http://planescape.com/

Now let us hope they don't ruin it, so I can finally beat the game and die in peace. What say you NMA hive?





i did just pop a boner so to speak, but I hear that Baldur's Gate one sucked...

A 4chan /v/ poster claiming to be a tester for the game is now claiming they aren't planning to touch the writing. I think he is the one who leaked the pics according to Codex. You know how anonymous 4chan posters are though.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...fargo-plans-to-retire-after-wasteland-3-ships

Brian Fargo recently announced his plans to retire after Wasteland 3 is shipped in 2019. This may come as a shock to some but he has been in the industry since 1981, so I am sure he wants to do something else. He has yet to say who exactly will take over in his stead.

Wasteland 2 and Torment both came out great," he said. "The Mage's Tale's got a great buzz. The Bard's Tale 4 looks spectacular. Wasteland 3 is building on Wasteland 2. It seems like a good time to drop the mic.

"I love this industry, but I've been at this since 1981. I've been at it with Ken and Roberta Williams [Sierra co-founders], Trip Hawkins [EA founder], the guys from Brøderbund - I look at my friends, they have a lot more spare time than I do. It's a very intense business. It's all encompassing. It seems like I should relax for a little bit."

Fargo's Interplay is perhaps best...

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This might be interesting to those of you looking forward to TToN or if you are wanting to know more about certain aspects of game writing in the industry.

Chris Avellone and TToN writers narrative panel talk at GDC: http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/everythings-on-fire-and-no-one-knows-what-to-do

Everything's on Fire and No One Knows What to Do

George Ziets | Lead Designer/Writer, inXile Entertainment
Leanne Taylor-Giles | Scriptwriter, Ubisoft Montreal
Chris Avellone | Narrative Designer, Freelancer
Colin McComb | Narrative Designer/Creative Lead & President, 3lb Games LLC
Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie | Lead Writer, inXile Entertainment

Everything's on Fire and No One Knows What to Do is about developing a common knowledge base for game writers, narrative designers, and cross-discipline communication. This panel focuses on the day-to-day aspects of game writing and working within a team, namely problem-solving, clear communication, and uncovering constraints after...

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Wasteland 3 was just updated on Fig to include the Vision Doc. It is definitely worth a look for Fallout fans. InXile has received a lot of complaints recently due to poor communication with backers, and Blacklisting RPG Codex, so let's hope they can turn things around this year.

Hello Rangers,

It is time to give you all another status update on Wasteland 3! As we mentioned previously, we are deep in our pre-production phase. We have a set of core team members working to build out the vision for the game. In the coming months we have a set timeline to ensure our future team members will roll onto the project smoothly. Lead Designer George Ziets and the content team are hard at work hammering down the overall storyline, as well as working on area design and coming up with all kinds of quirky characters and companions to populate Colorado.

Beyond area and system designs, a key goal for our...

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The developers behind the recently announced Apocalypse Now Kickstarter campaign took to Reddit to answer questions about the game. You can read some of the more interesting segments from that Q&A session HERE. At the moment it looks like it won't reach it's goal raising a little over $151,000 which is far short of the required budget to make such a game.

In other news recent controversy over dropped stretch goals and poor communication from InXile, currently developing Torment: Tides of Numenera, has led them to apologize in a recent article from Eurogamer. You can see some of that here:

Torment: Tides of Numenera developer inXile has issued an apology, following...

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A bit of of various news about various topics.
First some Fallout:
Fallout 4 is about to get PS4 Pro support, and there's a high res texture pack for PC incoming.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...and-pc-high-resolution-texture-pack-next-week
The pack is 58 GB (!) large and requires quite a beefy PC, here are the recommended specs:

• Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
• Intel Core i7-5820K or better
• GTX 1080 8GB/AMD Radeon RX 490 8GB
• 8GB+ Ram

That's quite something. Let's wait for the modders (who have been handing out 4K texture packs right from the start) to optimize that load...

Thanks to @0wing, here's some more interesting news about Fallout...

Guess that Obsidian rumor was right. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire just went up on Fig. Still no sign of Van Buren, but I wager it's just a matter of time.



Thanks to @eissa for posting the link.

Eurogamer posted a new article about Fallout 2 and a formula the developers used for the sexual encounters. Chris Avellone is in it so there is that. Hey at least it's not about Fallout 4!

Eurogamer said:

When you weren't trying to save your village in Fallout 2, you might have dabbled in a little extracurricular activity. That's cool, I'm not here to judge. Crack on.

But here's a thing! Fallout 2, it turns out, has a surprisingly involved formula that works behind the scenes to determine exactly how good your character is when it comes to, y'know, a little afternoon delight.

This sounds daft, doesn't it? Well it is. And that makes for a pretty fun story, I reckon. Join me in this week's episode as we take a look at the formula itself and share some insights from its actually-quite-famous-creators, Chris Avellone and Tom French.

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Obsidian recently held a 48-hour marathon stream for charity, where Josh Sawyer played Fallout: New Vegas while answering questions from the viewers and telling stories from the development:

https://www.twitch.tv/obsidian/v/100606816?t=6h47m
(starts at the 6h47m mark and ends a bit before 11h mark)

Of course, he plays with his own mod enabled and on Hard difficulty, because Josh ain't no slouch.

While I have yet to watch (or rather, listen to) it all, there does not seem to be a lot of unknown information in this video, as Sawyer has answered so many questions about development elsewhere already.
One funny story I noticed was the reason for the bug where ED-E would go hostile in Camp McCarren. Apparently this happened because of Radiant AI perceiving ED-E as an animal, so if any nearby humans had the "Hunter" AI, they would hunt and kill animals for food, thereby attacking ED-E if it had food in its inventory.

Hot on the coat tails of Dude101's novel release, CT Phipps asks us to post about his new book: Cthulhu Armageddon. As the name implies, it's a mix up of two genres which are beloved by our community: post-apocalyptic sci-fi and Lovecraftian horror.

Cthulhu Armageddon is a post-apocalypse science fiction set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. One hundred years have passed since the destruction of the Earth by the Great Old Ones' Rising. Humanity continues to survive in small pockets. John Henry Booth as a Ranger for New Arkham suffers a devastating loss when his team is wiped out looking for a group of kidnapped children. Blamed for the disaster and exiled into the Wasteland, he vows to get revenge on the...

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NMA has never lacked writing talent, in the form of games, mods and stories. However, it is rather rare for our members to release a novel. Dude101 gave it a shot and how now been published. If you like dark stories wedged in between 1984 and Brave New World, give it a shot and let us know what you think.

William King is as out of control as the world he lives in. While a hulking, menacing government bureaucracy consolidates its grip on the general populace, stripping rights and twisting bodies and minds, with its attempts to tighten control ever increasing toward attaining utter dominance, Billy’s fracturing mind and feral body scrabble for hope and freedom. Abandoned by father and by brother, assailed by the insanity of his frail yet despotic mother and the dog-eat-dog society she reflects, Billy must choose between starvation in the gutter or submission to military might and pray that...

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Inxile has just put the first gameplay mock up trailer trailer of Wasteland 3 online.
Some of the changes mentioned in the announcement article were shown in action here such as the new conversation menu, and using vehicles for protection or using turrets installed on them.

Edit: this is apparently the gameplay Inxile will be going for with the finished product.

inXile Entertainment has just announced Wasteland 3!
For the development of it they'll be launching a crowdfunding campaign on October the 5th on fig.co.
It will apparently be set in the frozen Colorado wastes, and it will have coop!
http://kotaku.com/wasteland-3-announced-will-have-co-op-1787185091
https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/47757-wasteland-3-fig-launch

Now usually the NMA Podcast isn't exactly newsworthy, but in this installment there is something special going on: An interview with this guy:

Chris Avellone! You might know him from classic games like Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and some random games nobody cares about, like Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment.
Anyway, here's the interview:

A little late with this as this article came online two weeks ago but the people of the gaming article website Gaming 101, a site that does both articles on current day games and series, and retrospectives on titles and series of yesterday have written an article on the Fallout franchise, the various releases and canceled titles, its history, and of course its fandom and modding community.
No Mutants Allowed, probably the most famous or infamous depending on people's perspective also got mentioned (both as being one of the places were Fallout 1 and 2 mods were hosted and these days for the majority of its members' dislike for Bethesda's take on the franchise).

Among Fallout fans, there are two conflicting ideas about what Fallout actually is. To many players, Fallout is about exploring the post-apocalyptic wasteland, shooting raiders and participating in conflicts which will shape the future of the world (or rather what remains of it). Others will say...

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In a way it's a full new classic Fallout game: An ambitious mod of Fallout 2 creates a new story set between Fallout 1 and 2 in New Mexico.
Fallout 1.5: Resurrection promises content on the scale of Fallout 1, so it's definitely a very ambitious project by the czech team behind it. The czech version has been out for a while, but now the english version is also available.
http://resurrection.cz/en/
http://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-15-r..._source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer-pcgamertw

Fallout 4 and especially its DLC has been heavily criticised for using ideas very similar to some found in mods, like New Vegas' "RobCo Certified". The workshop DLCs have been under most fire, but apparently even proper quests in Fallout 4 might have been "heavily inspired" by previously existing mods for Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
Those who played the New Vegas quest mod "Autumn Leaves" and Fallout 4's DLC "Far Harbor" might have noticed that there are some peculiar similarities between the mod and the Far Harbor quest "Brain Dead". On ModDB this also didn't go by unnoticed, with a user providing a handy comparison between the two: http://www.moddb.com/mods/autumn-leaves/news/big-publishers-and-a-small-mod/
Both involve new Vaults where the player has to investigate a murder case where the victim is the prime financier of the vault, and all the prime suspects are people who willingly put their brains into robobrain bodies. Both have the option to sleep with one of the...

Bethesda just released their beta to Steam with some additional details about what the update includes. It seems they've added a number of extra settlement customizations.

Opinion: My personal feeling is the settlements need more than just "stuff". I can't even get my settlers to use half the settlement they're in and half the fun of defense turrets is watching them mow down raiders... but with a defense so high you never get raided? Still holding out for some major settlement changes to make them worth investing in.



Along with support for upcoming add-on content and additional gameplay fixes, the 1.4 update includes several new features that will let you add even more character to...

Bethesda has released their 1.3 update which includes fixes and enhancements for the console and PC versions of the game. They had done something similar with Skyrim where they continued to release general enhancements and a few minor features with their patches (likely in preparation for coming DLC content), like better gun debris:



Better settlement and build management were definitely sorely needed features. The below excerpt is taken from the Bethesda website's post about the release.

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Fallout 4 1.3 Update
The 1.3 update for Fallout 4 is available as an automatic download for Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 users.

The update has several new features – including PC-specific enhancements like our new ambient occlusion setting (HBAO+) –...

Kotaku wrote an interesting article about the fandom behind Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas in the face of Bethesda's release of Fallout 4. Seems many fans are still looking for Obsidian to do more with the Fallout franchise, something many people on NMA can relate to:

Picture this. You spend years putting together a massive, ambitious RPG. After countless hours of hard work, you release your baby out into the public. Curious to see what people think, you start looking around the internet...only to see a small but vocal chunk of your fanbase wishing someone else had made your game.

That’s been the story with Fallout 4 since its release back in November. Bethesda made the game, but plenty of people are wishing Obsidian Entertainment had made it in their place.

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..."It sometimes seems as though you can’t talk about Fallout 4 without having someone...

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