The Console Wars have gotten themselves an interview with Pete
Hines of Bethsoft, mainly about Oblivion, but there are two mentions of Fallout 3:
TCW:
"Are you going to keep making open ended RPG's or are you getting into
some other genres? If so which ones and do you have any details?"
Pete Hines: "In
addition to Oblivion we’re in the very early stages of development on
Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic role-playing game. But it will be a long,
long time until we’re ready to talk about what we’re up to on Fallout
3. The teams here in Rockville will definitely continue to focus on The
Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises.
...
TCW: Any news on Fallout 3?
Pete Hines: "As
I’ve said before, we believe in taking the requisite amount of time to
do a game right. Oblivion is a good example of that – it’s already
three years in the making and wasn’t even announced until it was more
than two years in development.
All
we really announced last year was that we had acquired the rights to
develop and publish Fallout 3. So, for us, it’s still very early in the
process and we don’t like to talk about our projects or show anything
on them until we are much further along the road to completion and
actually have things to show.
We
believe that great games are played, not designed, and until you take
all those ideas and implement them and see if they work, you really
don’t know what you have, so why bother talking about them? For
example, we designed three complete combat systems for Oblivion before
we finally found the one we liked, so as a result it would have been
really pointless to talk about the first two at the time, when it turns
out they ended up getting completely redone."
Interesting
that he mentions the combat system in a question about Fallout 3. Maybe
they haven't decided how combat will work in the game? Now for the bit that worries me:
TCW: "Will the 360 version of Oblivion be equal or superior to the PC version?"
Pete Hines: "That’s
a tough question because “PC” can mean an almost infinite number of
things. What video card? Sound card? How much RAM? Are the right
drivers installed? The list goes on and on. All these things determine
performance on a PC. The advantage of the Xbox 360 is that it’s
designed to run our game, period. You know if you have a 360 it will
look as good as it can possibly look. If you have the latest, greatest
PC with the best video card, etc., it will probably look the same as
the Xbox 360 version. Anything else will probably lag behind.
When people ask us
whether or not to do a major PC upgrade or get the console version of
one of our games, we always recommend the console version. Our games
tend to push the limits of technology pretty hard, so it’s much easier
to predict performance on a closed box than one with thousands of
possible configurations."
"Fallout 3 - it works best on a console!" doesn't make me feel right.
Thanks for the news tip, Pete! |