New Interview at EuroGamer

Eurogamer interviews Pete Hines, and this one is rather interesting for a change:

Eurogamer: A lot of the humour in Fallout 3 revolves around ironic juxtaposing of cheerful utopianism and grim reality. Is there a line at which that becomes trite?

Pete Hines: If it’s overdone and it’s not in the right tone, it absolutely does. Our lead designer is Emil Pagliarulo, and one of his key functions is to go through and do the humour check. You’re trying to get gradations and you’re trying to be careful about how many times you’re presenting something to the player. I’ll use an extreme example: swearing, when used appropriately, is really funny. If it’s in every sentence you read it’s just annoying; you’re just trying to hard to be edgy. You have to ask, “How much are we using this, and is it appropriate for the person who’s saying it?”

Eurogamer: Do you think there’s a reason games avoid humour so much?

Pete Hines: A lot of times it ends up being a distraction. Done poorly, it is horribly and terribly destructive to the vibe you’re trying to set. Humour gone bad is worse than just about anything else you can try and do in a game. Even violence gone bad can still be almost comical in its execution. But humour? Nothing sucks the soul out of an experience than somebody who’s clearly trying to be funny but is not. So I hope we’ve done a great job of balancing that and not going over that line.

Eurogamer: How much of the design for Fallout 3 is a reaction to your work on Oblivion as much as your ambitions for the Fallout series?

Pete Hines: The reaction to Oblivion is very much a case of, “How do we do this better when we do it in Fallout?” opposed to, “Oh we always wanted to do this in the Elder Scrolls, but now we’re doing Fallout we’ll just put it in Fallout.” There’s none of that. Fallout’s already such a rich series, such a great playground to work in, with the vibe and the tone and the moral choices.

What we really brought from Oblivion is just stuff like feedback on levelling. People didn’t like the way the world levelled with the player, so we’re going to do this differently. It’s things like working out how to sculpt the experience for the player in terms of quests and giving you choices. We want to give you more choices in how to finish a quest rather than fewer choices and a lot more quests.[...]

Eurogamer: Were you tempted to make the Karma system a little more morally ambiguous?

Pete Hines: One of the things we really tried to avoid is surprising the player with whether they’ve been good or bad. We wanted to be clear to you that you’re making a conscious choice to be one or the other. I’ve played games where I made a choice and I thought I was being the nice guy, and then it’s, “Wait, wait, why is he upset?” We didn’t want it to be a surprise. Sometimes it’s a surprise in terms of how a person reacts if you are being a jerk, but it’s not a surprise as to whether you’re good or bad.

Thanks marusia on the Bethsoft Fallout 3 forum.

Learning From The Past At IGN

A quite extensive interview with Pete Hines at IGN-XBox360:

IGN 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.

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: 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.[...]

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.

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.

This one is worth a read, it goes into some detail. Spotted at VoodooExtreme.

Voices and Butch on Next Gen

I already talked about the piece on Fallout 3 published in the last issue of Edge, now you can read it online on the Next Gen site:

“War never changes,” grumbles ubiquitous voiceover favorite Ron Perlman in Fallout 3’s opening cinematic. Of course, the one major bugbear among diehard fans of previous turn-based Fallout games is that war has actually changed rather substantially with the coming sequel. Thankfully, as we see more and more of the game, it seems like these detractors are misguided.[...]

“This is the Vault bully, Butch, and his little cronies,” says Hines pointing at a table of youths. “They’ll start talking about how they’re forming a gang and what they want to call their gang. He wants the sweet roll that Mrs Palmer gave me, and there are a variety of different options here. I can wuss out and give it to him, I can ask him if we can share, I can spit on it and give it to him, I can tell him to go suck his head, I can insult his mom – so we give the player a lot of choices and how Butch will react depends upon these different choices, so if I choose one of these last two options he basically gets up to fight me.”

Hines instead opts to spit on the sweet roll and offer it to Butch. “I don’t want your nerd cooties,” replies Butch. “You’re going to be sorry you did that.” The choice here, says Hines, then affects how other characters view you.[...]

As for the quality of the dialogue’s delivery, Hines emphasized that all the voice-acting, apart from Liam Neeson’s turn as your father, was temporary – a point well illustrated by the distinctly gruff tones of your mother. But if there was any area in which Bethesda risks falling down it is this – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion wasn’t a sterling demonstration of voice direction, failing to squeeze anything other than wood from Patrick Stewart or Sean Bean. Liam Neeson’s efforts here also felt a little staid. However wry or smart a script Bethesda produces, it could be jeopardized if the voice-acting doesn’t match its written standard.

That Mother’s voice is the voice of Emil Pagliarulo. You can read the rest here.

Fallout 3 First Look at Videogamer

New Fallout 3 preview, from Videogamer.com:

It’ll take something pretty special to follow The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Bethesda Softworks’ must-own next-gen RPG ushered in the new generation of consoles spectacularly well, offering hundreds of hours of gameplay in a world impossible to imagine only a few years ago. Its success, though, must have put some pressure on the developer. With a legion of new fans and a hardcore army of long-time followers, only something of truly epic proportions could follow Oblivion. It’s a good job Bethesda had Fallout 3 up its sleeve then.

For Fallout 3 to have the success of Oblivion it’s going to have to be more than a game for hardcore fans. Vault 101 and Pip boy mean nothing to most people, and they didn’t to me either. This didn’t stop the game, demoed by Bethesda’s Peter Hines, looking extremely promising and very different to the fantasy setting of Oblivion.[...]

On to the dangers you’ll face then. During our demo these came in the form of mutants and Ghouls. Super mutants are your biggest foe in the game, with super mutant strongholds being set up across the wasteland. You’ll also face Ghouls (humans exposed to extreme amounts of radiation), with one particular variant being so full of radiation that it glows. How easily you spot these enemies depends on your perception stat, with high level characters seeing enemies on their radar much sooner than beginners.[...]

There’s far more to weapons combat than just targeting an enemy and pressing fire. For one, weapons can take damage and jam during use, meaning you need to keep them in tip-top condition if you’re entering a dangerous area. You can also acquire schematics for special weapon variations of each gun in the game – although these will take some finding. One area, set in what looked like trenches, saw numerous grenade traps. Peter was able to avoid them, but the pursuing super mutants weren’t so lucky. Fallout 3 isn’t a game for kids, so expect plenty of gore too, with limbs flying off in all directions.

Spotted on the Bethblog, that also talks about some Italian coverage of the game.

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.