Quicky

The Fallout 3 Forum and Official Site are online again.

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Server down, discussion up

I’ve been up since really early (courtesy of my beautiful and too energetic toddler) and everything Zenimax seems to be down, including the Fallout 3 Forum and Official Site for quite some time. So while we wait for everything to get back online let me show you this interview with Susan O’Connor, a writer that worked on Bioshock and had this to say about Fallout storytelling:

I’ve always adored the writing in the original Fallout 1 & 2 games from years ago: so many bits and pieces that there was no way to find every piece of the story in a single play through. The Lesbian Library especially stood out as a hallmark of absurdist comedic brilliance. Massive multiplayer games afford the opportunity to expand what Fallout poked its nose into. The trick is to have the means; WoW is a PC application only right now. Though massively popular, it’s still not as far-reaching as could be on a console, once consoles can handle those sorts of server loads.

Speaking of WoW Fergus Urquhart, the man with less sleep hours on the northern hemisphere and Fallout veteran turned CEO of Obsidian Entertainment has this warning on an interview at CVG:

Think those of us that make non-MMO RPGs need to look at what a single-player/small multiplayer RPG can do that MMOs can’t and spend our time and effort on those things”, Urquhart said.

“For example, in Mask of the Betrayer, we can make the world react more to your personal decisions than any MMO could hope to. We can let you impact your companions and the game’s NPCs – and the entire story outcome – in ways that MMOs cannot.”

Looking at the future of the RPG genre, he added that he’d “like to see RPG focus more on the world that they take place in with particular focus on making the player a real part of that world.”

“Many RPGs, including some that I’ve made, allow the player to just stomp around and not really have to worry about the world that they are playing in. I think that really limits the feeling of you being in that world, which is what I certainly want when I’m playing a great RPG.”

Interesting advice… I found these bits at RPGBlog.