New Featured Article: BGamer’s Interview With Chris Avellone

This Interview with Obsidian Entertainment Chris Avellone first appeared in issue 120 of BGamer, a gaming magazine of reference in Portugal.

It was made by Ana C. Santos, to whom I would like to thank for the good will in allowing me to publish this.

I also would like to thank Chris for giving his yes nod to the publication, and special thanks to our friend ZiggyMeister for taking on his shoulders the task of getting all of this together.

It’s a treat for Video RPG games fans, hope you enjoy it, here’s a snip:

Fallout 2 and Planescape Torment are to this day considered cult classics. How does it feel to have people still discussing and asking you about games that you developed a decade ago?

It’s pretty gratifying. It was a labor of love for both titles above, and to still have people respond enthusiastically to both titles makes all the effort and long hours we put in worthwhile. When releasing a game, there’s always the subconscious thought that it’ll be forgotten in 2-3 months, but seeing the long-term feedback to Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment has been rewarding to the teams on both titles.[...]

You have worked in some of the best RPG ever made. What, in your opinion, are the crucial elements for a good game of this genre?

Aside from the ability to advance your character, player choice (whether in character development or quest resolution) and world and character reactivity to these player’s choices is key.

Players want to build the character they envision, and then they want to push buttons in the world and see the world give them positive (or negative) feedback that is unique to their character – it makes them feel that they are having a direct impact on their environment based on their specific choices. In addition, the more specific you can make the reactivity to the player’s character creation choices (Fallout 1 and 2 did a fantastic job of this, in my opinion), the better. The more a stealth character is given consistent rewards and feedback on their chosen skills and using those skills to solve quests, for example, the more they feel their character choices and their character’s skills truly matter.

The Guardian Talks Post Apoc Games

Litograph by Hisaharu Motoda

Guardian Unlimited has a piece on Post Apoc games:

I’m currently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a raw, sad and frightening story of a nameless man and his son fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic America. Thematically and stylistically, it harks back to the likes of I Am Legend, The Earth Abides and JG Ballard’s disaster novels of the sixties and seventies – the latest entry in a long-running genre that examines the consequences of Armageddon through the eyes of lonely, pitiful survivors.

As I’m reading, I’m doing what I always do when I read a book or watch a movie; I’m imagining it as a game. It sort of feels like it could work – as most apocalyptic narratives do. A futuristic setting, a small group of characters, a weird environment which does not have to closely represent anything in the ‘real’ world, a sense of threatening ‘others’ lurking in the darkness. One part Silent Hill, one part Disaster Report.

But can games cope with such nightmarish finality?

They haven’t so far. Post-apocalyptic titles like STALKER and Fallout take a sort of Mad Max approach to the collapse of civilisation – bands of armed troopers battling it out in scorched deserts. It’s all pretty exciting. What novels like I am Legend and The Road explore, is the loneliness and uncertainty, the haunting nothingness of life without society.

That’s rather controversial, but it’s still an interesting read. Thanks Aargh at NMA.

DAC: Please Stand By

Fansite DuckAndCover has been hacked, it will be out for at least a week:

Sorry folks, Duck and Cover has (once again) been seriously compromised by my inability to keep the Coppermine Gallery up to date.
As such, DAC will be offline for the next week while I completely delete and re-install EVERYTHING.
There is also a chance that your forum password has been stolen by internet thievery. If you use that password anywhere else, I recommend you change it immediately.
In the meantime, you can join us in IRC on irc.gamesurge.net, channel #fallout

Besides the IRC channel you can contact them through the FalloutFans Facebook page.

In the meantime, you can join us in IRC on irc.gamesurge.net, channel #fallout