Fallout: New Vegas

[Squid Division]

IGN(!) has a bunch of new info about New Vegas. The game sounds awesome and like it might be incorporating stuff from Red Dead with the gangs and STALKER with the weapon mods.

New Vegas=Fallout 3(Oblivion + guns) + STALKER (Fallout 3 + Far Cry 2) + RDR (GTA + horses)

so

New Vegas = 2Oblivions + 2guns + Far Cry 2 + GTA + Horses?

[lobotomy42]

It's all being done in the original Fallout 3 engine, with some modifications - I don't think the gameplay will be *that* different from Fallout 3. The one aspect I'm excited about is having Avellone & co (from Fallout 2) back at the writing/direction/design helm. I'm optimistic, but still cautious.

[elmuerte]

Looking forward to that. Could use a new fallout with guns.

[Squid Division]

I think that the weapon mods and faction mechanics/hardcore mode will make it an incredibly different experience, even if the gameplay isn't necessarily very different.

[Nappi]

I loved Fallout 3 and I'm really looking forward to this game.

At first, I thought there is some kind of Infinity Ward/Treyarch thing going on with the development and was a bit worried about the quality of the final product. I guess that's still sort of the case but I was pleasantly surprised to hear that there are original Fallout people working on this game. The small improvements they have made sound really good to me.

[elmuerte]

some kind of IW/Treyarch?!

It's Obsidian who's working on the game.

[Moelman]

This is easily one of the games I'm looking forward to most this year. I just played Fallout 3 late last year, and I loved it. Chris Avellone is one of my favorite game designers (and Obsidian is one of my favorite studios).

[Nappi]

some kind of IW/Treyarch?!

It's Obsidian who's working on the game.

I meant that the situation (the game not being developed by Bethesda) reminds me a bit of that Call of Duty thing where Infinity Ward makes the great ones and Treyarch makes the not so great ones (my opinion). I don't know much about Obsidian and almost nothing about the nature of the deal between them and Bethesda. I now assume that Obsidian is awesome and I should never have doubted them.

[elmuerte]

Oh like that. Well, Bethesda was new to Fallout, and also a bit new to the RPG style of Fallout. Obsidian is partially the original Black Ilse, the guys who made Fallout in the first place. The also worked on Baldur's Gate. Created Icewind Dale, Planescape. As Obsidian they created KOTO2, and Neverwinter Nights.

So, Fallout is in very good hands with Obsidian.

[Snooglebum]

I'm not terribly interested in this, as I think I'm one of the few people who liked Oblivion more the Fallout 3. I am mutant human.

[Squid Division]

The one thing I'm very confused about is the way it looks. I don't have a problem with them reusing assets, but they look...different...somehow. The textures look off, like they're brighter or have lower contrast or something.

[elmuerte]

I'm not terribly interested in this, as I think I'm one of the few people who liked Oblivion more the Fallout 3. I am mutant human.

You also liked Oblivion more than Morrowind?

[Snooglebum]

You also liked Oblivion more than Morrowind?

Oh yeah. WAY more. They pretty much improved on everything in Oblivion, with the exception that the world became rather bland, sadly.

[MrHoatzin]

Oblivion's forests were uniformly phthalo green. At least Fallout's drab wasteland had the decency to be coherently monochromatic. Morrowind, as ugly as it was (and it aged even worse), had some really nice variation to the landscape.

[DanJW]

Oblivion's forests were uniformly phthalo green. At least Fallout's drab wasteland had the decency to be coherently monochromatic. Morrowind, as ugly as it was (and it aged even worse), had some really nice variation to the landscape.

Agreed, but all hail the PC version for being modifiable. Making the forests nicer was just one of the many mods I used.

[mikemariano]

I don't agree much with this Lament of a Fallout Fan, but he makes a good point about VATS in New Vegas:

I’m sure you’ll agree that the Fallout series is in desperate need of even more brown.

I do think it's absurd that Fallout is so brown. Any modern picture of Chernobyl will show you creepy abandoned buildings surrounded by green forest.

That's what Fallout needs: more trees and fewer senior citizens! Cancer rates should be through the roof!

[juv3nal]

I'll pick this up to see what Obsidian does with the storytelling (and I'm not too fussed with the graphics either way), but to be honest I never finished FO3. I got hit by some bugs (npcs, include a potential quest giver randomly dying on me) and just lost heart at the prospect of either redoing a fairly lengthy section or skipping some stuff.

[Squid Division]

Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear bomb site. Look at photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there aren't many trees left there if at all. I don't really have a problem with the browness of nature, it comes with the setting/circumstances, but the buildings and stuff should be more colorful, which I think Vegas will provide.

[elmuerte]

I never finished FO3. I got hit by some bugs (npcs, include a potential quest giver randomly dying on me) and just lost heart at the prospect of either redoing a fairly lengthy section or skipping some stuff.

That was an other crappy feature of FO3, the ability to jump ahead in the story by going somewhere you shouldn't have been.

[brkl]

Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear bomb site. Look at photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there aren't many trees left there if at all.

Oh, I don't know.

But it's not about realism, is it? It's more of a design question. I wouldn't know how to present a world like Fallout's with bright colours.

[Squid Division]

I was more referring to this but I agree.

[MrHoatzin]

I never bothered to sit down and subtract some numbers. How long has it been in the world of Fallout 3 since the world was nuked to hell?

[Squid Division]

200 years.

[Garple]

That's what Fallout needs: more trees

Even assuming all trees weren't destroyed by the nuclear blast, nearly all the trees would have probably been cleared for building shelters, firewood etc... don't you think? I imagine that a situation like the denizens of the Wasteland found themselves in during the early days after the bombings (before the vaults were built and stuff like that) would lead to a hoarding of all available resources, much like the resource hoarding you find yourself doing in the game. That was one of my favorite parts of Fallout 3: the metagame of managing your inventory, deciding which of your precious possessions you'd sacrifice so you could run again and stockpiling radroach meat and old cereal in case you ran out of stimpaks.

[brkl]

People used trees for everything for a long time. There are many trees.