Fallout 3 Interview

The editors at Game Revolution have interviewed Bethesda’s Pete Hines, asking him fairly standard questions about Fallout 3.

GR: What particular design philosophy, if any, did the dev team follow to ‘reign themselves in’, in terms of adding game-world detail upon game-world detail? Generally speaking, at what point do you have to tear yourself away from including all sorts of clever fan-service side-quest/backstory/environmental polish detials, and just go about making a solid game?

PH: Well, usually our design philosophy is to try not to do everything, but then we usually end up doing that anyway. At a some point Todd and the producers start saying, “ok, enough is enough, we’re full.” You have to stop adding content at some point, but a lot of that comes from playing the game. Making sure the world feels dense enough, big enough. So there were things added along the way because we were trying to address issues that came up in playing the game and the way it felt.

GR: There’s an anwful lot of decidedly-not-for-kids elements in F3–explicit/implicit gore, language, innuendo, and plain old black humor–would you say that the amount of this particularly adult-oriented content has increased somewhat (from the previous games) as a natural result of the series’ continued expansion into a more sophisticated console/market?

PH: I don’t think it’s increased from the previous games, especially if you go back and look at what the original Fallouts did compared to other games of that time. They were decidedly mature and violent and we felt it was important to stay true to those themes. Because it’s now in 1st and 3rd person, it may make it more vibrant than before, but not markedly different.