Bethesda confirmed earlier this morning that they have released a patch to fix some of the technical issues found in the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas. When this update will be available for the console edition of the game is still unclear.

” We’reworking hard to make this update available for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360,” reads the official Bethesda blog.

Blast reviewed Fallout: New Vegas this week, and cited the game’s surprisingly high amount of technical errors as one of the game’s major downfalls.  Stay with Blast for more on the upcoming patch.

The first batch of screenshots for the upcoming Fallout: New Vegas hit the Internet today and besides a few featuring some spectacular beards and golf-club murder, we still don’t know much about the title.

The game is slated for a Fall 2010 release and if you missed its debut trailer, have a look at it right here.

Check out all the piping hot new screens in the gallery embedded below. Remember to click each to embiggen.

Source: Joystiq

Bethesda released a trailer for its upcoming RPG Fallout: New Vegas this morning and also dated the project for a general Fall 2010 release.

Developed by Obsidian, this game, from teaser-trailer alone, already gets me excited. It’s accompanied with the familiar phrase “war never changes” and we can’t really argue there.

Notable inclusions in the trailer are a California flag, a dude in a heavy military jacket, and a generally dark tone to the experience.

What’s also interesting is Obsidian handling development duties. Bethesda’s in-house studio is not working on it, leading us to believe Bethesda is working on projects simultaneously and one we have no idea about.

We’ll keep up-to-date with the story as it evolves. You watch the trailer below.

Fallout 3 fans rejoice! Bethesda Softworks has released a few screen shots of their newest upcoming Xbox 360 downloadable content for Fallout 3 called The Pitt. The new screens include a preview of one more interesting new weapons in the approaching DLC called the AutoAxe.‚  The other screens show the impressive environments that will only be discoverable with a download of the Pitt.

The Pitt put characters in the middle of a struggle between the Raiders and their slaves in what is left of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unlike Fallout 3′s previous DLC, The Pitt will be based in a present day reality and offer many different karma driven options.‚  Also, throughout the quest, players will be put through many difficult and often “morally grey” choices.‚  Be prepared to fight foes, find weapons and enjoy new experiences unique to the soon-to-be-released DLC.‚  The Pitt will be available through Xbox Live in March 2009 for 800 points/$9.99.

Bethesda Softworks announced Tuesday that an update is available for Fallout 3 for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

It will be up today on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network and the PC patch can be found on the official Web site, and will also be up on Games for Windows Live as well.

You also can download the patch FREE from Blast.

The patch is required to play the downloadable content coming to Xbox 360 and Games for Windows. The first DLC for Fallout 3, Operation: Anchorage, is scheduled to be released January 27 via Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live for 800 points.

A full list of patch fixes is on page 2.

Bethesda Softworks released three new screenshots from the upcoming Operation Anchorage expansion for Fallout 3.

In Operation Anchorage we get to relive the much talked about liberation of Anchorage that was hinted to throughout the game.

To maintain continuity, you will play out the 200-years-in-the-past battle by entering a simulation like the one you have to complete in a vault to find your father in the main quest.

Operation Anchorage is focused mainly on battle/fighting/shooting and less on the verbose storyline of the rest of the game.

The download will be available for Xbox 360 and Games for Windows later this month for 800 points/$9.99. Fallout 3 downloads are exclusive to the 360 and Windows, as Bethesda announced at E3.

Minor spoiler warning. We’re not giving away anything vital.

Every once in a while, a game comes along that plays out like so:

You sit down at 5:30 in the afternoon to play the game. You open a box of Cheez-Its. You figure on playing the game for an hour or two and eating a few handfuls of crackers.

Suddenly the sun is coming up, the box is empty, and you’ve just gotten started in the game.

This caloric description doesn’t even begin to do justice to Fallout 3. Not only is Fallout 3 the best game of the year, but it’s one of the best games ever made.

That’s a lofty statement, but you’re reading a magazine that has a track record of telling the truth. So listen up.

The game takes place in post nuclear apocalyptic Washington D.C., and you’re one of the lucky few that got to live in the secure Vault 101, free from the radiation, deadly super mutants and certain death in the barren wasteland outside.

You begin Fallout 3 at the moment of your character (male or female) is born, and you age through the game in quick chapters until you one day when you wake up to discover your father, a scientist and doctor, has inexplicably left the Vault – a big no-no. Now the Vault director is after you, and your life is in danger.

Right from the start, Bethesda shows you the sheer volume of choices, side-quests, and adventures in Fallout 3. As you’re escaping the authorities, you’ll find that an infestation of giant radioactive cockroaches has swarmed the vault. You’ll run into a childhood bully begging you for help because his alcoholic mother is being attacked by the roaches, and he’s too scared to do anything about it. You’ll find that your father’s assistant – who was like an uncle to you – has been murdered for information about dad’s disappearance. Seeking revenge, you’ll find the vault director, but wait, he’s the father of your potential love interest and childhood best friend.

And that’s all before the game really even starts.

Leaving the vault, you’ll then spend the next, oh, month of your life exploring and re-exploring a visual masterpiece. Washington D.C., the surrounding area, and all the monuments have been reconstructed and then devastated by nuclear war. It’s eye-popping to walk through this virtual world and see the Washington Monument in ruins as you approach it and the museums of the Smithsonian in various stages of decay, squatters taking up shelter in their strong construction. It’s not just up-close either. From far in the distance, you can see the Washington Monument or the Capital Building, and it’s eerie.

Let me tell you what else is eerie: listening to the radio stations in the background. From the start, you’ll have your choice of Enclave Radio, the propaganda channel for a faction that claims to be the resurrected United States Government, and the rebel free radio wasteland station and its eccentric disc jockey, Three Dog.

You have the choice to be good or bad. You can be a hero, defending the helpless, saving cities and having townsfolk shower you with gifts (that does happen). You can walk into the slave trader’s village and kill all the slavers. Or you can be an asshole. You can exploit children, beat up women, destroy towns. You can be evil, corrupt, and terrifying.

That all starts when you’re a kid or when you’re escaping the vault. Your best friend steals a gun from her father to “aid” in your escape. When the childhood bully begs you for help, you can help him, save his mother and be the hero.

Or you can shoot him in the head and put two in the mother for good measure.

These are your choices, and don’t let emotion get in the way — yes, it’s just a video game, but we’ve all been there.

Even your own health is a series of carefully balanced choices. If your hit points are low, you can drink water from a stream or sink or even down a soda from a vending machine, but this increases your radiation level, which is bad for you in the long run.

You will also encounter a variety of drugs and chemicals that will raise HP or boost your abilities temporarily, but if you take too much, you’ll get addicted and dependent on the drug. If you run out, you’ll go through withdrawal and lose abilities.

The game is bloody, gory, violent, and full of sexually suggestive and explicit dialog. But the game doesn’t include swears in the same way that Kane and Lynch did — just for the hell of it. Fallout 3′s dialogue is tactfully woven together.

There are a lot of little things that I would have liked to have seen built up more, like sitting at a bar and ordering a drink, settling up two lovebirds and then going to the wedding, going to restaurants. These features all happen, but could have been a bit better designed. You don’t have food delivered to you or a drink poured for you; you just buy it and it appears in your inventory.

The game’s inventory system works exactly like Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls titles. You can carry items up to your strength limit, and then you have to drop stuff strategically.

The game world is massive. It takes many, many hours to go through it, and you can bet that expansion packs and downloadable content is coming.

Now, I’ll admit, I’m a little biased in favor of the post apocalyptic genre. I grew up playing and reading Shadowrun for Genesis, Super Nintendo and tabletop — still have all the books. I number Blade Runner, Escape from New York and Escape from L.A. in my list of favorite movies.

But forget about the genre for a bit. The visuals are unparalleled and the audio is sublime. Walking down a bombed out road in Washington is that much creepier when “America the Beautiful” is playing in the background, seriously. The controls are intuitive and can be inverted or adjusted for sensitivity. The plot is complex and gripping.

When I discovered Interplay’s Wasteland in the early 1990s, this was how I imagined the game would look in real life. Technically Fallout 3 is the fourth installment in the franchise. Interplay made Wasteland and then Fallout 1 and 2, as technical sequels. They also made two spin-offs: the combat-heavy Fallout: Tactics on the PC in 2001 and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (the first console Fallout title) in 2004. Interplay started making Fallout 3, (see Van Buren) but they were broke and struggling. Bethesda scooped up the Fallout franchise last year for just under $6 million. Bethesda completely threw out Interplay’s work and built this game from scratch.

It does use the same gameplay engine as The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Fallout 3 is artistic and timely. It has a message to it — a frightening message. But unlike other games with a social context, Fallout 3 doesn’t push these factors down your throat.

It is, however, a quiet indictment of corrupt politics, unscrupulous foreign policy and an increasingly insular American populace.

Blast tested the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. Joe Sinicki and Terri Schwartz of the Blast Magazine staff contributed to this report.

Bethesda has busted out a new Fallout 3 website, PrepareForTheFuture.com, which is full of vids, clips, art and info on the upcoming probable game of the year.

Jimmy and The Fatman

VATS

That’s Right Abe

Blast’s “Best Game fo E3” will be released October 28, Bethesda Softworks confirmed Wednesday.

“We are very excited to let gamers get their hands on Fallout 3, the latest chapter in this beloved and highly acclaimed franchise,” said Vlatko Andonov, president of Bethesda Softworks, in a statement. “To meet the huge demand for this title by our fans worldwide, we are planning one of the biggest launches of any game released this year.”

Bethesda is the powerhouse behind the mega-award-winning Elder Scrolls franchise.

LOS ANGELES — They knew a good deal when they saw one in 2004, when they bought “Fallout” from its failing creator, Interplay

After years of development, Bethesda Softworks, makers of the hugely successful "Elder Scrolls" series, is at the E3 Media and Business Summit at the Los Angeles Convention Center this week to show off "Fallout 3," the latest chapter in the post-Nuclear apocalypse role playing franchise, due on shelves in the fall.

Interplay’s release of "Fallout" in 1997 was a breath of fresh air to an otherwise depleted RPG game gene pool during a lackluster several years for RPG’s. Then, in came this real world, guns and rockets departure from dungeons, dragons, wizards, and elves.

That kind of history will give "Fallout 3" momentum, but Bethesda has sometimes been looked at as a step-parent to Fallout since buying it for $5,750,000. They completely remade the game, throwing out the work Interplay had done on its own version of "Fallout 3" before selling it off.

The company’s other titles have been mixed. It’s "Elder Scrolls" games and expansion packs for those games have sold millions of copies, won countless awards, and enjoyed nearly unanimous critical approval. That success has carried them despite less successful titles like the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie games; semi-failures like their half dozen or so Star Trek titles; and miserable failures like the 2006 "IHRA Drag Racing" simulation game.

Still, Bethesda likes to gamble, and it usually pays off.

"We took a lot of risks with ‘[Elder Scrolls:] Oblivion’ and learned a lot doing such a massive game," said Todd Howard, executive producer for Bethesda, during Microsoft’s E3 briefing Monday. "We’ve learned a lot."

Bethesda hopes to market the game to hardcore and casual gamers — a very fashionable trend in the video game world today.

"Lots of people want an experience that is fun and well-executed. So that group is everyone from the most hardcore to casual gamers who buy 1 or 2 games a year," said Pete Hines, vice president of public relations and marketing for Bethesda, in an interview Monday. "Our marketing strategy is to hit those consumers in a lot of different ways, at different times."

Fallout 3 will be available for Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 this fall.

ZeniMax Media Inc., the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, announced Mnday that it has begun direct publishing operations in Asia with the establishment of its Tokyo-based subsidiary, ZeniMax Asia K.K. ZeniMax Asia will be publishing titles throughout Asian territories under the Bethesda Softworks brand.

“This office will publish games in Japan from Bethesda — Star Trek: Conquest, Star Trek: Legacy, and Fallout 3 — as well as games from other publishers, including Bully (PS2), Bully SE (Xbox 360), and Major League Baseball 2K8 (PS3/PS2/PSP/X360),” said Pete Hines, spokesman for Bethesda.

“Establishing operations in Asia is very important to us as we continue to expand our presence in markets outside of North America,” said Robert Altman, ZeniMax CEO. “In addition to ZeniMax Europe Ltd., our direct relationships throughout Asia allow us to bring exciting titles like Fallout 3 to gamers across the globe.”

The Asian operations of the Company will be headed by Tetsu Takahashi, General Manager, ZeniMax Asia KK. “We are happy to be part of the ZeniMax family,” said Tetsu. “Extending their direct reach throughout Asia is an exciting, new phase in the Company’s expansion and we look forward to building upon their excellent reputation.”

Bethesda Softworks has released new screenshots for the upcoming postapocalyptic RPG sequel that they resurrected after the demise of Interplay.

The game is coming to the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms at the end of the year.

Fallout 3 pits you against hordes of irradiated mutants as you seek out your missing father. It was a cult classic in the Interplay days and looks to be a top holiday season title this year.