Pete Hines was recently interviewed by Shacknews about a load of different things. Things that really should interest us involve Digital Rights Management and Censorship (I assume we don't care about consolification). Here are some snips from the interview Shack: Is the game done?
Pete Hines: Every day we're one day closer. We're right to the end of it.
... Shack: After the Australia ratings board banned the game, you guys made some changes to the names of real-world drugs, which will now show up in all versions of the game. What did you think of the fan reaction to that?
Pete Hines: It is seriously the biggest non-issue in the history of video games. It got way more attention than it merits.
Shack: Do you think that anybody's going to even notice?
Pete Hines: Have you noticed? Does it make a big difference that it's called something other than Morphine? I mean, who gives a--
Shack: Still, does it frustrate you to have to make changes based on the ratings board?
Pete Hines: No. As I said,
Australia weren't the only folks that had brought this up. It had
actually been brought up in a number places. Like, "Hey, referencing
real prescribed drugs is kind of a little concerning." And we
went back and looked at it and went, "It's not like it's in the
original game, we just made it up. So why not just change it to another
made-up name?" It's the same thing called something else. We couldn't
possibly care less.
... Shack: Similar question in the sense
that it's an issue that can be overblown. What kind of copy protection
will be included on the PC version of Fallout 3?
Pete Hines: Pretty similar to what
we did for Oblivion, which was--we basically don't do any--we do the
mildest form possible. I actually don't know if I even want to get into
what it is that we exactly do, but we try to be really noninvasive when
it comes to that stuff. [ed- Oblivion employed a simple DVD check.]
And it is a pain in the ass--it is a pain in the ass that we
have to do it at all in the first place. But when you spend tens of
millions of dollars, we don't think it's right to just put something
out there and let everybody do whatever they want and pass it around.
And to have to support all of that--which is often the unspoken thing
that nobody really wants to point to. You can argue all day whether or
not somebody would have bought a copy of a game they pirated, but you
can't argue, and you will never win the argument that I'm not having to
provide tech support for those folks. Because I know for a fact that we
are. We catch those folks all the time, where we're providing support
for somebody who turns out didn't actually pay for the game and just
downloaded a copy.
There's a lot more. Pete goes on to talk about Console vs. PC, Steam, and Piracy. I'll leave you with this: Shack: As far as the DLC goes, do you expect that to be simultaneously released on both Xbox 360 and the PC?
Pete Hines: Yeah, yeah, that's the plan. Absolutely.
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