Game Informer interviews Fallout 3 Producer about Story

Brother None said:
The book is based on the video game, cody92, not vice versa.

It's also shit, in my opinion. Goes against the game's canon, and its story is significantly worse. Written by one of the Planescape setting creators, though, so it's more accurate in that I guess.

(unless you're talking about the fan-made novel)

I know the book was based on the video game, it says so on the cover, never said the game was based on the book, and if i did i didn't mean to.
 
Well, unfortunatly I have to agree with BN. Game needs to have a good gameplay foremost, the story comes second, even if it's important. Rarely does games like P:T make enough money to make up for the production costs.
 
The issue at hand isn't production costs, Ravager. It's about the game's playability. If it's fun.

That said, Torment sold ~400,000 copies.

Zing!
 
Wooz said:
That said, Torment sold ~400,000 copies.

Zing!

Yeah, in a time where not everyone had dsl-broadband.. today it wouldn't even sell 1000 copies. That's also the reason why all major games these days are cross-platform titles. Which doesn't do the games much good imho, since they're not optimized enough for each platform.. but yeah, whatever, capitalism is bound to fail at some point and this is one intresting branch to watch^^
 
Ravager69 said:
Well, unfortunatly I have to agree with BN. Game needs to have a good gameplay foremost, the story comes second, even if it's important. Rarely does games like P:T make enough money to make up for the production costs.

Actually, Fallout 1/2, PS:T and all the Troika titles all made enough to make up for the production cost.

That's not even remotely what I'm talking about.
 
If we accept that all video game characters fall under one of three literary classifications — prototype, archetype, and stereotype — it’s easy to see the appeal of the archetype. This is the established, easily-understandable character model. The badass space marine or seductive sorceress. The prototype, while imaginative and interesting, is too easily viewed as ‘weird,’ and that means inaccessible. The stereotype? Overused, oversimplified, and more often than naught, offensive.

The only difference I can see between what he considers an archetype and a stereotype is that stereotypes are "more often than naught (sic), offensive". The jive-talking token black guy is just as boring as the badass space marine or the seductive sorceress because they're all overused and oversimplified.

The archetypal portion of a character should only constitute a minor aspect of what defines them. "<s>Badass</s> space marine" is an archetype. "<s>Seductive</s>" sorceress is an archetype. Does this cunt seriously believe that "seductive space marine" would cause their end user to throw an exception and start thinking "DOES NOT COMPUTE"?

"Space marine" is an archetype - people understand what being a space marine entails. Prefixing that with "seductive" is the bit that sets Zapp Brannigan apart from Marcus Fenix.

The prototype, while imaginative and interesting, is too easily viewed as ‘weird,’ and that means inaccessible.

Is he fucking serious? He's basically saying "anything original is inaccessible". While it explains a lot about the sort of characters we get in Bethesda games, that's a fucking ridiculous attitude to take. How the fuck does anyone expect to have a memorable character if they're exactly the same as everything that's come before?

Best character I've related to in recent times? GlaDOS. She'd be so much less interesting if she was a SHODAN "kill all humans" wannabe. But instead, she's childish, to the point of being endearing and it's hard to pin any moral label on her, despite represhensible actions on her part. Does anyone seriously believe GlaDOS is "inaccessible" because she's different? Everyone gets the "not entirely sane AI" archetype. That's familiar, but it's such a small portion of her actual persona - which has a solid foundation of imaginative concepts.

Fucking hell.

Anyway.

…creating fiction for a video game poses one very distinct challenge - you’ve got to accept that the whole of your writing - characters, narrative, everything - is simply not as important as the gameplay…

See this I find a bit wayward too. He's right that gameplay ought to be paramount in the interactive medium, but "not as important as the gameplay" implies a needless separation. It would be far better to say something along the lines of - "You've got to accept that when working within an interactive medium, the whole of your writing ought to be integrated into gameplay with as little compromise as possible. Gameplay is paramount, so concessions must be made on the narrative side if the two don't integrate easily.

But will someone please kick this fucker's soapbox out from under him? Everytime I read Op/Ed ravings from him I think - "you're doing it wrong".
 
Brother None said:
But there's zero progress here, nobody is looking at ways to actually use narrative as a part of gaming's interactivity.
There are still occasional parts in games that handle it well. Sander Cohen in Bioshock for example. Letting you choose to attack the crazy bastard or not was pretty awesome, not to mention feeling tense as he walked down the stairs since he already snapped once and tried to kill you. Though admittedly, that was just one small part of Bioshock, and I can't think of any other gaming moments that are similar.
cody92 said:
I have the planescape torment book, its pretty accurate towards the video game but there are some differances. I didn't like the game much but the book was intereasting, suprised planescape hardcore fan's didn't know about it.
I've heard of it, but heard it was supposedly pretty bad. In general I don't trust books based on pre-made settings (Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, etc) except for Dan Abnett Warhammer 40k books which are surprisingly fun. That's mostly due to the fact that I like the W40K setting, and someone who doesn't know the basics of it probably wouldn't give much of a damn.
 
MrBumble said:
Brother None said:
And yes - narrative is or at least should be secondary to gameplay. These are games, not books.

That would make Planescape Torment a super-shitty game, which it is not. Same for Vampire : Bloodlines.


Yeah, totally! And Night Trap for Sega CD was FUCKING AWESOME! Could you imagine losing even a fraction of that gem's story for some lousy "extra gameplay"?
 
I think that Emil was trying to say that even though the story is important, game producers need to focus on making their product as enjoyable as it can be and crappy gameplay doesn't help to achieve that.

Example: Warhammer 40K Dawn of War doesn't have a rich and interesting story, yet the gameplay makes up for it. The game fullfills it's goals.

Although there are exceptions like Planescape, KotOR 2 and Bloodlines, where the gameplay is second to the story, it's fans are usually pissed on developers because of the crappy mechanics and shitloads of bugs. Plus, there are games which are based on story (RPG, adventure games), while others are not (sports games or shooters).
 
Night Trap for Sega CD...just stop.

Briosafreak said:
Now the fact that they changed the Fallout gameplay while they recognize how much more important it is particularly in this context (not on other games) is a different matter.
Right. The fact that he says they've put gameplay ahead of story, but then turn around and shoe-horned SPECIAL into RT/FP twitch combat. What does that tell you about what to expect from the story?
 
That's because the 40K universe has a very rich and developed story behind it, allowing the game to have depth of character without delving too deeply into the 40K storylines.

For example all those quotes and sayings that the units quip, they're from the 40K rulebooks, and those are just for the miniatures.

I would love to see DoW actually develop a proper story for their single-player campaign, they didn't do too bad with Winter Assault, but unfortunately the single-player is pretty much designed to showcase the units in the game rather than actually have a story to it.

Action oriented games can survive without a storyline, they're better if they have a well developed one, but they can live without them, and an RTS is an action oriented game.
 
Yes, that is exactly what I meant.

Anyway, Fallout is diffren - both story and gameplay are complex and fun, so they have no choice but to make both as best as they can.
 
Of course gameplay is the most important factor in a medium. If you want to just tell a story you create a book or movie, it makes no sense to create a game so you can tell a linear story.
However, this doesn't mean that the storyline can't still be a big part of the game, and games are almost always better if they have good, interesting storylines.

Also, ad Planescape: Torment. One could argue that the main point of gameplay in that game was through dialogue and exploration, and there really was nothing wrong with that.
 
Except that after finishing the game once I had absolutly no desire to play it again. I did all the quests and read almost all the dialogues in the first playthrough and there was nothing left for me to do.
 
Ravager69 said:
Except that after finishing the game once I had absolutly no desire to play it again. I did all the quests and read almost all the dialogues in the first playthrough and there was nothing left for me to do.
Replayability is not a characteristic of gameplay.
 
Of course it is. If gameplay is good, it means I can replay the game couple of time and still have fun doing it. If gameplay is bad, I usually can't force myself to finish the game more than once or even at all, sometimes.
 
So theres just those couple of quotes in that link or did i miss another link or something, well about those lines then:

So hes basicly saying gameplay over story. I got no problem with that its just matter of priorities when developing and its not like hes saying great gameplay makes up for horrible story. I think he means story cant be too restrictive to give (for example) freedom of choise for player or enough diversity within the game world to keep the actual playing intresting. Atleast thats what i think he meant.
 
Ravager69 said:
Of course it is. If gameplay is good, it means I can replay the game couple of time and still have fun doing it. If gameplay is bad, I usually can't force myself to finish the game more than once or even at all, sometimes.

No, that's nonsense.

Replayability is a a kind of design decisions, which can be achieved in several ways (randomization, branching paths, easter eggs, secret locations, etc. etc.). It's true linear games will generally have less replayability, but this isn't a "quality" of gameplay. They do not become inferior games by being less replayable.

So theres just those couple of quotes in that link or did i miss another link or something

Full story is in GI magazine, but none of us have that
 
That may be, but replayability is at least *some* measure of quality, you can't say that is complete non-sense.
 
Yes it is, because while replayability can be a good thing, it isn't a good thing by definition. Some games can profit from low replayability just like some films can profit from being only watcheable once.

If it is what you intend to do, replayability becomes a good measure. And if a game intended to be replayable (like a hack 'n slash) isn't, then it's a failure.

PS:T does not become a failure because you can't replay it, though.
 
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