Fallout Wiki
Register
Advertisement
Fallout Wiki
WikiDigestLogo2

Welcome to the Nukapedia News Digest, brought to you by the Museum of Technology - Keeping today's future for the future's past.

In your digest this week

From the Administrative Enclave[]

Less than 24hrs to have your say on Tocxhawk becoming a full Moderator.

We're talking about a few things in the forum. We're looking to drill deeper in racial categories in this forum whilst quotations and loading screen hints are being looked at as well as to how they fit into artucles, and the use of rotating templates to include them.

Lastly a note for everyone regarding our relationships with other wikis. Please act when you visit other wikis as you would like them to act when they visit us. That means no trolling, harassment or anything like that; make sure you follow the local rules, and act like a good guest.

Should you get into trouble or you feel you've been unjustly banned or blocked, remember what you've seen on this wiki - don't imitate the ones that get angry and abusive, don't spam or vandalise the wiki, but be polite and direct your complaints to the relevant admin or bureaucrat - just like you would here. Include logs and screenshots if you can.

There is agreement between us and Halo Nation that we would both refrain from directly linking the other's chatroom. This isn't to say that you shouldn't visit, and you can encourage others to visit if there's a conversation there that you think they might enjoy; but due to some prior incidents on both sides, please try not to make this seem like an invasion - small groups at a time if you can, or give them a heads up first (on an admin's talk page) if a larger group is coming (sometimes us moderator types can get spooked by a large number of new people coming).

Remember - its easier to attract flies with honey, than vinegar.

From Wikia[]

If you're in the process of setting up a wiki and trying to work out some good community guidelines, then stop by this webinar.

That Rumour[]

I kinda feel like I'm expected to mention last weekend's "Rumour" of Bethesda being spotted at MIT. Just want to remind everyone that it was posted by an unknown person on reddit, who offered no proof to his claims.

Yes, its being reported over the internet, but that doesnt make it confirmation. If I tell 5 mutual friends a lie, and they all tell you the same lie, that's not confirmation that the lie is true - thats 5 guys all reporting what I said.

Here's what we do know. Prior to Bethesda releasing Skyrim, we knew they were working on two games - Skyrim and one other, which we assume was Fallout 4. Presuming this is the case, given that they've been working on the game for so long, why would they only just now be getting pictures of MIT? Surely that would be something that they'd have looked at earlier on in development.

Is the MIT/Commonwealth likely, sure, but this rumour isn't confirmation of anything; its equally likely, if not more likely that this is just some random troll playing for a reaction.

If we believed all Fallout 4 rumours, the Game would have to span the entire US, and also take a side journey to Chernbobyl - remember the Stalker rumour the other week?

What do you think??

Poll:What_do_you_make_of_the_Bethesda_in_Boston_rumour%3F

"Black Isle" is "back"[]

Black Isle logo

Another story I'm going to have to grit my teeth on. Interplay has announced that "Black Isle" is "Back". Only Chris Taylor and Mark O'Green are at the studio (named for Fergus Urquhart) - Hardly the big names that made the studio what it was. It just seems to be an attempt by Interplay to play off the good reputation of people who do not work for them anymore.

"Corinth" said this on NMA:

One of the classic mentalities of CEOs is the inability to admit any form of wrong doing (this level of arrogance extends to their private life as well).

Yet, here we see, Herve chewing on the edge of humble pie. It was his idea to close down Black Isle. Interplay didn't close Black Isle out of financial difficulties, like the article indicates. I know, I was there.

Black Isle closed because Herve boldly claimed he didn't need them and their ideas, that he knew what the public really wanted. He also felt, openly so, that PCs were a dying market and consoles were the way to go.
— Corinth

Apparently what we all wanted was FBOS and Superman 64. The next "hit" the Caen boys will be responsible for will be their first.

Interplay don't publish financial information anymore, it seems that they're now too small to be required to do so, or even to have an external auditor - or so it seems from what i can figure out from their SEC filings. We do know that they got $2.1 Million from Bethesda to "go away" in Bethesda v Interplay, and they get a cut from Fallout 1/2/Tactics sales for the next few years. They tried to bring back Battlechess through a kickstarter which failed spectacularly - given that Interplay are (claiming to be) a publisher (rather than inxile being a developer) this seems like a really desperate move - as a publisher its their job to finance development and get it on the shelves.

Still no word on what is happening to the corpse of "Fallout Online"; The forum for PV13 is still open, and noone is talking. In theory they could make a MMO without Fallout elements. In practice, I don't think they have the funds.

Brian Fargo in the Netherlands[]

From what is dead to what is now, Brian Fargo was in the Netherlands for the Unity conference this week and has since moved on to Milan. Sadly tickets are outside of our budget range, but those who did go snapped up these tidbits:

"We've been working on Wasteland 2 for about 100 days, with no distractions from any kind of corporate overlord," he said. "We have hundreds of pages of design done, we have our first music in, we have our basic UI up-and-running, and we've taken our first screenshots".
"The bottom line is that, without any interruption, we're kicking ass."
"Corporations don't have artistic integrity; people do. This sort of integrity impacts on production and how a property

is exploited... There are employees of these organisations that have this integrity, but they don't have the power to do anything about it."

"The best creative work we're seeing is from creative people who have the power, or the financing, to control their destinies... These visionaries can be within an organisation: Rockstar would not achieve the level of quality it does if Sam Houser wasn't running that place with an iron fist. He's not a corporation; he's a person."

Credit to for going and taking notes.

Josh Sawyer - the man and the legend[]

Because we were reporting his comments before they were cool… Here's another roundup of Josh's comments. First off, Kudos to The Vault where Tagaziel rounded up some of his "Something Awful" comments. Here's what Josh had to say….

First on Bottle Caps as money.

"It happened during the BoS-NCR war. I believe Alice McLafferty mentions it, but I'm not positive. She doesn't detail the events in this much detail, but here they are:

The attacks caused NCR citizens (and others who held NCR currency) to panic, resulting in a rush to reclaim the listed face value of currency from NCR's gold reserves. Inability to do this at several locations (especially near the periphery of NCR territory where reserves were normally low) caused a loss of faith in NCR's ability to back their currency.

Though NCR eventually stopped the BoS attacks, they decided to protect against future problems by switching to fiat currency. While this meant that BoS could no longer attack a) reserves or b) the source of production (all NCR bills are made in the Boneyard), some people felt more uneasy about their money not having any "real" (backed) value. This loss of confidence increased with NCR inflation, an ever-looming spectre of fiat currency.
Because the Hub links NCR with the Mojave Wasteland and beyond, the merchants there grew frustrated with NCR's handling of the currency crisis. They conspired to re-introduce the bottle cap as a water-backed currency that could "bridge the gap" between NCR and Legion territory. In the time leading up to the re-introduction, they did the footwork to position themselves properly. If some old-timer had a chest full of caps, they didn't care (in fact, they thought that was great, since the old-timers would enthusiastically embrace the return of the cap), but they did seek to control or destroy production facilities and truly large volumes of caps (e.g. Typhon's treasure) whenever possible.

People use currency -- of any sort -- because they agree that it is a good store of value. When people no longer believe that a given currency is a good store of value, they stop using it and use something else instead. People will use the goofiest shit as currency.
People in eastern NCR and the Mojave Wasteland lost faith in the NCR government's a) ability to back the listed value of paper money and b) stability overall. If you're living in Bakersfield, staring at a piece of paper that says "redeemable for value in gold" and you have no faith in the government's ability or willingness to do that -- or if you see that the government has changed the currency to say that it is not able to be exchanged for a backed good -- you may very well listen to the strong consortium of local merchants offering to exchange that paper note for currency backed by water.

This little tidbit hints at post-hoover play

Side note: in the olden days when we planned to support post-Hoover play, I did want to introduce two new forms of currency in the event that the player supported an NCR or Legion victory: an NCR $500 bill with either President Kimball or Chief Hanlon on it, depending on the ending, and something commemorating the Courier on the back, also a Legion double aureus (worth 200 caps) commemorating the Courier on the back and conquered General Oliver on the front (in the style of Vercingetorix on Roman coins following Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul).

And on the Legion

Edward Sallow created Caesar's Legion as an imitation of the Roman Legion, but without any of the Roman society that supported the Roman Legion.
I've written this before, but there are no optimates, no populares, no plebes, no equestrians, no patricians, no senate, no Rome. There's no right to private property (within the Legion itself). There's no civil law. There aren't even the ceremonial trappings of Roman society. Legates don't receive triumphs following a victory. No one in the Legion retires to a villa in Sedona. It's essentially a Roman legion with only the very top commander having any connection to the "source" culture, the rest being indoctrinated conscripts from cultures that were honestly less well-developed than anything in Gaul. Gauls are pretty sophisticated compared to the 80+ tribes. Gauls could read the Latin or Greek alphabets (Gallic language, obviously), had extensive permanent settlements, roads, calendars, mines, and a whole load of shit that groups like the Blackfoots never had.
What Caesar gave to those tribes was order, discipline, an end to internecine tribal violence (eventually), common language, and a common culture that was not rooted in any of their parent cultures. The price was extreme brutality, an enormous loss of life and individual culture, the complete dissolution of anything resembling a traditional family, and the indoctrination of fascist values.
Caesar's Legion isn't the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic. It isn't even the Roman Legion. It's a slave army with trappings of foreign-conscripted Roman legionaries during the late empire. All military, no civilian, and with none of the supporting civilian culture
Yes, he does suggest that. He says that when the Legion dominates NCR, it will be akin to the rise of the Roman Empire following the republic. The Legion will become, if not a "peace" force, a domestic army instead of a roving war band, and the NCR's corruption will be swept away along with the government.

Arcade isn't exaggerating when he suggests that Caesar views the Colorado River as his Rubicon. e: It's true that Caesar doesn't say anything explicitly about the role of women, but Caesar's view of women is different from most of the legionaries. As I wrote above, the Legion is at war, and he views the use of women for military purposes as a bad strategic choice when he could be using them to create more legionaries.

In Caesar's view, NCR's problems have to do with the corruption of its government and what he sees as inherent flaws in NCR's republican system. All of the strategies he uses to assemble the Legion and march on NCR are means to an end, not social end goals themselves.
Caesar sees NCR as Rome and his role in reforming it as Julius Caesar's role in reforming the republic (by turning it into a dictatorship). When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and returned to Rome, his legion didn't rape and enslave their way through the city. However, rape and enslavement were common in outer territories of the Roman Empire and were regularly used as tools of intimidation and labor.
When Arcade "jokes" that Caesar thinks that the Colorado River is the Rubicon, he's not far from the truth.

And when he hasn't been talking on twitter about the allegations that Lance Armstrong has been doing performance enhancing drugs, he's answered the following on formspring:

You seem to be really adept at tuning and tweaking mechanics for a really solid, mostly-balanced RPG. Would you say you are good with numbers? We're you a good math student?
Thanks. No, I was never particularly good at math. Adjusting numbers is an integral part of tuning gameplay mechanics, but it's a means to an end. You start with numbers and goals, adjust based on feel, and then make additional adjustments based on observed use by players.
Did you write the Icewind Dale 2 storyline over the course of a weekend?
It wasn't over the course of a weekend, but it was over two days in the middle of the week. I had to write the story and define the major characters and all of the locations over a Tuesday and Wednesday, IIRC.

Its a dog's life[]

We mentioned Brian Fargo was in the Netherlands, and has since moved on in his tour of Europe, however in his absence, it looks a but sleepy at the Wasteland Offices…

[https://twitter.com/BrianFargo/status/237962005342994432/photo/1 Meanwhile, here's how he looks in game...

You can buy wasteland 2 here if you haven't contributed already.

Farewell Planet Fallout[]

IGN has apparently canned a whole lot of their network, including FilePlanet and Planet Fallout, or so has been announced on their twitter in the past few minutes. Farewell guys, and good luck.

Wrap[]

Don't forget The Apprentice One of these challengers WILL be fired.

Relic of the war that wasn't[]

A late breaking relic this week, as I've just learned that Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon has died at the age of 82.

Mr Armstrong of course needs no introduction - he was the first man to step on the moon. The US's journey to the moon was a hard campaign that in some ways defines "the war that wasn't". Spurned on by JFK, America would meet this goal with just a few months remaining.

Any words I say won't be adequate enough to match up to the occasion, so I'll leave this one to the professionals.

Next Week: God save the Queen

Subscribe today[]

Okay, so you can't really subscribe, but you can add this userbox to your profile:

WikiDigestLogo2This user has a subscription to The Weekly Nukapedia News Digest.

{{Userbox |text=This user has a subscription to [[User_blog:Agent_c|The Weekly Nukapedia News Digest]]. |left image=WikiDigestLogo2.png }}

Thank you Old World Relics

Your next news digest[]

Next Saturday. I'm off gliding over the East of Scotland this week, I will see you then. Agent c (talk) 23:03, August 25, 2012 (UTC)

Advertisement