Interview Informative Fallout 3 interview at Eurogamer

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: Bethesda Softworks; Fallout 3

<a href=http://www.eurogamer.net>Eurogamer</a> has posted an <a href=http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=78871>interview</a> with Gavin Carter, a beloved son of the Codex, and, coincidentally, Fallout 3 lead producer, and Emil Pagliarulo, the lead designer:
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<blockquote>Emil: Fallout 3 is Bethesda's triumphant return to gunplay games, after swords and sorcery for so long.</blockquote>This quote would be a great way to start my Fallout 3 review.
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<blockquote>Emil: It's like, you also can't proceed feeling like you owe the fans of Fallout anything, you can't feel bad that you're not making a turn-based isometric game.</blockquote>You are on a roll, aren't you, Emil?
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<blockquote>Gavin: Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 had many different people working on them. We have a great deal of respect for those guys, but what we don't want to do is open up our entire design to someone outside the company who doesn't really get the culture here.</blockquote>
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Jane: It certainly is a beautiful day. We should thank the leader.
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Homer: Who the hell is that, some kind of leader?
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Jane: Yes. He's the head of our perfect family, and when our galactic vehicle is complete he will take us to our new home, Blisstonia.
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Glen: Why don't you come chat with us about the leader at the welcome center?
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Homer: Will there be beer?
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Jane: Would you rather have beer, or complete and utter contemptment?
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Homer: What kind of beer?
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<blockquote>Gavin: We have a vision for the game and we're <s>taking</s> putting it all the way <s>through</s> in.</blockquote>Fixed.
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<blockquote>Emil: So take the relationship with "my" father. He's my moral compass, a good guy, a noble character, so if I'm an evil bastard how does he react to me? If I blow up a town, what does he think?
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Gavin: Your dad is like this warm, inviting guy. He's Liam Neeson! Who wouldn't want Liam Neeson as their dad, right?</blockquote>*sigh* Gotta love games for 12 year olds...
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<blockquote>Gavin: What happened to him? That's one of the central themes of the game. We wanted the relationship as a central point of the plot, <u>so we don't want you to be able to say, piss off your dad and ruin the plot</u>. To have a narrative you have to have some parts that are more strict. We definitely want you to feel like he is a central character in your life. When he leaves it is the biggest climactic moment in your life. No one ever leaves the vault - it is entirely self-contained.</blockquote>So much for the choices, eh?
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<blockquote>Gavin: Right at the top was, "choice and consequence in every quest line", as much as we possibly can. Every aspect of the game should have choice and consequence. Even choices like picking your character's stats. </blockquote>Sounds promising. Let's hope the game will actually reflect this philosophy.
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Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.nma-fallout.com/">NMA</A>

 

[Bradylama]

Emil: It's like, you also can't proceed feeling like you owe the fans of Fallout anything, you can't feel bad that you're not making a turn-based isometric game.

I guess it has a certain logic to it. It wouldn't have the same effect if Mr. Blonde had second thoughts about setting the cop on fire.

Gavin: Right at the top was, "choice and consequence in every quest line", as much as we possibly can. Every aspect of the game should have choice and consequence. Even choices like picking your character's stats.

No shit, Sherlock. This is so obvious it's embarrassing.

 

[Lingwe]

So far though the only example of the amazing multicolour choice in Fallout 3 has been the megaton quest, and that boils down to do it or don't do it.

If they really wanted to convince people that they are serious then why not provide some actual examples. I can understand not wanting to ruin the story, but there has to be a couple of side quests where they can say you choose who to deliver the item to (or to keep it for yourself), you can choose to convince the person to join an organisation, or convince him to join another organisation or frame him for a crime and have him arrested, you choose whether to divert the power from somewhere to power up somewhere else or another place entirely again or to leave the origin building powered and turn on the people who are trying to steal the power etc.

Until they show some real examples all we have to go on is a single quest. Considering how much coverage everything else about the game is getting it implies that Bethesda either knows that they don't do well with branching quests, or they just don't think that anyone cares about it.

 

[pkt-zer0]

Fallout 3 shows a joy for violence, but that seems almost in conflict with the good/neutral/evil divide. If you choose to play good, do you play a less violent game, or is it righteous violence?

Gavin Carter: What we can do is provide different avenues for the player. A big thing with the original Fallout is you could talk your way out of certain situations. You could got to the Master and talk him to death. We wanted to provide a lot of different avenues. You have to decide for yourself. Is shooting mutants something my character is going to do? In some ways we'll provide non-lethal combat options, but a big part of this game is the incredible level of violence. It's something people find a lot of fun, so it's not something we're going to back off from. The old Fallout had a slider for violence, you could turn it down if you wanted. We joked that on our options we were going to have one, but it would be taped in place at the max.

Who'd want to talk when you can blow people up with nukes and watch limbs and eyeballs fly?
It should be fucking funny, at least.

 

[Kortalh]

Jane: Would you rather have beer, or complete and utter contemptment?

Would you rather eat ice cream or be shot in the face?

... must be a typo. :D

 

[Ander Vinz]

Get back to work you pain in the neck you. If you don't like such an amazing game go make your own text-adventure instead of showing us how stupid Bethesda developers are.

 

[Twinfalls]

it harkens back for me to... the Terminator games.

First piece of honesty I've read from this mob about what this title is going to be about.

 

[franc kaos]

A lot of our time has been spent planning for every single contingency that could possibly happen.

Means the game's gonna come out with a thousand bugs. Pay to play content out two weeks after games initial release, patch that fixes desktop crash and 20% of game stopping bugs 2 to 3 months later.

Roll on Afterfall.

 

[Koby]

Emil: Fallout 3 is Bethesda's triumphant return to gunplay games, after swords and sorcery for so long.

I take that as –

"Finally Bethesda found an avenue in which it can provide the gunplay games the market wants."

And its about time too, "gunplay" is the best form of roleplay, everybody knows it, look at the FPS market, they know what a good RPG is.

 

[Excrément]

In some ways we'll provide non-lethal combat options, but a big part of this game is the incredible level of violence. It's something people find a lot of fun, so it's not something we're going to back off from. The old Fallout had a slider for violence, you could turn it down if you wanted. We joked that on our options we were going to have one, but it would be taped in place at the max

:evil:

 

[aries202]

Again, this misunderstanding about the old Fallouts that it was only about the violence. I'm a little more optimistic about the choice & consequence parts of this game, bit I'm still baffled and amazed over the story in the main plot.

Were' basically stuff with Neesom's character from Star Wars, Qin Gong?? for our dad??

 

[Hümmelgümpf]

So take the relationship with "my" father. He's my moral compass, a good guy, a noble character, so if I'm an evil bastard how does he react to me? If I blow up a town, what does he think?

Father: You were a naughty boy! I'm gonna slap you!
Vault Dweller: Forgive me father! That was the last time I was blowing up towns and enslaving tribesmen, I swear!
Father: I believe you, but I will slap you anyway.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Again, this misunderstanding about the old Fallouts that it was only about the violence. I'm a little more optimistic about the choice & consequence parts of this game, bit I'm still baffled and amazed over the story in the main plot.

Were' basically stuff with Neesom's character from Star Wars, Qin Gong?? for our dad??

"He's Liam Neeson! Who wouldn't want Liam Neeson as their dad, right?"

 

[Brother None]

Vault Dweller: "I love you, Liam Neeson. I'm sorry I blew up the town."
Dad: "I COULD'VE SOLD THE CAR!! I COULD'VE SAVED ONE MORE."

Low standards, baby! Welcome to the console age

 

[Goliath]

Gavin: Your dad is like this warm, inviting guy. He's Liam Neeson! Who wouldn't want Liam Neeson as their dad, right?

One of the reasons to play games is to experience things you will never experience in real life. You know, like gunning down super mutants with miniguns or.. having a father! It seems they are targeting the victims of feminism and African-Americans!

 

[Ratty]

We treated a lot like we treat our own. We went back and played the old games, so played a lot of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, to see what we wanted to bring over from those games, and to get our minds away from this medieval space [that of the Elder Scrolls games]. And we watched movies like Mad Max, read books like The Road, and started from square one.

Bethesda treating Fallout 3 like their own is comparable to a creepy psycho pedophile treating the neighbour's pre-teen daughter like his own. Rape inevitably occurs in both cases.

It does. One of the mantras of the Thief games is a big grey area. Garrett is the ultimate anti-hero. That's really important you know. If you want to play like that, we want to support that. As Todd [Howard, executive producer] mentioned, we originally started supporting good, and supporting evil, and we realised how important neutral was, and how viable of a gameplay path it is, and how many great games like the original Thief supported that. That's really important to me.

Nothing says moral ambiguity like getting to choose between blowing up a town for no reason at all and... not blowing up a town for no reason at all.

Me personally, I really feel like we're making a game in the legacy of the Fallout games. It's so different than working with the Elder Scrolls stuff. It's first-person, and that's it. Actually it's interesting for me - it harkens back for me to some of the most enjoyable first-person games I've ever played, the Terminator games Bethesda made. Fallout 3 is Bethesda's triumphant return to gunplay games, after swords and sorcery for so long. For me it's about bringing back /that/ legacy.

Can you believe this guy? He says he "feels like [they're] making a game in the legacy of the Fallout games" (you may want to stop trusting your feelings and start trusting your senses from now on, Emil) and then blathers on about Terminator games and how Fallout 3 is about "bringing back /that/ legacy"? So which *are* you developing, Emil? Fallout 3 or Terminator 3?

I feel like when people see it's first-person they're going to say, "Oh, there's Oblivion. It's Oblivion with guns."

Oh, no, they won't. After what Emil just stated, people are almost certainly going to say, "Oh, there's Terminator. It's Terminator with mutants."

You can't. You can't proceed feeling that way. It's like, you also can't proceed feeling like you owe the fans of Fallout anything, you can't feel bad that you're not making a turn-based isometric game.

That much is obvious from the fact that you ditched almost everything that made Fallout great and unique. But apparently, you *can* proceed feeling like you owe the fans of Terminator and Oblivion something, right Emil? Not only are you acting like you don't owe us fans anything, but you are also doing your best to alienate as many of us as you can. Probably because the same tactic worked marvelously for Chuck Cuevas. Oh, wait...

When I first started I think did feel like that, and there was a period of coming to terms with it, and just saying, "I'm going to make the best game I can make, it is what it is, and we have the skills to make an excellent game, so that's what we're going to do."

You aren't supposed to make an excellent game, dumbass, you are supposed to make an excellent *sequel* to an excellent game. It's a wonder your colleagues at Looking Glass didn't let you use the same idiotic approach on Thief II. I'm sure a turn-based strategy Thief would have been very well received and, I daresay, *excellent*.

Each of the older games had a different team on it. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 had many different people working on them. We have a great deal of respect for those guys, but what we don't want to do is open up our entire design to someone outside the company who doesn't really get the culture here.

You lying sack of shit. If you had any respect for them, you would also have a shred of respect for their creative vision, instead of raping it with your harebrained ideas.

For better or worse it's been ten years since the last game came out. We're very strict on authorial control. We don't want to bring someone in from outside and then only implement their ideas in a half-assed way. We have a vision for the game and we're taking it all the way through.

Newsflash, moron - you are working on a sequel. You aren't entitled to a vision. Or at least not one that departs from the original vision in any way.

As for the story, I really like stories that are character-based, so how do those characters change throughout the game?

You like stories that are character-based? Then what the fuck are you doing designing a Fallout game?

We really wanted to simulate growing up in the vault. Your dad is like this warm, inviting guy. He's Liam Neeson! Who wouldn't want Liam Neeson as their dad, right? Then you wake up one day and he's up and left. He hasn't told you about it, you don't know what's going on. A lot of the game is about, what is his motivation? What is he working on, why did he leave? What happened to him? That's one of the central themes of the game.

What if I don't want Liam Neeson as my dad? What if I don't give a fuck about what the old bastard was working on and why he left? What options have you provided for players like me?

Oh, right:

We wanted the relationship as a central point of the plot, so we don't want you to be able to say, piss off your dad and ruin the plot. To have a narrative you have to have some parts that are more strict. We definitely want you to feel like he is a central character in your life.

Nothing says Fallout like a railroad plot.

It was something we knew we needed - it was one of the key tenants of Fallout that we needed to do. Right at the top was, "choice and consequence in every quest line", as much as we possibly can. Every aspect of the game should have choice and consequence. Even choices like picking your character's stats. Those /don't change/ throughout the course of the game. You're stuck with your Special stats pretty much for the rest of the game. Every little bit from what equipment you pick up to whether you're going to shoot this guy in the head, is going to have that choice, and there are going to be consequences.

Sounds positively wonderful. And with all the examples you provided, how can I ever doubt your words? Especially when I look back at the Fargoth quest, which *so* nicely illustrated the amount of choice available in Morrowind, right Gavin?

There's a lot more handling! We spend a lot of time talking about, "What if the player doesn't go where we want them? What if they stumble on this spot that we wanted for the end-game?" We have to handle that. We don't want to just lock them out and say, "You have to go down this path, that's the only way." We have to handle everything the player's going to do. We're experienced with that because we do it in Oblivion.

Translation: plot-critical NPCs are invulnerable and if you do something wrong, the game ends with a Morrowind-style notification.

Really, when Bethesda designers boast about having a lot of experience handling non-linearity, it's akin to Keneth Lay saying he has a lot of experience running massive energy corporations.

What we can do is provide different avenues for the player. A big thing with the original Fallout is you could talk your way out of certain situations. You could got to the Master and talk him to death. We wanted to provide a lot of different avenues. You have to decide for yourself. Is shooting mutants something my character is going to do? In some ways we'll provide non-lethal combat options, but a big part of this game is the incredible level of violence. It's something people find a lot of fun, so it's not something we're going to back off from. The old Fallout had a slider for violence, you could turn it down if you wanted. We joked that on our options we were going to have one, but it would be taped in place at the max.

Translation: the game will play like your typical first-person shooter, but you will sporadically be able to avoid a fight by using the reflex-based diplomacy minigame.

Yeah. There was an old screenshot for Fable when that first came out, where the guy had a sword through a kid's neck! That was a screenshot - I thought, oh my God, that's crazy! It's really something disconcerting, so you have to balance it.

Pussy.

How important is it for the game? For Bioshock it's a central part of the game. The big choice is whether you're going to kill these little kids or not. Is that something we need to worry about so much in Fallout? I'm not sure it is.

Translation: in Fallout 3 it won't be possible to harm children.

 

[spacemoose]

Father: You were a naughty boy! I'm gonna slap you!
Vault Dweller: Forgive me father! That was the last time I was blowing up towns and enslaving tribesmen, I swear!
Father: I believe you, but I will slap you anyway.

that sounds more like a bioware production

 

[Goliath]

Father: You were a naughty boy! I'm gonna slap you!
Vault Dweller: Forgive me father! That was the last time I was blowing up towns and enslaving tribesmen, I swear!
Father: I believe you, but I will slap you anyway.

That should be:

Father: You were a naughty boy! I will have to spank you again!
Vault Dweller: Forgive me father! That was the last time I was blowing up towns and enslaving tribesmen, I swear!
Father: I will make sure of that! Now lower your pants..

Oh wait, I am writing gay porn here..

Damn, good, old-fashioned father son gay porn. That seems so wholesome and grounded compared to furries, nicolai, blackheart and Fallout 3.
The good old days, when RPGs were RPGs, and perverts were just gay! :nostalgia:

 

[Hazelnut]

Gavin: Your dad is like this warm, inviting guy. He's Liam Neeson! Who wouldn't want Liam Neeson as their dad, right?</blockquote>*sigh* Gotta love games for 12 year olds...

I'm not gonna say much because I just don't have the energy any more and it feels akin to pissing in the wind. I do hope that NMA et al can ensure this goes the way of POS though! :twisted:

Anyhow, allow me to get to my point, why is Fallout 3 all about being a character and having Liam Neeson as your dad, not just your characters dad?

I think that's the real root of the change of focus from the original two games, and it sucks.

 

[sportforredneck]

We treated a lot like we treat our own. We went back and played the old games, so played a lot of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, to see what we wanted to bring over from those games, and to get our minds away from this medieval space [that of the Elder Scrolls games]. And we watched movies like Mad Max, read books like The Road, and started from square one.

So they read The Road, stole the father-son relationship, but forgot about the part where the Father takes his son with him. And then they ignore anything else about the book besides that some people are cannibals and thus put that in but to the max.

 

[Hümmelgümpf]

that sounds more like a bioware production

Nah, canadians would write something like this:

Father: You were a naughty boy!
Chosen One: Your opinion means nothing to me, old man.
Father: You dare to talk to me that way? I'm your father!
Chosen One: I will talk to you the way I like to. Now give me your money!

 

[Rat Keeng]

When he leaves it is the biggest climactic moment in your life.

Oh come on. Surely losing your virginity to that sexy red headed vault dweller behind the storage lockers is the biggest climactic moment of your life, not your mick father leaving without warning.

I guess sex is out as well then?

 

[Claw]

I'm impressed. They're really making an effort to remove anything resembling Fallout from their design.

Kudos to Emil for retroactively tainting my fond memories of Terminator: Future Shock. Thanks a lot, bastard! If you read this (unlikely): Your mother was a five dollar hooker and still had more class than you.

 

[Ander Vinz]

Kudos to Emil for retroactively tainting my fond memories of Terminator: Future Shock. Thanks a lot, bastard! If you read this (unlikely): Your mother was a five dollar hooker and still had more class than you.

And then people complain about someone wishing Fallout fans to die from horrible disease.

 

[Claw]

Emil Pagliarulo is a horrible disease.


Besides, I said his mom had class, right? That's a compliment. :D


Seriously though, anyone can wish horrible death upon me, personally, provided he has a good excuse for doing so.