Fallout 3: “360 is our lead dev platform,” says Bethesda

It’s a kind of strange decision bearing in mind that Oblivion on 360 runs at a slower frame rate and in a lower resolution compared to the PlayStation 3 game.

Oblivion on 360 may have had a longer development time but the PS3 build had more optimisation time.

Fallout has a new home.

I don’t think anyone really minds which platform is the ‘lead’ providing all the versions are equally good. It’s cheap and shoddy ports that people dislike, not ‘which one gets it first’.

Yeah but the difficulty in porting from the PC/360 to the PS3 is what creates all the problems. Also developers leading on the 360 is still a far cry from how it was 3 years ago with the XBox getting ported to 99% of the time.

Not only does it show a shift in the balance of power between the two, it also shows that as far as the development world is concerned the 360 ‘seems’ to be the more dev friendly, which also has connotations.

Also, with talk of the PS3 winning by a country mile by the end of the gen (and even by 2009 according to some analysts) the fact that devs aren’t really taking note and using the 360 as lead negates that assumption somewhat.

Very few games are multi-dev’ed and I can’t think of one multi-plat title where the PS3 is the lead and the port is to the 360. That obviously means that as far as comparisons are concerned, the 360 version of any said title is much more likely to run better.

That’s why I think it’s significant anyway.

But wtf do I know?

Nothing stops them from asking Insomniac Games for help.

http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/techpage.php

Burnout Paradise lead on PS3.

I do see your point, though – it’s widely accepted that it’s easier to develop for the 360 using its tools, and it’s really not surprising that a (previously) PC-centric developer like Bethesda would go with what they know.

As for the rest of them, I guess it’ll eventually come down to experience. Is it easier to develop using the better toolset and have a world of pain doing the port, or is better to take slightly less pain straight off the starting line and do an (apparently) easier 360 port later?

tbh, I expect the final answer will be ‘none of the above’. They’ll just start developing for ‘nothing in particular’ and all versions will become ports of a generic starting point. That’s certainly how we develop the same thing for two different targets here at work.

Don’t care what console is lead platform as long as some of the stuff that could cause console holders issues (kid killing*, drug taking, sex) don’t cause it to be watered down, at least not on the PC.

I imported the original Fallouts because the Euro versions were pissed about with, plus FO1 took something like six months to finally appear this side of the Atlantic for no understandable reason.

*I’ve never killed a child in a Fallout but it being an option if I felt like it, with serious consequences, is far better than not having kids in the game at all.

Apart from Burnout Paradise on the PS3, of course!

Burnout Paradise needs a new home. ;_;

I can’t help remembering Sony’s PR guy spouting a bunch of stuff about people leading on the PS3 from now on and “downgrading” for the 360. I wonder just how many really are.

I know of a couple of games that are dual-dev, but know of none that are have PS3 as lead.