Fallout 3 interview w/ Pete Hines of BethSoft from IGNIGN AU: What did you learn from making Oblivion? What didn't work?
Pete Hines: There's no giant 'we can't ever do that again' stuff. It's more how do we design quests, what kind of choices do we let the player make, how do we account for things we think the player might try and do and anticipate those? So that they're like 'Oh, I wonder what happens when I do this?' And then there's actually something in the game that acknowledges it and takes it into account. And they go 'that's really cool that I got to finish this quest in a really unique way and the game recognised that and gave me a satisfying response.'
In Oblivion the most extreme example is the bandits, who's armour keeps going up and up as you're playing through the game. Suddenly they've got glass armour and amazing weapons. It was an obvious thing that didn't feel right. So we've spent a lot of time on making sure that the player has the ability to go where they want and do what they want, but to also provide them with situations where they're getting in over their head – so they've got to leave and come back. Or they're getting into situations where they're further through the game and their character is really tough and they get in there and they kick ass and feel like a bad ass for a while because they've spent a lot of time buffing up their character.
We've certainly tried to put more stuff on the screen in front of the player to make the world more believable. The dialogue is much more specific to those characters, as opposed to generic lists of things they can talk about. A lot of it is just tweaking and refining stuff that the player won't even notice. Stuff that we're doing behind the scenes to improve the way the game performs. A lot of it is taking those lessons and learning how to apply them better.
I'm glad there's going to be less generic-stuff in Fallout than Oblivion, when it comes to dialogue -- especially since Fallout was always so specific w/ its dialogue and giving the player tons of unique choices.
Pete Hines: You know, Fallout is a very different game [to Oblivion]. You've gone from swords and melee weapons and one ranged weapon to now where you've got lots and lots of ranged weapons. It almost flips the gameplay balance stuff.
IGN AU: Surely a post apocalyptic wasteland is a tough thing to make look sexy. Were the visuals a challenge?
Pete Hines: Absolutely. That level of detail when you're talking about destruction… and you get down to those DC areas where you've got bars sticking out of concrete and you're rendering out everything… or you've got Megaton with all those wires… Those little details are hard to render and pull off well. But you know for us the benefit is that this is our second go around on this hardware.
The last time (except for the last couple of months) we were doing it on hardware that was changing all the time because it was still in development. So to develop on something that's now stable and we know how it works and we know what we can and can't do…And we've learnt a lot of new tricks about how to make things look better, run faster and have more detail on the screen than before and have all of that run at an acceptable frame rate. I think we've just benefited from several more years of working on stable hardware.
Well, I hope Fallout 3 runs well on PC's -- especially since it is using the Oblivion Engine, which ran well on my aging PC when it came out. And, since Oblivion runs and looks great on that same PC with a GF 8800 GT.
Pete: And to your point, it definitely was a challenge to do blown-up destruction as opposed to a forest. I mean they're both challenging but I think Fallout 3 has been more challenging for sure, in terms of being able to put all that on the screen.
IGN AU: How do the choices you make about whether you play as a good guy or a bad guy affect the game?
Pete Hines: I don't think there are enormous differences. It's more the choices you make on a quest by quest basis. Whether or not you want to play them as a good guy or a bad guy and what the end result of that choice is. So it's not so much about people not talking to you because you're a bad guy with bad karma, as much as it is about using the karma to keep track and keep score on the kind of character you're playing. We want that reward and that payoff to be more in the choices you make and have it be more immediate. 'I'm playing this quest. I chose this path to try and finish the quest this way and how fun or interesting or rewarding was that experience based on the choices I made.' Or if you're playing as an evil bastard we want you to feel like the quest played out in a really satisfying way for me trying to be an evil bastard…
Sounds like Fallout to me -- that everything you do will matter, by the end of the game. Good.
IGN AU: Tell us a little about how the health system being tied to water levels has evolved in Fallout 3.
Pete Hines: It certainly plays off the original games where water was a big focal point - a theme. We've continued on that legacy. Water is a big, important resource in this world. Where you get it and what kind of radiation you take from it and what kind of health you draw from it.
We're playing up this idea that you're in this post apocalyptic world with all this radiation around and how it is affecting you as a player and what sort of impact is it having on you and what you're able to do. It gives you something else to manage and keep an eye on as you move through the world.
Cool.
IGN AU: On the radiation point, if you're choosing to carry the Fatman gun (a mini nuclear bomb slingshot) and use it heavily, will that add to your radiation level?
Pete Hines: The Fatman itself doesn't but if you go into any of the locations where one of its nukes has gone off then that will give you radiation. So if you shoot an enemy over there and an explosion goes off and you wander into it, then there will be radiation in that area for a period of time that you will take damage from.
Okay.
IGN AU: Was it tough balancing the RPG and FPS elements so that both felt right?
Pete Hines: We certainly spent a lot of time on that because we felt that the shooter element, what you're doing minute-to-minute, has to look good and feel fun. If that's all you do for ten minutes it has to feel good. There is all this other stuff you can do behind the scenes. It's not just a shooter. It's not that limited. But the shooting has to be good. Because 99 per cent of people at some point are going to pick up a gun and start shooting stuff and if it doesn't feel right and doesn't look right then we have a big problem. We did spend a lot of time on that because we felt it was important to get it right.
I think from our internal play-testing, and from some folks who've been able to play it recently, the feedback is that it feels pretty good. It's clearly not just a shooter but it holds up well when you're just running around shooting stuff.
Cool.
IGN AU: Is it possible to make the stealth elements as exciting as just running and gunning?
Pete Hines: I don't know about 'exciting'. If you're trying to avoid combat or sneak past stuff it's tough to make that as fun or as visceral as running around blowing something's head off but at the same time if you're rewarding the player with something that's really unique and different, that you're never going to see if you don't play that way, then that's the big thing. If you played it that way then you get to see a robot melt a couple of super mutants' heads off and there's some hilarious dialogue there and you get to see something that you never would have seen otherwise.
The important thing is that the payoff is there and that the gameplay doesn't feel like it's bogged down. It's important to allow the player to play that way and feel like they have the option as opposed to 'I'm playing the game as a stealthy player and there's nothing else for me to do other than to sneak past and avoid everyone all the time.
There're going to be occasions where it's not robots. Maybe you're turning on some turrets and it's killing everything in the tunnels because you snuck past some stuff and hacked into a terminal and turned on the turrets. You feel like you're getting to make choices and do things that feel right for the player you're playing. That's what's most important.
You can't always make sneaking fun and visceral every second but if the overall experience feels like 'I'm getting to do what I want' and it's satisfying, then we feel like we've been successful.
Ahhh, the old turn on the turrets from hacking trick and sneak your way around things. I loved how you could do that in Fallout 2 in the final battle and finish the game w/ just letting the turrets do all the work, if you had that kind of character that fit the bill, of course.
IGN AU: Is it a balancing act between scripting cool, cinematic scenes versus giving players freedom?
Pete Hines: I think the freedom can be up to that point. In other words, you can have different elements and scripted stuff that still feels natural within the context of whatever the player is doing because the important thing is not whether or not you ran across the scripted thing but whether we force you down one alley where there's only one thing to see and everybody sees the same thing. You don't have to do that. All the choices that you made up to that point were real choices. You could have decided to go in guns blazing. You could have decided to just never go there and gone somewhere else. You could have got through the area a different way.
So, it's more like making the player feel like they have their own path. As opposed to, 'I'm in this level. It looks like there are a lot of ways to go but it turns out that every alley I go down is a dead end, every door I try is locked and there's only really one way I can go.' That feels a lot more heavily scripted and constraining. And that's what we try and avoid.
You can do whatever you want. We might have told you to go somewhere but if you don't want to be doing this you can go off and do something else. You don't have to do the main quest if you don't want to. We try and focus more on that as opposed to should we ever use a scripted thing that's going to happen in a certain place. It just depends on what it is and whether this is something we think is really important and we don't want anyone to miss, or whether it's just a little Easter egg that only 10 per cent of people are going to find. You don't want to put a lot of effort into something that's really great and have the vast majority of people miss it.
Yeah, Fallout and Oblivion are two in the same, in one sense -- you don't have to do the Main Quest, you can just wander around and do the side-quest stuff. I'm glad they're keeping that intact for Fallout.
IGN AU: The third-person view didn't feel as slick in Oblivion. How did you develop the first-person versus the third-person views in Fallout 3? Did you focus test both?
Pete Hines: For Oblivion we didn't specifically focus test the third-person view. We did some focus testing and let people play however they wanted to play. For Oblivion you could play it in third-person but it wasn't designed to be a separate way to play the entire game. In Fallout it really has been, particularly because it's gun combat. So things like accuracy become much more important. When you're shooting with a gun, the crosshairs and where the bullets are going have to line-up. Whereas when you're using a sword, if I'm swinging here [gestures at his shoulder] versus here [gestures at his stomach] I'm still swinging at you.
We definitely spent more time on third-person as a real, viable, 'play the whole game in this way' mode. And it is becoming more popular – the third-person, over the shoulder. I definitely think it's a much more playable, viable option than before.
I still wish Oblivion had cross-hairs in third person, for namely when you're shooting arrows -- so you got a clue as to where you're shooting. It's fine when you're just swinging a sword, since it's obvious where you're swinging.
I'm glad third-person view's being tweaked for Fallout 3 -- b/c it definitely will be ranged-weapon heavy, given Fallout's nature.
IGN AU: I was intrigued by the custom weapons. The example you gave of the Rock-it Launcher (combination vacuum and a rocket launcher that can suck up and use any object as ammo). Is it possible to use a rock as ammo in the slow-motion VATS shooting mode and watch it cause different animated damage compared to say a bullet?
Pete Hines: I don't want to spoil everything. But we take lots of things into account. We spent a ton of time on VATS and making sure that it's fun and unique. There are still a few things for VATS that we've not talked about yet that add more layers of fun and coolness to that mode.
Okay.
IGN AU: You mentioned that your canine side-kick Dogmeat can be killed off. Are there main characters in Fallout 3 you've chosen to make invulnerable, as you did in Oblivion, for scripting purposes?
Pete Hines: In very few cases we may have folks who either permanently or momentarily can't be killed. In Oblivion there were a lot of guys who got flagged because we didn't want you breaking quests but in Fallout we try and account a lot more for quests being able to continue on without characters being alive. So here's this quest going on. 'Now what happens if the players kills this person?' 'Oh well, then this happens.' 'Well, then, what happens if they kill this person and that person?' 'Well, then this happens.'
We do want to make sure you can continue along the main quest and not fundamentally break your game, but we're able to do that without flagging most folks as essential. This time there's a much larger number of people who can be killed while you still keep playing your game.
Given how big Oblivion was, it made sense to flag certain NPC's w/ the "Can't kill this person" tag b/c BethSoft didn't want to break the Main Quest. But, it still would've been nice to pull a Morrowind and kill a God-like leveled-up character, of course.
It was nice in Morrowind to be able to kill -- well, anything and anyone -- but if you didn't pay attention the pop-up if you killed a main character that stated "please reload your last save to be able to finish the main quest", you'll (obviously) never finish the Main Quest. Maybe what Morrowind should've done was allow for the player to be able to kill ANYONE in the Morrowind portion of the game once the player finished Morrowind's Main Quest first?
Regardless, I like the idea that Fallout 3 has going on -- some will be killed and you'll still be able to continue; some won't be able to be killed at all. I think a lot of the best games out there have gone this route of doing a little of both -- such as PS:T and The Witcher, since whatever you decide actually does matter and will impact the game, sometime later on.
