John Deiley, creator of the talking deathclaws, explains their background and puts Chris Avellone on notice

[Beastro]

This is the one major thing Bethesda doesn't understand/didn't care about. They just went all in on the silliness.

This isn't really true. Bethesda's Fallout games are often "serious" and the lack of a serious tone isn't their problem.

Bethesda's most comedic moments occur when they're trying to be serious, and their most serious occur when they're trying to be funny.

Case in point the original ending of Fallout 3 and what the super mutant companion said to you to excuse why he, the one who should be doing the deed because he's not harmed by radiation, won't do it:

"I’m sorry, my companion, but no. We all have our own destinies, and yours culminates here. I would not rob you of that."

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

This argument never used to pop-up online before Chris Avellone made a statement regarding it.

Bitch, I was making this argument back when Vault13.net was a thing. So were people like Roshambo Warrior on No Mutants Allowed.

 

[luj1]

This is the one major thing Bethesda doesn't understand/didn't care about. They just went all in on the silliness.

This isn't really true. Bethesda's Fallout games are often "serious" and the lack of a serious tone isn't their problem.

You are a big retard.

Ever since Fallout 3, Todd reduced Fallout to cowboys, yippee ki yay and explosions. The art aspect of Fallout was turned into a parody. If you don't believe me, this guy really explains it well.

 

[Beastro]

This is the one major thing Bethesda doesn't understand/didn't care about. They just went all in on the silliness.

This isn't really true. Bethesda's Fallout games are often "serious" and the lack of a serious tone isn't their problem.

You are a big retard.

Ever since Fallout 3, Todd reduced Fallout to cowboys, yippee ki yay and explosions. The art aspect of Fallout was turned into a parody. If you don't believe me, this guy really explains it well.

The best thing about Tenpenny Tower being one of the best things about Fallout 3 is the unintended consequences of helping the ghouls.

The only problem with that conclusion is that the full implications of it are themselves clearly unintended by the designers when you realize that the story was intended to be played as a straight good guy/bad guy conflict and the ghouls massacre is never seen as a horrible thing. The game doesn't acknowledge the villainy of the ghouls, what they do, and the inhabitants of Tenpenny Tower are clearly intended to deserve what is done to them despite it confirming every reason why they refused to accept the ghouls in the first place.

That story would have been awesome had it been treated by almost anyone else with a sliver of nuance to them. Someone that could better portray the moral greyness of the situation rather than the assumed "the ghouls are good because they're the designated good guys and an ostracized minority while Tenpenny are bad 'cus they're the designated bad guys - can't you see them twirling their mustaches and wanting to blow up Megaton to improve their skyline???".

It's not like the original Fallouts lacked in clear moral delineations. Junktown is very black and white, but the special way that Bethesda is incompetent would be to make Gizmo clearly pushed as the good guy option despite a complete lack of establishing him in some way to be so. I've heard in production of FO1 that they scrapped the moral greyness that was originally to be in Junktown where Gizmo would be the "tough but necessary" option and the good ending (IIRC, Killian would descend into paranoia and become an oppressive tyrant) but he wouldn't have been left as one dimensional if they'd done so.

Tenpenny Tower is tonal whiplash, but not a good kind. It isn't the tonal whiplash of Fallout, it's the tonal whiplash of poorly thought out writing.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Feargus changed his mind later on and agreed it was a terrible idea (and said so publicly).

I think the problem is this, per the interview:

Instead, he was asked by Fallout 2 director Fergus Urquhart to come up with something unique, expanding on the deathclaws much as the game had already done with ghouls and super mutants.​

Of all the things that Deiley could have come up with to make the Deathclaws "expanded", he went with making them human-smart and talk. You look at all the adaptations in nature that have occurred naturally which Deathclaws don't jhave and you go with the Deep Blue Sea thing. He could have made them bigger, or smaller, or frog legs so they can jump crazy distances, or venomous skin, venomous claws, venomous spit, and/or venomous bite, or given them a shell like a turtle, or quills, or chameleon skin, opposable thumbs, or any number of other things or a combination of these things.

Instead, you make them friendly, can talk, and are ultra-smart.

 

[Infinitron]

The best thing about Tenpenny Tower being one of the best things about Fallout 3 is the unintended consequences of helping the ghouls.

The only problem with that conclusion is that the full implications of it are themselves clearly unintended by the designers when you realize that the story was intended to be played as a straight good guy/bad guy conflict and the ghouls massacre is never seen as a horrible thing. The game doesn't acknowledge the villainy of the ghouls, what they do, and the inhabitants of Tenpenny Tower are clearly intended to deserve what is done to them despite it confirming every reason why they refused to accept the ghouls in the first place.

That story would have been awesome had it been treated by almost anyone else with a sliver of nuance to them. Someone that could better portray the moral greyness of the situation rather than the assumed "the ghouls are good because they're the designated good guys and an ostracized minority while Tenpenny are bad 'cus they're the designated bad guys - can't you see them twirling their mustaches and wanting to blow up Megaton to improve their skyline???".

I don't think the ghoul massacre in Tenpenny Tower was intended to be seen as good/deserved. It felt more like Bethesda's designers weren't given the time to flesh it out.

 

[huskarls]

the deathclaws were good in the greater context of the story where all the evil options are killing non-humans on the basis they would or have rised up to kill humans, then you get to the end and the enclave wants to kill you for not being human enough

 

[thesecret1]

Talking deathclaws were a retarded idea, a mistake. Something you pretend was just a bad dream.

The issue isn't even that talking deathclaws are silly, it's the execution - a garbage trope trying to inject some moral relativism in just to stroke the writer's ego. A hallmark of amateurs and hacks worldwide.

 

[Herumor]

It felt more like Bethesda's designers weren't given the time to flesh it out.

You're implying like Bethesda is capable of fleshing it out or making it good. Hint: they aren't.

 

[NecroLord]

Well, Avellone is right tho. Talking Deathclaws are infantile and poor taste.

Deathclaws saying the N word.

 

[Darvus]

What's the name of that furry weirdo on Twitter again? Somebody send this link to him.

lol Avellone just posted this:

The talking Deathclaws are retarded but what the fuck kind of reasoning is this? This has to be the most ass backwards imaginable justification and I feel like it's probably contradicted by at least a few other things within Fallout 2 itself.

Anyway I think intelligent Deathclaws could have been an interesting idea but it was handled in the dumbest way imaginable. I remember actually being pretty intrigued in Navarro when that scientist tells you about how the Enclave was trying to weaponize them. But the actual reveal was hokey as all hell and the writing during that part feels weird and out-of-place.

 

[NecroLord]

What's the name of that furry weirdo on Twitter again? Somebody send this link to him.

lol Avellone just posted this:

The talking Deathclaws are retarded but what the fuck kind of reasoning is this? This has to be the most ass backwards imaginable justification and I feel like it's probably contradicted by at least a few other things within Fallout 2 itself.

Anyway I think intelligent Deathclaws could have been an interesting idea but it was handled in the dumbest way imaginable. I remember actually being pretty intrigued in Navarro when that scientist tells you about how the Enclave was trying to weaponize them. But the actual reveal was hokey as all hell and the writing during that part feels weird and out-of-place.

Exactly.
I think it was more the dumb writing and the explanation for their existence.
They were a bioweapon made by the Enclave, meant only to be intelligent enough to follow basic orders.
However, some were smart enough to even develop moral codes...

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I may be tripping but i remember some old pre-release screenshots of Fallout Tactics with minigun wielding deathclaws...

Fallout Tactics also had talking deathclaws, though their design in that game is so different from the ones in the mainline series that you could easily that they are a completely different species.

They're also smaller and hairier, iirc.
Gameplay wise they aren't that good. They can only use throwing weapons and unarmed, and they have practically no armour so when it's time to fight mutants and robots they just die instantly.
Mutants and Ghouls are a lot better because they can use actual weapons and armour.

 

[NecroLord]

I may be tripping but i remember some old pre-release screenshots of Fallout Tactics with minigun wielding deathclaws...

Fallout Tactics also had talking deathclaws, though their design in that game is so different from the ones in the mainline series that you could easily that they are a completely different species.

They're also smaller and hairier, iirc.
Gameplay wise they aren't that good. They can only use throwing weapons and unarmed, and they have practically no armour so when it's time to fight mutants and robots they just die instantly.
Mutants and Ghouls are a lot better because they can use actual weapons and armour.

There's also Goris in Fallout 2...
Great melee, but tends to get wrecked by enemies with Big Guns and Energy Weapons.

 

[Sinder Velvin]

There were a few more "chapters" to Deiley's interview, complaining about a bunch more things (such as the TV show nuking Shady Sands). For reasons that will soon become apparent, this one is my favorite:

https://www.thegamer.com/fallout-pagans-banned-chris-avellone/

Fallout Designer Says Pagans Were Banned​

Allegedly, Chris Avellone drew a hard line at Pagans in Fallout.

BY JAMES TROUGHTON

Before the Fallout 3 as we know it was released, original developer Black Isle Studios was working on its own sequel, codenamed Van Buren. Like the first two games, it was an isometric RPG, but it was cancelled after Interplay sold the IP to Bethesda.

I sat down with Fallout 2 and Van Buren designer John Deiley last week, and he revealed a strange rule he ran up against when putting together a location called the Nursery - no Pagans.

To make a long story short, The Nursery was an alternative way of surviving the nuclear apocalypse to the vaults. It was a perfectly selected spot in America that could avoid radiation to thrive and sustain much of the pre-war environment, sort of like Noah's Ark.

"I did some research and chose Black Star Canyon in Arizona as its location because somebody took the time to research data and figure out wind patterns, weather patterns, and everything," Deiley says. "[They said,] 'Hey, if you put everything here, it won't get irradiated and die.'"

Deiley's plan was to have this last bastion of pre-war America be inhabited by Pagans and Wiccans, but Obsidian Entertainment co-founder and Van Buren co-lead designer Chris Avellone allegedly said no.

"He said, 'You are not to bring Paganism or Wiccanism or anything into the game,'" Deiley recounts. "I said, 'Well, Chris, what do you think happened to these people when the bombs went off? Did every one of them just vanish from the face of the Earth? When you consider the whole purpose of the Nursery, wouldn't they make the perfect tenants and tenders?' [He said,] 'I've made my decision' and just turned around and walked off."

If Van Buren were to have been released, we would have found carnivorous plant life instead of the Pagans that Deiley wanted. Our quest would have been to restore power and wipe out the human-eating fauna to refurbish the Nursery so that we could bring wasteland animal samples there for preservation.

We see some elements of this resurface in Fallout: New Vegas with Vault 22, where the survivors began an agricultural study to grow plants underground, only to become carnivorous vegetation themselves.

What did Chris have to say when asked about why he had "banned pagans" in Van Buren?

Source.

How are you guys liking this Deiley character now?

 

[9ted6]

This is the one major thing Bethesda doesn't understand/didn't care about. They just went all in on the silliness.

This isn't really true. Bethesda's Fallout games are often "serious" and the lack of a serious tone isn't their problem.

You are a big retard.

Ever since Fallout 3, Todd reduced Fallout to cowboys, yippee ki yay and explosions. The art aspect of Fallout was turned into a parody. If you don't believe me, this guy really explains it well.

The best thing about Tenpenny Tower being one of the best things about Fallout 3 is the unintended consequences of helping the ghouls.

The only problem with that conclusion is that the full implications of it are themselves clearly unintended by the designers when you realize that the story was intended to be played as a straight good guy/bad guy conflict and the ghouls massacre is never seen as a horrible thing. The game doesn't acknowledge the villainy of the ghouls, what they do, and the inhabitants of Tenpenny Tower are clearly intended to deserve what is done to them despite it confirming every reason why they refused to accept the ghouls in the first place.

That story would have been awesome had it been treated by almost anyone else with a sliver of nuance to them. Someone that could better portray the moral greyness of the situation rather than the assumed "the ghouls are good because they're the designated good guys and an ostracized minority while Tenpenny are bad 'cus they're the designated bad guys - can't you see them twirling their mustaches and wanting to blow up Megaton to improve their skyline???".

It's not like the original Fallouts lacked in clear moral delineations. Junktown is very black and white, but the special way that Bethesda is incompetent would be to make Gizmo clearly pushed as the good guy option despite a complete lack of establishing him in some way to be so. I've heard in production of FO1 that they scrapped the moral greyness that was originally to be in Junktown where Gizmo would be the "tough but necessary" option and the good ending (IIRC, Killian would descend into paranoia and become an oppressive tyrant) but he wouldn't have been left as one dimensional if they'd done so.

Tenpenny Tower is tonal whiplash, but not a good kind. It isn't the tonal whiplash of Fallout, it's the tonal whiplash of poorly thought out writing.

Tenpenny Tower comes to close to being a really good quest. Multiple ways to resolve it, some world reactivity, a pretty interesting dilemma and no obvious good guy or bad guy. Tenpenny is an asshole who snipes at people from his penthouse but his residents are mostly good people who just want to be left alone, the ghouls are mostly good people who're tired of being mistreated by humans but Roy is an asshole who wants humans dead.

Then it falls apart because the forced narrative has to be that oppressed minority = always right and dominant group = always wrong. If you kill Roy you're berated and lose karma, kill Tenpenny and get the ghouls in and gain karma.

It still wouldn't be as bad as it is if it weren't for the fact that even after Roy massacres the tower's inhabitants you still lose karma for killing him, you can't confront him about it and shithead Threedog doesn't even comment on it. But if you kill Roy he'll still berate you on the radio.

It's like someone had a neat idea for a morally grey quest with no completely happy outcome then someone like Todd stepped in and forced their retarded Make It Like Ultima misconception of morality onto it. It's like how Autumn is an evil bastard and Lyons is a saint even though they're doing the exact same thing with the exact same goals in the plot but one is the writer designated villain and the other is the designated hero.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

That just confirms that he is, in fact, a git.

 

[Roguey]

How are you guys liking this Deiley character now?

People can remember an event different ways, though The Gamer is certainly being unprofessional in not reaching out to Avellone for his side of the story. This is Basic Journalism.

 

[Sinder Velvin]

People can remember an event different ways, though The Gamer is certainly being unprofessional in not reaching out to Avellone for his side of the story. This is Basic Journalism.

I get the feeling you haven't paid attention to The Gamer's previous lack of journalistic integrity.

 

[AndyS]

Anyway I think intelligent Deathclaws could have been an interesting idea but it was handled in the dumbest way imaginable. I remember actually being pretty intrigued in Navarro when that scientist tells you about how the Enclave was trying to weaponize them. But the actual reveal was hokey as all hell and the writing during that part feels weird and out-of-place.

I'm not opposed to the idea, but the way it's handled in the game, allowing you to basically become buddies with them and even have one as a companion, was frustrating. I was intrigued by the one guy who wanted to kill them because he recognized them as an existential threat despite how benign they seemed now and the game could have worked with that more. There's something very Phase IV about the concept that I think fits Fallout as a setting, but the game sort of treats it like a simple animal welfare situation where you're either on the side of the nice creatures or want to kill them because you're a monster.

 

[Herumor]

People can remember an event different ways

What?

In the article that's been posted in the OP, it says the following:

Deiley also claims that Avellone refused to let him include pagans inside of The Nursery for the original, cancelled Fallout 3. Allegedly, after arguing his case, Avellone said “I’ve already made my decision” and “turned around and walked off”.

While Avellone himself straight up says there was clearly a pagan faction for Van Buren.

So this isn't a case of misremembering, but outright lying.

 

[Roguey]

People can remember an event different ways

What?

In the article that's been posted in the OP, it says the following:

Deiley also claims that Avellone refused to let him include pagans inside of The Nursery for the original, cancelled Fallout 3. Allegedly, after arguing his case, Avellone said “I’ve already made my decision” and “turned around and walked off”.

While Avellone himself straight up says there was clearly a pagan faction for Van Buren.

So this isn't a case of misremembering, but outright lying.

Deiley remembers Avellone telling him he didn't want his particular pagans in his game. That is not necessarily a lie.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Deiley remembers Avellone telling him he didn't want his particular pagans in his game. That is not necessarily a lie.

It could be that The Gamer is the one lying, since Deiley would most likely know that there would have been the Daughters of Hectate faction that other people in the same office were working on. However, given what Deiley said in reply to Chris's "You are not to bring in [stuff]" which was "Well, Chris, what do you think happened to these people when the bombs went off? Did every one of them just vanish from the face of the Earth?", that's mostly clear. Either The Gamer is putting words in Deiley's mouth or Deiley is lying.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

The talking Deathclaws are retarded but what the fuck kind of reasoning is this? This has to be the most ass backwards imaginable justification and I feel like it's probably contradicted by at least a few other things within Fallout 2 itself.

His reasoning is that talking Deathclaws are a) thematically inconsistent, and b) a case of "lazy morality". Both points ring true to me.

Even if you would argue that Fallout 2 commits both of those sins anyway, well, that's no good reason to let it sin even more, now is it?

 

[Butter]

Tenpenny Tower comes to close to being a really good quest. Multiple ways to resolve it, some world reactivity, a pretty interesting dilemma and no obvious good guy or bad guy. Tenpenny is an asshole who snipes at people from his penthouse but his residents are mostly good people who just want to be left alone, the ghouls are mostly good people who're tired of being mistreated by humans but Roy is an asshole who wants humans dead.

Then it falls apart because the forced narrative has to be that oppressed minority = always right and dominant group = always wrong. If you kill Roy you're berated and lose karma, kill Tenpenny and get the ghouls in and gain karma.

It still wouldn't be as bad as it is if it weren't for the fact that even after Roy massacres the tower's inhabitants you still lose karma for killing him, you can't confront him about it and shithead Threedog doesn't even comment on it. But if you kill Roy he'll still berate you on the radio.

It's like someone had a neat idea for a morally grey quest with no completely happy outcome then someone like Todd stepped in and forced their retarded Make It Like Ultima misconception of morality onto it. It's like how Autumn is an evil bastard and Lyons is a saint even though they're doing the exact same thing with the exact same goals in the plot but one is the writer designated villain and the other is the designated hero.

It's a clear cut case. The Tenpenny Tower residents, no matter how unpleasant, have no obligation to share their home with a bunch of outsiders. As it turns out, their refusal is completely justified because the ghouls slaughter them if granted access to the tower. There's no argument for the ghouls being good people, except for the shit-for-brains "well they look like the typical OPPRESSED MINORITY" take. The game is just retadred and gives you positive karma for siding with the bad guys, and gives you negative karma for siding with the good guys.