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Eric Fenstermaker on New Vegas' Vault 11

LESS T_T

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(Spoilers, obviously.)

Eurogamer's Wesley Yin-Poole did a retrospective on New Vegas' Vault 11, that vote for an "overseer" thing: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-17-the-horror-of-vault-11

Apart from his appreciation of the Vault he also interviewed its designer Eric Fenstermaker, so I only quote that part here:

Behind the horror of Vault 11
Vault 11 designer Eric Fenstermaker speaks about the making of the human condition.

Eric Fenstermaker is a writer and designer who worked at Obsidian Entertainment for over a decade before leaving to go freelance. He had a hand in Neverwinter Nights 2, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Pillars of Eternity, Pillars of Eternity: The White March Parts 1 and 2 and Pillars of Eternity 2, writing, designing levels, scripting and playing with gameplay systems design. He got his start in college as a summer programming intern at Pipeworks Software in Eugene, Oregon, working on a couple of Godzilla fighting games. "I was a big Godzilla fan growing up, so it was a pretty great introduction to the industry, and everyone there was just really cool to work with," he tells Eurogamer.

Obsidian was Fenstermaker's first job after college. He inched his way into level and narrative design over time after joining as a gameplay scripter. New Vegas was about halfway into his time at the studio. "At that point I was a level-designer-who-was-allowed-to-write-his-own-stuff," he says. "That's a good job because the ratio of creative freedom to overall responsibility is very favourable."

More recently, Fenstermaker wrapped up work on Pillars of Eternity 2. "I remained narrative lead through pre-production, and then I moved out-of-house to work as a part-time contractor instead," he says. "So I ended up writing a companion, Edér, for that project over this past year. He was a lot of fun to write in the first game, and the other writers on that team are terrific to collaborate with, so doing him for the sequel was a no-brainer to me."

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What were the inspirations behind Vault 11?

Josh Sawyer, who was the project director, walked into my office one day and told me I was going to be doing Vault 11 and it should take inspiration in some fashion from Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery.

I had never read it, and I resolved at that point it would be better if I didn't read it as part of the research, just because I wanted the narrative of the level to stand on its own and not be some kind of rehash - even subconsciously. All I had to go on was the basic description Josh gave me, which was that the story was about a small town where every year they choose a person at random and stone them to death. (I think. I really should read it at some point.) So I started thinking about what an annual execution would look like as a social experiment.

What was the initial idea for Vault 11, the top level conceit you were going for?

Everything came out of trying to envision what a community might do if they were forced to murder one of their own every year. What kind of system would they settle on? It occurred to me that, while random selection would seem to be the fairest approach, it probably wouldn't have sat well with people. I figured they'd want to believe they had some kind of control over their circumstances. And the more aggressive types would work quickly toward a structure that they could manipulate in their favour.

A democratic framework would probably be the path of least resistance in that regard - it sounds fair on its face, it's an American ideal - especially for that generation, it minimises individual guilt over the decision, and it allows for a rationale. A random selection could mean you, could mean your kid. A democratic choice, you just have to not be the most hated person in the vault that year. That is something you could see an entire community getting behind, and it's also of course easily corrupted and manipulated.

So the reverse election became the foundation of the story. And with Fallout, you always have this pairing of willful 1950s naivete with the stark, brutal realities of human nature. So a lot of the joy for me came from bringing in trappings from the postwar era, and at the conceptual level I thought it would be fitting and fun if we found out at the end that Vault-Tec had made a quaintly optimistic hypothesis about the experiment's outcome and then been proven horribly wrong.

How much reference work did you make when preparing Vault 11?

The design document itself wasn't extensive. It was all text, and I think much of it was devoted to an overview of the narrative, and an explanation of the order in which it would be experienced.

The rest of it was art and sound requests. Since it was a vault, most of the level art came from preexisting Fallout 3 tilesets, so I focused my art requests on smaller things that would create the right atmosphere. I caught wind that legendary Fallout artist Brian Menze, a few doors down, was not overly busy at the time so I saddled him with a ton of requests for 50s-era campaign and recruitment posters, as well as the filmstrip slides. (Some of the posters got blown up and printed out and they're still hanging at Obsidian in their common area.)

Tell us about the design process. How do you go from a cool idea to it being this cool place in the game?

I spent almost all my time trying to work out the plot and how the level would progress it. I never got it quite as clean as I'd have liked, but the design took longer than it was supposed to as it was, and various managers had begun breathing heavily down my neck, so I had to run with it.

Implementation was fast. Compared to my other levels, I spent hardly any time on it. For all the flack that engine gets, the level design tools are very efficient, and you can lay out a vault in no time. I don't think many of our design documents even included layouts (or maybe it was just me), because our schedule was so tight and because in many cases was just easier to build out the interiors and iterate on them in-game.

Is there some Fallout lore reference book you could refer to to ensure Vault 11 made sense in the Fallout universe? How much freedom did you have when creating the vault and the characters in it?

There was no book. We had a few ex-Black Isle guys like Josh who had been part of the early games in the series, and knew the setting really well. They were always helpful when questions came up.

The nice thing about the vaults though is they have very little baggage to them in terms of lore. With Vault 11 I really had carte blanche when it came to narrative choices. As long as I got the tone right, it was going to feel like it belonged.

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What kind of experience did you hope the player to have in Vault 11?

There were a few goals. I wanted the whole thing to be structured as a mystery where players would see the outcome first and then progress through the level trying to learn the reason for it. So the first point of interest the player is meant to come across is where the "survivors" lie, near the entrance.

From there, I wanted things to get stranger and more opaque before they became clearer, which is maybe a dubious goal for a narrative designer. The hope was to make it very difficult at first to imagine what on earth these people could have been up to, so when the story all slowly came together, the revelation would hopefully be satisfying.

And then, towards the end, I wanted the player to walk in the shoes of the former overseers, with only the vaguest idea of what was in store, and maybe the dim hope that the "sacrificial chamber" would just be a secret exit from the vault. I did also have some notion that I wanted the path to the sacrificial chamber to feel half like you had just died and half like you were about to get on a ride at Disneyland.

More broadly, there's kind of an essential Fallout feeling that you get when the game is hitting all the right notes that are the basis for the IP. It'll come in a level, or an encounter, or a moment. You can't really get it anywhere else. Fans will know what I mean. In the back of my mind, that's probably what I was chasing above anything else.

How do you approach designing the layout of the vault so players are likely to discover its secrets in the way you hope?

I took it level by level. The top level was about establishing the overarching mystery and the election structure, and introducing some of the major characters. Further down, you'd learn about the corruption, and about Katherine Stone doing something to upset the order. Then at the bottom you'd see the outcome, both in the writings and in the physical evidence of armed conflict, and you'd get a complete explanation of the history of it all. At that point you'd understand what had gone down, but the question of the survivors' actions would still remain. Thus the sacrificial chamber was set up to come last, so that only after sharing in the overseers' experience would they "earn" the answer to the puzzle.

It's a perpetual bane of a level designer's existence that you can lead players to water but you can't make them drink, so you have to operate under the assumption that they're liable to miss a great deal of what you wanted them to see. That's why there's a lot of redundancy in the computer terminal entries - if you missed the important stuff on the top level, you'd still be able to read it on terminals in the second level. By the time you get to the bottom, those computers have just about every bit of important information on them.

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The most tragic character in Vault 11 for me is Katherine, who endures unspeakable horror to try to save her husband. Can you tell us more about this character, her inspiration and role in the story?

As I was figuring out the backstory, one of the main questions to answer was, what changes? Why do they stop sacrificing themselves, and finally stand up to the vault's computer system? One answer that seemed conceivable was that it might be because an insurrection had killed most of the inhabitants. The whole situation was so ripe for conflict. It'd only take one person to to seize upon everyone's disillusionment with the process and upset the balance. In that regard, someone with a strong connection to one of the overseers-to-be-sacrificed made sense. So Katherine was conceived as the person who had finally said, "Enough."

I think I took her last name from Donna Stone, who was the main character of The Donna Reed Show. (I used to watch a lot of old sitcom reruns as a kid.) Donna Stone was the quintessential '50s sitcom housewife, with the house dresses and the pearls and idealised family and the whole bit. And that was sort of what Katherine became for me - a kind of Fallout funhouse-mirror reflection of Donna Reed's character. Donna Reed as a vigilante revenge killer.

The combat end of Vault 11, when you experience the fate of the Vault 11 overseer, is one of the most memorable moments I have from the entire Fallout series. It was not only tense and terrifying, but difficult to survive! On this, where did the idea of having the player sit down and listen to an authoritative voice explain your fate come from? Was it, as players suspect, a Fallout take on the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures?

I had the idea for the filmstrip first. I wanted something funny there, partly for pacing, partly because it'd be the right mode for Vault-Tec, and partly to get players to drop their guard. I liked the thought of some last bit of social control being exerted on the part of Vault-Tec to get the victim to accept their death peacefully, as though that were somehow more humane, or that someone would actually ever overcome their fear of death thanks to an absurdly generic two-minute filmstrip about their life. I knew we had the framework to do a filmstrip from the Fallout 3 G.O.A.T character generation test, and I thought something in the vein of a '50s health class film on puberty would be about the right level of condescending.

The background music in that filmstrip was originally this very serene piece - something that was in the Fallout 3 legacy music, but somehow it got changed by someone else to something more jaunty, and I didn't catch the change until it was too late. I much preferred the original for the mood it set - it really lulled you to sleep before the walls opened up.

With the execution, I was just going to have the room be a gas chamber, but then I realised it'd be much better if for some reason their plan for killing the sacrificial lamb was just the messiest, most over-the-top and inefficient method possible.

The Milgram reference I added during implementation. Early on in the design phase, I had looked into social experiments that might provide me with a kind of proof-of-concept for Vault 11, so Milgram came up, the Stanford Prison Experiment came up. And they seemed to suggest that Vault 11's situation was, sadly, quite plausible in the right conditions. (Just as importantly, they provided insight into the mentality of people who design and run such experiments.) Later, when I was implementing the sacrificial chamber, I wanted the player character to actually have to sit down in a comfy chair to watch the filmstrip, and that required a VO prompt. In the interests of having the player experience what the sacrificial overseers had experienced, it seemed appropriate to goad a hesitating player into going along with authority, Milgram-style. Any player who sat down was doing so despite the fact that they always had the option to walk out.

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Do you have any data on what percentage of players died the first time they robots came out of the walls? (I suspect it's a high percentage!)

I don't. The stat I would really want is how many people made some kind of audible yelp or peed or something when it happened. As a designer you want to know that your work is making a difference out there.

It sounds like there is one survivor of Vault 11, who we presume leaves. Did you intend for this character to pop up somewhere else in the game? If so, what was their fate, and how come they didn't make the cut?

There are so many good fan theories on the identity of the character that I don't want to put any of it to rest. At this point I think what a player imagines happened to the survivor is far more personal and satisfying than anything a developer answer would provide.

Does Vault 11 contain any secrets players have yet to uncover, any elements players have yet to fully understand?

Just the stuff about the mysteries of human nature. But these days, there's probably a reddit thread or something where somebody figured all that out too. Same way they figure out what's going on in Westworld.

Does the Vault 11 story end on an optimistic note, because eventually the vault dwellers break the chain of sacrifice, or is it an essentially downbeat ending, because even with freedom beckoning pretty much everyone ends up dead?

This is just the sort of question I would want players to be asking when they finish the vault!

What does Vault 11 say about the human condition?

If I told you it would take all the fun out of it. I'm not saying that to be an ass - it's really kind of true. Sometimes content creators do their consumers a disservice by demystifying their work too much. And sometimes the creators are wrong, too.

And finally, what makes a great Fallout vault, and why does Vault 11 work so well?

For me, a vault is kind of a perfect microcosm of the Fallout setting. Elsewhere in the wasteland, you might have a level that's just about fighting ghouls, or raiders, or supermutants. But the vaults, via Vault-Tec, always bring in that post-World War 2 cultural element that makes the setting what it is. That was a time of great optimism and imagination on the one hand, but whitewashing, denial, and paranoia on the other. It's great material to draw from, and I think a lot of successful vaults make good on the opportunity. If you took that element out of Vault 11, I'd imagine you'd be left with something comparatively bland.

The other thing is, there's something inherently fascinating about social experiments. They satisfy one of our most basic curiosities. At the end of the day, as long as the vault has an interesting experiment (assuming it's not a control vault), you're gonna want to know how it played out.

Illustrations by Anni Sayers.
 

Sigourn

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Fenstermaker said:
The other thing is, there's something inherently fascinating about social experiments. They satisfy one of our most basic curiosities. At the end of the day, as long as the vault has an interesting experiment (assuming it's not a control vault), you're gonna want to know how it played out.

I wish people understood this. The whole "social experiment" goes out the window the moment it stops being a social experiment and becomes cruelty for cruelty's sake. The twist stops being "wow, that is interesting" or "wow, that is interesting (but terrifying)".
 
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More broadly, there's kind of an essential Fallout feeling that you get when the game is hitting all the right notes that are the basis for the IP. It'll come in a level, or an encounter, or a moment. You can't really get it anywhere else. Fans will know what I mean. In the back of my mind, that's probably what I was chasing above anything else.

This guy gets it.
 

2house2fly

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Love this right from the first question.

"What was the inspiration for this?"

"Well, Josh Sawyer told me to."

I wonder at what point it came up that he'd never read the story he was being asked to imitate
 

Bester

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Josh Sawyer, who was the project director, walked into my office one day and told me I was going to be doing Vault 11
That's why all modern obshitian games are shit. Somebody walks into your office and assigns a writing task to you that you don't feel passionate about or even interested in, and you force yourself to push something out of yourself on the subject. That's no way of doing anything that requires creativity.
 

agentorange

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Josh Sawyer, who was the project director, walked into my office one day and told me I was going to be doing Vault 11
That's why all modern obshitian games are shit. Somebody walks into your office and assigns a writing task to you that you don't feel passionate about or even interested in, and you force yourself to push something out of yourself on the subject. That's no way of doing anything that requires creativity.
That's called being a professional. And, as the subject of this very thread speaks for itself, it can often be a good thing to be forced to do something out of your comfort and/or with direction. You can wait around all day for that brilliant burst of passion and inspiration and you're just going to be another loser on an internet forum who criticizes other people's work eternally without ever completing a decent project of their own.
 

Cross

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Josh Sawyer, who was the project director, walked into my office one day and told me I was going to be doing Vault 11 and it should take inspiration in some fashion from Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery.

I had never read it, and I resolved at that point it would be better if I didn't read it as part of the research, just because I wanted the narrative of the level to stand on its own and not be some kind of rehash - even subconsciously.
So basically what he's saying is that Vault 11 only turned out well because he disobeyed Josh.

:whatisfun:
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I can't feel the same for hype about Vault 11 after our interview with Eric: http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10231

On New Vegas I worked on Beyond the Beef but I also did one of the vaults - Vault 11. Vault 11 was a relatively linear, exploration-based quest and probably had half a dozen bugs reported total during production. I probably spent triple or quadruple the amount of time I worked on Vault 11 working on Beyond the Beef. So much of it depended on nondeterministic systems (AI, scheduling, pathing...) that the whole thing was a nightmare to debug. And when the game came out, it was interesting to see that Vault 11 got a lot of public praise, but hardly anything was said about Beyond the Beef. I'm glad people like it now, but at the time it did teach me that there are many ways to make a memorable quest, and some are harder than others.

Vault 11 is cool, but it gained recognition from game journos because it hit walking sim notes.
 

Bester

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Josh Sawyer, who was the project director, walked into my office one day and told me I was going to be doing Vault 11
That's why all modern obshitian games are shit. Somebody walks into your office and assigns a writing task to you that you don't feel passionate about or even interested in, and you force yourself to push something out of yourself on the subject. That's no way of doing anything that requires creativity.
That's called being a professional. And, as the subject of this very thread speaks for itself, it can often be a good thing to be forced to do something out of your comfort and/or with direction. You can wait around all day for that brilliant burst of passion and inspiration and you're just going to be another loser on an internet forum who criticizes other people's work eternally without ever completing a decent project of their own.
How many people have you hired for creative positions?
 

2house2fly

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How many games you like were the result of writers with complete creative freedom following their passions? Assignment like this isn't particularly pretty, but it's how things are done with commercial projects, and certainly not unique to Obsidian. Anyway, the assignment was just a high concept; all the specifics of Vault 11 came from Eric Fenstermaker himself
 

Sigourn

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How many people have you hired for creative positions?

You won't get as far in life as you could by accepting any project that comes your way, regardless if it is outside your comfort zone or not. Our comfort zone expands with experience.
 

Bester

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How many people have you hired for creative positions?

You won't get as far in life as you could by accepting any project that comes your way, regardless if it is outside your comfort zone or not. Our comfort zone expands with experience.
I'm assuming you're saying this because you got very far in life?

Leonard Boyarski did a formidable job on the titles he was passionate about. Then he "got out of his comfort zone" or whatever, to work on Diablo 3 story. And it's between mediocre and shitty. End of story. You can pat yourself on the back every time you play table tennis with a shoe, but it won't make you an amazing tennis player. It won't improve you at all. In case of creative jobs, once you realize you've produced shit (which will most certainly be the case if you do something you have no interest in), this may negatively impact you for future jobs. Also, working on something you have no interest in sometimes even results in depression. Try your own advice some time, get a job you hate for a year, tell me how it broadened your horizons.

In short, you're rehashing self congratulatory bullshit that you hear from guys like Chris Avellone who doesn't know what's good for him. Sure enough he "gets out of his comfort zone" and works on a shit ton of random titles. And his contributions to these titles are always unremarkable at best.

Eh. I feel like this post is pearls before swine. You people have no idea what you're talking about. Hire 10 guys for creative jobs they're not fit for, see them make shit, see your project burn and then come give me advice ok?

PS: whoever fucking said that as a writer, your job is to be versatile enough to write anything? Or as a 2d artist, you must be able to draw in all popular styles? Wtf. You find your voice/style and you write in your favorite 1-2 genres. Rare are writers who can do more. As rare as ambidextrous people probably.
 
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Sigourn

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You people have no idea what you're talking about. Hire 10 guys for creative jobs they're not fit for, see them make shit

Not my fault you can't distingusih between "it's outside my comfort zone" and "I'm shit at it".

What you've basically said in your previous post could be rephrased as "Great content is why modern Obsidian games are shit". In the end, that's what Vault 11 really is, and you make it seem like it was doomed from the start.
 

PorkBarrellGuy

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Vault 11 is cool, but it gained recognition from game journos because it hit walking sim notes.

Nothing wrong with having a purely exploration-based dungeon. I maintain that The Glow was good because its threat was something you couldn't shoot between the eyes.

As long as there's some meat to go with the potatoes, so to speak. IMO most walking sims make the mistake of thinking you can create a satisfying three-course meal with nothing but boiled tubers.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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Come on, it's not like The Lottery is full of complexity and depth. It's a simple concept that's easy to get your head around, even if you've never read it. Frankly, Fenstermaker's version of the idea is much better than the short story Josh told him to base it on. I struggle to imagine how there was anything wrong with this process.
 

PorkBarrellGuy

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Didn't Fenstermaker write Boone and his quests as well? Boone was slightly flat but his companion quest and the ticks you have to earn in order to unlock it kind of made up for that. Makes him much more 3-dimensional than when you first meet him in the dinosaur.
 

2house2fly

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In short, you're rehashing self congratulatory bullshit that you hear from guys like Chris Avellone who doesn't know what's good for him. Sure enough he "gets out of his comfort zone" and works on a shit ton of random titles. And his contributions to these titles are always unremarkable at best.
The fuck are you talking about. Avellone works on the projects he's passionate about since leaving Obsidian. Is his output on Prey or FTL better than Dead Money or KOTOR2 which he made while he was depressed at Obsidian, having his soul crushed by the grind and getting raped by the head of HR?
 

agentorange

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PS: whoever fucking said that as a writer, your job is to be versatile enough to write anything? Or as a 2d artist, you must be able to draw in all popular styles? Wtf. You find your voice/style and you write in your favorite 1-2 genres. Rare are writers who can do more. As rare as ambidextrous people probably.

No one said this, though. Fenstermaker was working on New Vegas and his boss told him to write a specific piece of content for New Vegas. That's hardly an outrageous demand. Part of being a boss on a creative project also means being able to assess the talents and abilities of those under you and delegate accordingly. Sawyer clearly felt that Fenstermaker was capable of writing Vault 11, and he was proven right since, despite whatever your personal opinion is on the area, Vault 11 is considered one of the standout sections of the game.
 

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