Inside the Vault - Gavin Carter

[13pm]

Today's "Inside the Vault" is the last in 2007 and it features Gavin Carter, lead producer on Fallout 3. Okay, he played Fallout, though they didn't ask him about it.
<blockquote>What’s your job at Bethesda?
I’m the lead producer on Fallout 3. The easiest way to describe it is to think of it as more or less “Head of Communications” for Fallout as far as the development team goes. My job involves working with our department producers and leads to communicate task requirements, schedules, and ongoing status updates to the team, along with making sure everyone has everything they need to do their job efficiently.

What other games have you worked on?
I worked on Morrowind and Tribunal as an intern, then came on full-time shortly after Oblivion got off the ground. I’ve been working on Fallout 3 since day one of the project, and it became my sole concern pretty much the day Oblivion went gold.

What would you say is your personal favorite game of all time?
Karnov! I poured some serious hours into that fire-breathing Russian. Seriously though, this is a tough question because there are so many games that I enjoyed tremendously over the years. The ones that I remember playing the life out of are games like Final Fantasy 2 and 3 (the American numbers), Cybernator, the Might and Magic Xeen and Heroes games, Master of Orion 2, the first two Quest for Glory games, and Pool of Radiance. The games that influenced how I think about making games run more along the lines of Ultima 4-7, Wing Commander 1 and 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, X-Com, Blade Runner, and a couple little-known cultish games called Fallout and Wasteland.

What games are you looking forward to?
There’s a whole slate of post-apocalyptic games coming up that I’m looking forward to. Gearbox’s Borderlands sounds very ambitious and I like the focus on co-op. I’m excited to see what id does with their game, Rage, as well. The tech looks great, and the words “post-apocalyptic racing game” get my nerd engine firing on all cylinders. Mostly I like surprises – the Katamaris, the Witchers, the Bioshocks. The games that just kind of come from nowhere and catch fire. I am also keeping my fingers crossed for more Peggle. Lots and lots more Peggle, please!</blockquote>Link: Inside the Vault - Gavin Carter

 

[Serbaside]

and a couple little-known cultish games called Fallout and Wasteland.

Uh-huh....alright...*silence*

Edit: maybe he is being sarcastic, my meter is not too good.

 

[Mord_Sith]

Mostly I like surprises – the Katamaris, the Witchers, the Bioshocks. The games that just kind of come from nowhere and catch fire. I am also keeping my fingers crossed for more Peggle. Lots and lots more Peggle, please!

Surprising being how instantly forgettable that game was? bloody hell man are you that starved for intellectual stimulation that you'd consider that game to have caught fire?

Katamari's a Tire fire, Witcher I can't say anything about, but Bioshock's all hype, it's a sheet of paper, burns brightly for a few seconds then goes out.

 

[Mick1965]

Bioshock's all hype, it's a sheet of paper, burns brightly for a few seconds then goes out.

I don't know, I had a lot of fun with Bioshock...

Ok, it was good for about 2 or 3 hours. Disappointing really.

Mick

 

[Xenophile]

Oh come on.. you know you got more than 3 hours of enjoyment out of bioshock.. it might have "felt" like it went by really fast, but I really enjoyed it while it lasted. I think as shallow as it sounds.. the gameplay was good, but the art was amazing. I was totally absorbed in it up until the very end.. I didn't like the very end much, but as far as games go it is one of the few in the last year or two that sunk it's hooks in enough that I actually cared to finish it.

 

[ErrantSaint]

The art direction in BioShock was amazing, (even though I hear it has been accused of being influenced by at best, and stealing from at worst, a certain other and much better game ) but the game behind it was garbage.

I'm thinking it might be nice to show to somebody who doesn't actually play games so they can appreciate the pretty without being distracted by the dumb and the easy. After all, CS is probably not the place to start somebody on FPSs, and BioShock is a gameplay snooze to anybody who's played an FPS before. (Especially if you've played the prior Shocks)

Edit: Furthermore, I never played Katamari, but what the fuck do The Witcher and BioShock have in common?

Edit 2: Oh yeah, nevermind. Lame.

 

[shihonage]

I remember showing Bioshock to my cousin, and in the beginning of the game there's a "puzzle".

You go to this place and get stuck. The game tells you to go get a plasmid which will help you go past this place. You go BACK, find the plasmid, bring it to the place, and use it.

Seeing as how I already knew that it will just send you back scouting for the plasmid, I told my cousin "don't waste time going there, just start looking for the plasmid NOW".

Lo and behold, he wasted 30 minutes trying to find the plasmid, which was NOT THERE. The plasmid only appeared when he gave up, went to the place, and got the "GOAL" to get the plasmid.

MAGIC !

 

[Vault Boy]

After all, CS is probably not the place to start somebody on FPSs, and BioShock is a gameplay snooze to anybody who's played an FPS before. (Especially if you've played the prior Shocks)

you must be a hardcore twitch gamer, based on that statement.

an FPS doesn't have to be a fast passed twitch game. look at Deus Ex, a great FPS and not nearly as much action as Bioshock. i do admit though, Deus Ex was 5 million times better then Bioshock.

 

[Bernard Bumner]

you must be a hardcore twitch gamer, based on that statement.

an FPS doesn't have to be a fast passed twitch game. look at Deus Ex, a great FPS and not nearly as much action as Bioshock. i do admit though, Deus Ex was 5 million times better then Bioshock.

Deus Ex could be a frenetic shooter, if you played it that way.

There is something wrong with Bioshock, but I'm struggling to put my finger on what it is, because the elements of System Shock 2 are all pretty much there.

I think it may be that Bioshock feels much more linear, whereas in System Shock 2 the level design was much more convincing as a real place. Additionally, System Shock 2 was bastard hard, whereas I've managed to play Bioshock without dying, and without ever really being at risk of running out of ammo.

Still, Bioshock is a well crafted and very good game, especially by comparison to much else on the market.

Oh, and good on Gavin Carter for having actually played some real roleplaying classics. Now Gavin, about Fallout 3...

 

[Brother None]

There is something wrong with Bioshock, but I'm struggling to put my finger on what it is.

It's not that tough, BioShock is just a mediocre shooter with a great setting and fairly nice story folded around it. Don't try to figure out what it lacks, just identify it clearly as it is.

This is where I pimp my review again.

 

[junkevil]

There is something wrong with Bioshock, but I'm struggling to put my finger on what it is.

It's not that tough, BioShock is just a mediocre shooter with a great setting and fairly nice story folded around it. Don't try to figure out what it lacks, just identify it clearly as it is.

This is where I pimp my review again.

nice. i hate it when people try to dress that game up as an RPG. also, i like your review, but i really loved this one

(also, as far as recent shooters go, STALKER was by far way better, and reminded me heavily of games like fallout and jagged alliance, although it is not turn based, nor an rpg.)

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

...

 

[Bernard Bumner]

It's not that tough, BioShock is just a mediocre shooter with a great setting and fairly nice story folded around it. Don't try to figure out what it lacks, just identify it clearly as it is.

This is where I pimp my review again.

Good review, and your overall assessment given above is quite right.

I haven't really been losing sleep over it, its just that the elements of the game are so similar to System Shock 2 - which I consider to be one of the greatest games ever made - that I couldn't quite see where it went wrong. (Perhaps I should just dig SS2 out of mothballs, patch the graphics up, and remind myself of the glory days.)

nice. i hate it when people try to dress that game up as an RPG.

Indeed, it isn't an RPG. However, the RPG elements of the game - and more so System Shock 2 - do instantly lend it a great deal more depth than the majority of shooters out there.

I think that much more worrying than shooters being smartened up with roleplaying elements, is for roleplaying developers to dumb down their products via a reciprocal arrangement.

 

[junkevil]

Indeed, it isn't an RPG. However, the RPG elements of the game - and more so System Shock 2 - do instantly lend it a great deal more depth than the majority of shooters out there.

hi, theres this game called stalker and you should play it.

also, what does it take for a game to have "RPG elements" anyways? i dislike that term, mostly because i am confused as to what are you talking about... the inventory? choice/consequence? stats that are affected by equipping items? these things are not solely limited to the RPG genre....

i mean, this one time i played this game called super mario bros., and i got this item that affected my stats and made me able to shoot projectiles from my finger.

 

[TheWesDude]

karnov was a kickass game...

he gets points for that.

sadly,

we dont know what ideas these people had that was shut down so we cant really judge if his contributions were good or were bad.

 

[Bernard Bumner]

hi, theres this game called stalker and you should play it.

It is on my to-do list...

also, what does it take for a game to have "RPG elements" anyways? i dislike that term, mostly because i am confused as to what are you talking about... the inventory? choice/consequence? stats that are affected by equipping items? these things are not solely limited to the RPG genre....

i mean, this one time i played this game called super mario bros., and i got this item that affected my stats and made me able to shoot projectiles from my finger.

Well, gobbling mushrooms to make you temporarily bigger doesn't really count as character development, does it?

System Shock 2 has a character design system, dynamic character stats, and a clear choice of character classes which affect gameplay. (Come to think of it, those things are absent in Bioshock, which is probably what I've been missing.) System Shock 2 is resolutely a hybrid-shooter, but it definitely has roleplaying elements. The things which it lacks to make it a proper roleplaying game are narrative choice and consequence.

They are roleplaying elements insofar as they are elements which were assimilated from roleplaying games. If the semantics displease you, then don't blame me. These are the terms in which they have been widely discussed and understood by the general community.

 

[junkevil]

Well, gobbling mushrooms to make you temporarily bigger doesn't really count as character development, does it?

wait, what? plasmids = character development?

System Shock 2 has a character design system, dynamic character stats, and a clear choice of character classes which affect gameplay. (Come to think of it, those things are absent in Bioshock, which is probably what I've been missing.) System Shock 2 is resolutely a hybrid-shooter, but it definitely has roleplaying elements. The things which it lacks to make it a proper roleplaying game are narrative choice and consequence.

i've not played system shock 2, it was never hyped in my face as the best fps rpg ever, and none of my conversation has been about that game as i have never played it.

They are roleplaying elements insofar as they are elements which were assimilated from roleplaying games. If the semantics displease you, then don't blame me. These are the terms in which they have been widely discussed and understood by the general community.

i wasn't blaming you for anything, i was just asking you to define a term you had used. which really, you still haven't done. if you can't define what it means, than the term is useless and doesn't mean anything.

you wouldn't go and tell me i had a plethora of pinatas if you didn't know what plethora meant, would you?

 

[Makagulfazel]

At least this one can say they actually played a Fallout game.

 

[LuckyOasis]

The way I see it, the guy has played a lot of really great games from a lot of different genres. Whether or not any one of us agrees with all of his favorites, he has some classics on his list. He knows what is great and is trying to make Fallout 3 great as well as far as I can tell.

Edit: Come to think of it, he doesn't seem to have much of a job in actually making the game... but I could be wrong about that. So, maybe people shouldn't be too hard on the guy. Even if you don't like the way things are going, I think he's sort of a civilian from a design standpoint.

 

[Bernard Bumner]

wait, what? plasmids = character development?

To be fair, as I pointed out in my last post, I realised that the roleplaying elements that were present in System Shock 2 had been culled from Bioshock. The plasmids are really analogous to psychic powers available in the former, which was of course a weapons system, not a roleplaying element.

The only vestige of earlier hybrid games retained by Bioshock are those slight tweaks offered by the tonics system.

i've not played system shock 2, it was never hyped in my face as the best fps rpg ever, and none of my conversation has been about that game as i have never played it.

Then I see where your confusion arises from as to what the hell I've been talking about. System Shock 2 had numerous fully-fledged roleplaying elements.

i was just asking you to define a term you had used. which really, you still haven't done. if you can't define what it means, than the term is useless and doesn't mean anything.

Okay. Roleplaying elements are the game mechanics which have been drawn from those developed for roleplaying games. These include things like stat-modified combat mechanics, and character development. Basically, any system which allows the player to intelligently direct gameplay mechanics via some sort of character sheet.

In the case of System Shock 2, the very early part of the game is devoted to deciding what training your character took when entering the military. Firstly, what branch you entered, thus deciding your character class, which would be one of soldier, technician, or psychic. Further training gives you a series of class-modified stats and skills effecting weapons, armour use, and damage resistance.

Stats and skills can be modified throughout the game using cybernetic modules and other equipable items (functioning similarly to Adam). There are additional crafting elements, and the player has to maintain, repair, and modify weapons (which degrade with use, to the point that they can jam).

I think that all of those things are clearly identifiable as systems originating in roleplaying games, which were incorporated into FPS to create the hybrid genre. Unfortunately, most of them didn't make it into Bioshock, which I hadn't really thought about until after making my first reply to you, and which is making me angrier the more I do think about it.