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- Tell us a little about yourself, what have you accomplished in life?
After Fallout I went on to work at White Wolf as a developer for their tabletop and live-action role-playing games. I spent just under four years there, where I worked primarily on Mage: The Ascension, Kindred of the East and Mind's Eye Theatre with the occasional contribution to Vampire: The Masquerade. From there I went on to Decipher, where I headed up development for the Star Trek roleplaying game up until Decipher closed their RPG division. I spent a little while at Activision and did some time as a production coordinator on Call of Duty 2 (and you can see my face as a texture for the Russian soldiers). I then went back to college to finish a Computer Science degree (I had previously left without finishing when I went to work on Fallout), and I'll be done with that in about . . . a week from now, on Dec. 16th of 2008.
So, mostly game design!
- What are your favourite computer games/board games and why?
I'm an eternal fan of Planescape: Torment; anything with Chris Avellone's involvement piques my interest. Also enjoyed the entire ol' Ultima series, the three games released by Troika before their unfortunate dissolution (Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines), and the more recent Knights of the Old Republic games. I'm an RPG fan; I like stories, character development, personality quirks and conflicts, and drama. I find such elements intellectually satisfying. I like the way that computer games allow the player to be a participant in the unfolding story, as if you're reading a novel and then you can change what the protagonist does or alter the direction of the tale.
- What hobbies do you have besides computer games?
I studied several different martial arts when younger, and I still enjoy Tai Chi. I also like camping and hiking. I'm a fast and voracious reader, not only of science fiction but also of political and economic analysis.
- What are your favourite bands/artists (music) ?
While I appreciate good music, my tastes are not terribly exciting, and I actually don't spend a lot of time listening to diverse musical styles. I like the usual soft modern rock and a lot of trance, darkwave electro, techno, and gothic music, ranging from Sisters of Mercy to Enya to Rammstein to Wolfsheim to Loreena McKennitt.
- Tell us a little about your role in the making of Fallout 1/2/3(Van Buren)/Tactics ?
I was involved only in Fallout 1 for the most part. I came in partway through development, right before the game switched from GURPS to SPECIAL. At the time, the team was ramping up for the big push toward release, which was about a year off. I was brought on as a scripter, since I had some skill in programming in C and Pascal. As with the rest of the scripting team, I wound up also doing work on design, since the game was just too big and the design documents too elaborate to be maintained by one guy (especially since some of the original design docs were obsolete but hadn't been updated with early changes in the dev team). I proposed a few ideas for interface and for the SPECIAL system itself after the GURPS license deal fell through, though Chris Taylor really deserves credit for a lot of the SPECIAL design. I also lobbied hard for a couple of things that did make it into the game: one, perks that were not just combat-related, like Empathy (boy did that turn out to be a pain); two, companions who could join the Vault Dweller (since they were in the initial design doc but got cut, but I figured out a way to "fake" Ian into the game and the programmers decided to make it stick); and three, the Power Fist (since I did a lot of my testing with an Unarmed/Speech/Science character and found that Unarmed Combat just couldn't hang unless it had its own categories of weapons).
My scripting mostly handled Junktown, parts of Vault 13, random encounters, the military base, a little material in Shady Sands, and the joinable companions. I also scripted the original ZAX in the Glow, based on some early design docs.
- What's your favourite Fallout memory?
Fallout 1 happened so long ago that the memories are pretty old now, but I still remember hanging out with Chris Taylor, Nick Kesting and Robert Hertenstein and coming up with a lot of the ideas to help flesh out the game's design. We had some pretty kickass brainstorming sessions and it was amazing to have the chance to work with some real geniuses like that. Dave Hendee, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky did a lot of stuff as well, of course, but there was kind of a "scripter collaboration" that went on as the scripting team was dragooned into additional design by necessity. The water thief in Vault 13 if you go back later in the game? Totally an off-the-cuff remark by Nick Kesting. Brilliant.
We had some early bugs that were hilarious to watch. In one case, the animation sequencer for the rocket launcher called the same subroutine used to animate a critter. This subroutine would take as a parameter a value that was assumed to be an index into the critter table. Of course, the rocket launcher passes it an index that is assumed to be the object index for a rocket - but the animator subroutine takes that number, compares it to the critter table, and fetches the midget. So you'd fire the rocket launcher, a midget would leap out and run really fast to the target and then explode.
- What specifically inspired Fallout for you? What were the biggest influences?
Growing up in the Reagan era meant that I was vaguely aware of the late Cold War era and associated paranoia, but I must admit that while I was familiar with a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, I actually hadn't experienced many of the greats until I went to work on Fallout. I saw the Road Warrior for the first time while at Interplay, for instance. I'd read A Boy and His Dog, A Canticle for Liebowitz (which I hated) and seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I didn't even see Red Dawn up until about 2006! Much of my Fallout inspiration came from the Mad Max material that I had seen, of course, as well as the old role-playing game Twilight: 2000. I also really grabbed on to the ideas of the Forced Evolutionary Virus and the notion of the apocalypse through the lens of the '50s - movies like Day of the Triffid and Them! - and used those.
- Pop Culture played a big role in Fallout, what pop culture influences you?
I really enjoy thoughtful science fiction. Badly-done SF is like pop culture junk food; it's entertaining but empty. Well-done SF is more akin to literature with scientific underpinnings. For this reason I really wanted my contributions to Fallout to make sense in the context of the world, so I leaned on science fiction pop culture that spoke about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the (re)discovery of technology. Though Fallout 1 had far less pop culture references than its immediate successor, there were certainly influences there. Some were just meant to be tongue-in-cheek; there's a note in the Glow, for instance, that is presumably an exchange between Mulder and Scully regarding the alien corpse in one of the tanks there. Conversely, the idea of ZAX - a benevolent AI - is more in line with, say 2010 and the notion of intelligent computers as partners for humanity's explorations instead of as enemies or threats.
I like the Mad Max movies, Star Trek and Star Wars as much as the next sci-fi gaming guy, but I also think that sometimes the "pop" part of pop culture does a disservice to good SF. When fans complain about movie studios "ruining" a given graphic novel or book in a movie adaptation, oftentimes they're really griping about the fact that the studios have changed fundamental elements or conflicts in the story just to appease the mass audience. If you sell to the mass audience, you're selling to the lowest common denominator, and that doesn't have a very high threshold for science fiction, which often presumes some actual scientific understanding on the part of the reader/viewer.
- How was it to be a part of the Fallout team?
Legendary.
- Were there things that you wished you had added to either Fallouts?
We ran out of time for implementation of a lot of stuff in Fallout 1, as is well known. I would've liked to have the Vipers and the Jackals gangs near Shady Sands - no time to make maps and scripts for them. I also wish that the joinable companions had been a bit more robust in Fallout 1, since they had a tendency to die horribly near the endgame, but that was because they didn't have the means to adjust for armor or to improve their skills.
One thing that did really bug me was that we were inconsistent with some scripts and we had some cuts that, I think, kind of hurt gameplay a little near the end. For instance, lockpicks don't always give you a bonus like they should. The repair tool doesn't always give you a bonus when used in cases where the Repair skill is checked. Some of the encounters near the end that are supposed to be bypassable with diplomacy, stealth, or trickery just don't work and you have to fight them, which is really tough if you're trying to play a character who's not combat optimized.
- What were you favourite places in fallout and why?
I really, really enjoyed Junktown in Fallout 1. Since it was the demo level for the game, too, I was kinda sold on it early. Not only does it have a nice "look" to it (including the giant bus at the entryway, an homage to Mad Max), but the interactions between the character factions are, I think, interesting. There are lots of side quests based on interacting with human nature. You have the usual law-vs-crime angle in Killian and Gizmo, but the Skulz gang is like a secondary threat, the interaction of Trish and Saul is a nice "human drama" touch, and the fact that you can bump Sherry out of the gang (because she's not really that bright and just needs someone to push her in the right direction) gives a feeling that your character is really touching the lives of individuals all over the wastes in addition to the big changes that you make when you roll into a settlement. The fact that the ganger shows up to take a hostage when you spend the night at the flophouse, and that an assassin shows up to kill Killian after you talk to him, gives a sense that events are going on as you play through the town. Junktown has fewer "generic" NPCs than a lot of the later big cities like the Hub, which in turn makes you feel like it's a community with people you can recognize.
I think that the Hub is pretty awesome as well, just because its scope is so ambitious, but I didn't actually work on any of the Hub so it's hard for me to say much about it.
- What is your hope for future Fallout games? Would you like to be a part of a future Fo team?
I've played Fallout 3 and I enjoy it quite a bit. I think that Bethesda made a great game and they did an excellent job of paying homage to the Fallout continuity while bringing some fresh, new ideas to the table. I think that what I would like to see in a future Fallout is the same as addressing my only real issue with the game: All of the old familiar elements of the Fallout world migrated to the east coast, so we have the Enclave, the super mutants, the Brotherhood of Steel; I'd like to see more new groups, more power factions and societies that have sprung up in a big way. I get the feeling from Fo3 that there's a sort of "power vacuum" in the east and that these groups moved out there to fill that hole, but this is probably not the way things are going everywhere. I bet there are other big groups out and about making their mark on the wastelands, some of whom may have crossed swords with the existing power blocs, others who have never heard of 'em. (See Caesar's Legions in the design docs for Van Buren - a large, organized power group that runs the show in a particular area of territory.) I'm glad to see the BoS and the super mutants and the centaurs and whatnot, but I don't have to see all of the old groups to know that it's Fallout. I guess we don't have Followers of the Apocalypse in Fo3, though. Most of the new power groups in Fo3 are relatively local in the game, such as Rivet City (which is a thriving metropolis, but it does not try to project its power across the Capital Wasteland) or the Temple of the Union (which is an awesome idea but I get the sense that they're very "new" and not super influential). Anyway, for future Fallout games, I hope that Bethesda (and Interplay, on V13 - assuming it is in fact Fallout Online, 'cause I'm not in a position to confirm anything) continues to look at the franchise with a critical eye and say "How can we tell interesting stories in the same vein established previously for Fallout?" I'm really looking forward to the downloadable content. I really want to see the Pitt.
I'm sure that Bethesda has a ton of really talented and experienced people on their Fo design team already, but if they offered me a shot at working on Fallout again, I probably wouldn't say no!
- Who would you bring with you in a future Fallout team and why?
Well, I always felt that Chris Avellone was a spectacular writer and designer. Of course, he's heavily invested in Obsidian now, so I don't think he's in a position to migrate to a new Team Fallout. Tim Cain was and is a spectacular programmer, and Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson had this amazing, intuitive sense of graphic design that really made the world visually distinct. It's no wonder those guys all went on to found their own companies; they had drive and creativity and talent in spades.
Back-patting aside, I'd have to give the caveat first off that I'm a terrible manager. Having me oversee Team Fallout would be a really bad choice. I'm a great designer, I'm a solid and fast writer and I excel at taking sucky things and finding ways to make them cool. I also know how to do scripting and code, so that's a handy combination of talents. But I am better off supporting a team rather than building one from scratch. From the people I know today and the folks whose talents I've really come to respect over the last few years, I'd say . . . I'd probably bring along the aforementioned Gods of Fallout, of course, as well as some associates of mine whom you've not heard about: Rob Telmar and Max Peters, both of whom have a real talent for design but who haven't worked in the "industry" as such. I have spent several years in casual game groups with those guys, and they have some real chops. Rob is excellent at taking stereotypical tropes and turning them on their head, so you get a new twist on an old story. Max has a really analytical mind and a lot of experience in psychology, so he's got a natural handle on how to make interesting and believable characters, motivations, and social structures. In fact, the three of us have even talked a little about messing around with the Fallout editor once it's out. Who knows, maybe we'll come up with somethin'.
- In your opinion, what are the key ingredients that every RPG should have?
An RPG is a role-playing game, so you are playing a role - that is, you are making choices about the protagonist. In some RPGs the only choice you make is which stat to increase when you level up. A good RPG, I feel, gives you more meaty choices. To do that, you must do three things:
1. Establish a setting with versimilitude. It doesn't have to be a simulation of reality, but it needs to have enough internal consistency that the player buys into it. Then the player can feel "grounded."
2. Create groups or individuals about whom the player has a sense of investment. In Fo3, you are trying to find your father, and since the entire tutorial section has interactions with your dad, this establishes a tie and a sense of character investment. In Fo1 you are trying to save your entire vault, and later humanity. In Planescape: Torment, you are just trying to figure out who the hell you are. All of these games put you in situations where you make connections with people - or even with just your own protagonist - so you have a sense of investment in what's going on. Your choices matter because their outcomes affect the people that you, the player, have come to know and perhaps care about. Sure, they're ultimately just pictures on a computer screen, but if you even paused for a second and thought about whether it was all right to steal from Killian, or to swipe the water chip from the ghouls, or if you cheered when your character killed the Overseer, you just felt investment in the game.
3. Give the player choices that impact that setting and that investment. The "slideshow" at the end of Fo1 (and now at the end of many an RPG) gives you a sense of closure. It shows you that your actions mattered and that you actually made things happen. Similarly, when you have a choice between helping two good people (but you can only help one of them) or having to work with bad people to fulfill your goals (people who would normally be your enemy, but you can't kill 'em 'cause you need 'em), this creates a real conflict of interests that makes you think about what you're doing. Given enough time, or some cheat codes, you can overcome any fight or problem that a game can throw at you. The question in an RPG is less whether you can pursue an option, and more whether you should and why. In the Fo series, you sort of see this in the sense that you can choose to gain karma by doing heroic things without pay or compensation - "heroism is its own reward," so to speak. A more telling sort of choice would be if you have to decide something where you're not sure what outcome is really best and you make a choice based on your investment in the story and your hope for how things might turn out - like the bit with Harold in the Oasis in Fo3 (I won't spoil any more than that).
- Where do you see computer RPGs going?
It's clear that RPGs are a difficult market. They don't sell as well as big MMOs or FPSes, but their dev costs are pretty high due to all of the detail level in the scripting and design. I think that a lot of RPG design is going to head toward streamlined systems with procedural models. The Elder Scrolls games already do a lot of this; their dialog system will create entire dialogs on the fly just out of procedural models (stuff generated algorithmically, without anyone having to hard-code the dialog choices). We'll probably see procedurally-generated quests and objectives soon (it's already in the alpha of the little-known game Dwarf Fortress, in adventure mode of that game). We're at the point where the graphics for RPGs are so immersive already that the way that you really get players into the game is to offer strong story, strong gameplay, and the same sort of thing that you do with any video game: easy to learn, hard to master. You want people to try the game because it has an interesting premise, a cool look, a neat story. They stay because it has lots of detail, clever hooks, compelling characters and locations, and a sense of a powerful world behind it, even if this is just a shadow that's implied without ever really being seen (like in the FPS Portal, where various comments hint at things without ever really telling you a lot about the world outside or even what's really going on with GlaDOS and Aperture Science Labs).
I think if some good AI content is generated (not real "sentient computer AI" but "better character AI routines") via the various dev communities out there, this will go a long way to making RPGs more advanced. Half-Life 2 really blew people away with how the characters look at things, fidget, follow stuff with their eyes; we take this sort of thing for granted now. Writing good AI routines is hard and time-consuming, though, so a lot of games just run pretty simple stuff. If community developers write more detailed AI that you can just plug in via script, we may start to see some of these sorts of routines give us ever more detailed character behaviors and interactions. It's kind of like how WOW lets people write their own interface addons, and the ones that are really good get co-opted into the core WOW interface in subsequent patches. If people make really good content for stuff that usually doesn't make the cost/benefit analysis during dev, then it may get picked up. Making good AI is hard and time-consuming, so it usually takes second fiddle to doing more quests and better graphics and more environments, but having characters that behave in consistent, interesting ways is a nice way to help people feel like they're interacting with people and not with some polygons that are clipping oddly through terrain.
- How does the fan base hinder/help the projects that you've worked on?
Man, that's a loaded question for me. Mage: The Ascension was a project where the fan base pretty much ruined my enthusiasm for the property. The prior developer had made several major story elements that came to a head right before I took over, and then the management at White Wolf wanted some new directions established. I also took a look at the property and thought about stuff that seemed inconsistent to me and how I wanted to fix it. When the revised edition of the game came out, though, it caused such a furor from a small but vocal element of the 'net that I actually got death threats and I even had someone posting crap on my webspace about what a horrible person I am as recently as just a few months ago, all with regards to M:tA. In a sense, fan expectations can be the worst killer for a property. The fans get this notion of the "perfect vision" of what the property should be like or about, and they have this idealized notion, and the reality can never compare to it. They get themselves in love with something that is not the "real" property but just their imaginary wishes, and they of course are angry when they are inevitably let down because reality can never match some nebulous imaginary concept. Plus, of course, one man's hash is another man's trash, so even if you please one person you piss off another.
On the flip side, some fans are really enthusiastic, and they just like to take the stuff that you give them and run with it and have a good time and thank you for that. People who make community stuff are the best - folks who love the material so much that they want to spread the love, so they make mods, or stories, or wikis, or any sort of content. It's really heartening when people build communities so that they can enrich this material that they all enjoy.
- When planning the story how do you go through the process of integrating themes and story with the constraints on software?
Since I do both writing and programming, I get to see both sides of this coin. To be honest, in the modern dev setting, software constraints are not the big limitation. If I want to make a map of all of Georgia and provide the means for a player to run around in it, I can probably do it, although maybe a lot of it will be procedurally-generated terrain from a regression equation taken from various points of Georgia topography. The real problem is time and manpower. "Better is the enemy of done," as John Wick once said, and he's right. At some point you have to do development triage and decide what features you want to keep and what you want to cut.
So, when I think about story themes, I don't worry about the software. If I want to tell a particular story, it's going to come out through dialog, through events, or through environments. I don't have to worry about an effects budget; I can just use an in-engine scene to show things going on, and if it has weird aliens or technology or explosions, that's all digital anyway, so who cares? The bottleneck there is time and manpower for animators, not software.
The only place where software really limits storytelling is in character interaction. You have to script everything for how a character behaves or responds to things. I think maybe in the future we'll see more procedural behaviors where you just give a character certain values of tolerance for particular things, certain patterns of behavior that they like or dislike, and a network of other characters they know, locations they've been, and objects they own, and you let them make their own behaviors based on this - but for now you have to code in everything. Again, though, you can get as detailed as you want if you have unlimited time.
Ultimately if you want to make a compelling story, you hold to the elements that I mentioned in #14. You have to keep in mind the realistic appraisal of schedule and resources. This means that even if you start with a grandiose plan of incredible scope, you parcel it down into small pieces and you nail them out one at a time. We have seen quite clearly, though, that storytelling of great depth and breadth can take place in CRPGs today thanks to modern processing power. Look at the sheer size of the environments in games like Fo3 or GTA or WoW. Look at the depth of characterization in KOTOR and Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2. We have the tools to make interesting stories; we just need the people and the time to use those tools. Heck, the mod community for Fo3 has already released XML extenders and new fonts for the dialogs and altered interfaces. Making your interface cool and your scripting robust isn't that hard any more. Making your characters interesting and believable - that is, making your computer game simulate human behavior - that's the trick.
- If you could make any computer game that you wanted, which would it be and why?
Whoo, interesting. My answer to this varies over time. Decades ago I would've just wanted to make another epic fantasy game to go alongside Ultima and Wizardry and Bard's Tale. Now? Not so clear. I really enjoy working on RPGs, obviously. I'd really like to take a crack at working on another large-scope RPG of some sort. I'm not super picky about the genre. Look at some of Bioware's recent stuff - Mass Effect is sci-fi, and sci-fi that isn't Star Trek/Wars historically doesn't do too well, but it got some rave reviews; Jade Empire, too, was an interesting niche fantasy China game and it kicked all kinds of ass (at least, I liked it).
I think I might be interested in toying with more behavior modeling (as mentioned above), finding a way to make the autonomous NPCs in a game have a more "human" set of behaviors in that they do more than just wander from A to B and occasionally sleep. The particulars of a game with that kind of scripting could be anything, though.
I'm actually really torn, now that I think about this. I like settings that are unconventional in a cool way, like PS: Torment and Jade Empire. I also really like classical fantasy that is exactly what you expect to get from it, like Conan; you have these expectations and preconceived notions, and you always get just what you think you're gonna get. The former is cool because it's so unique and different. The latter is cool because it's easy to jump in and familiar. Both neat in their own way . . . hmm.
I guess if I made a big new CRPG today, I might do something based on the RPG 7th Sea or Legend of the Five Rings, perhaps, or maybe even Houses of the Blooded - a game with the player thrust into the midst of these social conflicts as well as battles and power struggles in a world with a highly elaborate society and dangerous social rules, where wit and charm is just as valuable as a sword. Or perhaps I'd just create a property whole cloth.
For now, though, waiting for the Fallout 3 editor before I make anything new on the computer . . .
- Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I'm hoping that 10 years from now I'll have a few more good projects under my belt and a lot of fond memories of telling good stories and writing material that people enjoyed. That's all.
- Any last word to the Fallout fan base?
Just like with inside jokes: "You do it for the few who get it, not the many who don't." For those who dislike the current Fallout material, I hope you can eventually go on to find parts that you do like; it's far better to find things that you will enjoy than to spend your energy being angry about stuff that you didn't. And, of course, if you really love Fallout and you don't like what's out there now . . . well, Bethsoft has promised to put the tools in your hands. Now everyone can show their vision of the post-apocalyptic future. If you're presented with a choice in Fallout to tear down something new or to rebuild from the ashes, which do you take? Make your vision of Fallout happen.