Strategy Informer had a chance to interview Pete Hines. It is big and worth a read.<blockquote>Strategy Informer: Would it be fair to label Fallout 3, “Oblivion with guns”? It seems as if the dialogue seems to be the same, the wide open spaces and there are a lot of similarities.
Pete Hines: Well, from the standpoint of both Fallout and Oblivion are kind of “go wherever you want” kind of games, so certainly from an engine point of standpoint, we designed it to be something where we wanted to give you big vistas and really sort of impress upon you the level of destruction as well all the possibilities. All of these places you can see, you can walk to in real time and go explore.
You know, the dialogue is exactly like the dialogue from Fallout so it may feel similar to Oblivion and I guess in terms of how it’s structured, but it’s sort of exactly the way Fallout presented its dialogue; You know what it is you want to say, how people respond back, trying to do a lot more with the dialogue in terms of choices of how you talk to people, the ability to unlock certain options in dialogue based on having a higher speech skill or having certain attributes that allow you to unlock a certain dialogue option that you usually wouldn’t be able to get, different perks, you know when you levelled up you may have noticed “The Ladykiller” or if you’re playing as a girl, it’s called “Black Widow” where you pick that perk, then talking to certain people you get a dialogue option that you wouldn’t normally have gotten. All of that is very different ad unique to Fallout in terms of giving the player options they wouldn’t normally have gotten because of the type of character they are playing with; you get to say this because of who you are.
To answer your question, I don’t discount that folks are going to call it that, it’s based off the same engine, it’s still doing big epic vistas, but I think Oblivion was a really good game, my only hesitance with that phrase is that it doesn’t take in to account how much effort we put in to making this a very true Fallout experience with characters, dialogue and setting and all that stuff to make it very different and true to what the series is about. I think we’ll certainly get that and I don’t think that’s ever going to go away but I think it probably sells the game a bit short.
(...)
Strategy Informer: Talking about the game world, obviously it’s massive, you can do anything you want, go anywhere you please. Do you think there’s a danger you went too far?
Pete Hines: Did we go too far? (laughs) I don’t know…
Strategy Informer: Well during the play-through, I noticed that there wasn’t much around. Obviously this is a post apocalyptic setting, but the world was pretty barren. Apart from the main story, you’ve got no real direction, no incentive to go one way or the other.
Pete Hines: Well, a couple of things. First of all, we sort of take a risk in having you guys go out into the world without having experienced the first thirty to forty-five minutes where you get everything explained to you. If you pay attention to your compass, and where it’s trying to direct you to unknown locations out in the world. You actually come across a lot of that stuff, it’s just that it’s fairly easy to just walk past it without even trying. In Oblivion it’s a little easier because it’s like, there’s a mountain and then there’s a cave in the side of the mountain.
Whereas in Fallout it’s not always quite as ‘beat-you-over-the-head’ obvious, but I do think it is a combination of using your compass to recognise when you’re walking past lots of things you can see and do. Also, we’re preventing you guys from doing anything in the main quest, which is pretty prohibitive in that we use the main quest to send you out to parts of the world, which intentionally run you past a lot of other things to do. So when we keep you from doing that we keep you from going right past all this stuff that we lead you to in the main quest.
So we might take you out to this part of the map knowing that you’re going to come across all this stuff here. And then we know that you’re probably going to go over here, and then go to this point of the map. So we’re kind of smart about using the map as a setting for different parts of the main quest, and how you’re going to get there and what you’re going to cover along the way. But take Megaton for example, there’s like a good 5,6,7,8 hours worth of quest stuff available too you just like that. One lady’s putting together a survival guide, another lady wants you to go to another town. Next thing you know you’ve been playing the game for a long time.</blockquote>
Pete Hines: Well, from the standpoint of both Fallout and Oblivion are kind of “go wherever you want” kind of games, so certainly from an engine point of standpoint, we designed it to be something where we wanted to give you big vistas and really sort of impress upon you the level of destruction as well all the possibilities. All of these places you can see, you can walk to in real time and go explore.
You know, the dialogue is exactly like the dialogue from Fallout so it may feel similar to Oblivion and I guess in terms of how it’s structured, but it’s sort of exactly the way Fallout presented its dialogue; You know what it is you want to say, how people respond back, trying to do a lot more with the dialogue in terms of choices of how you talk to people, the ability to unlock certain options in dialogue based on having a higher speech skill or having certain attributes that allow you to unlock a certain dialogue option that you usually wouldn’t be able to get, different perks, you know when you levelled up you may have noticed “The Ladykiller” or if you’re playing as a girl, it’s called “Black Widow” where you pick that perk, then talking to certain people you get a dialogue option that you wouldn’t normally have gotten. All of that is very different ad unique to Fallout in terms of giving the player options they wouldn’t normally have gotten because of the type of character they are playing with; you get to say this because of who you are.
To answer your question, I don’t discount that folks are going to call it that, it’s based off the same engine, it’s still doing big epic vistas, but I think Oblivion was a really good game, my only hesitance with that phrase is that it doesn’t take in to account how much effort we put in to making this a very true Fallout experience with characters, dialogue and setting and all that stuff to make it very different and true to what the series is about. I think we’ll certainly get that and I don’t think that’s ever going to go away but I think it probably sells the game a bit short.
(...)
Strategy Informer: Talking about the game world, obviously it’s massive, you can do anything you want, go anywhere you please. Do you think there’s a danger you went too far?
Pete Hines: Did we go too far? (laughs) I don’t know…
Strategy Informer: Well during the play-through, I noticed that there wasn’t much around. Obviously this is a post apocalyptic setting, but the world was pretty barren. Apart from the main story, you’ve got no real direction, no incentive to go one way or the other.
Pete Hines: Well, a couple of things. First of all, we sort of take a risk in having you guys go out into the world without having experienced the first thirty to forty-five minutes where you get everything explained to you. If you pay attention to your compass, and where it’s trying to direct you to unknown locations out in the world. You actually come across a lot of that stuff, it’s just that it’s fairly easy to just walk past it without even trying. In Oblivion it’s a little easier because it’s like, there’s a mountain and then there’s a cave in the side of the mountain.
Whereas in Fallout it’s not always quite as ‘beat-you-over-the-head’ obvious, but I do think it is a combination of using your compass to recognise when you’re walking past lots of things you can see and do. Also, we’re preventing you guys from doing anything in the main quest, which is pretty prohibitive in that we use the main quest to send you out to parts of the world, which intentionally run you past a lot of other things to do. So when we keep you from doing that we keep you from going right past all this stuff that we lead you to in the main quest.
So we might take you out to this part of the map knowing that you’re going to come across all this stuff here. And then we know that you’re probably going to go over here, and then go to this point of the map. So we’re kind of smart about using the map as a setting for different parts of the main quest, and how you’re going to get there and what you’re going to cover along the way. But take Megaton for example, there’s like a good 5,6,7,8 hours worth of quest stuff available too you just like that. One lady’s putting together a survival guide, another lady wants you to go to another town. Next thing you know you’ve been playing the game for a long time.</blockquote>
