Fallout 3 Forum Activity

Some comments from Fallout 3 lead designer Emil Pagiarulo on the genesis of the V.A.T.S. system can be found on the Bethesda forums.

I’ll take a stab at answering this, since V.A.T.S. was my initial design to begin with. So grab your popcorn, sit back, and enjoy…

The Story of V.A.T.S.

Starting at the beginning — What was the inspiration? Well, first and foremost, it’s pretty obvious we wanted to pay tribute to the Aimed Shots in Fallout and Fallout 2. But it certainly goes beyond that. We knew from day one we were going to be using a first- and third-person perspective, and we needed to have compelling skill-based, RPG gun combat. We had some existing examples to look at, of course — most notably, Deus Ex and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. But we knew we wanted to take it a step beyond that as well.

Todd and I had both played a lot of Burnout on the 360 at that point, and Todd had this idea of doing the sort of exciting Burnout playbacks, but with RPG combat. I thought that was an awesome idea, and looked at other examples in more games than I can count, I mean everything from the bullet cameras in Battlefield 1942 to the slow motion combat stuff in Spiderman 2. For my part, I also really wanted the V.A.T.S. selection screen to pause the action. We debated that for a long time, and at one point started heading in the direction of having the whole thing be more slow-mo. Kind of more like the targeting stuff in John Woo’s Stranglehold. I sort of fought against that — I wanted V.A.T.S. to be more of a “panic button.” You know, you get jumped by an enemy, you hit the V.A.T.S. button and then… exhale. Okay, now I have a second to breathe. I can relax, think tactically, and then the slow-mo stuff would come afterward. The more we talked about it, the more we liked it, and realized that was the core design right there — pause game; queue up actions; watch actions play out cinematically.

We had Adam Adamowicz, our amazingly talented concept artist, draw up some gameplay concepts, and BOOM! There it was. We could see it, we could feel it. I am really proud to say that what we shipped with in Fallout 3 is incredibly close to that initial design, and those initial pieces of concept art. We knew how we wanted it to feel, and that’s how we proceeded. Which brings me to my next point…

It certainly wasn’t the case that we came up with a concept, put it into the game, and said, “There it is! It’s perfect” The road from paper design to implementation was loooonngg…. So regardless of what the paper design was, for us, that’s always just the beginning. The one thing you have to realize is that anything can look good on paper. Anything. In a written doc, you can justify your arguments, tighten any logic errors, dot your i’s and cross your t’s… but if you get it into the game, and it sucks (and it often does!) you have to change it. Most of the “bad’ games I’ve played are bad not because they’ve been crappy ideas, but because they haven’t been properly executed. It’s as if the developers were so blinded by the the awesomeness of their ideas on paper, they couldn’t accept that those same ideas just did not translate into fun gameplay. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and every developer has at one point or another, myself included.

With V.A.T.S., whether you love it or hate it, the fact remains that the system in the shipping game is one we played, and played, and played, and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked, until we found what we felt was the right balance between tactical combat and exciting gameplay. And that includes additional ideas and work by many, many people that go far beyond the original paper design. A big part of this, of course, is combat balance. I’ve seen some comments where people think Fallout 3 is too easy because of V.A.T.S — I honestly don’t think they’ll get that impression after they’ve played the game, for a few reasons:

1.) We designed the combat balance with V.A.T.S. use in mind. Trust me, those who say they won’t use it will. If there’s one thing we learned throughout development it’s that people use V.A.T.S. It just feels natural, and the camera playbacks are a kind of visual crack. So V.A.T.S. is one part tactical, one part pure visceral entertainment. Chances are at least one of those elements will appeal to you, and you’ll end up using V.A.T.S.

2.) Don’t forget, at any time, you can change the difficulty of the game. So Fallout 3 being too hard or two easy is really a non-issue. So if you DON’T want to use V.A.T.S. at all, there’s a difficulty setting you’ll be comfortable with.

3.) If you’re not careful, you’d be surprised how completely torn apart you can get in those moments when your AP bar is recharging. When you’re almost dead, and you’re out of AP, you’ve got to play really smart or you WILL die. So believe me, V.A.T.S. is not some kind of endless “get out of jail free” card.

And there you have it. At the end of the day… screw the math, screw the numbers, screw what looked brilliant in a Word doc — games are about sitting down with your hands on a controller or mouse, and playing. At the end of the day, that’s how we designed V.A.T.S., and that’s what we feel is the only way systems like that should be designed.