Fallout 3 Interviews

New Fallout 3 interviews are now available over at Shacknews and GameRadio.de. Shacknews interviews Istvan Pely and Pete Hines.
Shack: Are you guys getting sick of the comparisons to Oblivion? Like, "It's Oblivion, but with guns"?

Istvan Pely: It's two-sided, you know. It's a compliment, and at the same time we set out to make a very different game. We did not start with the design of Oblivion and decide how we were going to change it to make Fallout. We started with, "How is this going to be Fallout?" But we built on experiences we learned with Oblivion. So obviously it's a similar kind of open world--there's experiences with how to make that work, how to keep it exciting, so we applied our lessons learned. It works both ways for us.

Pete Hines: I think the thing that makes it most annoying is that it's said in a tone that's sort of like, that's the best that we could do. For guys like Istvan who have spent literally four years making this game, it really sells short how much time and effort they've put into making this a Fallout game that is true to Fallout. As opposed to just the bare minimum we could do, let's just re-skin all of our creatures to look sort of post-nuclear and just be done with it.

So much more time and effort went into it by the designers and the artists. That's really the only thing that gets me. We love Oblivion, we made it, of course we're proud of it. But just to say that that's all we did, the least amount of effort, really sells short the four years we've put into making this game.
GameRadio interviews Pete Hines.
GameRadio.de: My next question is about the graphics. I saw some screenshots where exactly the same car-model was placed three times side by side. Were these bugs you've fixed by now?

Pete Hines: Even when travelling around here we sometimes find buildings where they built a set of apartments and they're all built in a similar style and are part of a group of buildings. In Fallout it's obviously a destroyed world. We try to vary the destruction in terms of (What would actually be here? How would this city have been built up first before it got destroyed?) We do spent a lot of time thinking about the variation of the architecture and what would it all look like once it was destroyed.
Pete Hines kinda dodges the question there, but it's a good one. You can clearly see repeated damage patterns in buildings and environmentals right next to each other in some screenshots. GamesRadio is being polite in calling it "a bug", it's mostly lazy design.