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?

More than 1.2 million votes were cast for this year’s Golden Joystick Awards, representing a 47 per cent jump in votes over the previous year, and a great many of those voters were Activision Blizzard fans. While Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic epic took home top honours, five of the 15 awards announced last night went to Activision Blizzard games. Call of Duty: World at War took home awards for MSN Multiplayer Game of the Year and Nintendo Game of the Year; Guitar Hero World Tour snagged the Rampage Soundtrack of the Year award, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was named the ShortList One to Watch. With those four under the company’s belt, it comes as no surprise that Activision Blizzard were named Publisher of the Year as well.

Other notable awards include Fallout 3’s PC Game of the Year award, Left 4 Dead’s Online Game of the Year, and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars’ Handheld Game of the Year win.

Check out the full list of awards and their winners below.

Family Game of the Year: LittleBigPlanet

Bliss Handheld Game of the Year: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Retailer of the Year: GAME

Mobile Game of the Year: Metal Gear Solid Touch

Nintendo Game of the Year: Call of Duty: World at War

MSN Multiplayer Game of the Year: Call Of Duty: World At War

The Rampage Soundtrack of the Year: Guitar Hero World Tour

Xbox Game of the Year: Gears of War 2

PC Game of the Year: Fallout 3

Amiqus Games UK Developer of the Year: Jagex

PlayStation Game of the Year: Killzone 2

Publisher of the Year: Activision Blizzard

Online Game of the Year: Left4Dead

ShortList One to Watch: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Ultimate Game of the Year, together with Zavvi.co.uk: Fallout 3

“Mainly I’ve used an x-acto knife and three tiny screwdrivers to do most of the carving,” ceemdee said in an email. “I used some wood carving tools to scrap out the bigger areas on a few of the pumpkins and a needle is used to trace the image. They were all carved in the last four weeks. It’s actually only four pumpkins (one a week) with three carvings on each. :)”

You can check out unlit views of the pumpkins here.

Got any more? Send pictures of ‘em my way!

The Wasteland Commentaries aims “to create an audio commentary track for Fallout 3 that is accessible in-game via audio holotapes.” Think of it as like the tapes in BioShock or Batman: Arkham Asylum except, instead of the developers fleshing out the fiction, the Fallout 3 community will “provide anecdotes, commentary, analysis or even humour relating to their experience with Fallout 3.”

The project is helmed by Gerard Delaney of the Binary Swan blog, part of the “brainysphere” of critical games bloggers. So you can expect the final results to be full of smart ruminations on the moral choices and metaphors found in the Capital Wasteland.

Developer commentaries, as found in games such as Riddick or Portal, add much to our appreciation of game design. But are you interested in hearing the thoughts of other gamers as you play?

The Wasteland Commentaries [Binary Swan]

According to reports from Kotaku tipsters affected by the save and posters on Bethsoft’s official Fallout 3 forums, the problem appears to be limited to folks in Canada (with one from Sweden) who have the PlayStation 3 version of the re-release. Limited though it may appear to be, the inability to play with characters cultivated over dozens or hundreds of hours in the complete Fallout 3 package is understandably frustrating.

Fortunately, Bethesda Software appears to be investigating the issue.

“Wanted to let you know I’ve been working with folks here at the office to investigate the issues with GOTY in Canada,” assures Bethesda’s Sr. Community Manager. “When I have more details to share, I’ll let you know. Stay tuned.”

So, buyer beware, especially if you’re from America’s hat and have invested heavily in the original version of Fallout 3. Kotaku readers, who’s having similar issues? Who’s getting along in the wastelands without issue? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Wolfsong, Evan and everyone else for the tips.

GOTY saves not working. [Fallout 3 Forums]
Fallout 3 GOTY – Now Available [Bethesda Blog]

Dr Greg demoed both games, devoting most of the hour to explaining the various interface features, before I was able to grab a little bit of hands-on time with the limited demo areas. Witnessing Dragon Age running on console was perhaps the most interesting aspect, given I knew pretty much what to expect from the Mass Effect sequel’s fine-tuning.

But more on them later.

Also, before I head off to another press event—this time for a trio of Ubisoft games—I want to give away something. You might know that Bethesda has been handing out download codes for a premium theme to everyone who purchased all five Fallout 3 DLC episodes over Xbox Live (as long as they bought them prior to September 22). I did that and got a code earlier in the week. And then this morning I got another, totally different, code.

So, if you’ve got a 360, would like a Fallout 3 theme, and can work out how to follow my personal Twitter account, I’ll be tweeting my spare code at some time in the next 24 hours. Hit me up with a reply if you’re the one who successfully redeems it.

UPDATE: Fallout 3 theme code has been redeemed!

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.

It bundles together the original game plus the five DLC episodes – Operation Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta – all in the one box. It’s coming for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

The RRP is $99.95. But CDWow are flogging it right now for $66.95 on console and $60.05 on PC. That’s about what you’d pay just for the DLC if you bought them individually over PSN and Live.

Some saps (like me) have spent nearly $200 on Fallout 3 all told. So yeah, this is a pretty good deal.

Fallout 3 AER9 Laser Rifle [Volpin Props]

[thanks Link257!]

My twitter feed was full of comments comparing Sydney’s “red dawn” to either Mars or a post-apocalyptic wasteland. So I figured I’d try to track down a few appropriate screenshots of Red Faction: Guerrilla and Fallout 3 to see how accurate the comparison actually is.

So up there is the Sydney CBD skyline, as snapped by Kate Geraghty for the Sydney Morning Herald. Below is another shot looking out over the harbour, taken by Shaun Brewer for News.com.au.

Now here’s Mars, as depicted in Red Faction: Guerrilla.

And here’s Fallout 3’s DC wasteland, post-nuking of Megaton, as captured by Kotaku friend Ben Abraham.

Clearly, neither game conveys the full extent of what we woke up to this morning. Red Faction fails to do justice to the sheer impenetrability of the Sydney dust storm, while Fallout simply isn’t red enough.

So, there you go, this morning Sydneysiders are living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland… on Mars.