Fallout 3:Pete Hines At IGN

From IGN:

After an extended stint in the vault, Bethesda’s highly anticipated Fallout 3 has finally begun to emerge into the public eye, and early impressions suggest it’s set to be one of the year’s best titles. We recently caught up with the developer’s Vice President of Public Relations Pete Hines to talk Dogmeat, morality and those 500 endings.

IGN: Has it been a challenge developing across three different formats and working towards a simultaneous release?

Pete Hines: It’s never easy, as any developer will tell you, and you’d always prefer to just make it for one, so you’re aiming for one thing, but this is our second time around on all these platforms, so we’ve learnt a lot already from doing one big sandbox game on 360, PS3 and PC, and we’re able to use a lot of those learnings and that tech for the next generation of stuff we want to do. It’s gone pretty well, and we’re pretty confident we’re going to have three versions that are all on parity in terms of performance, and certainly from a content standpoint and gameplay standpoint it’ll be exactly the same.

IGN: Fallout’s got a massive following and quite a vocal community. Have you at any point consulted the fan-base to see what they want from a Fallout game?

Pete Hines: Back when we first announced we were doing it in 2004, there was tons of feedback with people saying here’s what we want and here’s what we don’t want. We’re not really into consulting, in that we’ve got 75 people who spend all day every day working on this game, so we look for information and feedback for the kinds of things the fans are looking for, and feedback from the last game that we made. Even though it’s an Elder Scroll game, we’ve looked at the things they liked or didn’t like from that, and we have our own opinions about what we liked and didn’t like, and look at what things may be applicable to Fallout. Whether its how fast travel works, or for example how we’ve changed the way leveling works, so it’s very different from Oblivion.

IGN: You’ve said previously that Fallout 3 will have 500 different endings.

Pete Hines: Somewhere around that.

IGN: How’s that going to work? Is it going to be permutations of different elements?

Pete Hines: It’ll be like in the original games, where the ending that you got was a compilation of different things that you would have done along the way, main quest related or not main quest related, you piece it all together so it’s custom tailored to what you did. We want player choice to be meaningful, so anything that you get will be based upon what you chose to do – did you save this town, did you blow it up – and taking what you did and retelling it back to you so that it’s meaningful to you as opposed to having one generic ending.

There’s a lot more to read.

Fallout 3: The Womb and The Sphincter

Jeff Green and friend

1Up has a conversation between Jeff Green and Shawn Elliot about their experiences in the latest Fallout 3 presentation:

Jeff Green: I’ve played a lot of games in my life, and a lot of weird games, and a lot of weird games that have had weird beginnings. But I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game that started with me emerging from my mother’s womb.

Shawn Elliot: Prey‘s sphincters are as close as I’ve come, but sure, Fallout 3‘s “opening” moments are more than a perineum away. I’m sorry. I really wrote that. Seriously, though, the cunning way that Bethesda takes the thinking behind traditional tutorials and character creation interfaces and naturally integrates these game conventions into the game’s narrative is impressive. You crawl around a playpen in first-person perspective; you press a button to cry and call for daddy; you learn about strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, and other RPG traits by browsing children’s books — has any game truly attempted to tell the story of a life from birth to death?

Jeff: This is great. Now anyone who Googles “womb” and “sphincter” will come straight to this article.

Shawn: And perineum — where heaven meets hell. T’aint an RPG, t’aint an FPS.[...]

Shawn: Ten minutes of infancy, that is. Then comes the jump cut that brings us to our 10th birthday/introduction to dialog trees. No matter how hard you try to guarantee that you’ll grow into a freckle-faced, pig-nosed person in need of a YouTube video blog, you can rest assured that the other Garbage Pail kids at your party are uglier than you’ll ever be. Bethesda’s faces are far, far better here than any in Oblivion, but to be frank, I doubt that Vault 101, where we’re born, is really radioactivity-free.

The neat thing is, as you choose to be bratty or craven with these kids, your karma stats change to reflect your behavior. Oh, and the other 10-year-olds whispering about forming a Greaser Snake gang? Bethesda’s Pete Hines leads us to think that we’ll encounter them later in life after they’ve done just that.

Jeff: Yeah, with all due respect to Bethesda’s immense talent in many areas, I don’t think I’d go to them for plastic surgery. Anyway, yes, karma factors big in Fallout 3, and the choices you make, starting way back from that 10th birthday party of yours, will follow you throughout your life, affect how NPCs will react to you (start being a bad guy, and other bad guys will come out of the woodwork to…do bad things with you) and even affect the game’s ending. Bethesda is promising something like a zillion endings — OK, 500, but that sounds equally preposterous — all based on the decisions you make and actions you take, however minute they might seem to you at the time. And though what I wrote makes it sound like I don’t believe they can pull it off, I actually do. The original Fallout did that very thing.

More here.

Fallout 3: Now With 500 Plus Endings

New Fallout 3 Preview at Destructoid:

In proper following of the previous Fallout games, your character will eventually come across the ultimate bad ass doggy companion, Dogmeat. His owner destroyed by some means of carnage or another, you approach a wandering Dogmeat in an elaborate junkyard and engage in conversation to eventually convince him to tag along. Naturally his responses are limited to friendly woofs and barks, but with enough persuasion Dogmeat determines to aid you in your journey in search of your father across the post-apocolyptic landscape. This companionship proves to be highly beneficial as you can request Dogmeat to search the surrounding area for helpful items such as weapons, food, and drugs. The diligent dog that he is, Dogmeat will search your surrounding area for up to an hour to scour every inch of land for items you could use. However, mistreatment of Dogmeat and assigning him to dangerous tasks could result in the loss of a faithful friend forever, so it’s wise to be pre-cautious when sending him off to dutifully fulfill your requests.[...]

What’s waiting to be demonstrated now is the procedure through the various in-game quests that eventually determine the nature of your character’s morality. According to Pete, the writing for the game is a combined effort between game designers, engineers, and producers – selective game development teams build individual quests and eventually take their finished work back to the rest of the team for review. Will this approach generate a cohesive yet diverse set of side-quests for the player to explore? Furthermore the main quest can be completed in a mere 20-25 hours, and amidst discussing the hussle and bussle regarding the proposed 200 endings Pete revealed that they were up to 500-something endings now. It’s important to note that these ‘endings’ could easily be something as minimal as a variation in the narrative depending on what you managed to accomplish, but the question still remains as to how (or why) one would possibly experience all of the endings.

As it is, Bethesda has given us something crunchy enough to chew on until the next teaser. As for me, I believe the ultimate success of Fallout 3 solely depends on the complexity and variety of experiences derived from the individual quests. I hope for and look forward to participating in the reverred moral ambiguity and rich dialogue that was so preciously celebrated in the past Fallout games, but has yet to be revealed to the public. When asked whether the moral choices in Fallout 3 were presented as black and white options, such as is the case in BioShock, Pete replied that there were a lot of gray areas in this game. With hope, these gray areas are what will truly define Fallout 3 and aptly set it within the ranks of its predecessors.

Interesting read, although they seem to confuse Feral Ghouls with regular Ghouls, and no new pictures are shown.