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Fallout 4 Will Be Skipping Xbox 360 and PS3 204

Posted by samzenpus from the only-the-best dept.
An anonymous reader writes: There's some sad news for those of you looking forward to playing Fallout 4 on your Xbox 360 or your PS3. Bethesda has announced that Fallout 4 will be a current-gen and PC exclusive game and that there will be no last-gen releases in the future. Bethesda global community manager Matt Grandstaff says of the old consoles, "the stuff we're doing will never work there."
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Fallout 4 Will Be Skipping Xbox 360 and PS3 More

Fallout 4 Will Be Skipping Xbox 360 and PS3

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  • Good! (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by lennier1 ( 264730 )

    It's bad enough that the game will be crippled by design thanks to compatibility with the underpowered "next get" train wrecks. No need to add even more ballast to waste resources.

    • It's bad enough that the game will be crippled by design thanks to compatibility with the underpowered "next get" train wrecks.

      Really? I don't see that as a problem. The only part of the PS4/XB1 consoles that is underpowered is the raw power of the CPU/GPU, but on the PC, you can simply have higher res textures and better features...

      The benefit to the consoles is that being 8 core chips with 8GB of memory, the game can be set in a true open world.

      FO3 for example had all kinds of "tricks" to work in the limited memory of the PS3, so much of Washington DC was really zoned areas with all that rubble to keep you from really exploring

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        So I don't buy issues in Fallout being so much a problem with the hardware as with the game running on top. GTA V managed an open sandbox game on top of the same hardware and arguably had a far more dynamic and demanding world than any Fallout / Elder Scrolls game.

        That said, I don't see much reason to support the PS3 or 360 since both platforms are in their twilight. I doubt sales would justify the effort of making the games run acceptably or the compromises that come to the game design from doing so.

        • Re:Good! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday June 08, 2015 @05:41AM (#49865477) Journal
          Bethesda is not...exactly renowned...for their technical brilliance and dedication to software quality, so I wouldn't expect them to be on the bleeding edge of the possible for any given platform; but they'll still do a hell of a lot better on nearly-normal-x86s with 8GB of RAM than they will on two differently weird PPC boxes with 512MB, so I'd say that this counts as good news.

          Frankly, though, Bethesda is one of the outfits that I just wouldn't touch on the console. Their specialty is bug-riddled-but-bursting-with-promise, and they've historically had good relations with modders, so you miss out on a whole lot on the console side, even if it isn't a total clusterfuck like Skyrim+expansions on PS3.

          With some games you can expect reasonably complete polish and/or hostility to mods on the PC side, so consoles are more or less the same deal; but Bethesda RPGs are not those games.

          • Their specialty is bug-riddled-but-bursting-with-promise, and they've historically had good relations with modders, so you miss out on a whole lot on the console side, even if it isn't a total clusterfuck like Skyrim+expansions on PS3.

            Even without any expansions, there's a super-shitload of bugs Bethesda hasn't bothered to fix, most of which are addressed in the unofficial patch... which you can't have on a console. And since you can't bring up the console on a console, you can't work around the bugs either. So yeah, Skyrim is pretty much the poster child for doing it wrong. But as you say, I wouldn't trust them with a console game.

            Problem is, I bought Fallout 3, and I wouldn't trust them with a PC game, either. Fallout 3 is actually a b

            • Problem is, I bought Fallout 3, and I wouldn't trust them with a PC game, either. Fallout 3 is actually a bigger, buggier piece of shit than Skyrim. It's got way more hang and CtD bugs.

              Oh? I'd heard that F3 was buggier on PC than it was on the PS3 (and it was bit buggy till the last patch they did on the PS3) For Skyrim it seems it is the other way around. I've had a better experience with F3 on the PS3 than Skyrim

              The latest bug I've seen on Skyrim? Killed a dragon just outside a cave, absorbed it's soul, it turned to bones as usual. Entered cave did some stuff, came back out and Dragon was fleshy again. It was still dead and all with the empty inventory I left it with, but fleshy a

              • Apparently experiences differ; but my experience with F3 was adequate(not bug free; but manageable) after editing the .ini file to restrict the game to 2 cores only. For some reason, I don't know the gory details, running on 3 or more cores causes hard locks or crash-to-desktop every 15 minutes or so. With that out of the way, it's pretty well behaved.

                Fallout: NV and Skyrim both don't have that problem, and, while they crash occasionally, are mostly just a medley of Bethesda's beloved broken quests and d

                • It's a pity, they know how to build an open world RPG that's great fun; but they really phone it in on QA.

                  Yes, I am continually amazed by how complex the world of Skyrim is, but I am also continually perplexed by how fragile their scripts are. I would be seriously pissed off if I had paid full price. Lesson learned, and cheaply.

                • For some reason, I don't know the gory details, running on 3 or more cores causes hard locks or crash-to-desktop every 15 minutes or so. With that out of the way, it's pretty well behaved.

                  I actually have the PC version as well (to compare it to the PS3 version), didn't crash for me on a quad core, but I was having issues with VATS with the game being VERY slow, going into VATS, doing things in vats and exiting VATS. Same behavior in both Windows and Wine under Linux.

                  It's a pity, they know how to build an open world RPG that's great fun; but they really phone it in on QA.

                  You can say that again, quoted for truth. Fallout 3 is my favorite game on the PS3, got the platinum trophy. I'm looking forward to F4 on the PS4, but god I hope they improve their QA.

          • I do touch Bethesda on console, I run Linux on the PC, and prefer console for gaming, but I sure wish they'd improve their QA and bring it up to the quality of other dev houses.

            I wonder if Bethesda should have handed over the porting of F3 and Skyrim to 4J like they did with Oblivion, instead of porting in-house. Because for me in terms of bugs and whatnot from least to most it's:

            Oblivion>F3>Skyrim>NV (yeah not a Bethesda game but it uses the F3 engine)

            Though the last F3 patch fixed most of the F3

        • I've not tried GTA 5 yet but the GTA world is generally very limited to do what it does. A great example would be GTA 3 and Vice City. Open world games that ran on PS2 hardware. Amazing... However they did it by tracking very little. Only things in your FOV and relevant to what was happening (quest NPCs, police chasing you) were handled. Everything else was not there. Turn around and then around again, and traffic would be totally different because it was not tracked off screen. Drops/pickups disappear when

        • GTV V doesn't require the same level of detail across the world that FO does.

          The cops aren't named across town, the world can be randomly generated as you travel.

          Imagine a GTA that kept track of every car in the city. That isn't going to happen in the 256MB of RAM on a PS3.

          FO4 will be able to keep track of NPCs far from your line of sight, what they are doing, and your actions can have a real effect on the world.

          In FO3, your actions never really extended beyond your line of sight, other than scripted actio

      • Was this also the reason for the highly annoying partitioning of The Strip in Fallout: New Vegas?

        I never played either Fallout3 or Fallout: NV on a console, and found it quite tiring to have to constantly click through the different sections of such a small area.

        • Yep... The Strip was a series of "instanced zones" that didn't actually exist when you were walking around in the outside world.

          That the outside world worked as good as it did is impressive, but you couldn't just "walk onto the strip" from the outside world, that is why you had loading screens.

          Think back to FO3, remember Megaton? It was an "inside place", you couldn't get in other than through the door and it was a loading screen.

          That is because in the world outside, nothing was actually inside the walls.

  • Glad to hear it... (Score:4, Informative)

    by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Monday June 08, 2015 @04:36AM (#49865303)

    With respect to the hundreds of millions of people with a PS3/XBox 360, those systems are now 10 years old and have been holding back open world game design.

    Yes, games like GTA V are on those systems and work, but that is perhaps the extreme limit of what those systems can do.

    Given the jump from less than 1GB of RAM to 8GB of RAM, so much more of the game world can be left in memory, the "tricks" of FO3 no longer have to be used as much, where some items were "sort of" in the game world, but once out of sight, weren't kept track of.

    There of course has to be an end to it, there are tons and tons of games for the PS3 and XBox 360, and more will come, but there has to be an end to it.

    • Yes, games like GTA V are on those systems and work, but that is perhaps the extreme limit of what those systems can do.

      Those systems can't really run GTA V. They shit themselves down to 2 FPS or whatever all the time during intense action.

  • PC is the only one that counts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Monday June 08, 2015 @04:38AM (#49865311)

    The Bethesda games are crap unless you can install mods on them. And you can only do that on the PC versions.

    QED... play the PC version or don't play.

    Some games are great on the console. Bethesda games are not amongst them.

    • Re:PC is the only one that counts (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dakiraun ( 1633747 ) <dakiraunNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday June 08, 2015 @06:35AM (#49865629) Homepage

      Well put - they are often complex games that need the controls of a PC, and the mods to customize (and fix) the game environment. Any time a game is brought out for the consoles, they also tend to get dumbed-down to the point of being boring

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm surprised that developers have not found some way to do mods on consoles yet. Include a good editor, perhaps with some PC tools that allow you to do some serious editing and then load it into your account for the console. Considering how much they love DLC it seems like mods are an obvious way to generate more revenue, since the locked down nature of consoles would mean you could charge for the tools and then sell the better mods as DLC with the typical profit sharing rip-off.

      Didn't I read that someone

      • If they let users install unsigned code on the systems then you can undermine the DRM.

        Simple as that.

      • I'm surprised that developers have not found some way to do mods on consoles yet. Include a good editor,

        Therein lies a rub. Skyrim mods are made without a good editor. But mostly, the console experience is locked down on purpose. Some titles are adding in features like this; the last Halo title I bought had a fairly complicated editor, and you could make pretty fancy multiplayer maps with it. But it will be probably another generation or two before anyone really embraces modding, with scripting and so on.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by halivar ( 535827 )

      No way! Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Skyrim were all amazing games in their own right, and are shining examples of how a sandbox game should be made (except for FO3's game-ending conclusion; booo!). Oblivion had some great mods; even entire NPC-voiced cities and some great new dungeons and storylines. The mods for FO and Skyrim were a bit lack-luster, IMHO, but even so those games shine.

    • I have played every Bethesda game since Morrowind via a console, and I loved every one of them. Not everyone cares about mods, I like to enjoy the games as Bethesda intended them.

      QED play what you enjoy and don't make assumptions on what other people may or may not enjoy based on your own enjoyment.

  • No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Monday June 08, 2015 @05:19AM (#49865429) Journal

    There's been solid data for over a year now showing that the majority of games sales have shifted away from the PS3/360 and towards the PS4/Xbox One/PC. We've seen plenty of current-gen-only releases do just fine (Witcher 3 just had the most successful launch so far in 2015) and plenty of games which spanned both generations have sold a lot more copies on the newer platforms. Meanwhile, developers/publishers who stuck with the older platforms have paid a commercial price for it - the initial release of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (which was limited to PC, 360 and PS3) bombed commercially and shifted only a fraction of the copies at launch that Borderlands 2 managed.

    The last console generation was the longest we've ever seen and there was a clear appetite among both developers and consumers to move on from it quickly. A lot of the money-men preferred to hedge their bets, not least because the installed bases for the PS3 and 360 were so huge. But what happened in practice was fairly predictable. Core gamers - the people who buy a lot of games - moved to the new platforms quickly and shifted their spending to those platforms. While the installed base of the older consoles remained larger, most of that base was made up of occasional and casual gamers, who don't spend a significant portion of their disposable income on gaming.

    The caution in betting on the new generation wasn't entirely irrational. The new platform launches in the years leading up to it had not gone well. EA got burned hard by the Vita's launch flop. Ubisoft got burned even harder when they spent a lot of money supporting the Wii-U launch only for the platform to bomb. But with the PS4 and Xbox One, the developers who could get titles to market fairly soon after launch were generally rewarded (even when those games stunk, as with Watch_Dogs).

    The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot. The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched. But for major launches, there's no longer any point in targeting anything but PS4, Xbox One and PC.

    • It probably doesn't help that the current-gen consoles are both so similar to each other and similar to PCs. Yes, the last-gens have the virtue of dev tools and middleware being about as mature as they are ever likely to get, so if you don't need to get heroic and ultra close to the metal there has probably never been an easier time to build an adequately functional XB360/PS3 game; but they are still weirder and a lot more constrained than the current generation.

      • It's still a massive PITA to make your game run properly on both PS3 and any other platform, but gamers are split between the platforms so if you don't go multiplatform, your sales will suffer. The similarity of the two new platforms is probably as strong an influence as anything else.

        • Which could well be the salvation of the Xbox One. Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, cross-platform development was a PITA because the three platforms were so different from each other.

          However, the PS2 had an installed base way that was way larger than either of its rivals. So for a lot of small and mid-sized developers, the obvious solution was to develop only for the PS2; it would give you 90% or more of your sales anyway.

          I had a friend who worked at a mid-tier developer during that time who worke

    • Don't forget that back catalog of AAA games these systems have.

      I'm having a serious blast playing Red Dead Redemption for the first time.

      The used market is chock full of great games and new ones can be had for a fraction of a PS4 game.

      • It's true that the consoles have a good backlog. This is why I still have my PS3 (well, that and it's a better media player than either of the new consoles). And it's true that if you haven't owned a console before and want one you can get lots of cheap games for, the PS3 and 360 are still worth considering.

        But that's different to making them viable platforms to target for new games. People who buy new games tend to want to experience that game with the best experience possible (or in some cases, the best e

      • yeah but no game is going to be as good as MGS V: The Phantom Pain.

        Even if the gameplay is as good or better, I'm pretty invested at this point in the story line so, I care about that more than just raw gameplay.

        If the gameplay is awful then whee hype train just plowed through the terminus and completely derails, but all reports seem to be that yes, it's worth the hype.

      • That's why I'm still exclusively playing Commodore 64 games. I've still got tens of thousands to complete and they are basically free.

    • The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot.

      Yup.

      The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched.

      A lot more than 2 years, the last PS2 game in North America was released in 2013. That thing just wouldn't die as a platform. Something similar happend with the PSone too, the last NA release for it was in 2005. The PSP's last release was this year.

    • They were having real, real problems getting the kind of game they wanted in to the very limited memory of the last gen consoles. Cutting down graphics only goes so far, there are just limits to how large a world you can easily have, and how many things you can keep track of at once. They did a lot of creative things to manage that, but it was causing issues and they were reaching their limit.

      Some games scale more easily but the big open world types that Bethesda likes do not do as well. Hence it makes sens

  • Last gen systems are still news? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rodrigoandrade ( 713371 ) on Monday June 08, 2015 @05:48AM (#49865485)
    This is 2015 and we're supposed to be surprised that a new game won't be compatible with ancient last gen consoles?

    I guess readers are too young to remember when the NES, Master System, N64, etc, all were dropped like hot potatoes by the manufacturers once the new ones were released...

    • That was back when upgrades actually offered something substantial.

      Nowadays, it's mainly all about the "social" bollocks and ways of screwing more money out of the customer.

      The 360 is likely the last gaming machine that I'll own.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RyuuzakiTetsuya ( 195424 )

      The NES got a trickle of games for it from 1991, release of the U.S. Super Nintendo, until 1995, U.S. release of the final game for the system.

      So it's not been instantly.

    • I feel like it's worth noting that the PS3 came out in 2006, and XBox 360 came out in 2005. The original XBox 360 has an optional add-on for HD-DVD. That's how old these things are.

  • It won't run on anything I have either. According to marketing, everything I have is either "old hardware" or "next-gen" No current-gen at all.

  • I thought the need to hold it back for last-gen consoles explained the trailer.

    But if there's no 360/PS3 version, why does the trailer look like ass?

    It's a trailer. It should be the prettiest the game can be, rendered on high-end hardware, with their best bullshots.

    The dog looks good, I'll admit, but in general in-game footage from The Witcher 3 looks better than the FO4 trailer.

    Perhaps they started to build assets before giving up on the old consoles? The Vault Dweller is especially unimpressive.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      The game hasn't been released yet and I would be surprised that that the storm of negative feedback about crappy graphics hasn't taken them by surprise, meaning they will take another pass at it before its released. But it can't be a revolutionary change this close to release so at best will only result in marginal improvement,

      There's also an expectation/myth that won't die floating around, no matter how retarded it actually is, that the latest consoles are now so powerful they should be able to run all ga

  • ...since that is the only material we have available: The graphic fidelity is downright embarrassing for a AAA title in 2015. My current install of a lightly modded FO3 has better texture clarity. I never got past the opening mission on New Vegas, as I lost interest after realizing that this was the same exact game as FO3, only in a brown place instead of green place. I couldn't understand why the texture on my characters hands looked like a lizard's. I thank my sense of skepticism for telling me to wait fo

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