Fallout

Update: Microsoft say they'll "keep the commitment" to bring Bethesda's Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo to PS5 as timed exclusives. More below.Microsoft just announced they've bought ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda. The developers of games such as Skyrim, Fallout, Dishonored, Prey, Doom, Quake and all those classics are now technically Xbox Game Studios. Xbox boss Phil Spencer made a post welcoming the developers, in…

Ages ago I learned how to lockpick in real life, and ever since I've been so impressed at how video games emulate the feeling of managing to crack a lock open. I think maybe it's the noise, that signature *clunk* that makes it so satisfying. It's a staple of RPGs like Skyrim, where lockpicking is literally a skill you can level up. But loads of…

War never changes, but prestige TV sure can. Today, Bethesda announced that Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of HBO's Westworld, are taking their cinematic lens to Fallout, working with Amazon Studios to create a post-apocalyptic telly show based on the long-running nuke 'em up RPG. Hold on, though - a darkly comic show about robot cowboys, deserts and conspiracies? Sounds quite a leap for…

The best RPGs have always found their home on PC, but the sheer size of the genre can make it difficult to know what you should play next. That's why we've put together this list of all the best RPGs you can play today on PC.

Awesome Games Done Quick (aka AGDQ) has started yet again, and just four days in has already blessed us with some unforgettable moments and absolute must-watch PC speedruns. The clips I offer up to you today involve one speedrunner whacking out a real life model to explain a glitch, one speedrun where everything went wrong but everyone had a fabulous time anyway, and one game…

Folks who bought Fallout 76 last year can now grab ye olde Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics for free. Finally, your Fallout 76 purchase will get you a good game (several, even). The giveaway is the latest part of Bethesda's ongoing apology tour over the multiplayer survive 'em up's shonkiness. Unlike the trifling amount of virtuacash offered in apology for the £175 edition's garbage…

Clubbing on a Tuesday night is not a good idea. The only places open on a Tuesday are named after sea creatures and bandits; “The Dolphin” or “Copper Face Jack’s”, “Sneaky Pete’s” or “Mermaid Bar”. Inevitably, you will tryst with a stranger. Primal urges will be satisfied. In the following days your nethers will begin to itch in a sinister way, as you both realise…

War may never change, but a lot can happen in a public beta test, and those braving Fallout 76's wasteland early have found some things in need of changing. Bethesda may have warned that there were "spectacular" bugs to be found, but few were expecting this laundry list collated on Reddit - client-side modding, unsecured connections and worse. Also the significant issue of player speed being…

Bethesda revealed a few more details of their upcoming Fallout 76 beta event today, for those wanting to get in on the ground floor of the multiplayer spinoff. Beginning this October (with Xbox One leading the way, and PC/PS4 starting soon after), players who pre-ordered the game from "participating retailers" will gradually be invited, although not everyone at first. The initial wave of players will…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

"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…

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.…

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…

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…

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.

One of the main reasons I got into RPGs back in the day was that if you bought one, you were getting a lot of game for your money. That was important when there was only one birthday and one Christmas a year, and not much chance that some relative might pop their clogs in sync with Ultima VI coming out. Years later I no…