Joel
1881
How can something be preemptively rated?
from the kotaku.au thread it sounds like this isn’t really a huge inconvenience, just need to order it from play-asia.com or a similar service.
Sarkus
1883
What do you mean? Do you understand how games are rated? They don’t play them, the ratings boards ask that a game publisher sends them a series of clips that show the degree of violence and sexual material in the game and then rate them based on that.
In other words, games are almost always “preemptively rated.”
Not true for Germany. Here someone hired by the commitee is playing the build sent by the publisher complete through. The publisher has to provide means that he / she can complete it (e.g. cheats).
Besides that the publisher has no say at all and is not even presented during the playthrough.
After that he / she creates a presentation with video clips, screenshots etc. he / she made while playing and presents it to the board.
The board is a mix of “honorable” people of different parts of society (clerics, youth organizations, state people) that will then give her / his personal rating for discussion. At the end they get to a final and binding rating.
The rating is only for this version of the game so if something is changed later that the board decides will change the rating the rating will be modified or the game could even be removed from retail if it’s already out. That way a clever publisher can’t fool them with a tame build for the commitee and then retailing with a much more violent version.
So for Germany the games are more or less finished when they are sent in for rating.
Sarkus
1885
I didn’t know that. In the US it’s how I described it and it appears a similar system is in place in Australia. Basically, it’s an honor system that the publishers will send in representative clips. However, there are times when the ratings change due to later revelations. For example, the rating of Oblivion when launched was “T” but after release was changed to “M” when some quests were clearly seen as more graphic than what Bethesda had given the ESRB to judge.
I coulda sworn Oblivion went from T to M because it was possible to mod it so everyone was naked.
There were nude textures on the game disc but not in the actual game. You couldn’t mod the 360 version but they changed it to M as well, from what I remember. Dumb, dumb shit.
If I recall correctly, the official reason was due to ONOES NIPPLES, but the unofficial reason was that people were starting to point out that things like the flayed corpses in the Oblivion gates were a bit much for T. The graphic violence was in the ESRB highlight reel but they ignored it, so they chose to flip out over the nude textures since those hadn’t been submitted.
Anyone see the Amazon special collector’s edition for the game? Only $120.
According to Kotaku (though they at least have evidence/research this time), d0med for Australian release.
Drugs drugs drugs!
Lake
1891
But you get a Pip-Boy 3000 clock.
New teaser video:
Not much different from the last one, cept it features the PC instead of a Brotherhood guy.
Also, from the developers blog:
If you’re waiting for your chance to see Fallout 3 in action, G4’s got you covered on Monday. Beginning at 7PM (Eastern Time), they’ll be airing a two-hour E3 Preview Show featuring a Fallout 3 demonstration from Todd Howard. For more details on G4’s E3 schedule, head here.
finally some actual gameplay footage on monday
Squee
1893
Hopefully they put it online, since I haven’t got G4.
nabeel
1894
Nice teaser, can’t wait to see the demonstration.
Draikin
1895
Bethesda are stuck in the past with those teasers. Great cinematics need first person view, gore and swearing.
Squee
1896
Don’t forget they’re shamelessly ripping off the iconic style of previous Fallout cinematics. Can’t Bethesda do anything by themselves!? MUST THEY ALWAYS STEAL!?
God, it’s like they never even played Fallout! There’s nothing at all like it in those teasers I mean the resolution is over 640x480 and what the hell why are there over 256 colors.
Fallout 3, more like Sellout 3.
Bethe$da can do no right.
bago
1899
Except ship millions of units.
If this is really in engine and ingame the game looks very nice and the screenshots do not do it justice.
