Chris Avellone is a legend in the gaming industry, and has worked on some of the greatest western RPG's of all time like Fallout 2, New Vegas, KOTOR 2, and more. Recently, I had the chance to send him some questions via email. Chris was gracious enough to give me some good responses. The entire interview will be released over three parts, the first part (which you can read here) mostly discusses Chris' perspective on Obsidian, Fallout 4, and Bethesda. In this part, I get some insight into New Vegas, get his thoughts on Godfather Pete Hines' and Bethesda's marketing abilities, pick his brain on quest design, and more. In the third and fourth parts which will be released over the next few weeks or so, the focus is mainly on Chris' current work on both Prey and System Shock, along with a follow-up to his comments on Obsidian in Part 1. For updates on when the rest of this interview will be released, be sure to follow me on Twitter @4allout, and let me know what you thought of this part in the comments below and what you would like to ask Chris!
SB: Now onto New Vegas. Since you designed New Reno in Fallout 2, how did you and the other developers go about differentiating New Vegas from it? And what influence did you take from it (New Reno)?
CA: I don't know if there were any conversations on differentiating New Vegas from New Reno, the level designers for the city might know (I don't know if they played Fallout 2). BTW, New Reno wasn't solely mine, I inherited the design from the Troika guys before they left Black Isle, so I had that template to build on (the crime families, the Enclave, jet production, etc.) The worst parts of New Reno you can blame me for, don't blame the Troika guys.
Looking back the only thing I regret in New Reno is that I should have cut out one of the crime families (four was too many with everything else that was going on) and made Myron more systemically valuable to the party (his combat build and crafting abilities weren't helpful). Cassidy ended up being a better companion for systemic considerations, even with his heart condition. I did a post about companion design based on this learning experience a while back on the Obsidian forums, but I don't know if it's still up there (Obsidian locked me out of my profile after my departure, and they've refused to delete my account). The companion system design principles are not being used in recent Obsidian titles, so it may have been removed.
SB: For you when you look back on New Vegas, which turned 6 years old last month, what part of the game or what particular moment are you most proud of?
CA: I enjoyed working on the DLCs, but the proudest moment isn't mine - it was when one of the level designers Jessica Johnson got the Robobrain sequence in Old World Blues where it becomes self-aware working - and it worked great. Jessica has since moved on to other things - she was part of the mass layoffs, unfortunately, along with a number of other designers I wished we could have kept.
SB: About the DLC’s, my personal favorite is Old World Blues which you were the director of. It’s definitely the most comedic and “out there” Fallout has ever really been. How did you come up with the whole concept of Big MT, and how important do you think dark humor is to the Fallout franchise?
CA: Dark humor is definitely important to Fallout (although not 4th wall breaking humor, which I was guilty of doing too much of in F2, and I regret). For Old World Blues, one of the comedy goals was that the comedy could be over-the-top, but it couldn't jump the wall - any humor had to come from within the setting.
As for the idea, Big MT came from an automated military boot camp idea that was in Fallout Van Buren (both the pen and paper game and the computer design), and I mashed it up with the Boulder Dome from Fallout Van Buren as well.
SB: Dead Money is another DLC in which you were a big part of. Although I loved the story and characters, I wasn’t huge on the design decisions. I felt that there wasn’t enough open exploration for my tastes, and that all the traps and speakers etc. were an unnecessary annoyance. What was behind the decision to make this DLC more linear and difficult?
CA: Yeah, it was trying to be like The Pitt and there were other considerations I can't talk about, but I understand your reaction and I don't think it's unwarranted (not many people liked it, or liked it despite the problems). Again, there might be an Obsidian forum post about the decisions involved, but I can't check. Regardless, I accept responsibility for the lack of fun.
SB: Something that most people can agree on is that Bethesda and Godfather Pete Hines are experts at marketing. By using the hype of Fallout 4 and announcing it 6 months before release, they were able to make it one of the most profitable games in history. What were your personal experiences with Bethesda's PR/marketing department like, and how does this compare to other companies you’ve worked with in the past?
CA: Ah, a Bethesda question, I was waiting for it (Part 1 was filled with them, Monte, almost as if they were LEADING QUESTIONS HMMMM Editor's Note: Lol). I've been wrapped up with Prey for a while now, and I didn't have much interaction with marketing, but I doubt it's changed much - overall, I think Bethesda is one of the few companies that do marketing right. I've said this before, and I'll say it again - I have a lot of respect for Pete Hines - if you see him on the trenches at E3, he takes his job seriously and isn't fucking away on his mobile phone while journalists ask the developers shitty questions that PR should be listening to and monitoring (sorry for the tirade, am channeling past experiences).
In addition (and I've said this before, too), but he knows how to demo games he's working on, and he was always willing to take over showcasing the game and gameplay for one of the other demo folks if a developer or demo-er needed to be pulled away for an interview, and he did it without a hitch, something a lot of other PR folks I've worked with in the past wouldn't dare do or want to (and most may not even like the games, and feel that demoing is what "the developers are for").
Another thing which may be hard for non-developers to understand the full importance of, but Bethesda plans their marketing. This is rare in my experience. Bethesda is clear about messaging, they time and focus information releases, schedule demo dates properly (ask any developer, but demo deliveries should never be sprung as a surprise to any development team because demos can derail development by months), and more. Also, if there's any doubts as to how well marketing does their jobs, I'll just say this - you can buy Fallout T-shirts in Target. Target. I still can't believe it. That never would have happened at Black Isle, but Bethesda made Fallout visible to the public, which is no small feat. Even my parents recognize the Fallout logo (and the Vault Boy) when they see it - hell, I wasn't able to do that and I'm their son, and this is my livelihood.
So, yeah, I think they do a good job with marketing. Other folks I've worked with in the past have the exact opposite opinion, however, but that's up to them to outline their grievances. I don't agree with their opinion, and their opinions were so vague/hyperbolic it was hard to argue them - and I hate hyperbole in any event, it's the equivalent of lying to make your ill-founded point.
(Oh, and to say it, LucasArts was pretty good to work with, too, they also had their shit together.)
SB: My personal GOTY of 2014 was South Park: The Stick of Truth. How involved were series creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone in its making, and how well did you guys get along?
CA: Matt and Trey were heavily involved. I wasn't, beyond a few months of production experience (no writing, no design), and I was working on other projects at the time. I do think Trey's game critiques of games on the market are pretty spot-on (and brutally funny), and you can feel them expressed in the game itself.
My only regret about the project is that we lost one of our best designers (and one of our best writers) early on (Travis Stout, who worked with me on the Fallout DLCs and went on to other studios - he wasn't part of the mass layoffs, he resigned). Travis rocks - if you see his name on a title, pick it up.
SB: Although it was a great game, there were noticeably some things cut like the underground crab people. Obviously there is a sequel coming out soon. Do you know if any of the scrapped ideas from the 1st game are going to be in the sequel?
CA: I don't know anything about it, I'm sorry.
SB: I’m currently helping to write a Fallout 4 quest mod called “Realm of Dusk” (basically Fallout meets the Twilight Zone, check it out here!). I have one full length main quest written and it’s about 20 pages long. What is the process you go through when writing a quest, and how long does it usually take?
CA: That's a good question, and it depends on the game and the genre (which sounds obvious), but let's use Fallout as the template. When working on Fallout 2, we'd either create or get a bullet-point list of quests (very brief), a list of all story ties that needed to be in the area to make other areas work, and then told to "go." It wasn't well organized (and a lot of area and quests also had to change hands for a variety of reasons - I inherited what remained of Vault City when one of our lead designers/studio head couldn't make time for it) so we had to wrangle most of it ourselves.
I found the easiest way to manage it was to focus on each NPC quest giver, start with the origin NPC or quest trigger, establish the pacing points (and when to cut them off if a gameplay loop starts going on too long), make sure that each Fallout archetype brought something to the quest (or was at least considered for the completed quest - combat, stealth, talking, and psychological and factions as well - bad karma, good karma, slaver, etc.). So 20 pages for a quest wouldn't be unheard of... well, as long as it includes dialogue. If it doesn't include dialogue, then I'd strongly suggest making your quest design no longer than a page or two, stick to bullet-points, and get it implemented as fast as possible to start testing it out and see how it plays.
SB: When making quests, how do you balance giving the player as many options as possible to go about doing it, with making sure it all makes sense and comes together as a piece of writing?
CA: Swen Vincke (Larian/Divinity: Original Sin, and Sin 2) and I share the same opinion on this aspect of design - the best way is to sit down and go through the process a few times before you start getting the balance and tone right for the quests to come. You'll likely mess up, but by the third or fourth attempt at doing a quest (or new quest), you suddenly notice you're using a mental checklist in your head to gauge the quests and reactivity (although you can write then down, too - we had a huge quest spreadsheet for Fallout Van Buren to cover all the bases for each quest, skill, ability, end sequence, reactivity for each area to insure nothing was missed).
The fact that each quest option generally leads to a different "ending" to the quest actually helps, since the biggest problems can occur when you try and funnel the experience too much or use too many chokepoints (because you're actually robbing the player of true options, not creating them).
Some other advice - be aware when the world would make an option or lack of option jarring to the player. I sometimes call this the "drow elf rule" - to explain in the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign setting, the drow (dark elves) are super rare. They don't usually come to the surface. Everyone hates them, including themselves. This means that if you put a drow elf in your game, or if the player is playing a drow elf (we can all thank Drizzt for this, thanks, Drizzt), it's jarring if people in the world don't react to this and/or the player character isn't given a choice to bring it up in dialogue. This obviously can create a lot of options, but you should at least be aware of it.
SB: Draco Deathclaw on Twitter (@Falloutlsd) told me something about a “penis hydra” and said you would know what it meant, please enlighten me.
CA: I sometimes offer to draw cartoons on Twitter, and when he suggested it, it would have been cowardly to back down from his challenge. The drawing still haunts my dreams. It's out there. Somewhere. Waiting. And most likely erect.
