I ment to have this done and up yesterday but I got busy :|
War. War never changes.
For starters it wasint the fans fault it was Bethsofts for not expecting a massive turnout.
The buzz about Fallout 3 started a while back in 2004 when Bethesda Studios purchased the rights to the well known RPG from Interplay. Until that point fans thought all hope was lost because Interplay was hurting and probably going out of business. Truth be known Bethsoft probably would have kept the lid on it if they could but because of legal reasons they could not hide the fact that they purchased the title and of course why spend 6 million dollars for something your not going to use. For the full skinnie on Fallout check out the No mutants allowed website. Fast forward 2 years............
It all started about a month ago with a countdown time timer and some conceptartwork that when clicked on lead to the forum.All hell broke loose just after 3 am PST yesterday when the counter ran out. Actually people in Crackcanastan who are +13GMT started whining a full day before but everyone assumed the teaser would be up at the start of business Eastern Standard Time. Well of course they were wrong and it ended up being more like the after coffee and a doughnut West Coast time. The video went up around 11am EST. but not before the inpatient fans had crashed the Bethsoft server several times. The first crash was around 4 am EST. Twenty "waiting for the video" threads opened and closed before the clip was finally put up. At times the number people on the board (that also services TES/Oblivion fans) topped 5000 with over 2000 of them viewing the one thread (600 or so unregistered guests) and a staggering 20 posts per minuet. That was ten times normal amount of users and broke the board record for members online at one time several times. This proved to be more then the Bethsoft server could handle and all there web sites crashed and still appear to be wounded although the dreaded "Cannot Find Server" seems to happen less frequently now that the initial surge has passed. Bethy should have expected this kind of turn out from such a loyal fan base like the Fallout community. Ultimately having the artwork site (where the teaser is now) link to the forum site when clicked proved to be a bad idea. People saw the little hand pop up showing that the photo was a link and assumed clicking on famous sepia tone TV test pattern from the beginning of the original Fallout game would start the teaser clip. Ooops... When users arrived at the forum they started clicking around looking for answers and it could not handle the load .
The teaser of course showed nothing of the game and was just a trailer like the ones we have all seen before here on games spot, at E3 and on TV for Gears of War Halo2 and the like, it's unlikely any game play footage will be shown before next year.
What will the game be like? Youcan visit the Bethsoft forum if you wanna talk about it but the truth is.......nobody really knows how its going to turn out or even the basics of thegame play mechanics will be. Everyone is afraid it will be Oblivion with guns and the old school fans cringe at that idea. I'm staying out of the debate for now. War never changes, but for better or worse the game obviously will. I hope it's a good game.
