As you might know, 4A's post-apocalyptic shooter sequel Metro: Last Light, has been released today. You can find it on Steam, GamersGate, GreenManGaming or retail for $49.99/€49.99 tho' it should be noted that the game is still a Steamworks title so, no matter where you get it, you'll have to use Steam to play it.

Reviews, for what it's worth, are generally good if not enthusiastic or on par with the biggest, most critically acclaimed titles, with an 82 metascore on PC, an 80 on Xbox 360 and an 82 on PS3.

According to ex-THQ president Jason Rubin (who joined the company as a last ditch attempt to save it but didn't manage to turn the tide fast enough), 4A had to work in pretty terrible conditions:

When 4A needed another dev kit, or high-end PC, or whatever, someone from 4A had to fly to the States and sneak it back to the Ukraine in a backpack lest it be "seized" at the border by thieving customs officials. After visiting the team I wanted to buy them Aeron office chairs, considered a fundamental human right in the west. There were no outlets in the Ukraine, and our only option was to pack a truck in Poland and try to find an "expediter" to help bribe its way down to Kiev. We gave up not because this tripled the cost, but because we realized that the wider Aeron chairs would require spreading out people and computers, which would lead to extra desks, and that ultimately would have required bigger offices. Yes, really.

I truly enjoyed Far Cry 3, which deserved its great reviews. But how many times did Ubisoft Montreal lose power for hours or days during development? Power outages are the norm for 4A. All developers have deadlines, but I know of few that had to bring in construction generators to be able to work the weekend before final submission because an extra day meant missing shelf dates by weeks. Montreal is cold, but when it gets cold in Kiev it's different. That's because the government provides all of the heating through a central coal burning facility that pipes hot water to homes and offices. Unfortunately, it breaks down reliably a few times a year for a week at a time. Then 4A works in their parkas and struggles to keep their fingers warm in temperatures well below freezing. That is unless it snows and they get stuck home for a few days at a time because snow clearing isn't up to Western standards.

The only thing for which 4A is getting more credit than I think they deserve is the creativity behind the ever frightening, dark, post apocalyptic environment of the game. I've been in Kiev to visit the team, so I know they just stepped outside for reference.

Hello everyone,

We've worked with THQ for 10 years (as we are the guys who made Stalker, too), and Jason is the only THQ President who visited us in Ukraine. And he did this on his second week in THQ. Keep in mind that he only had few months to somehow fix the situation. Alas, that didn't work out.

It is a fact that our work conditions are worse than those of other developers outside Ukraine. I don't think anyone can doubt that - yes, it's true that American and most of European developers operate in a country far more comfortable than Ukraine. And yes, the publishers pay them more. This is clear: the more "reasonable" the country the less the rrisks. And we don't want to be all dramatic about that - after all, better conditions are earned, and we strive to do this as soon as possible ...

And we are thankful to Jason for his article.

Jason, please don't blame Deep Silver for not having our logo on the game site... just like us, they ended up in a harsh situation and had to do a lot of things in two months, which was definitely a very hard task. I don't blame them for letting the logo thing slip. They are trying hard.

After all, it's our game that matters and not our logo.

Also. We did want to make a multiplayer. Though if it was excluded from the start, a lot of precious time wouldn't be wasted and we'd make an even better single.

What else& We deserve the ratings we get. After all, the final consumer doesn't care about our conditions. And this is RIGHT. We need no indulgence.

PROF and all Ukrainian bobsled team:)

Given there's not a lot going on these days and that Underrail looks like a really promising turn-based indie RPG, I thought some of our readers might enjoy this recent preview from RPGFan. Here's a snip:

The game uses an "action point" style of turn based combat, for example. Everything costs action points, and you have a certain number of them you can use before the baddies get a chance to do their thing. Firing a gun, moving around, using an ability — everything takes away from the pool of action points that replenish the next round.

But there's more going on here than just a new Fallout game for more modern times. Dejan is doing things to not just differentiate Underrail from Fallout 1 and 2, but also pay homage to other games that he enjoyed growing up. For example, I asked him about a sequence in the game where you are sneaking through a ventilation shaft and a picture-in-picture view is employed.

"For one, I'm trying to improve on the subterfuge aspects of the game. So in the Underrail, you have security cameras that you can access, patrolling enemies, traps, and vents that you can crawl through and peek out of. Here I drew inspiration from another one of my favorite games — System Shock 2. Like in System Shock 2, Underrail is a game where you will often find yourself going through hostile areas where, in addition to the unfriendly humans, you will also be threatened by automated security systems, dangerous creatures, and biohazards.

"On the combat side of things, I attempted to implement a more complex combat system with special attacks, abilities, utility, and psi powers. This is in contrast to Fallout, which was pretty simple (not in a bad way!). I also want to make the creatures in Underrail more diverse, so most creatures you encounter in the game will have at least one special trait or ability that will change the dynamics of the encounter and force you to adapt and think of ways to deal with it."

inXile Entertainment has recently posted on Facebook, regarding cutscenes and Wasteland 2:

One thing we haven't talked about so far is cutscenes. We want you playing the game rather than staring at cutscenes, but we'd also like to do an opening cutscene that sets up the history of the rangers including the events of Wasteland, a scene as part of our closing sequences and perhaps one mid-game cutscene. We have these written out , and we have some great footage taken from the Wasteland Weekend to use in them. We are not going to do expensive cinematics, nor we will want to, but we'd like to get creative in the execution, find a way of doing them that is not too expensive but still aesthetically pleasing.

And what's the best source of crazy creativity? We've seen some very cleverly done small films done on Youtube, and we're looking for that kind of independent but creative director who could bring a style we want. Maybe you're familiar with a specific artist or director who has impressed you with their work - maybe even though Kickstarter.

EDGE is offering a retrospective on the original Fallout on their website, and while it's likely that there's nothing new in there if you're reading this website in the first place, it's still a pretty interesting article. Snippet ahead:

Fallout’s best stories feel incidental – things that you simply come across one day in the wasteland, or uncover by accident in one of its cities, and that you wouldn’t know existed unless you’d happened upon them. Wasteland encounters like a crashed UFO or a band of ghouls may provide a valuable item or hint, but they point the player in interesting directions, leaving room for the imagination. It works because it’s not explicit, leaving you to draw inferences from the world, to make up and investigate your own quest lines. You might think that Junktown’s sinister Doc Morbid’s extreme rudeness is borne out of caution, just like everyone else in the wasteland – unless you happen to be scavenging his house for ammo at night and find the manhole leading to his secret butcher’s shop, where he and his dwarf assistant prepare their patients for sale as snacks in a neighbouring town. If Doc Morbid’s tongue-in-cheek name isn’t Fallout’s only flash of black humour, then nor is Vault Boy, the cheerfully grinning face of nuclear disaster. Fallout flashes its gallows humour like a wicked grin, elevating the mood without undermining the tone.

The game owes much of its intrigue to the level of detail. Fallout realises with words and situations a rich, detailed, tortured and desolate landscape that it can’t show with a limited colour palette and isometric sprites. Scrolling text descriptions at the bottom-left of the interface embellish what’s onscreen with incidental detail; where you see a brown clump of pixels oozing red, the text describes how a mutated mole-rat, fatally wounded from a crippling injury to the right leg, crumples and dies. Character descriptions, dialogue, even the manual all feature a descriptive verbosity that greatly enriches the game’s fiction.

As well as finding stories, Fallout excels at letting you create them. Generally, videogame moral decisions amount to either giving a begging tramp 20 credits in the hope that he’ll turn up again later with a nice item or shooting him in the kneecaps for the experience points. Either way, there’s a reward, and the Right Thing To Do is often patronisingly obvious. Fallout screws with this primary-school perception of good and evil. The harsh reality is that there are usually two bad choices, and at best you’re forced into the least morally reprehensible course of action. Fallout is aware that being a good person can mean doing a terrible thing, and the game never attempts to moralise. It’s a far cry from “nuke the village for money, or save it for a house”.

Indeed, one of Fallout’s key quest lines – determining the fate of Junktown – was so distressingly morally ambiguous that Interplay demanded that the outcomes be altered. When the Vault Dweller first stumbles across it, the settlement is locked in a power struggle between mayor Killian and gambling mogul Gizmo, whose criminal activities bring both financial prosperity and problems to the town. Originally, siding with Killian against Gizmo turned the town into an authoritarian nightmare, led by Killian’s own personal version of frontier justice; siding with Gizmo turned it into a filthy rich but morally bankrupt den of sin. In the final release, though, the outcomes had been forcibly changed to provide a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ ending, wherein Killian enforces just law and increases prosperity or Gizmo simply increases his own wealth before choking to death on a chunk of Iguana-on-a-stick.

A new concept sketch was posted by inXile to their facebook/forums, showing "another interesting denizen of the Wasteland".

We are kicking the inventory screens ass right now! Will hopefully be ready to show in the next update. Usability is increasing greatly.

Today is all about music design with the brilliant @Kotowst [Mark Morgan - NMA], as we nail down the mood for the remaining areas of Wasteland 2.

We are having a great production day on Wasteland today! Lots going on...

Nukapedia has been off the radar for quite some time, but they've managed to do a few cool things. Most notably, they've managed to get Chris Avellone to talk to them about post-apocalyptic settings, designing Dead Money and a few other topics in a Google Hangout. Unfortunately they managed to not put it up on YouTube, which means we can't embed it here for you. Sorry about that.

The other significantly less cool thing they did was get Erik Dellums to talk to them about his role in Fallout 3. He doesn't sound familiar, you say? He played Three Dog. Yeah. So, give that a whirl if you want.

InXile CEO Brian Fargo has been doing some kind of PR tour recently, giving out interviews for various websites, focusing mostly on Wasteland 2 and Kickstarter in general. Nothing new, but I'm sure they'll still be worth a read for some.

GameFront:

Games have the potential to address serious issues. BioShock addressed libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, while Spec Ops: The Line painted video game violence in a completely different light from normal, run-of-the-mill first person shooters. Is Wasteland 2 going to approach any difficult, or even political, topics?

The main purpose of Wasteland 2 is not to tackle the big questions. It’s primarily a game about having wild and dangerous adventures in a post-apocalyptic world, and, in the tradition of the first game, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Having said that, post-apocalyptic worlds have always been great venues for satire of the contemporary world, and we can’t resist taking broad potshots at our society’s obsessions and foibles as we create the various towns and people our rangers meet along the way.

The residents of the wasteland are rebuilding society from scratch, and because they don’t know much about the past, they’re pretty much making it up as they go along. Just about every form of society is being tried out, from theocracy to meritocracy to dictatorship to democracy to the-one-with-the-biggest-gun wins. What could be more fun than poking every one of those systems with a sharp stick?

The Kickstarter method is preferable, according to Fargo. "Our game certainly has less risk because it's being pre-ordered," Fargo notes. "I specifically make the game for that audience, and then I let the chips fall where they may. I think people that like roleplaying games are going to love it. Some people say, 'How do you make it for the younger generation,' and I don't think about that. I'm just going to make something that's smart and intelligent, nuanced, and the audience will figure it out."

The ideal situation for Fargo, assuming Wasteland II and Torment do well, is to continue to do RPGs that are interesting. "I don't want to be in a situation where we finish Wasteland II and I have to hurry up and get Wasteland III out the door. I don't ever want to be in that situation," Fargo said. "You do a sequel when you have the right idea." In other words, do a sequel because you want to, not because you have to.

And so finally, on March 13, 2012, Fargo cut out the middlemen and went directly to the thousands of fans who’d spent more than two decades asking for a game that publishers didn’t seem interested in. Turning to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, Fargo and his team at inXile gambled that they could source the million dollars needed to fund Wasteland 2 by appealing to the players rather than the suits – with Fargo even offering up $100,000 of his own cash if the pool only made it to $900,000. In the end, the Kickstarter closed at three times that amount, raking in $2,933,252 in 30 days. “Ironically, I am fortunate that no publisher picked the game up,” he says, “since [it’s now] being created with the right sensibilities in mind.”

Those sensibilities will look pleasantly familiar to gamers au fait with Interplay’s back catalogue, because Wasteland 2 shares the same key ingredients as its RPG cousins from the ’90s, namely a rich universe and a deep script. And although he makes a point of playing most new games on release, Fargo regrets that this style of game-making appears to have fallen out of fashion in many current-generation RPGs.

“One sees less of this style of game [because] the newer RPGs use large cinematic pieces or spoken dialogue at every turn,” he says. “In our case, we craft these games up to the last minute… [That’s not easy] if you already have 20 million dollars’ [worth] of prerendered cutscenes.”

Delivering on promises is important to Fargo. With crowd-funding schemes like Kickstarter, players fund projects based on what they expect them to deliver. Deviate from that, and you risk angering the people who are bankrolling you. But what happens when you get into a Mass Effect 3 situation, where players expectations aren't met because the team wants to deliver choice - a vital component of RPGs. "Part of the problem there, as I understand it, is that they promoted the fact that your decisions could effect the ending," he says.

"So, you’re if you’re making a strong claim like that then you have to follow through with it. The general feeling is that they didn’t follow through with it other than you being able to choose a few different colours. I think that if you’ve committed to a principle then you need to deliver on that. However, if you as an author decided that you wanted to have an ending that goes one way or the other then that’s your prerogative. It all comes down to how you’ve communicated about what you’re going to do. So if I say that I’m going to do multiplayer, and it isn’t in the final game, then I don’t get to just say “Hey, I’m an artist. I don’t believe in multiplayer” because people might have bought your game on the understanding that there would be multiplayer."

PCGN: When you reboot these old IPs, fans often have diametrically opposed ideas about what they want the game to be. Is it a problem making sure most of your backers are satisified?

BF: Ahh, no problem at all. None! Well yeah, I mean, it’s sort of a yes and a no. You’re right, not only are you trying to build a product, you’re trying to build a product that’s often based upon their memory of what it was, and not even what it actually was. We all get fonder of things as time passes, so I recognise that we are competing with people’s memories of those games also. Not what they actually were.

The reason I have confidence is because our communication is much tighter than it’s ever been before. Back in the days when we worked on Wasteland or Fallout of Planescape: Torment, we would work on these games in a vaccum and then hope we nailed it. We’d realease it and keep our fingers crossed. Kickstarter is anything but that, we’re in this constant communication, showing them things and reacting and modifying and dialling it in. We have our own sensibilities too, we know what pillars we’re going to hit and those aren’t going to change, but they know what those are and we know what those are. It allows us a greater confidence that we’re delivering against a vision.

The other part of it is that we have an amazing writing staff on this team. It’s unbelievable, you know, we’ve got Colin McComb, Pat Rothfuss, Chris Avellone. It’s an amazing team of writers, so if anybody can do it it’s these guys.

PCGN: Chris Avellone is a sort of strange, human stretch goal for this campaign. What happens if you don't hit the target to hire him? Does he just go away? [At the time of the interview, the $3.5 million stretch goal target to hire Avellone had not yet been reached]

BF: Well look, if we come up a dollar short am I not gonna do it? Of course not. We have to put the stretch goals down. There is an increased cost of bringing him aboard though, we have to take his time from Obsidian, that costs a lot, and then we have to create whatever it is that he builds. It’s fine that it comes from his mind, but now we’ve got to possibly do more work and art and so on, so it’s not just pure writing. But yeah, if obviously we’re right there, we’re not going to get ridiculous about it.

It's been a while since we got an update on Wasteland 2's development, but luckily for us, the inXile team served us with one just recently. Aside from a brief report on the state of development, it offers a fairly in-depth look at the weapon progression system they've planned, and how it'll differ from the original's title:

What sort of weapons are at my disposal?

Hello everyone my name is Devin Morrow and I am a combat designer here at inXile Entertainment. I have been asked by the powers that be (read: Chris Keenan, our production director) to introduce myself as well as provide to you, our generous fans and backers, a little insight into our current weapons design progress and philosophy.

This is my first time, so please be gentle.

In the original Wasteland and many other RPG’s, there is a clear weapon progression. As you worked your way through the game, weapons like the handgun became less effective in favor of the larger weapons. While this makes some sense it does limit the ability of a player to choose their favorite weapon type for thematic or role playing purposes. It’s hard to play the part of a wasteland gunslinger when you had to ditch your trusty M1911A1 pistol for an AK-97 because the damage just wasn’t cutting it anymore. In Wasteland 2, we want to give back a little more control to the player over how their characters are built and how they progress. This is something we have heard the community echo many times in conversation and on the forums, so it’s nice to know we are on the right track.

With that in mind, Wasteland 2’s weapons are divided into a number of classes, each with their own progression. We’ve created a system where if you invest into pistols, you can use them from start to finish and be effective throughout. The same thing goes for sniper rifles, sub machine guns, blunt weapons, bladed weapons, brawling weapons, anti-tank, demolitions, energy weapons, and rifles (list subject to change™). We even took this a step further and allowed more specific, thematic progression within the classes. For instance, we have a range of revolvers from starting equipment up to end-game death dealers that are all part of the handgun class/skill. The same is true for semi-automatic pistols if they are more to your taste. Do you like bolt-action or semi-automatic sniper rifles? One-handed or two-handed melee weapons? How about rockets or grenade launchers? Not to worry, we have something for all of you!

That’s not to say that each of these weapons will be as effective as the others in every combat situation. A core design tenet that spans all systems we’re creating has been one of “the trade-off”. We applied this to the weapons system by creating a defined role for each class. Most of these roles you will pick up on quickly. SMGs aren’t as accurate as rifles, don’t shoot as far, and don’t hit as hard or penetrate armor as easily. They do however put out a respectable amount of lead, have the advantage of using pistol rounds which are in greater supply, and require less Action Points to move with. A fast character can be devastating with a SMG, quickly closing in and unloading on an enemy where the accuracy penalty is drastically reduced. On a lightly armored enemy, the damage per action point will be much higher with a SMG versus a rifle (of the same approximate level). Anti-Tank weapons fire and reload slowly, will reduce your character’s speed in combat and are expensive to use, but will do massive damage to a large area. Just make sure you don’t have rangers standing behind your rocket-propelled grenade or the back blast might take them out too.

To keep things fun and allow a little flexibility to the system, we have incorporated weapons within each category that blur the lines between different roles. The perfect example of this is the D18 (totally not the Glock 18) automatic pistol. While not as effective at being a SMG as an SMG, it does allow the player heavily invested in handgun skills a little more flexibility in roles. Some other examples are the shotgun shell firing revolver and the .55 caliber WW2 anti-tank rifle.

Before I go I want to thank the community at Ranger Center. The “Weapons you would like to see in Wasteland 2” thread is one of the largest threads in our forums. You have been a great resource of creativity. I also think you’ll all be pretty happy with the weapon lists we have compiled. We have done our best to incorporate as many of the serious, real world fire arms as we could while still leaving room for some of the crazier suggestions as well (I’m looking at you, welded-together double SMGs). I will hopefully be back soon with an update on our weapon and ammo crafting/upgrade/mod systems and other assorted goodies. Until then please keep the flood of ideas and feedback coming, I assure you we are listening.

As The Vault reports, Joel Burgess (lead world designer) has recently published a transcript of his Game Developers' Conference presentation focusing on the level design philosophy of Bethesta Game Studios.

Co-written and co-presented with Nathan Purkeypile (world artist), it provides insight into how Bethesda develops their environments and the principles lying at the foundation of their work:

There are two points to make here. The first and most obvious: this approach allows a small number of artists to support a much larger team of designers, who can in turn generate a lot more content than those two artists otherwise could. The example provided by Skyrim shows just how effective this approach can be, when only two artists were required to provide the core art behind so much content.

The second, less-obvious point is the more important one, however. Think of the other 80 people in that team photograph. Because such a relatively small group was able to handle the dungeon component of the game, it allowed the rest to focus on the myriad other needs of the game, whether it was landscaping the massive world, writing and scripting the many quests, contributing to character art and animation, working in the guts of our game code.

Of course, there’s another reason that Skyrim had only two full-time kit artists; kits are really complicated things to work on. Kits require not only the artistic ability to produce high quality visuals, but also a technical competency in their art tool, a deep understanding of the editor and design workflow, and so on. This unique blend of left and right brain is somewhat at odds with what many art professionals value. I've worked with great artists who make excellent kits but hate working on them - so they don't.

So when you’re trying to identify somebody with the the aptitude and interest to be a great kit artist, you’re basically looking for a unicorn. They're rare.

Kotaku has a pretty interesting piece up about how the games industry uses Metacritic, and why it's not a good thing. This New Vegas example shouldn't be news to people though the amount cited is.

Perhaps you've heard the story: publisher Bethesda was due to give developer Obsidian a bonus if their post-apocalyptic RPG averaged an 85 on Metacritic, the review aggregation site. It got an 84 on PC and Xbox 360, and an 82 on PS3.

“If only it was a stable product and didn't ship with so many bugs, I would've given New Vegas a higher score,” wrote a reviewer for the website 1up, which gave New Vegas a B, or 75 on Metacritic's scale.

“It's disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant and polished game suffer from years-old bugs, and unfortunately our review score for the game has to reflect that,” said The Escapist's review, which gave the game an 80.

If New Vegas had hit an 85, Obsidian would have gotten their bonus. And according to one person familiar with the situation who asked not to be named while speaking to Kotaku, that bonus was worth $1 million. For a team of 70 or so, that averages out to around $14,000 a person. Enough for a cheap car. Maybe a few mortgage payments.

Pete Hines recently had an interview with OXM where he noted "I think you’ll hear us making considerably more noise this year than we did last year, as a publisher". This has led to a frenzy of speculation. With the Three Dog tease not too long ago, it's probably Fallout 4. Yay.

A Fallout fan made a Fallout monopoly games for his wife. We've seen Fallout monopoly before but I'm pretty sure this is new, and pretty amazing.

And finally, GOG is having a weekend sale on all Interplay titles, 50% off the entire catalog, including Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel.

So, the Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter hit $4,188,927 by the end (not counting Paypal which is easily another $100k), so aside from saying "whoah" I thought it was time for another round-up of info from their latest updates.

The devs at inXile have put out two in-engine tests of their early mock-up screenshots, showing how they run animated in-engine together with a 3d character. It's early time and they'll be significantly polished during development (the perspective in the Seagus Cliffs area in particular looks fairly off to me), but for material coming out so early it's pretty darn promising: the Bloom and Seagus Cliffs.

Second, all the stretch goals except for the lofty $4.5 million one were reached, meaning that, aside from the player stronghold, we're theoretically getting everything the developers have outed so far. Truth of the matter is that game development is a pretty iterative process though, so there's always the chance that something gets cut or modified later on. Stretch goals right now include a new city, companion quests, increased legacies (16 in total), an expanded journal, and more.

Third (and this list is by no means comprehensive), the devs have released the first art of the male version of the player character:

The latest update for Torment: Tides of Numenera, inXile's Kickstartered spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, has the first screenshot of the game.

From the write-up following it:

Torment will certainly present some special challenges, but more so I think, unique opportunities to realize our vision in a new old way. We’re looking back to a 2D approach, with a fresh eye rooted in contemporary modeling, texturing, and engineering techniques. Much like Project Eternity, our goal is to craft an experience that diverges from the common path of world building. We hope to strike a distinct style while achieving levels of detail often difficult to present in 3D game space with a small team, through a process of pre-rendering major portions of in-game assets. As you have seen in the published concept pieces, geometry varies greatly from location to location. We look to incorporate the organic nature of many of those structures into our asset creation pipeline while avoiding the often processor taxing in-game meshes.

The big debate: playing games in 2D vs. 3D – I know many of you are interested about our decisions regarding the art direction. There has been much talk about the costs associated with "2D development," the quality and scope that can be produced by a small team, and the impact that this might have (for funding) of other departments. And trust you me, I understand from where these expectation emerge. But to be clear, what we are really talking about here is not a 2D game, but what you might call a 2.5D game, with just a portion of art production that is 2D in nature. Bear in mind, any extra time we spend noodling in 2D will be made up 10-fold when we get to our beta build and we are not ripping our eyes out trying to figure out how to get all that geometry to render efficiently on screen. Our early tests are showing very promising frame rates for our 2D assets, freeing up additional processing power for characters, FX, lighting, post-processes, etc.

After all, characters are not 2D, rather 3D seen through an isometric camera. And particles, well, they’ve actually always been 2D, but you know that. I’ll admit, lighting in 2.5D was a concern of mine early on, but after some initial experiments, I feel confident that 3D lighting can and will be used to considerable effect, grounding the characters in the scene through dynamic lighting and some shadow casting. These issues, among others, simply require a mind shift in the creation process, and it’s quite liberating.

Award-winning* NMA user Searanox penned a Gamasutra blog devoted to break down Fallout 3's plot and explain why basically it makes no sense whatsoever. Snip:

Anyway, so the GECK was created by Dr. Braun, but he doesn't have one, because... no reason. Instead the GECKs were sent out to various Vaults around the country, even though they were very dangerous and probably should have been entrusted to the military or US government and not just random people. The only GECK on the East Coast, apparently, exists in Vault 87, which is an evil cloning lab... thingy for Super Mutants. Who is creating them there? Nobody. Why are they being created? No reason. But more importantly, why would you put the GECK, aka the goddamn GENESIS DEVICE out of Star Trek III, into a Vault that was centered around doing cloning and sick twisted experiments, and which is so heavily irradiated that anyone but mutants are instantly killed when trying to enter? You're telling me that the GECK is a miracle device designed to save everyone, and someone said "hmm, we've only got a few... put it in Vault 101, the control vault where nothing will go wrong? nah, let's put it in the one with insane hostile deadly mutants and radiation everywhere, that's much safer."

Speaking of, let's go locate the GECK. We need to use the computer at the Jefferson Memorial. So let's go to the Jefferson Memorial, so we can use the computer. Wait, I thought they wanted to go to the Jefferson Memorial to restart Project Purity? So which is it? Both? Did father lie to us? Whatever. The Enclave invades and father kills himself for his stupid project so we can't learn anything.

Well, now we're screwed, so what now? Oh, let's escape the Enclave invasion and visit the Brotherhood of Steel! Turns out that they have a computer that tells us where the GECK is. So basically, instead of going to the dangerous Jefferson Memorial and committing suicide, we could have gone to the big fortified Brotherhood of Steel base and just asked them for help instead.

Wait, come to think of it, couldn't we just have gone back to the Jefferson Memorial and killed all the Enclave soldiers? I mean, we already had to mow down several of them in order to reach the Project Purity control room to witness father killing himself. Why don't we just, like, kill the rest of them, make our stand there? If we can kill a few with no trouble, why can't we kill a few more? Why are we leaving? Why are we giving them time to reinforce and fortify the location? Can't we send one person as an envoy to the Brotherhood of Steel while the rest of us hunker down and keep the bad guys out? At the end of the game we have to use a big giant robot to get past the Enclave defenses, which are only set up because we waited too long to kick them out. I guess all those Brotherhood of Steel soldiers who helped us fight to get to Project Purity again died for nothing/because we were all idiots.

In Vault 87, we retrieve the GECK with the help of Fawkes. Yay! But then the Enclave knock us out with a magic stun grenade that does not exist anywhere else in the game, and they kidnap us and steal the GECK. Boo! After this, we never see or hear of the GECK ever again. How does the Enclave use the GECK to activate Project Purity? No idea. How did they know how to use it to save Project Purity? No idea. Did Anna Holt tell them, as she admits to blabbing about Project Purity? Maybe, but why would an understudy/lab assistant know a) exactly how Project Purity works, even though she looks too young to have ever worked on it (and I'm pretty sure her backstory says she never did work on it, only with Dr. Li at Rivet City), and b) how would she know how to use this ancient piece of miracle technology to work with another piece of brand-new miracle technology that she shouldn't understand to begin with? Did anyone at Bethesda proofread this or think more than 1 second about it?

In the Enclave base at Raven Rock, Colonel Autumn interrogates us. If we give him the correct code to Project Purity, we die and lose the game, so we have to lie to him or tell him to piss off. Why does he kill us after helping him? Is he so stupid he concludes that we are no use to him after he got the answer to one question, even though we single-handedly found the GECK, resisted an Enclave attack on the Jefferson Memorial, and did all sorts of other impressive shit? Apparently, yes, he is that stupid.

While there's no news of a Fallout 4 announcement yet, there are good chances the title will be announced this year, given next-gen consoles are being unveiled, and PC Gamer saw the chance to put down their wishlist for the title.

Here's a snip:

Make it about survival. In Bethesda’s hands, the Wasteland is fun. By the middle of a run through you’re clobbering Deathclaws with concrete capped rebars and sipping irradiated water without a care in the world. Possibly with a pinkie out. The point being is that the notion of survival becomes obsolete in a world dripped in caps to find, traders to sell to, and junk to collect. New Vegas has hardcore mode, forcing you to think about food, water, and rest, as well as altering the way meds and stimpaks work, but it’s still a world that can easily and comfortably be lived in. It needn’t be the main difficulty level, but the option to make the world a harsh place to live, to make the players think about every move, not just their weapon and perk choices, would give the ashy flavour of survival.

Bethesda’s Design, Obsidian’s Characters. There I was, wandering beneath a line-up of broken satellite dishes, looking for things to do when I spied a door. What could be behind it? A gang of gangers? A terrified NPC? A few steps towards it, a glance around to make sure there was nothing sneaking up. I popped the door. Behind it was a wall with “Fuck You” written on it. Bethesda’s worlds tend to be packed with detail, big and small. They’re places to live in and enjoy, and just brilliant places to explore. Their characters, however, are a lot less engaging. Obsidian’s take on New Vegas was packed with morally dubious Wastelanders with dark stories. Acquiring Boone as a follower, for example, meant leading a person out into a field for the deranged sniper to shoot. That’s dark enough, but as a player you could happily lead an innocent into Boone’s sights. Somewhere in the middle of Fallout 3 and New Vegas is the sweet spot they should be aiming for: dark, compelling characters in a curated world.

Treat us like PC gamers. I’ve never loaded up a Bethesda game and felt the studio really understood what PC gamers want from them. We have screen space and we have a pointing device that just seems to baffle them. I understand there’s a fictional reason for the Pipboy’s clunkiness, but all too often Bethesda will choose that over usability. Fallout 3 and New Vegas are remarkable examples of how to not lead a player through a game’s menus. I *have* to install a UI mod to deal with the endless scrolling of the inventories. When it comes to pure usability, divorce the theme from the menus

The same is true for FOV: the first thing I have to do in any Bethesda game is to hunt for an FOV hack. That I can do it is evidence that the engine is capable, and I’m still baffled that it’s not a native selection. Give me a damn slider.

We've rounded up a few Fallout/Wasteland tidbits for your tidbits needs.

Trzynasty Schron has an interview with Brian Fargo on inXile's latest stuff (Wasteland 2 and Torment), Fallout, etc.

Shacknews brings the gist of what Chris Avellone said at writer's workshop at GDC, in which he also referenced Van Buren's PnP campaign.

Finally, the Vault has posted some Fallout Extreme concept art on their Facebook page. We've also re-hosted the image here on NMA, though The Vault guys are friends so we really recommend to check their Facebook page now and then:

Just a couple of tidbits: Two fairly impressive weapon replicas from fans have come to our attention: Bethesda forums user unorthodoxdesign made a pretty good-looking Fallout 3/New Vegas Plasma Rifle, while Falloutnow's Urlag does justice to another Fallout 3 design, the AER9 laser rifle.

Also, Mutant: År Noll, which apparently translates to "Mutant: Year Zero", has received a teaser trailer. It's apparently going to be the sequel to Mutant, "Sweden's most beloved RPG" and is slated for a Spring 2014 release date. Just to clarify, it's a pen and paper RPG and not a videogame. (Thanks, DeadGuy.)

While we're not covering Torment: Tides of Numenera to the same extent as Fallout or Wasteland 2, it's worth noting that the project has been doing extremely well on Kickstarter (it's almost reached $3 million right now) and that a number of stretch goals have already been hit, including writing/design contributions from Brian Mitsoda (of Vampire Bloodlines and Dead State fame) and George Ziets.

In addition to that, the latest stretch goals to be announced, for $3.25 million and $3.5 million respectively, would add fantasy novelist Patrick Rothfuss and Planescape: Torment lead MCA to the team. Both would be involved in a relatively small writing capacity, although judging by the way pledges have started going up the moment Avellone was mentioned and the creepy shops with his face that have surfaced, I'm fairly sure people don't mind.

As The Vault reports, Aggrogamer has a new interview with Chris Avellone, reminiscing over the good old days as he strokes his lengthy gray beard:

AG: As far as Fallout 3 (Van Buren) goes is there any chance the files will ever see the light of day like KOTOR2 or HL2 on Dreamcast; or even a legit release from Bethesda down the line someday?

CA: I don't believe those files will ever see the light of day, but I don't know. And it's not up to me anyway. Fallout belongs to Bethesda, I doubt they'd dig through those archives or if they even have all the files in order to share them with the public, and I doubt they'd even want to (I don't see what benefit it would be for them). I do know that a lot of Van Buren docs have ended up on the internet and from what I've seen; they're accurate from what I remember.

(...)

AG: You and your team got to revisit Fallout again with New Vegas and it's add-ons, was this a something you and your team had to think about or was it just an instant yes?

Would you guys do another Fallout and do you think BethSoft would ever do an alternating dev cycle a-la Activision with Treyarch and IW doing CoD?

CA: Aside from getting the contract squared away, I believe everyone on at the studio was a "yes" on this. Fallout's one of the best RPG franchises to work on, and it was one we didn't think we'd get a chance to return to, and then… New Vegas came along.
We'd love to work on another Fallout, although that would depend on Bethesda. We certainly enjoyed working with them on New Vegas and we still have a lot of cool ideas and adventures we'd love to do for the Fallout universe.

You might be aware that TwentySided's Shamus Young has been doing a Fallout 3 let's play recently, and with the latest and last episode come his unflattering conclusions on the title:

Every single faction or major actor in the game – Brotherhood, Dad, Enclave, Lone Wanderer, Regulators, Supermutants, Talon Company, Tenpenny, and Vault 101 – ALL are fundamentally broken. They either have no goals, or their goals make no sense, or their actions run counter to the goals. I’m pretty sure this is the worst game plot I’ve ever played. Everything is wrong. Nothing in the story works. Nothing in the setting works.

Fallout 3 fails as a story. It fails to match to tone of dark comedy of the original. It fails to remain true to the given setting and fails whenever it tries to expand on it. Even if you’re ignoring the previous continuity, it still fails as a self-contained setting. It fails to properly convey its theme of “sacrifice”. Its morality system is sideways and broken, even by the standards of videogame morality systems. It fails artistically and visually, giving us a monotonous wall of grey-green rubble to stare at for hour after hour. It fails mechanically, giving us a broken leveling system, unbalanced weapons, a borked economy, and a small number of useful perks in a sea of useless ones. It fails as software, giving us a bug-riddled mess of glitches. It fails as a product, giving us Games for Windows Live on top of Steam.

I know sandbox games are hard to make, but damn if this isn’t a complete mess. Some games I grow to love after repeated exposure. But every time I’ve experienced Fallout 3 I’ve come to hate it more.

Still, I guess it was fun scavenging in the subway tunnels. So the game has that going for it.