Bethesda is bringing out a line of Fallout-themed avatar wear to the Xbox Live Avatar Marketplace this Thursday, giving players six new ways to show off their love for Fallout 3 and its creators, Bethesda Game Studios. There’s three t-shirts priced to move at 80 Microsoft points apiece; the standard Vault 101 suit, complete with PipBoy, for 240 points; a Vault Boy suit for 240 points; and the pièce de résistance – a Vault Boy head that covers up your avatar’s goofy cranium.

My advice? Just buy the head and play Vault Boy dress up. It’s simply the right thing to do.

Fallout 3 items hitting the Xbox Avatar Marketplace this Thursday [Bethesda Blog]

Zeschuk told me he’s been a fan of Bethesda’s game for the best part of two decades, from all the way back to Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall right up to Fallout 3. He says he admires how Bethesda specialises, producing games that are distinctively theirs.

“For me, Bethesda is probably the best in the world in terms of creating a sense of place,” he says. “The world seems so real it actually feels like you’re there. I think if you were to describe their superpower, that would be it. Fallout 3 was utterly believable as the area around Washington DC.

“Another thing that was actually very productive we learned from Oblivion is how a game is the sum of its parts, but often something greater than that. If you picked Oblivion apart, you could nitpick about certain things, but when you put it all together it was just a spectacular package. And in fact, it’s that package that’s the impressive thing. And I think that was a great learning for our Dragon Age.”

In parallel, Zeschuk believes what makes a Bioware game utterly distinctive is the high level of integration of story into the overall experience:

“There’s folks that do similar stuff, but I think you could almost say they do it in the Bioware style. We were the first to do it that way. If you look at, for example, how story is presented in a Final Fantasy, it’s very different to what we do. I think if you can identify a Final Fantasy style game then I think you should be able to identify a Bioware style game.

“Another we do – and maybe it’s not in the easily identifiable way – is we never compromise,” he continues. “By that I mean we never release a game with features or elements that are not as good as they could be. You can always disagree with the way it was implemented or what was implemented, but I think when we do put a feature in a game we do a good job of it.

I asked Zeschuk if he would agree that perhaps Bethesda makes the more ambitious games but that they lack the polish of a Bioware game.

“I think that raw ambition comes through in both our products,” he says. “And somehow what [Bethesda] build is magnified in some way. I mean, you can never polish every single aspect in a game the size we make; we just have to make sure we polish the right stuff.”

Zeschuk laughed when I then ask him if that was why Dragon Age has taken six years to make.

“Yeah, somewhat!” he says. “I think it was really daunting to create, in our minds, the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. I think it’s reflective of why there has never been a Baldur’s Gate 3. You know, you have this beloved product, and its very distinctive and detailed, and it’s very hard to recreat them or create a game in a similar vein. The sheer amount of stuff you have to put in it – that’s just an incredible undertaking.”

Can you identify what makes Bioware and Bethesda games unique or distinctive from each other? What style of RPG do you prefer to play?

Over on the Interplay website, the development team posted that some of the concept art for the still-in-work MMO have been released due to the lawsuit. So they decided to post them in their forums.

“Keep in mind that this is concept art. It’s not finalised art, but it will give you a feel for what we are aiming for with V13,” Interplay’s Chris Taylor wrote.

Welcome to the Concept Art Forum![Interplay via Duck and Cover]

Halpin, the Entertainment Consumers Association’s president, deployed the lightning bolt with ruthlessness on fellow racers attempting to jump the gorge on the stadium track. “Like my character [Wario], I rarely hesitated in sending other racers off the cliff,” Halpin answered.

Todd Howard, the executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, came up with a failsafe against his men getting mind-controlled by aliens in X-Com. Since they dropped their weapons under an alien spell, he equipped them with live grenades that, when dropped, went boom. No more mind control problem. No more soldiers, either, but that’s their problem.

Of course, there’s a lot of evil done in the Sims (a franchise with a capacity for cruelty unlike many others), Knights of the Old Republic, and plenty of RPGs, for that matter. One guy even gratuitously shot up all the cows in Call of Juarez. Check it out. And tell us about all the innocent people you’ve wasted with a headshot, down in the comments.

The Evil Things We Do [Bitmob]

A book blurb on the Waterstone’s retail site reads “A novel that takes places forty-five years after the Oblivion Crisis, which is the story of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game and the expansion pack Shivering Isles. It partly bridges the gap for the next game, which is set 200 years after the Oblivion crisis.”

So, assuming “the next game” in Oblivion continuity isn’t a ZeniMax Online massively multiplayer online game, this might be a hint at an Elder Scrolls V. Although, to hear Bethesda’s Pete Hines tell it, that’s the natural conclusion anybody could draw from how well The Elder Scrolls IV sold.

Well spotted, Silver!

P.S. Yes, I read The Age of Unreason series. When I was a kid. So Keyes’ Star Wars work is how I think of him and I consider it a compliment.

Greg Keyes is perhaps best known for his steampunk series The Age of Unreason, which features historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton, neither of which will be appearing in The Infernal City. The novel takes place four decades after Oblivion, telling the story of a group of unlikely heroes banding together to unravel the secret behind the floating city of Umbriel, which leaves undeath in its wake. It sounds like your standard fantasy romp, but Keyes does some pretty fabulous things when shaping characters, so we can probably expect a great deal of personality at the very least. All I know is it’s about time we got some officially sanctioned Elder Scrolls fiction to tide us over between games.

The Infernal City is due out on November 24 from Del Rey, and can now be preordered at Amazon.com.

Pre-Order The Infernal City [Bethesda Blog]

It’s something that’s been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I’m glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It’s open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn’t get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven’t crafted a level, they’ve built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can’t imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don’t call them truly “next gen” games. Why? Because they fail my “next gen” test, that’s why.

Here’s the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it’s not what I’m calling for the purposes of this piece a “next gen” game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it’s a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they’re nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn’t do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true “next gen” games.

So why do we have so few this time around? What’s the problem? There’s refinement under the hood. There’s games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued most games from the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can’t help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you’d have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn’t feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90’s – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can’t be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today’s games beyond the superficial. It’s just, we can’t see it. Chatting with Bethesda’s Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

“I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it’s also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you,” he says. “So it’s just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they’re there. I’d guess there’s just as much pure ‘design innovation’ with this generation as there has been in the last few.”

“Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they’re the worst part of a game. I’m interested in how games simply start.”

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. “There’s been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn’t kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards,” Howard adds. “The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that’s not an innovation, that’s simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

“My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply ‘work,’ that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else.”

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we’ll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

The first DLC to hit the PS3 version of Fallout 3 will be Broken Steel, available September 24. That will be followed by Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt on October 1, and Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta on October 8.

Bethesda also announced that the Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC will be available at stores on October 13.

The Game of the Year edition includes the game as well as all five downloadable content packs. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions will retail for $US59.99 and the Games for Windows version will be available for $US49.99.

Bethesda would like to send their fans a big thank you for sticking with them on the Xbox 360 Fallout 3 downloadable content front. Even after at least two of the five packs was released broken, you stood by the game, purchasing each new chunk of content as soon as it came out, from Operation Anchorage to Mothership Zeta. Your reward for such loyalty comes on October 1, when the premium Fallout 3 Xbox 360 theme goes live. As long as you’ve purchased all five DLC packs by September 22, it won’t cost you any bottle caps at all.

The rest of you can be prepared to pony up 240 Microsoft points. That’s the price you pay—$3.96. Next time maybe you’ll buy all the downloadable content, Dr. Cheapypants.