Fallout: New Vegas Message Board older than one year ago

Bethesda is releasing a Fallout: New Vegas package worth squirreling away in your bomb shelter. The Collector's Edition includes a bunch of goodies modeled after items found in the game, including a set of seven casino chips representing casinos from the game, a special "Lucky 38 platinum chip," a deck of cards with New Vegas character imagery ("Use the cards to play poker, blackjack or Caravan, an original card game that was created by Obsidian especially for New Vegas!").

A hardcover graphic novel, "All Roads," written by Obsidian creative director Chris Avellone, and a making-of DVD are also included in the package. Bethesda didn't offer a price for the Collector's Edition, but GameStop has it at $79.99 on PS3 and Xbox, and $69.99 on PC.

#collectorsedition Bethesda gambles on an extravagant Collector's Edition for Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas, packed with poker chips, playing cards, and other exciting accouterments from the post-apocalyptic Sin City. More »

Just in case you needed any.

Are we really ready for more Fallout? No mere expansion pack, Fallout: New Vegas is equal in size and scope to Fallout 3 and will require a significant time investment to fully explore. Bethesda has brought in Obsidian to develop the title, and the studio is adding a lot of content (more than double the number of weapons in Fallout 3, for example) and necessary tweaks to the Fallout foundation.

Set three years after Fallout 3, New Vegas stars a mysterious stranger, though not a vault-dweller, who recovers from a bullet to the head and ventures forth to figure out the identity of the shooter. Of course, this journey of discovery is just as much about meting out that particular brand of Fallout justice.

Update: We mention later in this piece that Fallout: New Vegas apparently wouldn't have a fast travel system. We decided to contact Bethesda about that ... since just like you, we don't want to spend all of our gameplay time walking from one town to the next. Here's the response we received: "Fallout: New Vegas will have a fast travel system - just like Fallout 3. The guys were just pointing out that unlike Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas won't have any underground tunnels (the metro) linking the various locations."

Imagine going to work on "Van Buren," the original Fallout 3, as a designer for Black Isle Studios, only to see the title canceled due to parent company Interplay's financial problems. Then, imagine Bethesda buying the Fallout 3 license and developing an entirely different game, which goes on to win multiple awards and accolades. Now, imagine you're brought back into the franchise, as a designer for Obsidian Entertainment, to create a sequel to Bethesda's popular title. Preposterous, you say?

Josh Sawyer is the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and, after having the rug yanked from under him on the original Fallout 3, he's happy to be working on the latest new Fallout project -- one that will be released later this year. Read on for our conversation with Sawyer.

Joystiq: What's your history with the Fallout franchise?

Josh Sawyer: I worked on what's called "Van Buren," which was the codename when Black Isle started to work on what would have been Fallout 3, and we had worked on it for maybe half a year, and then it was canceled because Interplay had a lot of financial problems.

Fallout: New Vegas begs the question: Are we really ready for more Fallout? No mere expansion pack, New Vegas is equal in size and scope to Fallout 3 and will require a significant time investment to fully explore. Bethesda has brought in Obsidian to develop the title, and the studio is adding a lot of content (more than double the weapons of Fallout 3) and necessary tweaks to the Fallout foundation.

Set three years after Fallout 3, New Vegas stars a mysterious stranger, though not a vault-dweller, who's recovered from a bullet to the head and ventures forth to figure out the identity of the shooter. Of course, this journey of discovery is just as much about meting out that particular brand of Fallout justice.

#bethesdasoftworks Your first day in Fallout: New Vegas starts badly as you recover from being shot in the head, left for dead in a post-nuclear wasteland and apparently so worse for wear the town doctor can barely put you back together. More »

Where Fallout 3 is involved, the idea of "more of the same" is never a bad thing, especially when we're still playing the game a year and a half after its 2008 debut. Fortunately, Fallout: New Vegas, due this fall, is more than more of the same. Here's how.

Picking up three years after the events that played out in Fallout 3's Capitol Wasteland, this full sequel casts players a courier left for dead in Nevada's Mojave Wasteland. As such, players will have the option to select their character's age during the initial creation (or, in this case, re-creation) process, in addition to choosing their starting S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats. While they might not be a vault dweller, the game finds a way of outfitting them with the familiar Pip-Boy 3000 wearable computer.

The plot unfolds across a variety of high desert locales, from the New Vegas strip to the Hoover Dam and settlements beyond. The Mojave Wasteland is filled with things that want to kill you -- new and returning alike -- so you'll luckily have a refined combat system and expanded arsenal at your disposal. The V.A.T.S. targeting system from Fallout 3 returns more or less unaltered, save for new special move commands that should make melee fighting fans happy.

Obsidian talks about how things are changing in Sin City.

#obsidianentertainment If you've already spent hundreds of hours combing the wastelands of Washington D.C., Pittsburgh and Anchorage, Alaska in Fallout 3, what might convince you to revisit the post nuclear version of Sin City in Fallout: New Vegas? More »

Fan service? Maybe. Awesome? Yes.

Click to embearden
Around these parts, we're all avid supporters of a thick, lustrous beard. Though our tastes for the gaming industries various genres differ greatly, we can all get behind any game so long as it includes characters with copious amounts of facial hair. For this reason alone, a recent batch of screenshots has placed Fallout: New Vegas firmly on our list of most anticipated games of 2010.

You can check out images depicting New Vegas' unprecedentedly hirsute ensemble in the gallery below. There's also a Super Mutant with heart-rimmed glasses and a doo-wop weave, and man, we've got to find out what that's all about.

The small, irradiated pool of Fallout: New Vegas knowledge is about to get bigger. Bethesda has announced that the April issue of Official Xbox Magazine -- set to hit newsstands next week -- will devote its cover story to the game. Readers can expect an eight-page spread on New Vegas and, as a bonus, the included DVD will also feature some exclusive gamer pics (what, no Avatar items?).

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the magazine has an eight-page feature on Halo: Reach as well. All in all, probably something Xbox gamers should keep an eye on.

Aside from a cursory description of the game's premise on its official website, we've heard very little about Fallout: New Vegas. Today, friends, that changes, with a USA Today feature that reveals the game's protagonist as a shot and left-to-die package delivery boy who finds himself in Sin City "and the surrounding area" in 2280. "You were a courier, and you were obviously carrying something that somebody wanted," Bethesda Softworks' Pete Hines says of the player's character. "Part of the story is finding out what you had and what they took."

Hines additionally insists New Vegas will "feel" far different from 2008's Fallout 3 through one key aspect: the setting. "Vegas is up and running. It is not a ghost town. It still exists and thrives. There are casinos, and you can go down onto the Strip. It will have a very different feel from that standpoint."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hines also notes that the New Vegas will "take you hundreds of hours to explore every nook and cranny" -- not unlike the 2008 iteration of the Fallout franchise. We'd be straight lying if we said we weren't unbelievably ready to invest that time in more of the Fallout universe this fall, even after all of last year's DLC.

A few bits of info emerge.

Our panel of experts dissects the teaser trailer.

Take a gander at the new trailer and enter to win some Fallout swag.

Single-player only, set in and around New Vegas in Nevada.

Bethesda sent word today that the Obsidian-developed Fallout: New Vegas will start radiating store shelves this fall. It's a little less nebulous than the previous "sometime in 2010," but it's still not specific enough for our tastes. No, the real draw today is the second half of Bethesda's release, the debut teaser trailer that we've put just above. No gameplay, but it's got style and Sinatra to spare. Also ... is that a Helghast? It's not, right?

Sin City has beat the odds and survived a nuclear winter and have even managed to pay their electricity bill. The Fallout RPG world returns with a new series of guns, bottle caps and super mutants.

The very first must-see teaser has arrived.

Holy wow, there's actually some news about Obsidian / Bethesda's Fallout: New Vegas. We hadn't seen hide nor hair of the game since its announcement in April of last year and ... well, we still haven't. No, dear Readers, today's news is merely that the game will be distributed in many locales outside of the US by Namco Bandai. Specifically, the Japan-headquartered giant will be putting New Vegas into the hands of gamers in Australia, Austria, Benelux, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Rivet City. (We made that last one up.) For its part, Bethesda mostly talked up the partnership, but added that, "Fallout: New Vegas builds upon the immersive gaming experience that made Fallout 3 the 2008 Game of the Year." Yes, please! [Via CVG]