Fallout 3! sorta kinda

[Zygar]

Think I'll check it out when I get home.

http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/view.php?id=265

[Winnow]

I saw that yesterday but forgot to post it. I know there's a few Fallout fans here. It looks playable enough to be worth a look.

[Hesten]

/cry, i want Fallout 3. Feel like playing the first 2 again now

Can just hope Bethesda will not fuck up whatever they are planning with the licence

[Winnow]

The real Fallout 3 is scheduled fro Fall 2008 from Bethesda:

The released trailer (done in-engine) sports plenty of treats for the long-time Fallout fan. First up is the Ink Spots singing "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire." The popular 1940s singing group's hit "Maybe" was used in the opening cut scene for the first Fallout. As the camera pulls back the player can see a toy "Nuka-Cola" truck and several empty Nuka-Cola bottles, two faded advertisements exhorting people to sign up for the U.S. military and Vault-Tec's Vault Boy telling readers that "their future lies underground."

As the camera pulls out of the ruined bus, the viewer is treated to a destroyed cityscape (recognizable as Washington D.C.) with a ruined Washington monument and a building ad for the "CorVega." The clip concludes with the fearsome visage of a Brotherhood of Steel trooper in powered armor and the dulcet tones of Ron Perlman intoning the series' tag line -- "War. War never changes."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxSdbSNc ... 2Dreleased

[Hesten]

BAD Winnow, stop making me drool. I cant wait for fall 2008

[Winnow]

oops, wrong thread!

[Winnow]

wow, this game looks good!

There's a new article scanned from the Game Informer about Fallout 3. You can see the scanned pages here:

http://www.nma-fallout.com/

Here's the text which can also be found:

http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=36883

Fallout 3

Playstation 3/XBox 360/PC
Style: Action RPG
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Release: Fall 2008

You were born in the Vault. And you'll die in the Vault. It's what you've always believed. For 200 years your people have survived down here, in this test tube of a home - bleached clean steel walls, sterilized floors, and dozens of fellow survivors crammed into this self-sufficient hole in the ground. Xenophobia is a lifestyle. The world above is gone, annihilated centuries ago in one brief radiation-filled flash, leaving you here to live out your sad existence behind a massive metal gate. At least that's what you believed until just hours ago, when it became clear that your father - the only family you have in the world - disappeared from the Vault without warning or explanation. So now you stand before that imposing portal, the great bolts that hold it in place sliding free from their mooring, ready to pursue him into the wastes. With a shudder, the breach slides open before you. Having never seen the glare of sun, the world beyond appears first in a haze and slides slowly into focus as you step out onto real soil for the first time. A shattered land lies spread out before you, the ancient husks of crumpled cars broiling beneath the midday sun, ruined and forgotten buildings dotting the ground out to the horizon. But as dead as the world appears, life has survived - normal humans struggling as much against irradiated food and drink as the mutated monstrosities that roam the wasteland. Even 200 years after that civilization ending holocaust, you and all the others who were left behind live under the perpetual threat of Fallout.

Into the Wasteland

Hunger for a new Fallout game began years ago, and deepened when the team that brought gamers the original masterpiece disbanded. One of the great PC gaming franchises was left in limbo, without anyone there to bring it to a new generation of players. When Bethesda bought the rights to the franchise in 2004, many were overjoyed that their favorite RPG developer would be reviving the series. Some Fallout fans immediately decried the move, sure from the start that Bethesda would change too much about their beloved series. Meanwhile, the folks at Bethesda quietly began to craft early concept art, research the original games, and brainstorm story and gameplay ideas. Now, after years of work, with the full force of their studio focused on their project, the team that brought us The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is ready to reveal their vision of the Fallout universe. "The spirit of Fallout - we've missed it. We've wanted to see it in games again," executive producer Todd Howard tells us. "It's humbling and exciting all at once to be the group that makes that game."

We got the chance to visit Howard and the rest of his team at their studio in Maryland. Ushered into a giant movie theater with enough seats for dozens of people, Howard sat in a booth high to our left as he played through a demo of the game while we watched on the massive screen. The nearly hour-long walkthrough (detailed in the narrative segments on these pages) revealed technology in stellar shape for a title that is over a year away from release. With almost no technical hiccups, the demo revealed how characters are crafted, the flow of combat, the structure of morality and questing, and wide stretches of the land upon which the game is set. As longtime players and fans of both Fallout and the Elder Scrolls franchise, that one hour as we sat in rapt attention made one thing abundantly clear: This is the best of both of those franchises, without any compromises, and with enough amazing new details to excite even the most jaded or skeptical RPG enthusiast. "Differences between how we approach this and how we approach The Elder Scrolls are pretty huge," Howard assures us. "It's its own game. We don't assume anything we did in Elder Scrolls fits."

"In Fallout 2, you start the game at birth," lead designer Emil Pagliarulo details. "In the original Fallout game, your character had been born in a Vault. We wanted the player to experience that process." As your mother dies during childbirth, you masked father lifts you up to where the other vault dwellers can analyze you with a DNA scanner - one that will reveal how you will look as you grow older. Here you are given the chance to choose your gender, body type, ethnicity, facial structure, and physique. All the classic elements of character creation with a huge amount of detail are present, but with more realistic facial options than were available in Oblivion. Once satisfied, your father will remove his mask, and his ethnicity and facial features will reflect your own - not a perfect match, but a clear familial link that reveals your parentage. From there, the early hours of the game will check in throughout the long years of childhood in the vault, reinforcing the prison-like environs of your home.

While still a baby, your father will give you a small infant-style cardboard book. As you flip through its pages, which is cleverly titled "You're Special!", you'll choose the baseline stats for each of your seven primary aptitudes. A brief stop as a toddler teaches you to walk, familiarizing you with movement controls. At age 10, you are gifted with a BB gun and your Pip-Boy 3000, a wrist mounted computer that will serve as your menu system throughout the game. At 16 you'll take your G.O.A.T. (Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test), where your answers to various questions will help determine an initial layout of skills and traits. Finally, at age 19, your father escapes and you pursue him into the world beyond. Sometime before the Vault's door opens, you're offered one last chance to alter the character you've crafted throughout childhood.

Whatever your choices, every aspect of character creation is based firmly in the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system that was utilized in the original Fallout games. Of your 14 skills, you can tag three of them to grow at a faster rate as you level up. Every other level, you choose a perk, a special talent that may give you small bonuses in certain situations. Traits give you pluses and minuses that may change your style of play. It's impossible to create a maxed-out superhero - each facet of character creation is set up to force careful choices about the path you want your character to take through life. From the beginning, Fallout 3 can be played in either a first-person camera view, or panned back to an over-the-shoulder third person angle not unlike the one offered in Resident Evil 4. In contrast to Oblivion's floaty and disconnected third-person option, the approach in Fallout 3 has been more focused. "We found with our previous stuff that if we have a third-person mode at all, then people like to play in it," Howard tells us. "So we spent a lot more time on that mode so you can play the whole game that way if you want." From either camera angle, players will be able to observe the amazing attention to detail on everything from wrinkles in characters' clothing to rough textures on the ruined stonework of old structures. This is an evolved version of the engine that ran the graphics of Oblivion, but everything from the animation of monsters to the dramatic lighting of different environments has been designed from the ground up for the ruined landscapes of the Fallout universe.

Once outside of the Vault, the focus of the game becomes finding a way to survive in the barren wilderness of the outside world. Water is a precious commodity, even though it is also one of the primary sources of radiation you'll encounter; every sip must be judged against how many rads it's likely to introduce into your body. Food, weaponry, and ammo are in short supply, so there's a constant need to ration and improvise new ways to confront obstacles. Hungry and malformed beats wander the world, and you'll have to find a way to either avoid them or take them down for good.

To do so, most players will find themselves taking advantage of the innovative combat system that Bethesda has developed for the game. The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) is what assures that this first-person game so chock full of guns doesn't become an FPS. "We don't want to be rewarding twitch play," Howard says. "It's not an action game. It's a role-playing game." While you'll certainly be able to tackle enemies in real time first-person shooting, V.A.T.S. lets players pause time and select a target at their leisure. Once targeted, a zoomed-in view of that enemy will show all the places you could aim to hit the creature, and the percentage chance you'll succeed. This percentage is based on distance, enemy defense, his cover, as well as your ability with the weapon at hand, among other factors. Just like in the original Fallout, you'll have a set number of action points, largely based on your agility score. Every combat move you make will deplete this supply, at which point those AP will begin to regenerate in real time at a rate that also corresponds with your agility. Once you complete all your actions in V.A.T.S. you can continue to attack in real time, but this will dramatically slow the recharge of your action points, thereby encouraging tactical targeting over constant twitch shooting. As for those specific targets, which area you aim for will have a profound effect on your foe. Hit the arm of a super mutant, and he may not swing that massive cudgel at you with quite the same force as before. Shoot off the antenna of a mutated giant ant, and he'll go crazy and attack his brethren.

Also in keeping with the tradition of Fallout, violence can and will be disturbingly brutal. If your final shot is about to result in a dramatic near miss, the sickening crunch of an exploding head, or any other dramatic moment, the scene will play out in slow motion, with the camera zooming in and circling around the bullet as it whizzes through the air only to tear into a mutant's leg as it explodes in a haze of blood. In addition to an array of ranged weapons, you'll also have access to melee weapons like the super sledge (a sledge-hammer) and the ripper (a weaponized chainsaw). These tools of war will function under the same V.A.T.S. system, allowing for gory close range slow-motion kills that shred those enemies foolish enough to get close. Embracing the bloody source material, Bethesda is very open in its declaration that Fallout 3 will most definitely not be fit for children. Meanwhile, your foes are certainly not content to sit still and eat your bullets. "We've revamped the entire AI system from Oblivion to give us better gameplay with guns," lead producer Gavin Carter tells us. "We've altered the whole pathfinding system so the NPCs are much more knowledgeable about their surroundings. They can take cover, catch you in flanking maneuvers, and mainly react more realistically with their environments."

With such clever adversaries, your foes aren't the only ones who'll be forced to deal with injury and pain. An intricate health system details the many problems your character will have to confront on his journey. Like most role-playing games, you will have a set amount of hit points that go down as you take damage. Food or soda will help improve your hit points slightly, and stimpacks (a sort of injection) can be a big help. As mentioned before, water can also give a boost. Sometimes the only way to completely fill up on health is to drink from some fixed water source repeatedly, like a toilet bowl in a forgotten subway station. However, when you go to drink, you'll be able to see both its health benefits and radiation level. Without medicating to reduce radiation, it will continue to rise until it begins to handicap stats and eventually kill you.

Beyond juggling health and radiation you'll also need to watch out for personal injury to different body parts. You're not the only one making targeted shots; your enemies will be aiming for particular weak points on your body as well. That means you may end up with a broken leg or a shattered arm. One might drastically slow you down, while the other will almost certainly make your once true marksmanship waver and fail. Conceivably, enough water and stimpacks could get your health back up to normal, but no amount of liquid is going to fix a broken bone. For these injuries, either beef up on your surgery skill or expect to make some long and painful treks back to the nearest town doctor.

While the simplest path to an objective is often through violence, Bethesda is committed to offering options that will fit anyone's play style, whether that means sneaking past dangerous foes or talking your way through to a solution. As with the original Fallout, a karma system is in place that will vacillate back and forth based on your actions. Ethical dilemmas are a big part of the Fallout universe, and sometimes one evil act may server a greater common good. Your place on the karmic scale will shift in response to your decisions, and different titles will be applied as you gain levels based on your current karma. In fact, many of the 360 version's Achievements will be about acquiring these different titles as you progress - getting all the Achievements is almost impossible in just one playthrough, particularly due to the nature of quests in Fallout 3.

Like Oblivion, Fallout 3 offers tremendous freedom in what actions and missions you want to take on. However, unlike Oblivion, a single character can't be all things to all people. Where your battle mage in Oblivion might have simultaneously been the heroic Champion of Cyrodil and the sadistic leader of the Dark Brotherhood, the quests you'll encounter in Fallout 3 will offer complicated choices that take you down one path or another. If you make one choice, it may close off an entire branch of missions from ever becoming available. However, because of that one decision, an entirely new series of missions will emerge that the other option would never have revealed. Subsequent playthroughs of Fallout 3 with different choices may very well completely change the path of the story. One avenue might have you taking up the insidious role of a slaver, while more righteous choices will have a town greeting you as a hero even upon your initial arrival since they've heard of your beneficent deeds. "Even within the quests we're trying to be careful to not just have the good path and the evil path, because a big part of Fallout is shades of gray," Pagliarulo informs us. With a less concrete questing path, you'll often find yourself swept up into tasks rather than being offered a formalized missions from some distressed townsperson - but you'll always have choices about how to proceed, or whether you want to participate in the event at all. "It's more about how you handle these different situations, and less which ones did you do and in what order," Howard explains.

The environmental backdrop through which you'll be making all of these choices is a detailed reinvention of the universe exhibited in the old games. "In our process of envisioning what Fallout 3 should look like, we started by going back to the first Fallout. There's a lot of great raw material to look at there," explains Istvan Pely, lead artist on the project. "Now we have so much more to work with. You're there, and you're seeing everything in a greater amount of detail. So we're going to town on that. Every single detail - just fleshing it out to a level of realism and quality that will overwhelm people in terms of making them feel like they're really there."

The location of the game world is in some ways a familiar setting for studio members at the Maryland-based studio. Washington, D.C. and its environs offer a dramatic backdrop to the post-nuclear adventure of Fallout 3. in the alternate history of the Fallout universe, many things were different in the years after World War II - a terrifying series of events lead to the the war in 2077 that wiped out most of civilization. In 2277, as you emerge from Vault 101, the world has had a hard time recovering, and few places are able to communicate the fall from decadence like a trip through the crumpled remnants of the Jefferson memorial, or spying the chipped and battered rock that remains of the Washington monument. A large central hub called Rivet City is based in and around the remains of a crashed aircraft carrier, while outlying settlements like the town of Megaton serve as other remote bastions of life. The sprawling remains of the underground Metro line and sewer ways interconnect much of the game world. The map as a whole is only slightly smaller in size than the land area you were able to explore in Oblivion. While the land mass is still huge, and seemingly endless quests abound, the harsh conditions in this post-apocalyptic land mean there are actually fewer individual characters to interact with.

"With Fallout, the number of NPCs is reduced. We're in the hundreds instead of the thousands," explains Howard. Consequently, the development team has been able to breathe more life into individuals as they move through their daily lives. "For us it's about making better characters - making NPCs that you're invested in," Pagliarulo adds. "The Radiant AI system of Oblivion takes its next steps forward in the game, as NPCs attempt to interact in meaningful ways with the game world. Characters who know each other won't just engage in generic small talk - they may address each other by name, and talk about things that matter to them as individuals. "Lucas Simms, the sheriff of Megaton, he has a son. If you see him walk up to his son and have a conversation, you would hear that the stuff that he says is particularly tailored to his son," Pagliarulo tells us. With the mention of Simms' son, the question of the presence of children in a game this violent must be addressed. In answer, Bethesda confidently assures us that kids will be found throughout Fallout 3 - but how they live and (more controversially) die within the game world is yet to be revealed. For both children and adults, you can expect far more voice talent this time around, with fewer characters that make you think: "Didn't I just hear this guy in the last town I was in?" That broader cast is being led by the inimitable Liam Neeson, who stars as the lost father at the root of your quest into the post-apocalyptic surface world.

Feature sets and questing structures aside, there's much more to Fallout than iterating off a great rule set from an old computer game. At its core, the Fallout universe appealed to mature gamers for its juxtaposition of the realities of war and death against a dark humor that delights in the ironies of a once perfect civilization ravaged by their own destructive tendencies. It's a complex world without simple answers. Heroism and villainy seem to carry more weight in a land so near extinction. Simply put, Bethesda gets it. From the emulation of the '40s propaganda posters to the impossible moral decisions placed before players, Fallout 3 is a role-playing game in the truest interpretation of the genre. It's about choices and consequences, characters and story, survival and sacrifice. And, after what seems now an excruciatingly short time seeing the game in action, it's about a long, long wait until the autumn of 2008.

[Funkmasterr]

I just got that issue of game informer, I don't think I had read this thread.

This game is going to be the best_game_ever, that is all.

[Winnow]

Fallout 3 will have over 200 endings.

I say make each individual ending worth one achievement point so Funk has to go through all 200 endings!

I'm hoping this game will be so good it will be worth it.

100 hours of game play if you do the side quests, (is that with just to get to one ending?), game already finished but being polished, Fall '08 release. Nice!

Bethesda's Todd Howard recently did the official Xbox podcast and talked about Fallout 3, and revealed somenew tidbits, including the boggling new number of endings available. The highlights list:


-Over 200 endings, since last week. The 12 endings was surpassed sometime ago.

-The game is twice bigger than what they thought in the beginning.

-Always just one humanoid-type companion, and another NPC like Dogmeat.

-Dogmeat can die, but they are working on his health and how you maintain him.

- Dogmeat can be given assignments, and will try to follow them with his Radiant AI.

-Brotherhood of Steel doing their own thing; already in finished state on the game; they are on the verge of extinction, you’ll interact with them a lot more after a determined point in the game.

-The game is finished, but needs a lot more polishing and testing, they are doing many playthroughs; they keep adding stuff, sometimes it takes 100 hours to play, just the main quest takes about 20 hours.

-Absolutely tracking at fall 2008.

[Dregor Thule]

As long as they have more than 10 actors doing all the voices I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

[Winnow]

A follow up explaining the 200 endings comment:

Todd Howard: Being that we are Bethesda…everything gets a bit big. So as of last week we’re over 200 endings. That is not an exaggeration, but it deserves some description. 200 endings…that’s a lot. So originally when we started, we had various iterations of the ending. The ending is kind of cinematic, that’s dynamic based on the things you’ve done.

When we started, it was kind of fuzzy, it was like “well there’s like 9 maybe 12″ and we started adding things to it. So if you had done this or not this, you’d get this other tweak to the ending. And we kept doing that. And you know even just two weeks ago someone had this idea, “Oh we should add this idea to the ending” (sorry I’m not going to spoil what that is). And I said, “oh that’s a genius idea, we have to do that.” But then it became, “oh, but there’s four versions of that.” So i was like, “okay there’s like four different versions of that part,” and that multiplies by, at the time we were at about 60 endings…so now there’s four versions of that, so now there are around 240 versions.”

The games on paper when we get started…they’re OMGIAMRETARDEDCAUSEALOTISTWOWORDS smaller, and then as we go they get bigger…we can’t stop ourselves. We’re have tons of people with good ideas here, and if they’re good and fit the tone, we’re going to try to jam as much into the game as possible. Fallout is probably twice the size of what we originally had on paper…it’s pretty big, so that’s what’s happened with the endings.

So some of that stuff is the big things of what you do very late in the game, some of those are things like your karma — how you’ve lived your life from the beginning of the game — you get certain scenes based on your karma. But we kind of like the ending as much as like the game itself at the beginning is you tailoring your character and then you play throughout this game, and unlike Elder Scrolls, where it’s a game where you can keep playing, Fallout 3 has a definite ending. So we wanted to go to efforts to make sure that the actual ending you get when you finish and get the ending, and make that ending reflect and make it individual to the user’s experience. We’ve definitely gone a little overboard.

[Funkmasterr]

That's cool, every RPG used to have dozens of endings and that has mostly gone by the wayside. It's nice to see this, it gives you a reason to make choices throughout the game other than just because.

[Winnow]

I think it's cool as well but basically it's a cinematic ending so, like Mass Effect, they'll take your character, combine all of the variables, and then create the ending. I hope the rest game plays quite a bit different depending on your karma so it's worth replaying. Mass Effect's Dialogs were quite a big different but the game basically followed the exact same path no matter what you did. It would be nice if there was some variety depending on how you choose to play your character more than mostly dialog and a shoot out here and there.

I think they'll get it right. Of course people will rip the game apart but people rip 9/10 rated games on a regular basis. Impossible to please people.

[Winnow]

Here's a new interview re: Fallout 3

Personally, I'm looking forward to Fallout 3 much more than GTA IV.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/868/868349p1.html

Fallout 3 Q&A

Bethesda's Pete Hines speaks out about this autumn's biggest title.

by Martin Robinson, IGN UK

UK, April 21, 2008 - After an extended stint in the vault, Bethesda's highly anticipated Fallout 3 has finally begun to emerge into the public eye, and early impressions suggest it's set to be one of the year's best titles. We recently caught up with the developer's Vice President of Public Relations Pete Hines to talk Dogmeat, morality and those 500 endings.

IGN: Has it been a challenge developing across three different formats and working towards a simultaneous release?

Pete Hines: It's never easy, as any developer will tell you, and you'd always prefer to just make it for one, so you're aiming for one thing, but this is our second time around on all these platforms, so we've learnt a lot already from doing one big sandbox game on 360, PS3 and PC, and we're able to use a lot of those learnings and that tech for the next generation of stuff we want to do. It's gone pretty well, and we're pretty confident we're going to have three versions that are all on parity in terms of performance, and certainly from a content standpoint and gameplay standpoint it'll be exactly the same.

IGN: Was anyone from the original game's developer Black Isle Studios consulted?

Pete Hines: We've talked to some of the guys from the original – there's pretty much two different teams – we have talked to some of those folks from a casual standpoint.

IGN: Fallout's got a massive following and quite a vocal community. Have you at any point consulted the fan-base to see what they want from a Fallout game?

Pete Hines: Back when we first announced we were doing it in 2004, there was tons of feedback with people saying here's what we want and here's what we don't want. We're not really into consulting, in that we've got 75 people who spend all day every day working on this game, so we look for information and feedback for the kinds of things the fans are looking for, and feedback from the last game that we made. Even though it's an Elder Scroll game, we've looked at the things they liked or didn't like from that, and we have our own opinions about what we liked and didn't like, and look at what things may be applicable to Fallout. Whether its how fast travel works, or for example how we've changed the way leveling works, so it's very different from Oblivion.

IGN: Though Fallout 3's world won't be as large as that of Oblivion, will there be any way to get around quickly?

Pete Hines: Yes there are ways you can traverse it quickly, using fast travel, but you can't explore it quickly – there's no vehicles, there's nothing you can ride to speed up that journey. We've certainly tried to create the world in a way that you're not traveling huge distances for no reason – there are lots of things that are put all over the place for you to do.

IGN: We've seen the welcome return of Dogmeat – are there any other non-playable characters returning from the Fallout universe?

Pete Hines: There are other things from the original that we haven't spoken about yet that folks will come across. As far as inanimate objects, there's lots of things, be it the skills, the perks, the weapons, there's lots of that kind of stuff, and all the references to that world, the Nuke Cola and all of that is just part of the world itself. If you've played the original Fallouts, you get some measure of pride or enjoyment out of seeing that stuff again. If you haven't played Fallout before, you're not missing out on anything – it stands on its own but it still has plenty of stuff from the last game and the series as a whole.

IGN: Has it been restrictive working with a canon as well defined as Fallout's?

Pete Hines: It's more just a pleasure to be able to work in that fantastic universe, and the canon is not that restrictive to work with. We obviously took it to a different coast for a number of reasons, but the canon itself is a lot of fun and there's still a lot of opportunity to play and we're pretty used to that with the Elder Scrolls, with the canon that we ourselves have created.

IGN: We've seen different factions going about their business in the demo – how persistent is the world of Fallout 3 going to be?

Pete Hines: We don't want it to constantly be wherever you go two groups are fighting each other, as that would get to be a little old after a while, but you see it enough, whether it's creatures attacking humans or different factions fighting each other.

IGN: You've said previously that Fallout 3 will have 500 different endings.

Pete Hines: Somewhere around that.

IGN: How's that going to work? Is it going to be permutations of different elements?

Pete Hines: It'll be like in the original games, where the ending that you got was a compilation of different things that you would have done along the way, main quest related or not main quest related, you piece it all together so it's custom tailored to what you did. We want player choice to be meaningful, so anything that you get will be based upon what you chose to do – did you save this town, did you blow it up – and taking what you did and retelling it back to you so that it's meaningful to you as opposed to having one generic ending.

IGN: Moral choices play a large part of the Fallout experience – how does this compare to games such as BioShock?

Pete Hines: I thought BioShock was terrific. It obviously draws some amount from Fallout, which is part of the reason why I like it, in that they borrowed the holo-tapes and stuff like that. I think the thing about Fallout that's unique is that is very much open-ended and up to the player in that there's moral choices and they're not in linear fashion, so you feel you have a lot more choice in terms of where you're going to go and what you're going to do. BioShock is very much a linear experience, you can harvest the little ones or you can save them, but still at each point you're going point to point and making that decision. To that end, that's where the difference in ending comes about. If you harvest the first little sister but save the rest of them, you still get the bad guy ending, and there's no ending for the guy who started harvesting little sisters but then had a change of heart and decided to save them as the story went on – where's that ending? That's where the 500 endings of Fallout come into play, we want to take into account if you started playing the game really evil and then turn into a good guy, then the story that you told is very different. Those endings are all different flavours to how you played the game, as opposed to whether you were good or you were evil.

IGN: Is this the start of an ongoing relationship with Bethesda and the Fallout franchise?

Pete Hines: I would hope so, and that was the whole point of picking up the rights. This is going to be something that we plan to continue and develop going forward, like we did with the Elder Scrolls, but obviously you've got to do the first one first!