Oh, for God’s sake. Leaving aside that your recommendation is that Obsidian should have burnt their bridges with Bethesda and pretty much ensured that they’d never work together again on the dubious belief that (famously litigation-happy) Bethesda wouldn’t have an open and shut case against them, third-party…

Wait... seriously? Your argument seriously is that Obsidian should have said, in essence, “fuck you, Bethesda: we’re going to take another year to finish this game,” and that, as long as they *eventually* did, there would have been no problem? I mean, even if this didn’t end up burning every bridge between the two…

Right. A good business owner would have funded Q&A entirely out of his own pocket... and when that amount proved laughably insufficient to do so, then what? Feargus Urquhart is not a multimillionaire, and the salary of relatively small studio isn’t going to cover the Q&A costs for a AAA release (which would be roughly…

You lied about the delay to South Park: The Stick of Truth having anything to do with Obsidian. You lied about a significant number of current Obsidian employees being BioWare expats. You lied about Black Isle developing the first BG: Dark Alliance game. You lied about how it was Obsidian’s responsibility to do Q&A…

Now you’re arguing against your own argument. You’re the one who insisted that Obsidian was terrible for not spending money and time to do Q&A work the contracts they sign don’t budget for. How, exactly, do you think the publisher is going to react when Obsidian tells them they unilaterally modified the timetable in…

Once again, Troika’s history is well documented, and you’ve clearly done enough research to know that your retelling is dishonest to the point of outright lying. Arguing that Interplay’s in-name-only revival of the Black Isle branding has anything to do with either Troika or Obsidian is even remotely relevant is like…

All right, you don’t understand how the industry works, clearly don’t care to learn, and can’t even be internally consistent with your fanciful idea of how the industry should work. A third party developer is supposed to take money they don’t have, to do a job they’re not contracted to do, with time they’re not…

We’re going to gloss over the fact that black isle and bioware employed over half of the same staff at different points in their careers.

This is because Obsidian is basically the Bioware B team, since a majority of their employ consist of fired Bioware developers — and the games they knew how to make, were the 2D D&D games, Baldurs Gate.

No, but calling it a story “of very stupid restaurant customers” seems a bit much. The guy asked a legitimate (if clearly uninformed) question in a polite way. The whole thing could have been resolved with a straightforward answer.

There were comments made during the E3 presentation that make me think that Fallout 4 will be native x64. But we probably won’t know for sure until they release the system requirements a month or so before release.

Interesting NPCs is the most impressive quest mod I’ve ever seen for a Bethesda-produced game. I didn’t mention it just because it’s fundamentally different, IMO, from things like Falskaar or Wyrmstooth. Those mods are much more like DLC: go somewhere entirely new and explore. As such, they can be done at pretty much…

Not at all. This is where we nitpick a reporter for Kotaku for a context-free bit of fluff. The Forgotten City looks fine, but pretending that it’s inherently more newsworthy this far in advance of its actual release than a half dozen similar mods is a bit silly.

I understand the problem, though. Skyrim was released in 2011, and releasing a 64-bit-only game then would have been a hugely risky proposition. That excuse won’t fly for Fallout 4, though....

There are several “expansion-sized” mods for Skyrim out already. Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, Beyond Reach, The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal, Moonpath to Elsweyr, etc. The Forgotten City looks competent enough, but nothing particularly special, either. And, personally, I’m always a little nervous about mods that announce their…

Controversial opinions ahoy!

I fully expect Bethesda to improve on their storytelling in Fallout 4, partly because I can’t honestly imagine it getting much worse, and partly because they did showcase some improvement in Skyrim. But I don’t expect a sea change, sadly. They’ve done and said very little that suggests they’ve made monumental strides,…

Van Buren was pretty far along in development when the axe fell (the engine and script were both basically finished, and the maps were about 50% finished). The project lead (J.E. Sawyer) was later the project lead for Fallout: New Vegas, and many of the things originally planned for the aborted project found their way…

There’s bitterness, yes, but that’s not where it comes from. The bitterness comes from the fact that these are people who have been legitimately passed on by the gaming industry. Many of them don’t just prefer older styles of games, they flat out don’t like newer styles. Telling them, in essence, to get with the times…

I guess I mostly just don’t understand why fans of Fallout are not happy with two amazing games that are different from the series roots, whn the alternative was no more fallout or, at the very least, more games like Fallout Tactics and Brotherhood Of Steel. Bethesda loves this franchise and Interplay doesn’t. Bottom…