Lead Designer Jumps Into The Forum

Emil Pagliarulo went to the Bethesda Games Fallout 3 forum and left a few enlightening posts, let’s start with armor in Fallout 3:

I know it’s been mentioned in some preview or other that all the apparel (armor and clothing) is a single suit. Headgear is separate. There are a LOT of apparel options, and yes, there are are some pieces of clothing that give stat boosts, so if you decide to wear clothing and not armor, you’ll still get a discernible gameplay benefit.

I’ve seen some apparel/headgear combinations I never wood have imagined (some which involve a big pre-war lady’s sunhat…)

And real time combat:

For us, balancing the combat is very much a “feel” thing. It’s something that takes a ton of playtesting (involving the entire dev team), and determining what feels right for everyone. It’s all about finding that nebulous perfect balance between player skill and character skill.

In run-and-gun, melee feels a lot like melee in Oblivion. If you connect with the weapon, you hit. There’s no die roll to determine that. But your character’s skill, as well as the condition of the weapon, determine the damage done.

In run-and-gun, ranged combat is… I dunno. I’d say it feels a lot like Deus Ex 1. Accuracy is affected by player skill and weapon condition — so if you’ve got, say, a really high Small Guns skill and a perfect condition assault rifle, your aim will be dead on. Low Small Guns and crappy assault rifle, and you’ll miss more. The skill and condition also affect the damage you’ll do.

With most ranged weapons in run-and-gun, you can also go into an aim mode, which zooms you in and increases your accuracy. With Melee and Unarmed weapons, the player will block instead of zooming in.

Based on all the feedback we’ve gotten, it feels really solid now.

Of course, V.A.T.S. is its own story completely…

I’d say for combat, I generally go 70% V.A.T.S., 30% run-and-gun (but that’s different for everyone, really).

Finally level scaling:

I’d say that:

a.) because of the issues some people had with Oblivion’s leveling
and
b.) the fact that we’ve really been focusing on the importance of overall game balance…

…this is something the dev team has come back to time and time again during our playtests, and is something we’re still tweaking. We’ve finally gotten it to a level that we feel really good about.

So basically, if you do the main quest path and adhere strictly to that, there are some areas that are set up to match your level, so you don’t get your ass handed to you unfairly while just naturally playing the game. But certain paths and locations are more difficult, by design.

It’s also the case that the farther you wander out into the Wasteland, the more you’re taking your life into your own hands if you’re not prepared. I mean, hey, a Deatchlaw’s a Deathclaw.

And, um, yeah — no Raiders in Power Armor.

Fallout 3 Gets Kieronized-Updated

Fallout 3 preview at Eurogamer, Q&A with Pete Hines coming soon:

Given that the developer is responsible for the most successful Western-style RPG of recent years, Oblivion, it was a little surprising, during Fallout 3′s demonstration, to get the sense of a team with something to prove. While there’s much about FO3 that recalls Oblivion, there are also regular elements that arise as if to signify, “You know – we’re good enough to deal with a legend as big as Fallout. Watch this.” In itself, this is a tad touching. A team like Bethesda would probably be justified in going, “Damn the lot of you – our way is the best way.” The result is something that – on these impressions – seems to be the next logical step on from Oblivion, while infusing as much of what made Fallout Fallout as they reasonably can.[...]

It’s at your birthday party, and you’ve just received your Pip Boy wrist terminal and promised your first work detail, but between the amusement of robots ruining birthday cakes, you get your initial conversations. The first one is standard enough (though it introduces the concept of lying), but the next one we’re shown is with a bullying peer by the name of Butch, where you appear to have at least six cake-related options available; everything from a diplomatic, sharing-it-fifty-fifty option, to the openly perverse provocation of spitting in it and then giving it him. Bethesda’s Pete Hines, demoing, stresses that these options will all play out differently down the line. The point is to show that we’re a long way from the “Yes, I’ll help you”/”Yes, I’ll help you for three pounds fifty and a cheeseburger”/”I WILL KILL YOU AND TAKE YOUR STUFF” conversation options with which most modern RPGs satisfy themselves. Hines and co. have talked about the game being a much more dense conversational game than Oblivion, and this is them showing how they’re walking the walk as well as talking the post-apocalyptic talk.[...]

Also worthy of a quick appreciative nod is the age of one sequence, where as a Toddler you make your way around your room making the literal first baby steps in the game. You also select your future abilities in a fully illustrated kids’ book called “You’re Special!”, arranging your assorted statistics. Is it too much to read this as a pointed eye-rolling at the perennial accusation of dumbing down? I suspect not.[...]

Combat including the VATS (Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System) is also demonstrated – and here my expectations are somewhat confounded. I came not entirely convinced by the VATS system’s utility – it struck me as the worst of both possible real-time and turn-based worlds – and leaving quietly impressed. Related to your dexterity, you gain an amount of pause-time, which you can spend on specifically calling shots – for example, aiming at arms to lose their weapons or just pummelling their body to knock them down. This then plays out in a cinematic video of the conflict, with agreeably macho angles. It looks actually stylish – in fact, this turn-based-game with 360-era graphics makes me even think that a fully turn-based game would have worked. Why can’t we have a turn-based game which goes for a crazy graphic effect? It’ll have the attraction of being distinctive, anyway.

This is especially pointed as the non-turn-based side fails to convince as much as you’d hope.[...]

Which is unfair, but that’s how it is. On a personal level, I found Mass Effect had a similar problem – the hope has to be that Fallout has a similar grace to Bioware’s game. That is, the combat is just about good enough to serve the purpose the game demands of it, and leaves the rest of the game’s charms to get its hooks into you.[...]

As with any game as big of this, we’ll only really get a chance to see how it hangs together when we stride out into the waste to see what’s out there. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s a lot more there, worth a good read. The “I’m Special!” book is just an homage to the games ruleset, and there’s nothing really close to Turn Based combat in VATS, but I can see his point, I asked myself the same thing a lot of times in the last months.

Update: Kieron Gillen clarified what he meant on that “turn based” remark, on a comment in Rock,Paper, Shotgun:

In passing, if any of the NMA guys are reading, the bit where I talk about how I’d like to see this turn-based thing go further, was me badly phrasing that the “Give orders/see results cinematically” is a bit like how turn-based games work. Clearly the pause-time attacks of VAS aren’t a true turn-based game, but it shows that a turn-based like interaction lead to cute results, at least on first impression. Since that’s relatively strong and the normal-combat is relatively weak, I’d have been interested in seeing them pursue it a bit more.

I should have been a lot more explicit with what I said.

Videogaming247 Fallout 3 Demo Impressions

Videogaming247 wraps up their coverage of the Fallout 3 showing in London last week with Patrick’s account of what he saw:

As Hines explained, there are several benefits to the VATS system.

Firstly, it means you can play the game exactly as you want to play it. If you’re more of an RPG person, you may want to err on the side of stats and will do a lot of the combat in VATS. If you’re a shooter fan, you may not use it at all. The choice is yours. We pointed out that the system is big on numbers, percentages, and so on, and is likely to be a bit heavy for the “general” player. Without skipping a beat, Hines answered that no one has to use it. Want to blast away in real-time? No worries.

Secondly, VATS is the “bridge” mechanic between shooter and RPG. Traditional RPG conventions permeate the entire game, but it’s still a 3D shooter. Bethesda needed a way to bring turned-based combat to the modern real-time shooter, and VATS was the answer. It’s unique: we’ve certainly never seen anything like it.

It must have been very challenging to beat that specific problem, we say. That’as why we’ve been working on it since 2004, says Hines.

Lastly, VATS adds a hugely enticing layer of depth. Hines gave an example. You’ve just been in a firefight and you’ve taken a kicking. You fix yourself with stimpacks – administered through the Pip-Boy 3000 to any body part you wish – then walk round a corner to find yourself facing another team of enemies. Instead of just blasting away, you drop into VATS and stop the action.

This isn’t just to take a breather. Now you’re in VATS mode you can assess what you’re facing, the strength of the enemies, where they are in relation to you, and so on. You can be tactical without the “twitch”. VATS makes Fallout 3 a game for everyone.[...]

Hines answers all our questions about platform differences, DLC, Dogmeat, system spec for PC, random encounters and FPS targets before telling us that the next time we see Fallout 3, it’ll be playable. Yep, the E3 build will be hands-on.

Fallout 3’s been stamped “game of the year” with good reason. The moniker’s subjective, obviously, but there’s no doubt that Bethesda’s RPG is up there with the likes of GTA IV and Gears of War 2 as one of the most anticipated of 2008. Now we’ve had a chance to see why, there really isn’t much more we’re looking forward to playing.