Just a couple'a'more. Machinima.com's Inside Gaming Feature interviews lead producer Larry Liberty (thanks Huntman). They talk mostly generalities, but this comment on the FPS-action in the game, while remaining vague, is of some interest.<blockquote>What we've completely overhauled - real-time combat. The way you actually calculate damage, the way you aim, the way input works on the controller. We found - in Fallout 3 - that there were actually times where you could miss inputs and overall it could feel unresponsive. So we've tried to make it still an RPG, but through weapon tiering to make it feel appropriate. So if you get a tier 1 gun at the beginning of the game it's not going to feel nerfed and weird and you're not going to aim at something and have bullets fly all over the place if it's a rifle. If you were to somehow magically get a tier 5 weapon at the beginning of the game, you would actually feel a little bit of that weird RPG feel, where "Hmmm, I'm not high-level, I'm missing and it feels weird." We wanted to get rid of that and overall make it feel more responsive and a more compelling first-person shooter.</blockquote>The New Zealand site Gameplanet interviews senior designer Chris Avellone. Worth a read as it has some solid questions and answers.<blockquote>Gameplanet: What did you identify as New Vegas’ key areas for growth over Fallout 3?
Chris Avellone: That’s an interesting question because with Fallout 3 there were a lot of things we didn’t want to touch because we liked them so much – so the question we asked ourselves is “what do we want to tweak or modify in order to make the experience better?”
So the first thing we looked at was the mod community – what were the things people were changing most about the title that we really like? One of them was weapon mods. We were like, you know what? We can implement those in New Vegas and make the weapons a lot cooler and make dealing with merchants a lot cooler, why don’t we implement that system and put it in?
Obviously we also have the usual stuff like an extended list of perks and an extended (base) arsenal and custom animations for those weapons, too. We also looked through the various weapon skills and then through the (Fallout 3) forums to see people’s reactions to them in order to find out why people found each one satisfying.
So we looked at things like melee combat, for example, and it seemed like melee players don’t have enough to do in combat. So we said to ourselves, why don’t we have the melee skill unlock special combat moves for each individual melee weapon you can get in the game?
We looked for things like that – not to overwrite the Fallout 3 experience, but to tweak in ways so that players can enjoy it even more.
(...)
Gameplanet: So we’ll have a confrontation with this purse-snatcher endgame?
Chris Avellone: One element that we’re not going to have is one Big Bad Guy in Fallout: New Vegas. We’re going to dump the player into a situation then allow him to examine the faction politics: Where they’re coming from, where they’re succeeding, where they’re failing and letting the player decide where his loyalties lie as a result of that. It’s based on player-choice: he can say “I want to support those guys.”
Or he can support none of them at all, (saying) “I have a better vision for the wasteland than any of these people.” That’s totally the Fallout way.
Gameplanet: You mentioned a Mafia-style execution in the desert, what are your other influences?
Chris Avellone: Oh yeah, the Rat Pack, 1950’s Vegas – redesigning it (with that aesthetic) for the future and then dropping bombs on it, that was a lot of fun for our artists to do!
(...)
Gameplanet: Can we expect to see any characters or references to Fallout and Fallout 2?
Chris Avellone: If you have never played Fallout or Fallout 2 you won’t be missing anything (knowledge) in Fallout: New Vegas. However, if you’ve played Fallout or Fallout 2, you’ll understand much more of the backstory of certain groups you encounter. Possibly you’ll also meet descendents of people you know from Fallout and Fallout 2, and of course creatures you’ve seen in those games in the New Vegas world.</blockquote>
Chris Avellone: That’s an interesting question because with Fallout 3 there were a lot of things we didn’t want to touch because we liked them so much – so the question we asked ourselves is “what do we want to tweak or modify in order to make the experience better?”
So the first thing we looked at was the mod community – what were the things people were changing most about the title that we really like? One of them was weapon mods. We were like, you know what? We can implement those in New Vegas and make the weapons a lot cooler and make dealing with merchants a lot cooler, why don’t we implement that system and put it in?
Obviously we also have the usual stuff like an extended list of perks and an extended (base) arsenal and custom animations for those weapons, too. We also looked through the various weapon skills and then through the (Fallout 3) forums to see people’s reactions to them in order to find out why people found each one satisfying.
So we looked at things like melee combat, for example, and it seemed like melee players don’t have enough to do in combat. So we said to ourselves, why don’t we have the melee skill unlock special combat moves for each individual melee weapon you can get in the game?
We looked for things like that – not to overwrite the Fallout 3 experience, but to tweak in ways so that players can enjoy it even more.
(...)
Gameplanet: So we’ll have a confrontation with this purse-snatcher endgame?
Chris Avellone: One element that we’re not going to have is one Big Bad Guy in Fallout: New Vegas. We’re going to dump the player into a situation then allow him to examine the faction politics: Where they’re coming from, where they’re succeeding, where they’re failing and letting the player decide where his loyalties lie as a result of that. It’s based on player-choice: he can say “I want to support those guys.”
Or he can support none of them at all, (saying) “I have a better vision for the wasteland than any of these people.” That’s totally the Fallout way.
Gameplanet: You mentioned a Mafia-style execution in the desert, what are your other influences?
Chris Avellone: Oh yeah, the Rat Pack, 1950’s Vegas – redesigning it (with that aesthetic) for the future and then dropping bombs on it, that was a lot of fun for our artists to do!
(...)
Gameplanet: Can we expect to see any characters or references to Fallout and Fallout 2?
Chris Avellone: If you have never played Fallout or Fallout 2 you won’t be missing anything (knowledge) in Fallout: New Vegas. However, if you’ve played Fallout or Fallout 2, you’ll understand much more of the backstory of certain groups you encounter. Possibly you’ll also meet descendents of people you know from Fallout and Fallout 2, and of course creatures you’ve seen in those games in the New Vegas world.</blockquote>
