Fallout 3

This is my site dedicated to getting popular ideas for Fallout 3 published on the net. Fallout 3 has not yet been officially annouced but many fans believe it is on its way.

 Ideas

Here is one of my favourite storyline ideas for FO3:

It is 10 years after the events of Fallout 2 and the states of New Reno and the NCR have expanded rapidly. Border raids between the two and rumours of a third power in the east have created a large arms race not seen since the War.

The Chosen One has forseen a new large scale war involving these three nations, New Reno, NCR and Las Vegas. It is up to you to end the advancement of this new weapon technology and to end the power of these three cities by any means!!

I will update this storyline soon, with ideas for the enemies and quest ideas.

As for a possible graphics system i think that the best option for the new designers would be tiles for the landscape and 3D characters. This would update the engine while not losing the feel of Fallout. The tile system could be used to create set pieces for the game such as large craters or vast gothic churches while the 3D models could be placed on top of FMV sequences. This would mean a chance to have atmoshperic movies when entering a location for the first time, building up the tension and flavour of the game. In game movies could now also show the party in them this time, a problem with past games.

Rumours

You guys don't need to worry, it's going to be cool. It's not going to be the same game that the original Fallout's were, but I think that is a good thing. We've learned a lot about making games in the past few years, and we are going to apply that to the Fallout series. Is it going to be a little more faster paced in combat - of course, it has to be because we can't make a solely turn based game anymore. But, we talk all the time about how to keep it from becoming a Diablo type game as well. That is not to say that we've started making Fallout 3, it's just something that we talk about a lot. Well the tough thing is that at some point most games will have to go 3D. We are trying to make the jump now rather than later. It has not been easy, and we are still working to make TORN look as good as possible - the current screen shots are certainly not there yet. I'm hoping we can get it up to the standards of Icewind Dale, and each day it is getting closer. If you are curious I can go into some more detail as to why almost everyone eventually has to go 3D.
As for turn-based vs. real-time it is a very tough decision. I really enjoy turn-based games, but the unfortunate thing is that game making is a business. On average, a real-time game sells more than a turn-based game. Since we have to sell between 150K to 200K units now just to earn back what it takes to get a game on the shelf, we need to look at what features can get us there and what features might not.
And I do agree with you that real-time can make combat less strategic. However, we are really trying to come up with ways to combat that and keep combat interesting. Hmmm... It is hard to figure out what is the best solution to making games like TORN and Fallout 3. I totally agree that the screenshots of TORN are not there yet, and the guys have been working the last month straight to get them looking better.
I can totally see how a lot of you feel that Fallout just won't be Fallout without a turn-based mode. It's a very hard call. I guess I feel that if we can keep the mood, look, quests, open-ended nature, and the complex character development of Fallout, then having real-time pausable combat will not make it an un-Fallout game. I could be totally wrong and it just won't work. However, it's something we have to try so that we get to make a next Fallout game.
I guess how I look at the real-time vs. turn based thing is that we just can't do turn based anymore and have enough people buy the games to make us able to keep on making them. However, I really don't think that the real-time of the Infinity Engine was a total action game. I know there are a whole lot of Diablo players that won't touch the Infinity Engine games because they think combat is too slow and not "actiony".

The reason we turned away from the Fallout engine in part was not just due to the engine itself, but also how the game was made. A big part of a game's success is the usability of the tools. For their day the Fallout tools, and I'm mostly talking about Mapper, were awesome (Jesse Reynolds did a good deal of the coding for it). However, they were really the first generation of game tools.
The problem is that since then we are dealing with more data, larger teams, and translating the game for the whole world - the tools need to be much better and they need to integrate seemlessly with a backend database to keep track of everything. Through the use of a lot of different technologies we've been able to build a new suite of tools/editors that actually make making games a whole lot easier. As an example, in Fallout the dialog had to be coded into the scripts for each character. It had to be translated by hand from a text file into code. For TORN, we have a dialog editor that works directly with MicroSoft Word to have a spell checked dialog imported directly into the game. What this gives us is far more efficient designers. So, we can in essence make bigger games with the same number of designers. Or at least that is the hope.
If we had tried to keep on retrofitting the Fallout engine to support new tools and technologies it would have become a coding Vietnam. Code bases only last for so long, because people remember less and less about how things work in the engine and the engine becomes more and more like magic. People are afraid to touch it, and we can change it less and less.

I guess lastly, my hope is that we create a true Fallout game. The Lead Designer, most likely, will be Chris Avellone, who was the Lead Designer on Torment and the twisted mind behind New Reno in Fallout 2. If there is anyone outside of Chris Taylor who understand the Fallout universe it is him. He certainly isn't going to let us make an unFallout game. I was just reading a fifty page document today about the Fallout world timeline, and his thoughts on keeping the world continuum going.

This comes from a number of reliable sources at Duck and Cover and NMA. Could this be the news we have been waiting for, lets hope!

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