Eurogamer put up a pretty good interview with Fallout 3's lead designer Emil Pagiarulo and lead producer Gavin Carter.<blockquote>Eurogamer: What about the moral dimension of Looking Glass games? Does that permeate into the Fallout development?
Emil Pagliarulo: It does. One of the mantras of the Thief games is a big grey area. Garrett is the ultimate anti-hero. That's really important you know. If you want to play like that, we want to support that. As Todd [Howard, executive producer] mentioned, we originally started supporting good, and supporting evil, and we realised how important neutral was, and how viable of a gameplay path it is, and how many great games like the original Thief supported that. That's really important to me.
Eurogamer: With a background developing the Elder Scrolls games, but taking on an Interplay title, which legacy do you think Fallout 3 follows?
Emil Pagliarulo: Me personally, I really feel like we're making a game in the legacy of the Fallout games. It's so different than working with the Elder Scrolls stuff. It's first-person, and that's it. Actually it's interesting for me - it harkens back for me to some of the most enjoyable first-person games I've ever played, the Terminator games Bethesda made. Fallout 3 is Bethesda's triumphant return to gunplay games, after swords and sorcery for so long. For me it's about bringing back /that/ legacy.
Gavin Carter: I feel like when people see it's first-person they're going to say, "Oh, there's Oblivion. It's Oblivion with guns." But honestly there's not a single thing we didn't look at and think, how are we going to do this for Fallout? We stripped out our entire character system. It's all Fallout now, with specials and experience, it's not skill based. The whole questing system is Fallout. There are different paths to all the quests, you can lock yourself out of quests. It's not like Oblivion where you can say, "I've just started in the Fighter's Guild, but I'm the Grey Fox." There's nothing in the game that we haven't looked at as its own thing.
Eurogamer: Do you feel like you owe Interplay anything?
Emil Pagliarulo: You can't. You can't proceed feeling that way. It's like, you also can't proceed feeling like you owe the fans of Fallout anything, you can't feel bad that you're not making a turn-based isometric game. When I first started I think did feel like that, and there was a period of coming to terms with it, and just saying, "I'm going to make the best game I can make, it is what it is, and we have the skills to make an excellent game, so that's what we're going to do."
Gavin Carter: Each of the older games had a different team on it. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 had many different people working on them. We have a great deal of respect for those guys, but what we don't want to do is open up our entire design to someone outside the company who doesn't really get the culture here. For better or worse it's been ten years since the last game came out. We're very strict on authorial control. We don't want to bring someone in from outside and then only implement their ideas in a half-assed way. We have a vision for the game and we're taking it all the way through.
Eurogamer: How do you go about beginning to create a new story for an established world?
Emil Pagliarulo: It's funny. Setting it in DC - it meant we knew what we needed to do. Originally we had it set on the West coast, but it just didn't work. Eventually I said, "Write what you know." So we have a location that doesn't appear all over the place in videogames. It's such a great place for a game. As for the story, I really like stories that are character-based, so how do those characters change throughout the game? So take the relationship with "my" father. He's my moral compass, a good guy, a noble character, so if I'm an evil bastard how does he react to me? If I blow up a town, what does he think?
Eurogamer: Does that relationship impact on the moral dimensions of the game?
Gavin Carter: To an extent. A large part of the game is spent with him absent, so a lot of stuff happens outside of that relationship. We wanted the relationship as a central point of the plot, so we don't want you to be able to say, piss off your dad and ruin the plot. To have a narrative you have to have some parts that are more strict. We definitely want you to feel like he is a central character in your life. When he leaves it is the biggest climactic moment in your life. No one ever leaves the vault - it is entirely self-contained.
Eurogamer: You've mentioned the good/neutral/evil options. Can you elaborate on that choice?
Gavin Carter: It was something we knew we needed - it was one of the key tenants of Fallout that we needed to do. Right at the top was, "choice and consequence in every quest line", as much as we possibly can. Every aspect of the game should have choice and consequence. Even choices like picking your character's stats. Those /don't change/ throughout the course of the game. You're stuck with your Special stats pretty much for the rest of the game. Every little bit from what equipment you pick up to whether you're going to shoot this guy in the head, is going to have that choice, and there are going to be consequences.</blockquote>I'd quote more but that'd be rude. It's a really good interview, so go and read it. Also, for some reason it has a concept art of Intoxicate Interactive's Afterfall on page 2.
Link: Fallout 3 interview on Eurogamer.
Thanks moocow.
Emil Pagliarulo: It does. One of the mantras of the Thief games is a big grey area. Garrett is the ultimate anti-hero. That's really important you know. If you want to play like that, we want to support that. As Todd [Howard, executive producer] mentioned, we originally started supporting good, and supporting evil, and we realised how important neutral was, and how viable of a gameplay path it is, and how many great games like the original Thief supported that. That's really important to me.
Eurogamer: With a background developing the Elder Scrolls games, but taking on an Interplay title, which legacy do you think Fallout 3 follows?
Emil Pagliarulo: Me personally, I really feel like we're making a game in the legacy of the Fallout games. It's so different than working with the Elder Scrolls stuff. It's first-person, and that's it. Actually it's interesting for me - it harkens back for me to some of the most enjoyable first-person games I've ever played, the Terminator games Bethesda made. Fallout 3 is Bethesda's triumphant return to gunplay games, after swords and sorcery for so long. For me it's about bringing back /that/ legacy.
Gavin Carter: I feel like when people see it's first-person they're going to say, "Oh, there's Oblivion. It's Oblivion with guns." But honestly there's not a single thing we didn't look at and think, how are we going to do this for Fallout? We stripped out our entire character system. It's all Fallout now, with specials and experience, it's not skill based. The whole questing system is Fallout. There are different paths to all the quests, you can lock yourself out of quests. It's not like Oblivion where you can say, "I've just started in the Fighter's Guild, but I'm the Grey Fox." There's nothing in the game that we haven't looked at as its own thing.
Eurogamer: Do you feel like you owe Interplay anything?
Emil Pagliarulo: You can't. You can't proceed feeling that way. It's like, you also can't proceed feeling like you owe the fans of Fallout anything, you can't feel bad that you're not making a turn-based isometric game. When I first started I think did feel like that, and there was a period of coming to terms with it, and just saying, "I'm going to make the best game I can make, it is what it is, and we have the skills to make an excellent game, so that's what we're going to do."
Gavin Carter: Each of the older games had a different team on it. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 had many different people working on them. We have a great deal of respect for those guys, but what we don't want to do is open up our entire design to someone outside the company who doesn't really get the culture here. For better or worse it's been ten years since the last game came out. We're very strict on authorial control. We don't want to bring someone in from outside and then only implement their ideas in a half-assed way. We have a vision for the game and we're taking it all the way through.
Eurogamer: How do you go about beginning to create a new story for an established world?
Emil Pagliarulo: It's funny. Setting it in DC - it meant we knew what we needed to do. Originally we had it set on the West coast, but it just didn't work. Eventually I said, "Write what you know." So we have a location that doesn't appear all over the place in videogames. It's such a great place for a game. As for the story, I really like stories that are character-based, so how do those characters change throughout the game? So take the relationship with "my" father. He's my moral compass, a good guy, a noble character, so if I'm an evil bastard how does he react to me? If I blow up a town, what does he think?
Eurogamer: Does that relationship impact on the moral dimensions of the game?
Gavin Carter: To an extent. A large part of the game is spent with him absent, so a lot of stuff happens outside of that relationship. We wanted the relationship as a central point of the plot, so we don't want you to be able to say, piss off your dad and ruin the plot. To have a narrative you have to have some parts that are more strict. We definitely want you to feel like he is a central character in your life. When he leaves it is the biggest climactic moment in your life. No one ever leaves the vault - it is entirely self-contained.
Eurogamer: You've mentioned the good/neutral/evil options. Can you elaborate on that choice?
Gavin Carter: It was something we knew we needed - it was one of the key tenants of Fallout that we needed to do. Right at the top was, "choice and consequence in every quest line", as much as we possibly can. Every aspect of the game should have choice and consequence. Even choices like picking your character's stats. Those /don't change/ throughout the course of the game. You're stuck with your Special stats pretty much for the rest of the game. Every little bit from what equipment you pick up to whether you're going to shoot this guy in the head, is going to have that choice, and there are going to be consequences.</blockquote>I'd quote more but that'd be rude. It's a really good interview, so go and read it. Also, for some reason it has a concept art of Intoxicate Interactive's Afterfall on page 2.
Link: Fallout 3 interview on Eurogamer.
Thanks moocow.
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, those arsenal inc mailboxes they keep mentioning. 
