with the system clock there!
But then as now, it's hard not to start wondering how time could be given its due as more than the fire in which bad movies turn out to be even worse than they initially seemed. Maybe it could be our friend too, and in so many interesting ways.
]]>So I'm wandering through Fallout 4 [official site], and I come across this old diner, sitting there, neon still lit, almost jaunty in a destroyed land. There's a guy outside called Wolfgang, a leathered drug dealer, who explains that a mother and son have set up a shop in this diner, and that he wants paying for goods he's sold to the son.
I go inside, aiming to resolve the problem between the dealer and the son, and get into conversation with the mother. But, looking down, I notice that, despite trading from this place, she hasn't thought to remove a skeleton from one of the booths. Because why would you remove a skeleton from your shop? Or any of the filth that’s accumulated on the floor?
It’s just one of the weird little things about the world of Fallout 4 that I find confusing and alienating. Little things that nudge me out out my suspension of disbelief that this is a place. Instead of enveloping myself in all its detail, it just gets me wondering, absently, is this how it would be?
]]>Above: The Murderettes
I briefly mention how much I dug Fallout 4's colourful, playful clothing options in my review, but given that my hard drive is full of screenshots of that stuff, it seems a waste not to give it its own post. The costumes are, as far as I'm concerned, Fallout 4 [official site] at its absolute best. Take a look below.
]]>Through a combination of avoidance and intentionally vague marketing, I've managed to come this close to the release of Fallout 4 [official site] without knowing a great deal about the setting and plot. Yes, the bombs have fallen and, yes, there's at least the one Vault involved in whatever happens next, but I had no idea what I'd be looking for out there in the New England wasteland. A Water Chip? A Garden of Eden Creation Kit? The Brotherhood of Steel's corporate headquarters?
The launch trailer, embedded below, told me more about the game than anything else I've seen to date. It also made me rather more excited than I'd been until now.
]]>Desert-dwellers rejoice, Fallout: Autumn Leaves [official site] heralds a return to the post-apocalyptic Mojave in a mod similar in size to an official DLC expansion.
Inspired by previous Fallout installments, Planetscape: Torment and Arcanum, Fallout: Autumn Leaves dumps The Courier into Hypatia, a never before seen town just east of Novac. From here, he must once again scour the barren Desert Wasteland in a journey which, according to the mod's page, will last seven to ten hours all told. Check the trailer below.
]]>The other day I grumped a little at the idea of our dutifully posting all seven of the Fallout 4 [official site] S.P.E.C.I.A.L. videos over the coming weeks, but you lot rightfully called me out on my cynicism. These cute animated shorts are doing a handy job of summarising Fallout's systems and general attitude.
So here's the fourth one then, this time looking at that most alien of concepts to me, Charisma. I particularly liked its depiction of Ye Archetypal Roleplaying Inn.
]]>You shouldn't really eye up the dessert menu before your main course has arrived, but sometimes the need to know that profiteroles are definitely available gets the better of one. And so it is that ears are already pricking about Fallout 4 [official site]'s post-launch stuff things, including word of downloadable content and a vague window for its mod support.
]]>I have been lost in my own TARDIS for fifteen minutes.
Having finally located it in a junk yard in Fallout: New Vegas's Mojave Desert I appear doomed to wander its innards, experiencing all the glory of time and space that can be offered by grey corridors which don't quite correspond to anything I can draw in two dimensions.
In short: the Fallout Who Vegas [Nexus page] mod has exposed me as the world's worst timelord.
]]>The weekend crept up on us silently, catching us snoozing or distracted flicking through magazines. But now it's here! Loudly! In our faces! And has brought a dog! Read on to be wholly surprised by which game many of us are playing this weekend, then why not tell us what you're clacking away at?
]]>Out from the expanding heap of creation birthed from the modding community comes one particularly impressive mod for Fallout: New Vegas [official site]. It's Fallout Who Vegas, a project that combines two of Earth's most beautiful and pure creations: the Fallout universe and Matt Smith's lovely, big face. Yes, friends, it is a Doctor Who in Fallout mod.
Fallout Who Vegas has been in development for five years, an intensive hobby for its creators at The Foundry - a little modding community of developers, modellers and animators. An initial release happened a few years back and the team has been tweaking things and adding all things Whovian in the time since. Now, finally, the mod is out in its final release form. Video after the jump.
]]>It's hardly a Bethesda RPG if you can't replace some part of it with the chugging terror of Thomas the Tank Engine, but Fallout 4's mod tools won't be ready at the game's launch on November 10th. Speaking to IGN, Bethesda's VP of Marketing Pete Hines said that, their "entire focus is on finishing the game."
]]>Bethesda are taking advantage of the encroaching release of Fallout 4 [official site] with plans to release a hefty collection of Fallout games. They're calling it, quite naturally, Fallout Anthology.
Put a circle around October 2nd in your calendars; the Anthology includes all five games in the Fallout series from the original through New Vegas, and all the relevant DLC in between. There's also space in its fake mini-nuke box reserved for Fallout 4, which is due out around a month later on November 10th.
]]>Bethesda have a spectacular talent for making moth-eaten ideas feel like revolutionary concepts: Fallout 4 [official site] will let you play a property baron who constructs not just houses but connected settlements from bits of duct tape and broken globe. I was beside myself with excitement at this news – giddy, even – but not because of any particular flair on display in the five-minute crafting reveal at E3. As my New Vegas mod list and cack-handed fumbling with the Creation Kit will attest, I’m a sucker for anything that lets me inhabit the Wasteland. The idea of reshaping it by my own hand (benevolent, naturally) is intoxicating, even if the mechanics are crap.
And crafting mechanics are almost always crap.
]]>This isn't a guide, because it's designed to be an open discussion about which other fan-made doohickeys are best bolted onto Fallout: New Vegas while we wait for the more vibrant Fallout 4 [official site] as much as it is my own recommendations. I want you, the veteran connoisseur of a game I skipped over at the time, to tell me and other readers what the must-have FNV mods are. But I'm also going to share a few I'm using, which have dramatically reduced the severity of the post-apocalyptic RPG's savage ugly-stick beating. They've added some of the fidelity and most of all colour that we cooed at in Fallout 4 footage - a game which suggested an altogether more appealing wasteland.
]]>What are the best Steam Summer Sale deals? Each day for the duration of the sale, we'll be offering our picks - based on price, what we like, and what we think more people should play. Read on for the five best deals from day 9 of the sale.
]]>There was a trailer for a new videogame today. The internet seemed quite taken with it. We don't actually know much about Fallout 4 at this stage, but I went through the trailer scene by scene to see what confirmations and implications I could glean from it. 40-odd screengrabs below, with annotation wibble for each. Click on any one of them for a 1080p version and gallery thinger (though bear in mind they're grabs from a trailer so aren't exactly After Eight-crisp.)
]]>An exploration of addiction in gaming, whether as a mechanical device or something more.
“Looking for a fix, man?” asked the unscrupulous dealer who met The Courier at the gates of Freeside. “I got what you need.”
]]>In the second and final part of a conversation with Josh Sawyer of Obsidian (part one), we discuss how the design of Pillars of Eternity differs from Fallout: New Vegas. That involves a discussion of New Vegas' post-release support, official and otherwise, and the pros and cons of traditional RPG systems. Of particular note - why Pillars of Eternity does not have a Speech skill, or any other skill of that sort.
With contributions from executive producer Brandon Adler, we also discuss the role of Paradox as publisher and the benefits of digital distribution, and end with a tribute to nineties RPG, Darklands.
]]>I can remember covering the first wave of big Kickstarter games in all their crowd-sourced hype, and feeling conflicted with every post. It was so exciting that all this could happen, traditional barriers between games and their players so suddenly eroded, but at the same time it all seemed like so many promises, talk of a new golden age that was so still so impossibly far away. A couple of years later though, and here we are - these games are steadily becoming a reality, from the so far excellent (Elite 4) to the inescapably ugly (Godus). Where will post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland 2, one of the first big names to be crowdfunded, wind up? We find out very, very soon.
In the meantime, we get to see how it's spent some of its less essential groats, with a live-action intro intended to set the scorched earth scene. It tries very hard to avoid saying "war never changes."
]]>Could it be? Is it even remotely possible? Has a major videogame publisher truly decided to make a sequel to one of its best-selling games? O brave new world, that has such speculation in't.
Bethesda alternating between Elderses and Falloutses seemed pretty much a given to me, so when talk arose around a URL apparently bought by Bethesda and entitled 'Survivor 2299', a return to the post-apocalypse was far from a surprise. Whether the website really is anything to do with Bethesda remains open to interpretation, but even if it isn't you should feel free to smack me around the chops with a rainbow trout and call me Charlie McArse if we don't start hearing official talk of Fallout 4 within the next year.
]]>I'm most distressed that I didn't get a chance to say hello to Chris 'Planescape Torment' Avellone during my limited time at Rezzed. Especially because the only other time I've met him when was when I was blind drunk on French wine and couldn't manage anything more than a witless reference to talking skulls. Still, they do say you should never meet you heroes, so at least I haven't had to risk discovering he has bad breath or doesn't like eye contact or fiddles with his nipples during conversation. Instead, I can live vicariously and safely through this video of his hour-long natter about Obisidian's strange history, his work at Black Isle and plans for the upcoming mega-Kickstartered Project Eternity.
]]>On paper, Fallout: Project Brazil sounds like the stuff irradiated, scorpion-coated dreams are made of. It's a ridiculously ambitious, fan-made prequel mod for New Vegas spanning a new vault, an entire new wasteland the size of Fallout 3's, and multiple story-driven, highly choice-oriented episodes. The team that assembled it, meanwhile, comes from various corners of the professional entertainment world, which is - in part - the reason it took so long to finally see the sepia toned light of day. But now it's here, in the gnarled, glowing ghoulflesh. I am kind of maybe excited a little a lot. But what's actually in this installment? Wellllll...
]]>Obsidian's a company that's always stricken me as bizarrely restless. Despite its near-legendary Black Isle legacy, the Project Eternity and South Park developer's rarely had an easy time finding a comfortable place in the industry. But then, when you think about it, that's not entirely surprising. Both RPGs and storytelling in games - Obsidian's wheelhouses - have spent countless years in constant flux. And though recent times and a massively successful Kickstarter have given the developer some solid ground to stand on, the eager hands of change are once again threatening to yank the rug out from under it. Uncertainty's permeated the entire industry as of late, but Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart has no intention of blindly following the future. His plan? To redefine the whole RPG genre. During the recent DICE Summit in Las Vegas, he and I chatted about that.
]]>When you speak with someone in Las Vegas, the topic of conversation naturally shifts to Vegas-themed things. In the case of Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart, that meant Star Wars, of course. Oh, and I guess Fallout: New Vegas. During a DICE chat that lasted innumerable moons, months, seasons, and centuries, Urquhart and I briefly touched on his studio's return to its old techno-magically irradiated Black Isle haunt. “Oh, we'd love to do Fallout: New Vegas 2," he enthused. "It would be awesome." But how would that work? And is Bethesda on board with the idea? Here's what Urquhart had to say.
]]>I am sad. I am sad because Fallout: New Vegas' Project Brazil mod isn't available yet, which means I can only ogle its incredibly impressive-looking peaks and valleys from afar. So here's the skinny: it doesn't actually take place in Brazil. Instead, the story begins in California years before New Vegas' courier ever began his promising career by being shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave. Your new main character's goal? To reach Los Angeles. But the entire new wasteland of San Bernardino is rife with factional conflicts, and oh goodness also there is this: "The vision of Fallout 2 will be honoured by Project Brazil. Project Brazil is a quieter, more harsh and severe world than Fallout 3 or New Vegas. It feels like a real place spotted with rare moments of absurdity and fear, split between multiple rising civilizations all trying to fight for what they want or need in a world recovering from the Great War." Yes. Yesssssss.
]]>Fallout: New Vegas was a glitch-ridden, unwieldy beast of a game, but it's a testament to the wonderful (and very Black-Isle) world Obsidian crafted that - in spite of rampant instability and a fiddly engine - it still stands as one of my absolute favorite games. And in spite of the couple-hundred-some-odd hours I've put into it, I want more. Semi-recently, I had quite a joyous time with the harder-core-than-thou JSawyer mod, but now I'm getting ready to dig into an official-unofficial project that positively dwarfs it. In short, a modder by the name of "Moburma" went sifting through New Vegas' code and excavated scrapped bits and bobs of all shapes and sizes. The end result? A restoration project that borders on insane.
]]>Let there much be rejoicing. Go on, rejoice. Well, at least smile. No? Well, how about a smiley instead? You won't have to use your face at all. You only have to press two buttons. Come on, let's do it together. On three. One, two, three : And again. One, two, three )
There now, that wasn't so hard, was it? The reason for this rejoicing is that Wasteland 2 just hit its latest crowdsourcing bonus target, $2.1 million - and as well as meaning it's now accrued some 231% of its original target, it confirms that Obsidian's Chris Avellone is coming onboard to co-develop Brian Fargo's post-apocalyptic RPG.
]]>Interplay founder Brian Fargo and his studio inXile Entertainment hope to be responsible for the next big Kickstarter-funded game, having recently announced plans for a sequel to Fargo's 1988 roleplaying game Wasteland - perhaps best known as the predecessor to Fallout. Wasteland 2 will be a turn-based, party-based roleplaying game in a post-apocalyptic setting - in other words, in theory what veteran Fallout fans have been crying out for. The same might be said of anyone who feels that today's RPGs have abandoned their roots in favour of big, glossy action. A few days ago, I chatted to the effusive Mr Fargo about how the project is going, why now, how far along the design is, who he's making it for, why old-school RPGs seemed to die out, how long the Kickstarter bubble can last and the importance or lack thereof of audio and cinematics to a game that's all about cause and effect.
]]>It's the Duke Nukem Forever of gaming-based legal scuffles, and apparently it's over at last. We don't yet know the details - i.e. who's won, who's paying who what and most of all who, if anyone, will be releasing a Fallout MMO - but we do know that, after an awful lot of back and forth and he said no he said but he started it but yeah but no a settlement has finally been reached in the long-running Bethesda and Interplay battle.
]]>The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the sequel to Oblivion, launches tomorrow. I've been playing the PC version of it during every waking hour of the last three and a half days, and most of the non-waking hours too. I'm still not really ready to tell you what I think. I will anyway.
]]>Here's the story so far. Interplay are developing a Fallout MMO title and Bethesda are attempting to block further development through application of The Law. When their previous injunction failed, Bethesda took things all the way to the United States District Court of Appeals, claiming that the previous court had "misapplied the law". If it was indeed a misapplication, the very same slip up has occurred once more. Stop misapplying Law, courts, you're getting it all over the drapes.
]]>Good, in fact excellent, tidings for those who find themselves able to enjoy Fallouts both old and new, and for anyone who lived through the 90s heyday of PC RPGs. Tim Cain, the main brain behind the original Fallout and later co-founder of the much-missed Troika, has fetched up at Obsidian. Until this July, he was at Carbine, working since 2005 on what turned out to be Wildstar, but today we discover that he's now Senior Programmer at the Fallout: New Vegas/ KOTOR 2 devs. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE.
]]>The great and terrible Final Battle between Bethesda and Interplay regarding the latter's right to create an MMO based on the Fallout licence they part-sold to the former some years ago is still yet to be fought, but the litigation-lovin' folk at Bethesda have seen a potentially major setback in their efforts to take full control of wasteland adventuring. For a while, the two parties have been locked in snarling battle about whether Interplay are still allowed to make a Fallout MMO, with Bethesda claiming they failed to meet time and budgetary criteria outlined in the original license-selling deal. Interplay have claimed they've stuck the agreement, and thus continued with working on said MMO (actually contracting developing Masthead Studios to do it for them). Bethesda tried to stop 'em, but a US judge has now stopped Bethesda from stopping them. Got that?
]]>I stopped paying attention to the Fallout: New Vegas DLCs a while back. Not out of a lack of interest mind, it's just that I have a preorder for the Goatee Edition from Amazon, from when they accidentally listed it early, and it was only priced at £20. I'll just dive back into the Mojave Wasteland once that gets shipped to me, and I'll gorge myself all the DLC in one tasty feast. This fourth DLC release for New Vegas is titled Lonesome Road. When you come, you'll walk it alone...
]]>It's the weirdest Fallout: New Vegas DLC yet. I went back to the Mojave to pit my brains against the worst that 1950s B-Movie science has to offer. Is Old World Blues an enjoyable trip?
]]>The next bit of Fallout: New Vegas DLC, which will be called Old World Blues, will be available on July 19th. That's the first image of it up there. What we know at present is that the plot is based on your being a "lab rat" in one of the experiments that produced many of the mutants that inhabit the game, and you will be able to either fight your kidnappers, or join with them to take on a "larger threat". It will also raise the level cap and give you some other options, such as talking to robot appliances.
]]>I have been to the Zion National Park in Utah, but I don't remember there being any murderous men with bandaged-wrapped faces, desert renegades being killed in slow-motion or weird naked masked dudes. It's possible I just went to the wrong bit, though - I'm not very observant. Fortunately, the second spot of Fallout: New Vegas DLC means to address my errant tourism. It's called Honest Hearts, it's out May 17 (same day as the Witcher 2 and Fable 3 - the gods of roleplaying can be so very cruel), and it goes a little something like this...
]]>And I can pluralise DLC like that, because I am in charge of language. Anyway, the Bethesda Blog has a bouquet of details on the forthcoming New Vegas content, and there is three of it: Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. Honest Hearts is due on May 17th and "takes you on an expedition to the unspoiled wilderness of Utah’s Zion National Park", then Old World Blues, which appears some time in June, enables discovery of "how some of the Mojave’s mutated monsters came to be when you unwittingly become a lab rat in a science experiment gone awry." Finally there's Lonesome Road in July. That "brings the courier’s story full circle when you are contacted by the original Courier Six, a man by the name of Ulysses who refused to deliver the Platinum Chip at the start of New Vegas." I don't know what that means, but it sounds like something that would happen in a Fallout game.
]]>Times were an awful lot easier for Interplay back in 1998. A string of hit franchises, apparent sovereignty of the new RPG kingdom and, it appears, big, brassy enough cajones to start up a film division. While nothing much ever came of this, we now know that a Fallout movie was in the works, based on the first game. Whatever would it have been like? Let's find out.
]]>It's hard not to feel at least slightly :( when a series that began on PC apparently gives this old platform short thrift. Such was the case in December, when it appeared Fallout: New Vegas' DLC Dead Money had been greedily exclusivorised by the dark beast that is the Three Hundred And Sixtieth Xbox. Fortunately, such punishment of the faithful was only temporary.
Gentlethings, further post-apocalyptic adventuring awaits us after all. In which case, I shall rescind my earlier :( and replace it with a :)
]]>Beyond Black Mesa turned up to a mixed reception last week, and due to taking a few... liberties led to internet troubadours suggesting what they felt were superior fan-films. Here's one of them, set in the Fallout 3 universe. As well as being built on a whole lot of love, attention to detail and - gasp! - decent acting, it starts with a heartfelt plea that Bethesda doesn't sue them, which I think we can all get behind. Recreated weapons, costumes, crumbled bridges and 50s ad reels await...
]]>Obsidian's high-selling (five million in its first month, they say) Fallout 3 expandosequel New Vegas might be somewhat, ah, divisive, but it's certainly got plenty of earnestly enthusiastic fans. And they will certainly be glad to hear that a megapatch landed yesterday, purporting to finally fix up a ton of the RPG's infamous bugs. It doesn't look like this is going to be a KOTOR 2 situation, thankfully - Obsidian/Bethesda seem pretty keen to get this slightly battered watch ticking properly again.
]]>Obsidian’s pseudo-sequel to Bethesda’s Fallout 3 hits the UK tomorrow, arriving amid a raft of positive reviews. But I see you there, perched atop that blasted rock, canteen in hand, waiting for the official RPS review. That wait is over. Here’s Wot I Think of New Vegas.
There’s a distant sound that can be heard throughout your time with New Vegas. Quieter than the cheery 1930s pop hits that warble from your radio, quieter even than the chirps of night-time insects, or the long gasps of wind blowing across the wasteland. It is the sound of Obsidian phoning this game in. I’m talking long distance, reversed charges, not-giving-a-fuck.
]]>That was fast! The New Vegas edition of the Fallout 3 "G.E.C.K." mod tools has been released, and even boasts a new, improved tool for editing dialogue with "built-in support for low-intelligence dialogue options". Modders? Get modding. Everybody else? Enjoy the incredibly disturbing video of a New Vegas bug I've left beneath the jump. I'll be happy when we're playing games that are meant to behave like that.
My own experience of New Vegas has become a lot more stable after my outburst yesterday. Seems I had a run of bad luck, compounded by the game not telling me about several different and VERY IMPORTANT controls. Hopefully I'll have my review up by tomorrow afternoon.
]]>I'm only about four hours into Fallout: New Vegas, and while I'm enjoying myself, I've already come to one saddening conclusion. It's a bit broke.
Below you'll find a list of all the mysterious happenings and straight-up bugs I've encountered so far, a list Jim suggests I call "Getting Glitched In Vegas". He's good, that Jim.
]]>Hmm. It's proving quite the day for PC Game/Sequential Art cross-over. Following on from the L4D2 comic I noticed an interview at Comic Book Resources with Obsidian's Chris Avellone about writing the Fallout: New Vegas prequel comic that Dark Horse are publishing. There's been an upsurge of gaming comics in the last few years, with the first issue of Wildstorm's Gears of War comic being apparently the biggest selling of the year... but it's still relatively rare that they're actually written by the creative minds behind the games themselves. It'll be out on in Hardback on October 19th - the same day as its US release - and has a rather lovely hyper-detailed Geoff Darrow cover. If you've got an Iphone or Ipad, you can view a full preview here. I haven't so, will just have to twiddle my fingers. Of course, with an Eisner-nomination for his Clone Wars comic work, Chris is hardly a newcomer to the medium, so it will hopefully be acceptably nifty.
]]>Ashes. All is ashes. All I've eaten is ashes. I've slept on ashes. I'm covered in ashes, following an unfortunate incident in which 31 Finnish journalists mistook me for an ashtray. I thought of Quintin, and how he had talked of sleeping on a mattress made of phoenix down. Perhaps he could spare a cup of water to throw at me, to wash some of the soot from my face. But then I thought of how he'd sneer and say how that water came from the highest mountain spring in Scotland, and that I owed him £500 for it. No. Better to carry on, to my next appointment, to a real world of ashes. To New Vegas!
]]>When is Fallout: New Vegas coming out? I didn't know. Then I read a news story on VG247. And then I did. It's October 22nd. This year. Not next year. Not last year. This year. October 22nd is the date for the release of Fallout: New Vegas.
The E3 trailer for it is also totally out. It features things going bang.
]]>I have to admit that Fallout 3 was one of those games that I played a bit of and then thought "well, I'll come back to that." I never did go back, and consequently I haven't done much to follow New Vegas, which is due at the end of the year (and is what a cynical person might suggest Obsidian had been working on when they should have been making Alpha Protocol shine... I'm sure it's far more complicated than that, of course.) Anyway, it's a big standalone sequel to Fallout 3, which takes place in and around Las Vegas, which was largely untouched by the nuclear apocalypse. Of course, the landscape remains typical blasted, and mutants have words of advice for you, as you'll see below. The game is out in "Q4".
]]>I think Alec is writing a preview for one of the other denizens of the game-o-sphere about this game right at this moment. I am sure he'll link to it later. But anyway, the new bit of Fallout 3, which is being developed by the lovely Obsidian for release towards the end of this year, is called New Vegas, and it's looking like it might please a few apocalypse-lovers. Bethesda sent over their latest images, and I've posted 'em up below. Click for full size!
]]>The trailer. The trailer never changes. Yes, the first teaser for Obisidian's upcoming Fallout 3.5, New Vegas, has arrived. As has a release date, ish - this Autumn. I.e. yer traditional pre-Christmas silly-season, then. Find the video and some words about it above. I mean below. Gosh, you'd have thought I'd have learned that by now, wouldn't you?
]]>News just in from Gamasutra. Bethesda's Pete Hines, speaking in London, revealed that KOTOR2/NWN2 veterans Obsidian are working on a new Fallout game going under the name "Fallout: New Vegas". The only facts we have are that it's not Fallout Tactics, Brotherhood of Steel and doesn't impact what the actual main Bethesda Fallout team are doing. Which does make the puzzle be exactly what it could be. My gut response guess would be something using the Fallout 3 engine, in a locale well away from where Bethesda are operating - perhaps, I dare say, in Vegas - and probably set in a different period. But that's just nonsense I've just made up, obv. It could be a Fallout Slot Machine Game for all I know. The comments thread is your place for speculation.
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