The Fallout series has evolved, and will no doubt continue to evolve. What we're talking about here, however, is not evolution. Implementing a Mass Effect-style conversation wheel is not doing anything new or original: it's apeing something that, as you yourself state, "is seen all over gaming now." For the series to…

You're implying that eating food out of a bowl or a plate is the same thing, when in fact bowls are capable of holding much a much greater quantity of food in a much cleaner fashion.

It's not just brand loyalty, though. There are plenty of reasons why someone would prefer a Xbox One or PS4 to a PC, or vice versa. Different platforms do better with certain styles of games, some people prefer keyboard + mouse to gamepad, etc.

Their Radiant AI system was functionally identical to the quest system they had all the way back in Daggerfall. Their much-heralded "new" Creation Engine was basically an incremental patch to the same Gamebryo engine they've been using since Morrowind. The talk about how much content they had planned for Skyrim DLC…

World War II still happened in the Fallout universe. The point of divergence from "our" history has never been exactly defined, but it was some time during the 1950s or early 1960s.

Bethesda is all about cliche. There is no developer out there more skilled and creating/taking an interesting setting and lore and churning out a hackneyed, unoriginal, and (especially in the case of Fallout 3) hole-ridden plot out of it (and I say that as a fan). That's why this "feels" legitimate to me. It's also…

Nothing about this fills me with confidence. I didn't hate Fallout 3, but I suspected at the time that Bethesda really didn't get the series's lore or history, and this only furthers that suspicion. They're obsessed with telling stories about the the war itself. Despite taking place centuries after the conflict, they…

Top-down perspective is better suited to certain styles of gameplay. Sticking with RPGs, a game like Skyrim is all about personal interaction with/immersion in the game world, and is ideally suited to the first-person perspective. But an RPG like Pillars of Eternity, or the Infinity Engine games which inspired it (Bald…

When a publisher contracts for an outside work of art, the contract usually covers a specific use or media, and may not apply beyond that. The music publishers whose work is featured in GTA V may have agreed to let their work be played in the game, but they may not have agreed for it to be featured in YouTube videos…

Interestingly, the makers of The Last of Us don't appear to share your opinion. Though Naughty Dog has been a bit noncommittal concerning monetized videos, they don't seem to care about videos in general. They were apparently as surprised as anyone by the spate of claims, and have been reaching out to YouTubers on…

Context matters. He wanted to be in charge of his own company, and be able to make his own decisions. Nothing he's done since Mojang started suggests that they're actively gunning for the same sort of position in the market as Valve.

Whether they "should" or basically irrelevant. The question is, can they legally do so, if they are so inclined? Generally speaking, I tend to come down on the side of Let's Plays (at least, the ones with commentary) as sufficiently transformative to be considered separate works.

Most publishers are at least tolerant of gameplay videos. The biggest issue is monetization: few publishers care if you make a video of their work, but some don't grant permission for you to make money of that video. That permission may or may not be required, mind you: the gameplay itself may or may not be considered…

This reminds me of one of the stretch goals from Obsidian's Project Eternity Kickstarter. Having reached a certain level of funding, they got Chris Avellone to sit down and do a Let's Play of Arcanum, because he (somewhat famously) had never played it before. Granted, Arcanum isn't technically an Obsidian game (it's…

Yeah, let's talk about "tangents that were not even brought up." Your claim that Notch "actually thinks Minecraft is going to propel him to starting his own Valve," for one. I mean, it's not like Mojang have launched a digital distribution platform, nor have they taken to taunting the public with their…

Minecraft was heavily inspired by Infiniminer. The end product, though, actually has very little in common with Infiniminer. There's a shared ancestry, but Minecraft evolved substantially. At this point, about all the two games share is a similar visual design and a broadly concieved genre of sandbox game. You might…

No game remains a best seller forever. I'd be shocked if Notch expects Minecraft to remain a best seller into perpetuity. Meanwhile, even if Notch never makes another game, as long as he manages his money reasonably wisely, he's set for life. Given that he clearly values his independence and his ability to pursue his…

This argument sometimes gets trotted out in defense of blatantly illegal and indefensible acts of piracy, sure, but it is a legitimate concern facing all kinds of proprietary hardware. People who need to preserve older software (librarians, businesses maintaining legacy applications, etc.) already have to deal with…

I suspect the lack of major exclusives (at least compared with previous generations) is part of the reason why there's not much of a emulation scene for recent consoles.

That depends on the system, though. Few older consoles bothered to implement DRM at the software level, so they likely wouldn't fall afoul of the DMCA's anti-circumvention restrictions. "Ripping" an original PlayStation disc, for instance, is generally as simple as copying a CD. Likewise, most pre-disc systems rely on…