Official Word on the Fallout 3 Changes: Morphine Now Med-X

[Starlight]

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about changes that were made to Fallout 3 so that the game wasn’t banned in certain territories (most notably Austraila). It was revealed yesterday by http://www.edge-online.com/news/censors-force-fallout-3-changes that the changes made to the game would be made across all territories, so as to not create confusion, but what changes, specifically?

I shot a note to Pete Hines, VP of Marketing and PR at Bethesda, to find out just what was changed.

UGO: Just wanted to confirm the annoucement that all versions of Fallout 3 would be indentical, with the changes being made to the names of specific drugs (changing them from real-world names to in-universe names). Can you be more specific? If I recall, all of the drugs in the builds we’ve played were made-up names like Buffout and Mentats.

Pete Hines: The chems in the original Fallout used fictional names... Buffout, Jet, Rad-X, etc. Those all appear in Fallout 3 in exactly the same way as before.

We had added a new chem to Fallout 3 and had given it a real-world name, Morphine. Questions were raised about the use of that real-world drug, not only in Australia, but other territories as well. We decided there was no reason it needed to be named that and it should be a fictional name like the other chems, so we changed it to "Med-X".

That’s the change we made in response to those concerns, nothing else.

So there you have it. Lots of craziness for something pretty innocuous. See, it always helps to ask! More PlayStation 3 News...

[mrqwe]

Eventhough it is a minor issue - this again raises the question if national offices should put meaningfull agegrades on work of fiction or in effect censor the work of material clearly aimed at adults.