Chris Avellone Interview

The previously announced interview based on user-submitted questions with Obsidian’s Chris Avellone is now available on Kotaku Australia.

Garrett
My question for Chris is: What did you think when you heard Bethesda were making Fallout 3? And what did you think of the game when you played it?

I was pretty pleased – Oblivion + Fallout seemed like a great combination to me. Also, I heard they gave Tim Cain some advance looks at F3, and he seemed happy with it, so I was pretty interested in playing it. I trust Tim. In a minor note, though, I was a little sad that my alcoholic drug-addicted psychopath couldn’t murder everyone in Vault 101 during the escape, but maybe that’s a good thing. I must have chased that robot and my (girlfriend) (my psychotic mind knew she’d been telling lies and plotting my murder behind my back) around for a half-hour beating them both into constant states of unconsciousness before giving up and embracing my Vault freedom. I did enjoy the opening and the exploration afterwards, though, and had fun, and even more gratifying to me was a lot of developers I knew who weren’t RPG fans were playing it and loving it as well, so kudos to Bethesda.

Fall-From-Grace
Your talk at Framework focused on everything you HATE about RPGs so I wanna know what it is you LOVE about the genre?

Aside from all the character creation and advancement options that come from normal role-playing game (which I do enjoy very much), I love the story and character focus. I also love all the emotional reactions you can provide in an RPG that don’t involve sticking a sword through somebody. In Torment, I like it when Morte tells you his version of how you met and you can sense it for the lie it is – and why he’s lying, I like it when you see your NPC friends stand up against certain death to protect you because they love you, and for K2, I like it when a fallen Sith Lord is willing to say she respects you so much she’d be willing to destroy the galaxy to see your philosophy triumph. Also, being a writer at heart, RPGs naturally lend themselves to stories, so I’m biased.

Elephant Fresh
Will we ever see Obsidian return to its Planescape roots, as we are seeing with Bioware and Dragon Age?

Probably not, I don’t even know who has the Planescape license now, and I’m afraid if I went back to it, I’d fuck up a good thing. Then again, we’re going full circle on Fallout now and that’s going well, but I’m not working on that project (it’s in the very capable hands of Mr. J.E. Sawyer), so that probably explains why it’s going well. 😉