Fallout 3 Interview

The editors at bit-tech.net have conjured up an interesting four-page Fallout 3 interview with Bethedsa’s Pete Hines.

BT: So, you can change the course of a quest based on what you say?

Pete: Yeah. You can pass-by quests if you act the wrong way to people. If someone asks for help and you say ‘˜No, screw you’, then you’ll almost pass that quest by.

BT: So, if you’re consistently bad to people then do you get sucked into a different path through the game?

Pete: No. We don’t detract that, so if you do bad stuff and say bad things then your karma will go down and affect a few things, but it’s more important that the response you get on a case-by-case basis is appropriate to your actions.

What we don’t do is say ‘˜You are this level of evil, so you can do all this now’, because if it isn’t obvious the player that you’re doing that then the game is just arbitrarily deciding. You have to have it so that the player knows they are in control of something.

BT: What do you think is the most important thing Bethesda has bought to the franchise then?

Pete: Other than that it exists? Um, that’s a good question. At the end of the day, I’m not sure. I hope what we’ve done it bring forward the game so old fans can enjoy it all over again and the new gamers can discover it. I don’t know if there’s any one feature though we’re just trying to balance between having the old tone and reinventing the franchise.

We’ve seen it so many times before, that if you just keep reiterating on what was done before then your franchise will die. We have hundreds of examples of games that we used to play and which are no longer around because all they did was copy the last game. We want to shake things up a little bit more.

Because it ever happens that someone tries to shake up a franchise and it dies because of that, right, Pete?