Fallout 3 Interview
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Q: How are you handling the challenge of player progression? Obviously, as this is a Fallout game, you can't just go everywhere and do everything like in Oblivion.
A: Actually the biggest challenge with Fallout (and the reason that the Achievements are going to have to work very differently) is that we do a lot of locking off of stuff to the player. In Oblivion you can be any kind of character you want, but there are different paths that are more focused towards good or evil or neutral; for instance, if you want to be an evil guy, you go play the Dark Brotherhood and do all that stuff. It's not like 'Oh, well, I'm going to be really evil and do the Fighter's Guild,' because the Fighters Guild are kind of good guys helping people out. It's not like every quest has lots of different ways you can solve it in Oblivion, so it's not like any of those things lock one another out. It's not like you play the Dark Brotherhood and then you can't join the Fighter's Guild. You can do everything, it's just the order in which you do them that can change.
Fallout is very different. There are much fewer quests, and every quest has a number of different ways to complete it, and based on how you do that quest you can open up or lock off things, based on your choices, that will no longer be available or will only be available based on what you've done. We actually monitor your karma as you go through the game based on the choices you're making, and whether you're good, evil or sort of in the grey area, you actually have different gameplay; so for example, what characters accompany you differs based on where your karma is. You also get titles, so like Scourge of the Wasteland if you're this really evil bastard and blew up Megaton [a town near the beginning of the game which you can choose to detonate, or not], and so we'll have some stuff that will be pegged towards how you're playing the game. You'll actually have to replay the game if you want to unlock all the Achievements, you'll have to take another other path where there's other stuff to unlock. Nothing's set in stone, of course, but that's the general idea that we have; it's not going to be just one playthrough to get it all.
