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Watch Elon Musk and Todd Howard's E3 chat at 3PM ET
It's the final day of E3 2019 and for some reason, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is chatting on stage about "games, cars, space and everything in between" with Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard. Musk has a clear interest in games -- he even wrote and sold one when he was 12. He's also put a number of them on Tesla dashboards, including Asteroids, Super Breakout and 2048.
Watch Bethesda's E3 media briefing in under 12 minutes
Bethesda's E3 media briefing started with a performance from Andrew WK hyping Rage 2 and ended with a look at the company's future, closing its show with a tease of The Elder Scrolls VI. It took just over an hour for the publisher and developer to make its announcements, but you can watch it right here in under 12 minutes.
Watch Bethesda's E3 keynote right here at 9:30PM ET
Bethesda's Todd Howard showed up during Microsoft's E3 media briefing this morning, teasing that Fallout 76's West Virginia would be the biggest game world in the series yet. Now it's time for Howard to put his money where his mouth is, and actually show us the game. Good thing then that Bethesda has its own media briefing to do just that and more, right? The show starts at 9:30 PM Eastern and we'll be covering it live. Of course, if you aren't in Los Angeles to attend for yourself, you can watch the keynote on this very page, via that streaming window embedded below.
Fallout 4's Pip-Boy is a glorified smartphone case
"The Pip-Boy is an important part of Fallout and we love it so much we made a real one." Those words, delivered by game director Todd Howard at developer Bethesda Softworks' first-ever E3 media briefing this year, triggered cheers around the world. And thus, the Fallout 4 Pip-Boy Edition was born: a $120 special edition peripheral bundled with Fallout 4 that aims to mimic the game's wrist-bound menu and stat-tracking system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the premium version of the game proved insanely popular, prompting Bethesda to apologize when it couldn't make any more units to meet demand. Not bad for a rather awkward looking piece of light brown plastic that sits on your arm and holds your cellphone. But is it actually worth the hype and high price?
Fallout 3 making its way to PS3 consoles in Fall 2008
The teaser trailer came up earlier today and in case you haven't seen it, we've embedded it for you after the break. Although it's too early to determine specifics between the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, the teaser still gives us a taste of what Bethesda has in store for its first go-round with the fan favorite. Bethesda purchased the Fallout franchise from Interplay back in April, giving them free reign on the upcoming sequel, and thank goodness Todd Howard posted his proclamation about caring for the franchise, lest crazed fanboys do something ... crazy. Bethesda's Pete Hines described the teaser as "in-engine," and goes on to say it's "not real-time" but that it was created using game assets in an in-house designed engine. So, in other words, it's not like the 2005 E3 trailer for Killzone, got it? Fallout is projected for a simultaneous release on all next-gen consoles (and PC) for Fall of 2008.
PS3's Blu-ray drive speed could be reason for Oblivion delay
GameSetWatch has singled out a tidbit about the PlayStation 3 version of Oblivion that's sure to ignite fanboy ire. According to comments made by Bethesda's Todd Howard in the latest issue of EGM, the development team is using extra space on the Blu-ray disc to duplicate crucial data and improve load times. "Drive speed matters more to me [than capacity], and Blu-ray is slower," Howard told EGM.This is a sketchy workaround, as it could be susceptible to issues caused by data irregularities; GSW notes, "What happens if you don't have your pieces of data correctly sync-ed and one of them is an old version of an object/piece of code and one is a newer version?" A better, albeit unpopular solution, is to include an option to install a chunk of a game directly onto the hard drive (Genji has this option; so does Ridge Racer). Bethesda's use of the extra Blu-ray disc capacity is clever, but hopefully won't become the standard.Overall, we know that the Xbox 360 drive reads data faster than PS3's. While the Blu-ray drive might consistently read data at the same speed, the 360 drive is faster at reading data on the outer layers of the DVD disc; and that's were devs tend to put the biggest files.While EGM makes no note of it, it's worth considering that drive speed concerns played into Oblivion's delay. Will this become an issue for other cross-platform titles?
