What Josh Sawyer Wants in Fallout 4
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With a handful of rumors swirling about a potential Fallout 4 announcement coming from Bethesda in the not-too-distant future, Eurogamer tracked down Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer for a brief interview about what he'd like to see in the inevitable sequel. A generous excerpt to follow:
Still, it brings to the surface the topic of what we'd like a new Fallout game to be. And who better to share their thoughts than Josh Sawyer, lead designer and project director of that other - and most recent - Fallout game, New Vegas.
"Ho! I don't know! My concerns are usually about a couple of things," he told me on Skype earlier this year (I've been saving the quotes for a rainy day).
"Fallout games are best when the choices are - and this applies to role-playing games in general, but Fallout is a more desperate world - more agonising. They feel more appropriate to the post-apocalyptic genre. So I hope that whatever twists and turns the story takes, it's more nuanced than a black-and-white choice."
Take the ending to Fallout 1, he said, warning of spoilers ahead.
(No really: there are Fallout 1 spoilers ahead.)
(Really.)
You save the Vault but you can't live there. "That's a very bitter-sweet type of victory," he said. "Granted, that's not really a choice that you had to make, but that's the course that the story takes.
"Also, you see that in the Road Warrior [Mad Max] films; Max, even when he wins, just goes on being a wanderer. There's that kind of bitter-sweet victory in the difficult choices that people make. Regardless of what the setting is, I would hope that that is a big part of the storytelling of it."
The same thing extends to the mechanics he'd like to see in Fallout 4.
"A lot of stuff I did in New Vegas was to try and make choices feel more impactful and meaningful and to challenge the player," he said. "Some people want to go through the wasteland like a tourist, which is fine - they don't really want it to be super-difficult. They want it to be interesting and engaging, and they want to see a lot of neat stuff and go through a cool story. And that's cool.
"Personally I like things to be a little more challenging," he added, "and there's a segment of players that also want [that]. I don't have any doubt in this."
