MCA Interview @ Planet Fallout
MCA Interview @ Planet Fallout
Interview - posted by VentilatorOfDoom on Tue 21 September 2010, 19:10:03
Tags: Chris Avellone; Obsidian EntertainmentThe Codex' favorite developer, Magnificent Chris Avellone, gets some time in the limelight over at Planet Fallout.
They're having him repeat his lifestory, ask him for tips to get into the industry and the like, but there's also more interesting stuff.
What, in your opinion, are the crucial elements for a good RPG these days?
The range of character development and customization, and reactivity to that character choice and development within the game world. The more you can do to bring story, world, and characters into the equation, the better, but ultimately, players want to build the character they want, customize their character, and then have the world respond appropriately through dialogue choices, ways to solve quests, or even NPC's reactions to your character's purple mohawk.
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The dialog system, something that you've known a lot of success in games like Planescape: Torment, changed a bit from Fallout 3, can you explain us more on what changed and what remains untouched?
We added more skill checks for various skills (Barter, Explosives, Sneak, Guns), displayed the success values for skill checks, added some stupid-speak at points for low INT characters, and changed the text of the line if your skill isn't high enough (as an example: adding [Crappy Speech] "uh... maybe... you'd be making a mistake?" vs. [Good Speech skill] "You pull that trigger on someone that's got NCR's full support, you'll be making a mistake.")
Torment's dialogue system is a scaled-down version of what was in Fallout 1, without the empathy perk and expanded alignment reactivity to compensate for D+D's alignment axis. There's not many other comparisons between Torment and Fallout aside from possibly companion depth in New Vegas and the quest solutions for different character builds, so I don't want to misrepresent either title by drawing any other comparisons between them. Torment owes a lot to Fallout, and not the other way around.
Thanks to Briosafreak for pointing us to this.
They're having him repeat his lifestory, ask him for tips to get into the industry and the like, but there's also more interesting stuff.
What, in your opinion, are the crucial elements for a good RPG these days?
The range of character development and customization, and reactivity to that character choice and development within the game world. The more you can do to bring story, world, and characters into the equation, the better, but ultimately, players want to build the character they want, customize their character, and then have the world respond appropriately through dialogue choices, ways to solve quests, or even NPC's reactions to your character's purple mohawk.
...
The dialog system, something that you've known a lot of success in games like Planescape: Torment, changed a bit from Fallout 3, can you explain us more on what changed and what remains untouched?
We added more skill checks for various skills (Barter, Explosives, Sneak, Guns), displayed the success values for skill checks, added some stupid-speak at points for low INT characters, and changed the text of the line if your skill isn't high enough (as an example: adding [Crappy Speech] "uh... maybe... you'd be making a mistake?" vs. [Good Speech skill] "You pull that trigger on someone that's got NCR's full support, you'll be making a mistake.")
Torment's dialogue system is a scaled-down version of what was in Fallout 1, without the empathy perk and expanded alignment reactivity to compensate for D+D's alignment axis. There's not many other comparisons between Torment and Fallout aside from possibly companion depth in New Vegas and the quest solutions for different character builds, so I don't want to misrepresent either title by drawing any other comparisons between them. Torment owes a lot to Fallout, and not the other way around.
