Fallout 3 GC Interview

[GameBanshee News]

The editors at Play.tm have finished transcribing an interview they did with Bethesda's Pete Hines about Fallout 3 during the recent Leipzig Games Convention.

How has the game you thought you were going to make when you started work four years ago changed into the game we're now playing, today?

Its pretty close, honestly. A lot of it is that we try not to spend too long on the concept part of a development, and as much as possible getting stuff in the game. You can then play it to see how it feels. Things that sound like a good idea maybe aren't when you start playing it, things need to be done in a different way. Then there's things that you weren't sure whether they were going to work, need a tweak, then become terrific. There's a lot of that. You put your hands on it; play it. This doesn't work at all; this is great; we need to do this differently - there's a lot of that.

...

Which other games did you look at when designing Fallout 3?

I mean, mostly we looked at the first two Fallouts in terms of what parts of these games will we bring forward; capture and replicate. And how can we do that. But, we started in 2004, so there wasn't a tonne of similar games about. I mean, we get asked about games that are similar in style or approach. We get asked whether we were influenced by this or that, but we say "we were three years into the project when that came out", and we weren't stopping for anything at that point. Mostly, we're influenced by a lot of the stuff we've done before, books, movies... post-apocalyptic... the presentation of that tone; that vibe. But you know, we also draw a lot from our own experiences. What kind of game do we want to want to make, what kind of experience do we want to create.

[dragon wench]

This part pretty much says it all...

Who are you expecting to play the game? Will it be mainly new players, or will it be players who've had experience of the series previously?

I think it'll probably skew a lot towards newer players, just if you look at how many people bought or played Fallout before, versus what we're looking at sales-wise, the numbers don't add up, there's got to be a lot of new players. Either that or all the original Fallout players need to buy ten copies each!

I think it'll be a mix. Even on 360, or PS3, there are a lot of people who used to be PC players in the 90s - maybe still are - but maybe they now play consoles and they're likely to play Fallout on these platforms. Rather than PC... that's their new platform of choice now.