No Mutants Allowed

Brother None · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 19:11 Post subject: Inside the Vault - Bruce Nesmith

The next Inside the Vault on Bethesda's blog is with director of design Bruce Nesmith:

What pen and paper RPGs did you work on?

I’ve lost count of the games I made while at TSR. I did work with Marvel Superheroes, D&D, AD&D (1st and 2nd edition), Gamma World, and Buck Rogers. I’m probably best known as the author of the original Ravenloft boxed set. For quite a while I was the lead for that product line. I also did work with Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Mystara. I was the designer of the Dragonstrike board game, and worked heavily on the Spellfire collectible card game.

(...)

What is your favorite part about working on Fallout?

I’ve always loved the post-apocalyptic setting. I did a lot of work with Gamma World while at TSR and really loved it. It was one of my favorite non-traditional roleplaying games. In particular, the work we’re doing with multiple paths through a quest and the moral choices the player has to make are very cool.

It also doesn’t suck to empty a clip into a Supermutant and watch him dissolve into a gory mess.

The standard question of "have you played the Fallout games?" seems to have been removed from the list.

Link: Inside the Vault - Bruce Nesmith.

Ausir · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 19:13 Post subject:

You forgot to quote the part about the thing he's best known for - he's the guy who came up with Ravenloft.
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Brother None · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 19:14 Post subject:

SuAside

The Dutch Ghost

fallout ranger

Brother None

fallout ranger · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 21:36 Post subject:

Yes, definitely more important than all of human history.
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radnan · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 21:37 Post subject:

well at least Bruce's background is decent

do these guys really like the violence part in F3 (or perhaps F1 & 2) that much ? ... i mean they really seem to _like_ it
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aries369 · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 23:44 Post subject:

I think that given Bruce's age, he probably have played the Fallout games. Remember that he was in college in 1973, at least according to this info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_3000

I'm not pointing fingers at Bruce's age, just mentioning it, because he seems to be one of the last persons who actually did the hard work himself, learning how to codein a lanuguage called COBOL. (and as I understnad it, this was very hard to do?) So, yes, he has a decent background. I'm not sure what a Director of Design does? Is that a boss job? like Emil P.'s Lead Writer job at Fallout 3?

I'm not sure, I agree with him that a game needs a lot input from designers and a lot of different ideas being tossed into the game salad. Bioshock sort of negates this, I think. It is clear, at least to me, that Bioshock mostly is Ken Levine's vision coming into being. The same could be said for Morrowind where Ken Rolston's visions for Morrowind clearly shone through Morrowind's design.

Mick1965 · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 4:25 Post subject:

sickfuck_diablo · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 4:59 Post subject:

that's the dude from Fear of Girls.. aged 30 more years

radnan · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 8:18 Post subject:

i'm guessing a director of design in a game dev company is responsible for the way the design decisions, features and mechanics are implemented at the smallest level and how things balance out and work together ... both statwise and prolly visually and conceptually

... basically the hard working mechanics dude .. one of the people who make it work even after someone goes "we gots to has a nukular katapult !"

inside beth he's the one that most often strikes this pose Wink

:

this is a rant offcourse ... so if i'm wrong please someone correct me and excuse me .. its cold here
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SuAside · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 9:47 Post subject:

TheWesDude · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 16:54 Post subject:

COBOL isnt that hard tbh.. of course i forgot everything from my class in college...

in like 1995 in the US there were like half a million C flavored programmers and only like 350 cobol programmers.

thats from people whos primary language was cobol.. most in government or legacy business app programming for government or banking/database programs.

it used to be the language of choice for databases and basic math.
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SuAside · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 18:10 Post subject:

a lot of banks etc are currently migrating their Cobol stuff to something else, but even with that move, there is A LOT of money to be made for someone who knows Cobol inside out. a friend of mine is sent across europe the entire time to perform maintenance on systems running Cobol. lots of dinero!
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Mick1965 · Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2007 4:04 Post subject:

TheWesDude · Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2007 15:00 Post subject:

that information for what was the primary language the programmer was employed to work with. so if a programmer was hired to do C++ but also did some FORTRAN or Pascal programming, they would still have been classified as C++
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