Fallout 4 VR is almost exactly what the phrase ‘Fallout 4 VR’ implies. Which is to say, the entirety of Fallout 4 rendered in giant-scale gogglevision. It’s funny – for some time there was this expectation that VR needed a full-fat mainstream game to truly get its wings, but now that’s finally happened, it just feels like the most normal thing in the world. (more…)

The world ended on September, 30 1997. Or, rather, that was the day we were first shown what would become gaming’s enduring definition of the end of the world. Interplay’s Fallout, a very different game from Bethesda’s Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 (not that this seems to bother anyone; no sirree, not a soul), was and is a landmark roleplaying game. It disrupted ideas that RPGs meant elves and kobolds; it disrupted ideas that RPGs were a straight march to the finish line; it disrupted ideas that RPG heroes should be heroic.

War never changes, but Fallout changed most everything else.

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A couple of weeks back – when I also went hands-on with both Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2 – I goggled up and gave the upcoming VR version of 2016’s Doom a spin, as well as bearing witness to other folks’ flailing and giggling in Skyrim VR and Fallout VR. Bethesda’s triptych of 3D ultravision spin-offs are due before the year is out, with Skyrim only available on PSVR at least initially and Fallout and Doom only officially> supporting HTC Vive, for obvious reasons. Their arrival is a pretty big event for a technology that so far has leaned far more heavily on brand new things rather than established names.

Curious about what this means for the technology and for Doom, Skyrim and Fallout, I picked Bethesda VP Pete Hine’s brains about the whys and wherefores, and what it might imply for the future of their own VR efforts. Also below: my own quick impressions of Doom VFR [official site].

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All social problems can be solved by data, any naive tech company can tell you, which is why Valve are attempting to solve Steam ‘review bombing’ by adding graphs to its player reviews. Review bombing is the practice of players organising to leave negative reviews that drive down a game’s rating in an attempt to punish or manipulate developers by damaging their future sales prospects. Games bombed over the past month range from Firewatch to Grand Theft Auto V. This is a known and old problem with Steam’s reviews, and one Valve aren’t happy with. So, to counterattack disproportionate bursts of negative reviews, Valve have added unusual activity warnings to Steam store pages with histograms tracking reviews over time. (more…)

As you may have spotted, Humble has been running an ‘End of Summer Sale’ over the past few days to ring in the Autumn and, well, discount a bunch of games. The sale only has a few days left to run and the final wave of titles has been added as of today. This batch is entirely from Bethesda and features some of the company’s best stuff – from Doom to Wolfenstein to Call of Cthulu. Just me on that last one? (it did sneak into our list of best horror games! – ed>).

You have a few days left to pick up this range or any number of discounts (like Hitman’s entire first season) before the sale is gone for good.

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Bethesda VP Pete Hines strikes me as a man grown weary of discussing mod controversies, like 2015’s paid Skyrim mods hullabaloo. In less than a week since its release, Bethesda s Creation Club, which lets you buy mods for Fallout 4 [official site] with credits that cost real cash, has drummed up a fair amount of them. Hines, however, not only seeks to assuage fears that these premium mods were heralding something terrible, but also disputes the very idea that the Creation Club constitutes ‘paid mods’. (more…)

The first digital fruits of Bethesda’s new kinda-sorta-paid-mods programme, the Creation Club, arrive today in Fallout 4 [official site]. It’ll then hit Skyrim in September. Unlike Bethesda’s disastrous first flirtation with paid mods for Skyrim in 2015, which was quickly abandoned, the Creation Club is more like a DLC microtransaction store partially outsourced to modders. It’s a selection of new content Bethesda are approving and commissioning themselves rather than Steam’s failed free-for-all marketplace where anyone could upload anything, see. The initial Creation Club lineup is pretty bland, mind, just odds and ends. (more…)

As the Steam Summer Sale closes, here’s the last of the charts influenced by the discounts, before they return to being exactly the same as they were before the sale, and indeed during it.

So this week we’re going to dig into the history of these familiar names, revealing some secrets of their pasts that many may not already know. … [visit site to read more]

As we learnt last week, the Steam Summer Sale feels> like the sort of thing that should enliven the charts. Nothing can enliven the charts…

Apart from me! … [visit site to read more]

The Steam Summer Sale is here to rescue us from the same old games! Hooray! Hooray! Hoo-whatnow? Oh for crying out loud, the usual games are all on sale too, aren’t they? … [visit site to read more]