Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Some of the Fallout chatter on here reminded me of the canceled “Van Buren” project, which would have been Fallout 3 had Interplay not closed down the Black Isle project in 2003. Most of you will have seen this last year, but I thought it worth mentioning that the tech demo was leaked in 2007 and is now freely available over on StrategyInformer. There’s not a great deal to it, but the very existence of an alternate Fallout 3 makes for an interesting compare and contrast.

Bethesda have said there isn’t going to be a demo for their Fallout 3, which should hit the PC on October 28th.

It’s always fun when a story generates another story. Regular readers will recall the Planescape retrospective I posted recently. The ever-lovely Slashdot picked up on it, and one of their commentators pointed everyone in the direction of the game’s actual Vision Statement over at RPGWatch, from when it was called “Last Rites” rather than “Planescape: Torment” and they weretrying to persuade management to greenlight the project.

Since I hadn’t read it, it’s likely that a lot of you haven’t either. It’s interesting to see what was planned that didn’t happen. And it’s interesting because it’s incredibly fucking interesting. It’s one of the best videogame documents I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s smart, driven, obsessed and actually really funny. For example, it has diagrams that look like this.

Clearly, you should read the whole thing. If you haven’t played the game, don’t go past page 25. It’s relatively spoiler free until then, before immediately revealing the biggest secrets in the game. And I’ll quote some random non-spoiler examples beneath the cut.

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