Fallout-3 posts

With Halloween now just 10 days away, thoughts are turning to decorating the house for the holiday. One artist who goes by the name "Ceemdee" has gotten a leg up on the season by creating a ton of pumpkin art designs. "Ceemdee" is also apparently a gamer as the designs are all based on classic and soon-to-be-classic games.

You can see Vault Boy from the Fallout series above but the Deviantart.com page for "Ceemdee" has a ton of similar designs for classic games like Deus Ex, Thief, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango and even the more recent Plants Vs Zombies. That's a lot of effort for art that will eventually decay and become compost.

Nvidia's latest driver release for its GeForce series of graphics chips is now available in beta form and this release happens to have some performance improvements for a number of games. The 191.03 drivers, for example, improve the performance of Batman: Arkham Asylum eight percent when PhysX support is enabled.

Other improvements in the driver release include a whopping 50 percent performance increase in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood with SLI set-ups, a 34 percent improvement in Prototype with anti-aliasing enabled and a 14 percent improvement in Fallout 3's indoor scenes with anti-aliasing enabled. SLI support is also added to a number of games in this driver release including Need for Speed Shift and Majesty 2.

Remember a while back when a game prop-replica maker named Harrison Krix created a cool-as-school replica of the Portal gun? Well, he's been keeping extremely busy since then with a number of different game-related projects. His latest effort is a commission for a AER9 Laser Rifle as seen in Fallout 3.

Krix goes into extreme detail on his web site on how he build the gun replica for a fan who wanted to use it for a Fallout 3 Vault Dweller cosplay costume. As you can see above the final result is pretty spectacular and we are sure that the person who hired Krix to make the gun got more than his money's worth.

Bethesda Softworks' hit RPG Fallout 3 will be a year old in October and now the developer/publisher has revealed that their previously announced Game of the Year edition of the game will ship to stores for the PC on October 13.

The Game of the Year edition will include the original game plus all five of the game's mini-expansions (Operation Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta) that were released earlier this year via download from the Games or Windows Live Marketplace. If you haven't bought Fallout 3 yet this is the perfect opportunity to get all of Bethesda's official expansion on one disk. The PC version for the Game of the Year edition is priced at $49.99.

Things have apparently come to a head between Interplay and Bethesda Softworks over the Fallout game license. Bethesda's parent company Zenimax Media bought the full Fallout rights several years ago but allowed Interplay to proceed, with certain conditions, with their plans for a Fallout-based MMO. Last April Interplay warned that Bethesda was planning to " . . . to terminate the trademark license agreement . . . for the development of FALLOUT MMOG" because those conditions were not met.

Now Gamasutra reports that Bethesda Softworks has filed a lawsuit against Interplay this week, alledging that Interplay violated Bethesda's Fallout IP rights when Interplay released Fallout Trilogy, a collection of the first two Interplay made Fallout RPGs along with their spin-off title Fallout Tactics. Bethesda claims that while Interplay has the rights to sell those games, it must send over all promotional and packaging artwork to Bethesda for pre-apporval. Bethesda says Interplay did not fullfill this requirement and also made agreements to sell the games via digital download sites without Bethesda's approval.

Bethesda claims Interplay's actions have caused Bethesda "immediate, substantial, and irreparable harm" since they claim consumers would confuse Fallout Trilogy with Bethesda's own Fallout 3. Bethesda is seeking the termination of their previous MMO agreement with Interplay and that Interplay pay for damages and fees. They are also seeking an injunction against the sale of Fallout Trilogy and all of Interplay's back catalog of Fallout games.

While John Carmack's speech at QuakeCon 2009 was super long, Todd Howard's speech today was under an hour but still highly informative and extremely funny. The executive director at Bethesda Softworks made his QuakeCon debut with a video and slide presentation that was very entertaining.

Howard pointed out that Bethesda and id were very similar; both were PC hardcore developers that slowly turned into multi-platform teams. Currently Bethesda has between 85 to 90 employees. To work at the company you have to have several qualities, according to Howard, including having a "low a**hole quotient".

Most of Howard's presentation went through some of the things they did while developing their last game, Fallout 3.They looked through not only the previous two Interplay made RPGs but also old reviews of the games to see what people responded to in the games.

Bethesda makes marketing part of the process of developing their games because marketing is how people are first introduced to the game before actually playing it. Even things like designing what the art will look like on the game disk is part of that process.

Check out more from Howard after the jump

Fallout 3 players complete a ton of fantastic achievements after stepping from Vault 101, the least of which includes saving (or dooming) humanity and working to revive (or conquer) the irradiated Capitol Wastelands. So, why limit those accomplishments to Earth? The newest downloadable content expansion, Mothership Zeta, takes former Vault dwellers toward the final frontier as they're abducted and beamed aboard a giant flying saucer high up in Earth's orbit. Players have a chance to fight a ship full of aliens using their advanced technology in an effort to figure out what they're up to and find a way to escape.

With the release today of Mothership Zeta, Bethesda Softworks has now sent out the last of their downloadable mini-expansions for Fallout 3. However if you are one of those folks who haven't yet bought the post-apocalypse RPG revival, you are in luck this week.

Direct2Drive has just announced that they have put their downloadable version of Fallout 3 on sale for just $24.95. That's a 50 percent cut from the game's normal price on Direct2Drive. The sale runs through August 9. Also we have a bit of an update on that Prototype $10 off sale that we mentioned Sunday. Direct2Drive has apparently decided to extend that offer until August 8. Finally Call of Juarez: Born in Blood has had its price cut by 30 percent from now until Sunday.

The first full week in August brings a downloadable expansion and a WWII strategy game to PC gamers:

Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta: In the fifth (and final?) downloadable expansion for Bethesda Softworks' post-apocalyptic RPG, you character finds a smashed spaceship and finds himself beams into orbit aboard an alien mothership. Look for new weapons and, yes, aliens to shoot with them.

Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta, the newest DLC expansion is August 3rd. In it, players are abducted by aliens and brought aboard the mothership. Players will have to uncover the aliens' secret plans and escape... preferably with armfuls of alien technology.

"A strange Alien signal is being broadcast throughout the Capital Wasteland, originating from a crashed UFO. Is it a distress call, or something far more sinister? That question is answered when you find yourself beamed aboard an enormous Alien spacecraft, with only one alternative – to fight your way to the bridge of the ship and secure your escape."

Download HD Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta Trailer (80 MB)
Check out all Fallout 3 downloads