Interview Tony Oakden Dev Profile @ NMA Fallout

[Sol Invictus]

Wow, that's a bummer. The real time combat pretty much sucked, too. It can best be described as Dungeon Siege with guns.

It'd have been nice to see FOT in its 'real' state. Probably had as great a degree of interactivity as Jagged Alliance 2 did, I expect?

 

[ctaylor]

Probably had as great a degree of interactivity as Jagged Alliance 2 did, I expect?

IIRC, by the end of that first week of pre-production design, we had settled on something that was just below JA2 in terms of tactical combat complexity, but with more role-playing "hooks" from FO and the SPECIAL system (frex, Speech skill was in the first draft of skills). The goal was never to out do JA2 at it's own game, but we all highly respected the Jagged Alliance series and it was commonly compared against what we were trying to achieve. Chip, one of the producers at Interplay, had proposed the game concept to the head of 14° East and I'm fairly certain it was described as "JA or X-Com meets Fallout."

If Interplay had allowed more time (and money), MicroForte would have been in a position to deliver a better game. That's fairly typical of the publisher/developer relationship. It just hurts more in this particular case, because there was a higher expectation of quality due to the Fallout name. The project wasn't completely on schedule in reality, but that was due to a couple of changes in direction during development and wasn't due to any major problems with the developer. Interplay should have taken a step back, slipped the game 3-4 months and released a higher quality game. That doesn't mean I take any less responsibility for my duties on FOT and my failure to keep the FO lore as close to canon as possible.

pax,
-Chris

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

That sounds about right. I think the biggest thing that hurt Fallout Tactics from my viewpoint was that it seemed one dimensional. That is to say that the game was designed as though the only tactic in the game was making everything dead. I think the game would have been a lot better if there were many more avenues for the player to use other skills in ways so that the gun skills weren't the end all and be all skills in the title.

I would have also liked the real time dropped, and Fallout Tactics to have stuck with the hexagonal movement thing, been closer to a table top wargame than to what it was.

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

Maybe the war cries for Tony Oakens blood should be reconsidered , turns out it was the old enemy that had the game ending up as it did.

 

[JJ86]

Additional development can only improve the game. I think any fan will be willing to put up with a several month delay to have a better game to play. But the delay should only be used to tweak the game not to change direction from the original design which can only introduce the possibility of major flaws. At the very least MF should have been given the opportunity to fix coop MP, fully test the game to work without crashes on most machines, balance the game completely, and tweak the game to complete all storylines. A slightly better dialogue system would have been much better too.

The moddability of the game was very welcome and many decent custom maps were created from the few tools available. A complete set of tools would have only increased sales and made the game much more popular. There still persists a small group working on making maps and new missions which put the missions of the original game to shame.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Additional development can only improve the game. I think any fan will be willing to put up with a several month delay to have a better game to play.

Consumers, sure. They always want a better product. The problem is that the shareholders want evidence that the company is pumping out goods.

 

[Ap_Jolly]

Well I guess IPLY shareholders got what they wanted...