Van Buren personality thread from IPLY boards

[Voss]

Anyone been tracking this thread over at the Interplay forums?

http://forums.interplay.com/viewtopic.php?t=29107&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

It starts with this quote:

Mr Chris Avellone is back on the internet talking about RPGs, only too bad he's not talking about Fallout 3 eh?. In a RPG Roundtable at RPGVault he answered a question about Character development and lookie here:

I want to see development outside of stats, and more related to the character's personality developing. Granted, you can't throw out stats without ruining the enjoyment a lot of players have with stat crunching, but I'd love to see a system that blends a PC's personality and stat development together in one package, and then dumps them in a world where both are important. For me, the key moment of a role-playing game (at least pen and paper) is the interaction you get from other player characters and NPCs and any changes that occur in your character as a result. I would like to see more games that take advantage of (and track) personality types and traits to help a player define a character and give them more tangible benefits (some of this was done in the SPECIAL system in Fallout, and it was a refreshing change, though there was no tracking throughout the game). Before I left Black Isle, Josh Sawyer had worked up some nice personality-tracking mechanics for the Jefferson project, which were a breath of fresh air. "

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JE, could you elaborate on this? Will we be seeing such things in VB?

And really gets going with this response from JE Sawyer:

To the extent that they were to be used in Jefferson? No, not even remotely close.

It gets even more interesting after that.
I'm not quite sure what my reaction is yet.
Disappointed is definitely present, though I'm not sure how amazing this personality tracking really was. He does go on to mention that writers were getting seriously burnt out on it and quality was becoming an issue, but...

JE also seems to be going through a brutally honest phase, and there are definitely some revelations.
Theres also another thread, entitled Controversial Stuff. JE had this to say:

I think hardcore RPGs with a multi-player co-op component are insanely dull and a waste of resources, but we will be required to have one for Van Buren. I know there are eight people out there who will play through 1/10th of the game as a novelty and then abandon it, but oh well. What are we doing to minimize the damage? Well, the engine fundamentally is always multi-player; the single-player game just has no clients.

Also, a multi-PC-friendly storyline avoids the "Bhaal-spawn" issues of the "main character" dying. Having a multi-player component does allow for certain potential problems in how dialogues, quest states, and similar things work, but it's not really a problem for our engine. The Jefferson/VB engine was always designed to be relatively multi-player friendly in terms of scripting and dialogue continuity.

I'm kind of confused about why having a turn-based game and multi-player are inherently incompatible, but I don't know the ToEE engine very well/at all.

Now the important thing about this statement, is this observation by one 'Orgone Accumulator':

Nothing inspires confidence in the development of a title more than a lead designer forced to implement features against his wishes

It gives me a severe case of the creeping doubts as well.

 

[Lemon]

happy happy fun times at black isle

 

[Voss]

Happy fun for the doom and gloom sayers, anyway

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Lets hope that gloom doesn't pour into FO3. I'd hate to see the story revolve around the doom and gloom of a PC called "The Mutated One", who has been horribly mutated in the wasteland, constantly coming into contact with the darker elements of a crumbled society reveling in decay, making the rules as it goes and being influenced by them, leading the PC to the dreaded moment where he must face his worst life choice ever: live on the wasteland, mutated, or put an end to his misery because he cannot bear his sixth toe.