Good news, prospective vault dwellers! While Fallout 76 will let you play with nukes, the chances of being trolled by AtomicSlayer420 are extremely slim. While nukes are the game s most devastating weapons, they re not designed to target players specifically, says Bethesda, and are instead a way to alter the environment. Of course, altering the environment might also include wiping an enemy base off the map.

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Over on Reddit, prospective vault dwellers have been diligently constructing a map for Fallout 76. It pays to be prepared for the apocalypse. Despite the fact that the Fallout spin-off was only announced just before E3, the user-created map is already in its sixth iteration. It s all speculation at the moment, but thanks to West Virginians chiming in, it might also end up being pretty close to Bethesda s version. (more…)

It is looking like a very fine year indeed to be a Fallout fan. Even if you’re not on board with Fallout 76 taking the series online, we’ve got two full-game-length mods on the way, both due out before the end of 2018. Fallout: The Frontier is an unofficial expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, and has you heading to the frozen north to aid a crew of New California Republic deserters in a massive new map (as big as the editor allows) against a well equipped enemy force. Check out the dramatic and explosion-filled new trailer within.

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While the recently announced Fallout 76 might be diverging from series standards, it looks like fans of traditional dialogue and roleplaying-heavy Fallout adventures won’t be entirely left out this year. Originally announced in 2010 as Project Brazil, Fallout: New California is effectively a whole new Fallout game built on top of the New Vegas engine by modding crew Radian-Helix Media, and it’s due for release on October 23rd. Within, a quite dramatic announcement trailer featuring some decent enough amateur voice-work and a whole lot of shooting.

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Well, there we go: Fallout 76 is the answer you were looking for. Not Fallout 5, not Fallout 3 remastered, but ‘Fallout 76′, which on the face of things implies a sort Fallout 4.5, much like New Vegas was to FO3. It might not be that simple, however – more on which below.

’76’ refers, it seems, both to the number of the Vault you’ll start off in this time, and to the year 2076 (that being the year Vault 76 was built, and the year before the bombs dropped in the Falloutverse). I’m hoping it also proves an excuse to use more of a 70s than 50s aesthetic for this particular take on the end of the world, which may be backed up by the use of John Denver’s ’71 country classic, Take Me Home, Country Roads. That song’s reference to West Virginia probably ain’t no coinky-dink either.

Below: the trailer, and my best educated guesses about the timeline, setting, theme and release date of this new Fallout. (more…)

“War,” Ron Perlman will almost certainly growl during Bethesda’s E3 press conference. “War never changes,” he’ll likely continue. Then he’ll go on about some past wars, which were bad, and tell us about fictional future wars which are also bad. Bethesda are teasing some sort of Fallout announcement, see. New or old, original or remaster… we don’t know. But at some point soon we’ll get to see some marketing for a new Fallout thing. E3, E3 never changes. (more…)

Democracy is on the brink of collapse. Caesar’s Legion, the authoritarian slave state across the Colorado River, has launched a massive assault on the last, best chance for freedom in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout. It’s a grim certainty in Old World Blues that the New California Republic will fight Caesar’s Legion: they’re the wasteland’s two superpowers, diametrically opposed ideologically, each expanding towards the other. I just thought I was better prepared. While Caesar was annihilating every ill-defended tribe to the west, I was rearming, inviting new states into the republic, and admittedly annexing a few tribes myself. With the game paused, I assess my options, reorganise my armies and ask, finally, does democracy die in 2279?

Old World Blues is a mod for Hearts of Iron IV which transports the World War II grand strategy game hundreds of years forward into the post-apocalyptic American west coast of the Fallout series. Players select a faction in the year 2275 and attempt to survive and thrive in the west coast wasteland. Structurally, it’s similar to Hearts of Iron IV, but the content and style has been transformed. Old World Blues is tremendously fun, comparable in quality to the standard Hearts of Iron IV game, and it does a terrific job of translating Fallout to grand strategy. (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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Since its foundation in 2003, Obsidian Entertainment has worked with seven different publishers. Commencing with LucasArts on Knights of the Old Republic II, Obsidian has since signed contracts with Atari, SEGA, Bethesda, Square Enix, Ubisoft and most recently, Paradox Interactive. In fact, up until Pillars of Eternity [official site], every single game Obsidian had made was funded and distributed by a different publisher.

This is a highly unusual state of affairs, and has proved precarious more than once in the company’s history. But it has also provided Obsidian with a unique insight into how the world of publishing works, and how the relationship between developer and publisher has changed in the last couple of decades. This topic is especially pertinent today, as new methods of funding and distributing games have seen a significant shift in the power dynamic between developers and publishers.

I spoke to CEO Feargus Urquhart about how it all works (and doesn’t).

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When Obsidian Entertainment started work on Pillars of Eternity [Official Site], the studio had two goals in mind. First, it wanted to recreate the style and tone of the classic Black Isle RPGs particularly Baldur’s Gate. Second, it wanted to modernise that style, taking advantage of today’s technology, and avoiding mistakes made the first time around. (more…)