Fallout 3 Demo on Monday

then there are two different Fallout 3s that they are using for demo purposes.

One is the version that they were showing to people long before the game was ever done.

If it wasn't "finished" at that time, then it wasn't the full game.
(much like the quake 2 demo, that was released to the public and included the full q2 engine, but only the first unit worth of content)


If all of the resources are there but you can't access them in the "full game" that people are now getting access to (and will be on the e-3 floor) then it's also a shortened version of the game by whatever artificial means they use to keep people out of those areas and away from certain content.

It makes little difference how they keep people out of these areas, since they could do it by not including that content or by imposing walls through custom code or by physically telling them not to go there irl.

None of this changes the fact that they have been showing 2 effectively shortened versions of the game.

My point was that they already made a demo, in the form of the version they were showing to the press all this year (which we know is not the whole game), not that we should all get to download the complete game that they are letting the press actually play in a limitted fashion, as a demo.

I was also making it obvious that they could have made a demo for mass release and have chosen not to.


BTW, I've been writing code in c++, various forms of basic, and java for years now, in addition to modding 3d engines and making maps, models, textures and other content for them in my free time, and I have a very good understanding of how games exist as programs.
 
Ranne said:
What difference does it make?
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The idea was apparently that if they present a shortened version at E3, they could also have presented a shortened version to the public. If there is no shortened version, this is a moot point.
 
see! the lizard got it.

:)

It doesn't matter how they shorten the game down for people to only play a bit of it to try it out, as long as they are doing so.

The fact that they are containing people to certain areas, means that they could make a demo of that game that isn't the whole thing and release it for public use, and that it would be just as indicative of how the game is, as the artificially shortened "full version" of the game that is being tried out at e3.

Considering that they already have the content and engine finished, and there are areas that you could be contained in just to get a feel for the game, they could easily just institute a couple of invisible walls or lock a few doors so that you could not progress past a certain point, leave out the rest of the content that you can't get to (or shouldn't see yet), and release it as a gameplay test demo.

It would be like letting people play through the temple of trials and arroyo quests in FO2 and then ending it once you got out into the world map.
 
Maybe they have such high standards that because all the game mechanics might not have been ironed out yet so they didnt produce an earlier demo, or maybe they didnt want to show a demo, or maybe even and bare with me here.......they decided to have bacon for breakfast instead of eggs.

It simply doesnt matter, your arguing over something that you cannot possibly prove. Your just guessing.

Short version or long version cut short........its the same thing. Its a demo, go with the flow.
 
RobOverall said:
CD-Action magazine plays Fallout 3
Posted by Per - at 17:27
Comments (82)/Comment me
I'm going to let Ausir dictate all the news from now on.

The Polish CD-Action magazine was invited to Bethesda headquarters for a hands-on preview of Fallout 3 as the only representative of Poland, along with 15 other journalists from around the world. A summary:

*Snip*

* They were told to steer clear of the main quest and were not allowed to talk about what they saw of it in the preview.
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I'd say full game and not shortened.
Click to expand...

Yes, with saves ready to show a few areas later in the game.
 
I'm not "proving" something other than the fact that they could make a demo that is indicative of what they are showing to the press that we could download and try out without any major hardship for them.

They have decided not to do it for a reason other than what they told us, which was that it would take too much time away from working on the game. (a blatant lie)

At this point, it would not take that much effort at all to put up a few things in-game to stop you from progressing past a certain point (walls, piles of debris, and locked doors) and then package up only the content you could access with a working version of the game engine.

They could even distribute this demo relatively cheaply thru gaming media websites and such.

This would allow everyone the chance that a few people at e3 are getting, to try out the game before it is released, without much added effort beyond someone going through the resources to figure out what wont be shown in the demo, and one level designer putting up a few walls using the resources they already have.


Really all of this just boils down to them lying about their reasoning for not giving us a demo.

While I'm not really all that surprised that they have been lying again, I'm going to keep pointing them out because I feel that we've been marginalized in favor of an entirely different group of gamers and that our beloved franchise is being stolen out from under us by a company composed of lazy and incompetent liars.
 
whirlingdervish said:
I'm not "proving" something other than the fact that they could make a demo...
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Sure, they could, just like any developer could. Doesn't mean they did, or that what they're showing isn't the full game. They're supervising these demos, so if it's the full game they're probably loading up saves and telling them not to walk in certain directions.

Of course, I wouldn't put it past Bethesda to make a shortened demo to show the press but not release to the public...
 
Oh, if it comes to the technical challenge of creating a demo, let me say that I am quite familiar with the TES4 iteration of used engine and I can practically guarantee you that making a limited demo would not be a problem at all. Moreover, I believe I could make a demo of Oblivion myself using only the official editor and a couple of available extraction tools. It's relatively easy.
 
whirlingdervish said:
I'm not "proving" something other than the fact that they could make a demo that is indicative of what they are showing to the press that we could download and try out without any major hardship for them.

They have decided not to do it for a reason other than what they told us, which was that it would take too much time away from working on the game. (a blatant lie)

At this point, it would not take that much effort at all to put up a few things in-game to stop you from progressing past a certain point (walls, piles of debris, and locked doors) and then package up only the content you could access with a working version of the game engine.

They could even distribute this demo relatively cheaply thru gaming media websites and such.

This would allow everyone the chance that a few people at e3 are getting, to try out the game before it is released, without much added effort beyond someone going through the resources to figure out what wont be shown in the demo, and one level designer putting up a few walls using the resources they already have.


Really all of this just boils down to them lying about their reasoning for not giving us a demo.

While I'm not really all that surprised that they have been lying again, I'm going to keep pointing them out because I feel that we've been marginalized in favor of an entirely different group of gamers and that our beloved franchise is being stolen out from under us by a company composed of lazy and incompetent liars.
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Wait... this is your argument? And we're fucktards for not agreeing with it? You have ZERO EVIDENCE supporting your wild-assed assumption that they will be, or have been any time recently, demoing a shortened version of the game, to anyone. You have to prove that before you can expect to convince anyone thet they're lying about it taking too much time, which you'd need to prove in order to back up your claim that the reason for all of this is that they're afraid to let people see their game.

Then you cite the extremely rough preview build that BN described from a year ago. They should just release that? You have no idea how playable that build is.


Also this:


The game engine is complete.
It's been done since tes4 with only a few changes to make it FO3.
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I think your personal feelings toward this production outweigh your coding and modding expertise, and that's what leads you to say such things. How can you possibly know exactly how much this game is functionally different from Oblivion, and in how many ways?
 
Fallout 3: Developer Q & A with the Press (Part 2), Jul 1, 2007
Q: Is this just the Oblivion engine?
A: It is a very supped up version of the same engine, with shorter load times.

I think your personal feelings toward this production may impair your own judgment as well.
 
This is actually they silliest argument I have seen in a long long time.

The challenge is not the engine.. it wouldn't matter if it wasn't changed at all..

What takes time in a game like this, an Open world game, is that their aren't really "levels" that can be "sliced" off to a demo.

You might agrue that they could take the initial vault "tutorial" and turn it in to a demo, but even that isn't indicative of the overall gameplay.. so to craft a compact standalone experience, like they did for the first Fallout (That was a great demo), actually takes quite a bit of work..

It isn't simple a matter of even slapping some magical walls down and slicing everything outside of it from the game.

Personally given a finite amount of resources I would prefer they work on polishing the game than crafting a throwaway demo. Don't get me wrong.. I would LOVE to try this game out, but just like the Fallout 1 team said.. creating a demo for an open world game takes resources that could be better spent on the game itself.
 
"How can you possibly know exactly how much this game is functionally different from Oblivion, and in how many ways?"

On the same engine, with all the information already available? Not much. I'm not arguing anything else. Also, if "shorter longer times" is an appropriate example of changes made, one cannot possibly expect anything groundbreaking.

-Yeah, it's the same engine, with shorter loading times. Oh, and by the way, now it's a turn-based strategy with multiplayer support. Another minor adjustment to the engine, you know.

EDIT: I just realized you were talking about the demo. First, could I ask you to stop with all that "open world game" talk? It sounds much bigger than it is and almost as bad as Todd's "massively single-player game" BS. It's sandbox world design that is awfully repetitive and generic if you actually take a close look at it. Making a demo of such a "world" would not be a problem at all. In particular case of Oblivion it would actually be a simple matter of slapping down some reasonable analog of magical walls and slicing the rest of the game environment out. It's called demo for a reason. It's not supposed to show you an entire game, just a slice of it.
 
Ranne said:
Fallout 3: Developer Q & A with the Press (Part 2), Jul 1, 2007
Q: Is this just the Oblivion engine?
A: It is a very supped up version of the same engine, with shorter load times.
Click to expand...

What Xenophile said, mostly.

I think your personal feelings toward this production may impair your own judgment as well.
Click to expand...

What are my personal feelings towards this production, anyways? I'm intrigued. :shock:
 
Releasing a demo also opens themselves to criticism. I just hope we get to see a fair amount of game-play on G4 and not just some 30 second segment with an annoying voice talking about things we already know.
 
I hope the one testing it will have some sort of experience with "presenting a game", and most of all, won't have a controller in his hands
 
If they let a demo out into the wild then they wouldn't have 100% message control, and the unwashed masses would just criticize their perfect creation.

It's not hard to see how Bethesda operates.
 
Beelzebud
No publisher or developer would let out a demo to the public at the stage of development FO3 is (probably) in. That would be insane madness from a developers point of view (the game code is really not going to be stable) and will become a PR nightmare.

Remember all the negative publicity that was generated by the leak of the Half-Life 2 source code, everyone was saying it was slow, buggy and the gameplay sucked. Well, thats what ALL games in development are like.

E3 demo builds are VERY carefully designed to only show off a few good bits selected to impress journalists. The Journalists on the other hand are aware of how games development works, and go easy on E3 builds.


I'm not saying FO3 is, or is not going to be a steaming dogpile, but I do understand why Bethesda is not realesing a Public Demo, and not releasing a Demo is not all that bad a thing. for instance it gives the poor tired programmers a chance to fix a couple more bug reports, rather than wasting time hacking a public demo together (something that they already often resent having to do for E3)
 
Why am I not surprised the the first gameplay footage of Fallout 3 is part of a big turd sandwich of advertising revenue rather than being freely downloadable?
 
Also, the notion that "I've modded oblivion, and it's easy to simply create some barriers to close off the rest of the game" is a bit weird.
Wouldn't that mean that if they released a blocked-off version, it would be trivial to *remove* the barriers and get access to the entire game?

That, along with the fact that the game probably has plenty of bugs, unfinished dialogue, placehodler graphics etc, are good reasons not to release a demo at this time.

Being a programmer myself(even if I'm not making games), I know something about how much precious time and resources goes into making demos. I can see how they just want to get the game out first, and then maybe spend time making a demo.
 
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