Fallout 2 Interview

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Interview with Eric and Feargus

IGN What makes Fallout 2 different from its predecessor?

Feargus First off, we rewrote the world map, made it possible for areas to be re-entered, so that it's easier to come and go again. One of the comments about Fallout 1 was that everything was on the map all of the time, and now people will be able to go anywhere at anytime, again and again, and they'll have to plot where to go. It's kind of a minor issue but what it also allows us to do is make patches for the game after the release, sort of like Total Annihilation.

IGN That's an excellent idea, gamers always like new additions for their games.

Feargus Yes, that kind of keeps things going for the game.

Eric A few of them will be really amazing, and we want to keep the hype going about the game.

Feargus We have the Internet and we have the Web, so that really makes it more possible to create these additions.
Another comment that gamers had about the game is that it wasn't big enough. You could finish it in a short period of time, like 25-30 hours if you played really kinda hard-core on it. The game took about 60 hours if you played it a little more roundabout, and you couldn't really finish it in less than 25 hours. So one of the goals we set out for ourselves was to increase the size of Fallout by about 50%. And also make the player actually have to do more as he's going through the game.

IGN When you say there's more to do in an RPG, there are numerous things you could be talking about, like to talk to more people, find more, fight more, integrate a bigger, more complex story to discover. Can you specify what you mean?

Feargus I guess what I mean is... in Fallout the story and the dialog are the same thing in a lot of ways because most of the story is given through dialog. The dialogs are pretty expansive and they're not very linear and they depend upon what the player is doing in the world and what's he's found out up until that time, so they're pretty complicated. We spent a lot of our time on the descriptions, so I guess what that means (laughs) is that we're spending a lot of our time on the dialog this time around, and it wouldn't surprise me if we're spending 50% more of our time just on the dialog just this far along in the project.

Eric This game is different. Essentially, in the first game there were a lot of small tasks. You had to get the lotto chip, you had to destroy the master, and the military base. Those were the critical things. You had to find this guy and take care of his problem, and then steal a necklace and in this game we want to add to both levels of that. There are more steps that you will have to go through to finish the game. That supposed 25 hours will now be at least 40 hours. And as it turns out there are about 100% more little random things that you can do. 'OK, so I find this guy and I talk to him and he told me a bit about the world, and he made me go do this, or he saw that I had this weapon and told me I could so this,' and it's that kind of stuff that will be a bigger part of this game.

Feargus We're also making the game deeper. Last time you could just play the good guy, well, this time you can also play the bad guy. We're creating a concurrent path for both the good and the bad guys, depending on whom you choose. Here's an example.
In the game there is this kid and he's lost his dog. You can talk to him and you can decide to play the nice guy and go find his dog. Or you can just say, 'Screw you, deal with it yourself.' And then the kid runs off. And then if you go to where the kid and the dog are on the map, you'll find that both are dead on the map.
[But] we've included in the game a thing called Karma. So, if the player saves the dog he will get positive karma, and if he lets it die, he'll receive negative karma. It's not like if you have negative karma it's detrimental to you, you actually get different benefits from either having negative or positive karma. It's just that people react differently to you in the game. If you walk into a town and you've got a karma of negative 500, people will stay far away from you. You know, they'll just get the feeling that you're this crazed lunatic. (laughter)

Your Karma Ran Over My Dogma

IGN Are you unable to get as much information with negative karma?

Feargus Just to whittle it down into a very simplistic model, what we have is good guys and bad guys. People in the villages can detect karma, so if you decide to earn negative karma then your karma will appear as positive karma to the bad guys. So in essence, these bad guys will be more responsive to you if you have negative karma.

Eric So, if you go to the seedy part of town and you're a 'bad guy,' you'll get all the information you need. But if you go to a church social and you're a bad guy, nobody talks to you.

IGN This is interesting because gamers like to play the bad guy part. Peter Molyneux's (BullFrog) Dungeon Keeper pitted gamers in the role of the bad guy running dungeons and it was really attractive to gamers.

Eric Right, and it gives the player a moral choice. 'Damn, I got that kid killed,' OK it's a videogame, but chances are some people are going to restart their game.

IGN OK, so say I played the game all the way through with really negative karma, and I was really evil, if I were to play the game through again with positive karma, would I get a different story, would I get more information, would I get a different ending? And is there more than one ending?

Feargus Here's how it works, there is one ending, so even though you've chosen to be an evil bastard, you're still this evil bastard that's supposed to save this village. So, I guess in AD&D terms you're lawful evil. You're mission is still the same. However, what the game also does at the ending is that it recounts how the world reacted to your playing of the game. So, over in Redding if you screwed the miners, in the end you'll see a slide show that explains what happened because of your actions. If you're a good guy then you'll go on to be a happy miner. If you're a bad guy, then you'll go into the mine and die. So, you still solve the game, in essence, but you get to see the consequences of what you did.

Eric To create two different endings of the game, you know, two different experiences within the same game is pretty unrealistic, so that it would be two different games. And you would probably end up with two really weak games, instead of one really strong one.

Feargus If you're the bad guy the ends justifies the means. You know, it isn't what I'm doing, I'll get there no matter how, no matter who I have to kill, what I have to steal from. But if I'm a good guy, then the means are important.

IGN Now does Karma In Fallout 2 play a much bigger role than in the first Fallout?

Feargus Yeah, a lot more. It had a direct effect on the abilities of your character. When you reach different levels of karma, your character has different abilities.

Eric You get perks.

Feargus You can do different things.

IGN Is it like experience points?

Feargus Kind of like experience points, but, well, it's karma, that's the best way of explaining it. (laughter)

Eric It's a just a separate system, and in Fallout 1 it was there, but it was really subtle. So, you're like, 'Oh, I'm a child killer, bummer.' (laughter) You didn't really know what you were missing. But in Fallout 2 we want to make it clearer, we want to make some bigger benefits. If you're a super, duper good guy then you'll get this skill. Or, vice versa, if you're a super duper bad guy, you get an equivalent skill.

Feargus They're both positive in that they allow you to push the character in that particular direction

The Nuclear Age Revisited

IGN What else differentiates Fallout 2 from the first that will make it a better game?

Feargus What will make it a better game? I think this time, at least in the development process, we're being much more careful about things like karma, character development, and things like reputations for individuals and for towns. And taking all of these things into account into the dialogs they have. We didn't do such a good job of that in the first Fallout. It was there, but we had to learn as we were going through how to do it right, so this time we're doing a much better job. So the person will have a much different feeling when they're playing the game.
Another thing is that some people have asked for a new and better unarmed combat system. So instead of guns, they can use just fists and kicks. So we have a whole new system in there, that's just for that type of player. This time around there is a car, so players can use that. The car makes it so that players can travel across the lands much quicker. They can avoid random encounters if they want to.

IGN Isn't that kind of strange to have a car in an RPG?

Feargus Well, in a lot of the console RPGs, there is always some kind of teleporter that will zap you back once you finish exploring that particular area. But you know, having to walk this huge distance more than once or twice can get a little annoying.

Eric It's not like you drive the car around in the city maps.

IGN What kind of car is it?

Feargus It's a '57 Chevy convertible that we converted to a hardtop.

IGN Is it one of your favorite cars?

Feargus Well, the look in Fallout has always been this retro, futuristic '50s look. So it's as if the '50s just stopped, and then went on for 30 years but the style never changed. Initially we were going to use a more '60s looking car, and then we got all Mad Max...

Eric And it didn't really fit with the look.

Feargus It didn't really fit with the look, and it didn't really fit with the sort of vacuum tubes and that kind of stuff that we put in there. Everything is analog instead of digital in the game...

IGN So a Jetta wouldn't have worked for your game?

Eric (laughter) Yeah, a Charger, or a car with really big fins...Yeah, we kicked around a lot of ideas.

The Chosen One

IGN So, is Vault Dweller still the main character?

Eric Actually, it's Vault Dweller's descendent. If you played the first game you wandered off into the wasteland in the end. In Fallout 2, the scenario starts 50 years later and the Chosen One is the new character. In the first game there was a Vault manual [referring to the last few pages of the Fallout Manual on which there's a funny little ad], and a little survival guide thing, well that's like the new villager's Bible. They've kind of like deified all of this technology, and their crops are failing and they've read about this Garden of Eden solution, so they're like, 'We've got to get this, this will fix everything.' So they decide that they've got to send someone off to the vault. So it becomes this like religious icon thing. They're a really primitive tribe, so off they send the Chosen One.

Feargus And the thing is that the player really doesn't know where the Vault is, so he needs to go to the first city, talk to a specific guy who helps to arm your character, and that's, in short, how the game starts off.

Characters and Detail In Balance

IGN Obviously Fallout 2 isn't Unreal or Quake 2, but certainly there was room for improvement over the first title. Have you implemented any new special effects, or make any leaps in technology with Fallout 2?

Eric Well, no not really. We didn't try to get too high tech. But mainly we did discover that we could do some really cool things with the engine which we just didn't have time to do in the first game. We discovered a lot of things that we could do at the very end of Fallout. We would say, 'Oh, we can this, and that,' but we just didn't have time at the end to the development process.

IGN What were those elements you discovered?

Feargus Some of them have to do with just how we put graphics on the map, which is tile-based. So, we're giving you the illusion of a full, 3D world, and essentially we're doing more to make the game look a lot less like a tile-based game. And other changes we've done aren't so much technology-based, but the combat AI is getting completely rewritten. A lot of people had a problem with it, and it'll be a lot...well, more intelligent.

IGN People criticized the group combat mostly. How do you plan on altering and improving it?

Eric Whether there was 10 guys or one on screen, they didn't work in cooperation together. They didn't really have any awareness of each other. There are also balance issues, like for instance with the Turbo Plasma Rifle; once you had that you could pretty much defeat anything or anyone. Once you got that and the power armor, you were unstoppable. So, we're working on group combat, balance, and NPCs. You'd start a fight and you'd be the super sniper guy (or I would anyway), and so you'd be picking guys off and be really happy, and your NPC guys would just run off into the middle of like 30 guys. And they couldn't wear certain types of armor or use certain kinds of weapons, and that will change.

Feargus That's right, the NPCs couldn't be controlled that well before, and you couldn't tell them to do certain things, and so we added a lot of functionality into them this time around. You can now tell them to do certain things, you can modify them, you can have them do different things in combat. In combat they can now be told to charge or stay far back, or stay near the main player, or they can be told to charge a specific enemy. In total, they'll act a lot more like the player, rather than just drones. Also, the NPCs will have different personalities and characteristics so that you can really get into them.

IGN Thanks for your time guys and good luck on the project.

Fallout 2 looks to hit store shelves in October this year, and retail for about $49 to $54. It will be published by Interplay/Black Isles Productions, and is being developed by Black Island Studios, Interplay's in-house RPG division.

-- Douglass Perry

IGN	That's an excellent idea, gamers always like new additions for their games.
Feargus	Yes, that kind of keeps things going for the game.
Eric	A few of them will be really amazing, and we want to keep the hype going about the game.
Feargus	We have the Internet and we have the Web, so that really makes it more possible to create these additions. Another comment that gamers had about the game is that it wasn't big enough. You could finish it in a short period of time, like 25-30 hours if you played really kinda hard-core on it. The game took about 60 hours if you played it a little more roundabout, and you couldn't really finish it in less than 25 hours. So one of the goals we set out for ourselves was to increase the size of Fallout by about 50%. And also make the player actually have to do more as he's going through the game.

IGN	When you say there's more to do in an RPG, there are numerous things you could be talking about, like to talk to more people, find more, fight more, integrate a bigger, more complex story to discover. Can you specify what you mean?
Feargus	I guess what I mean is... in Fallout the story and the dialog are the same thing in a lot of ways because most of the story is given through dialog. The dialogs are pretty expansive and they're not very linear and they depend upon what the player is doing in the world and what's he's found out up until that time, so they're pretty complicated. We spent a lot of our time on the descriptions, so I guess what that means (laughs) is that we're spending a lot of our time on the dialog this time around, and it wouldn't surprise me if we're spending 50% more of our time just on the dialog just this far along in the project.
Eric	This game is different. Essentially, in the first game there were a lot of small tasks. You had to get the lotto chip, you had to destroy the master, and the military base. Those were the critical things. You had to find this guy and take care of his problem, and then steal a necklace and in this game we want to add to both levels of that. There are more steps that you will have to go through to finish the game. That supposed 25 hours will now be at least 40 hours. And as it turns out there are about 100% more little random things that you can do. 'OK, so I find this guy and I talk to him and he told me a bit about the world, and he made me go do this, or he saw that I had this weapon and told me I could so this,' and it's that kind of stuff that will be a bigger part of this game.
Feargus	We're also making the game deeper. Last time you could just play the good guy, well, this time you can also play the bad guy. We're creating a concurrent path for both the good and the bad guys, depending on whom you choose. Here's an example. In the game there is this kid and he's lost his dog. You can talk to him and you can decide to play the nice guy and go find his dog. Or you can just say, 'Screw you, deal with it yourself.' And then the kid runs off. And then if you go to where the kid and the dog are on the map, you'll find that both are dead on the map. [But] we've included in the game a thing called Karma. So, if the player saves the dog he will get positive karma, and if he lets it die, he'll receive negative karma. It's not like if you have negative karma it's detrimental to you, you actually get different benefits from either having negative or positive karma. It's just that people react differently to you in the game. If you walk into a town and you've got a karma of negative 500, people will stay far away from you. You know, they'll just get the feeling that you're this crazed lunatic. (laughter)

IGN	Are you unable to get as much information with negative karma?
Feargus	Just to whittle it down into a very simplistic model, what we have is good guys and bad guys. People in the villages can detect karma, so if you decide to earn negative karma then your karma will appear as positive karma to the bad guys. So in essence, these bad guys will be more responsive to you if you have negative karma.
Eric	So, if you go to the seedy part of town and you're a 'bad guy,' you'll get all the information you need. But if you go to a church social and you're a bad guy, nobody talks to you.

IGN	This is interesting because gamers like to play the bad guy part. Peter Molyneux's (BullFrog) Dungeon Keeper pitted gamers in the role of the bad guy running dungeons and it was really attractive to gamers.
Eric	Right, and it gives the player a moral choice. 'Damn, I got that kid killed,' OK it's a videogame, but chances are some people are going to restart their game.

IGN	OK, so say I played the game all the way through with really negative karma, and I was really evil, if I were to play the game through again with positive karma, would I get a different story, would I get more information, would I get a different ending? And is there more than one ending?
Feargus	Here's how it works, there is one ending, so even though you've chosen to be an evil bastard, you're still this evil bastard that's supposed to save this village. So, I guess in AD&D terms you're lawful evil. You're mission is still the same. However, what the game also does at the ending is that it recounts how the world reacted to your playing of the game. So, over in Redding if you screwed the miners, in the end you'll see a slide show that explains what happened because of your actions. If you're a good guy then you'll go on to be a happy miner. If you're a bad guy, then you'll go into the mine and die. So, you still solve the game, in essence, but you get to see the consequences of what you did.
Eric	To create two different endings of the game, you know, two different experiences within the same game is pretty unrealistic, so that it would be two different games. And you would probably end up with two really weak games, instead of one really strong one.
Feargus	If you're the bad guy the ends justifies the means. You know, it isn't what I'm doing, I'll get there no matter how, no matter who I have to kill, what I have to steal from. But if I'm a good guy, then the means are important.

IGN	Now does Karma In Fallout 2 play a much bigger role than in the first Fallout?
Feargus	Yeah, a lot more. It had a direct effect on the abilities of your character. When you reach different levels of karma, your character has different abilities.
Eric	You get perks.
Feargus	You can do different things.

IGN	Is it like experience points?
Feargus	Kind of like experience points, but, well, it's karma, that's the best way of explaining it. (laughter)
Eric	It's a just a separate system, and in Fallout 1 it was there, but it was really subtle. So, you're like, 'Oh, I'm a child killer, bummer.' (laughter) You didn't really know what you were missing. But in Fallout 2 we want to make it clearer, we want to make some bigger benefits. If you're a super, duper good guy then you'll get this skill. Or, vice versa, if you're a super duper bad guy, you get an equivalent skill.
Feargus	They're both positive in that they allow you to push the character in that particular direction

IGN	Isn't that kind of strange to have a car in an RPG?
Feargus	Well, in a lot of the console RPGs, there is always some kind of teleporter that will zap you back once you finish exploring that particular area. But you know, having to walk this huge distance more than once or twice can get a little annoying.
Eric	It's not like you drive the car around in the city maps.

IGN	What kind of car is it?
Feargus	It's a '57 Chevy convertible that we converted to a hardtop.

IGN	Is it one of your favorite cars?
Feargus	Well, the look in Fallout has always been this retro, futuristic '50s look. So it's as if the '50s just stopped, and then went on for 30 years but the style never changed. Initially we were going to use a more '60s looking car, and then we got all Mad Max...
Eric	And it didn't really fit with the look.
Feargus	It didn't really fit with the look, and it didn't really fit with the sort of vacuum tubes and that kind of stuff that we put in there. Everything is analog instead of digital in the game...

IGN	So a Jetta wouldn't have worked for your game?
Eric	(laughter) Yeah, a Charger, or a car with really big fins...Yeah, we kicked around a lot of ideas.

IGN	So, is Vault Dweller still the main character?
Eric	Actually, it's Vault Dweller's descendent. If you played the first game you wandered off into the wasteland in the end. In Fallout 2, the scenario starts 50 years later and the Chosen One is the new character. In the first game there was a Vault manual [referring to the last few pages of the Fallout Manual on which there's a funny little ad], and a little survival guide thing, well that's like the new villager's Bible. They've kind of like deified all of this technology, and their crops are failing and they've read about this Garden of Eden solution, so they're like, 'We've got to get this, this will fix everything.' So they decide that they've got to send someone off to the vault. So it becomes this like religious icon thing. They're a really primitive tribe, so off they send the Chosen One.
Feargus	And the thing is that the player really doesn't know where the Vault is, so he needs to go to the first city, talk to a specific guy who helps to arm your character, and that's, in short, how the game starts off.

IGN	Obviously Fallout 2 isn't Unreal or Quake 2, but certainly there was room for improvement over the first title. Have you implemented any new special effects, or make any leaps in technology with Fallout 2?
Eric	Well, no not really. We didn't try to get too high tech. But mainly we did discover that we could do some really cool things with the engine which we just didn't have time to do in the first game. We discovered a lot of things that we could do at the very end of Fallout. We would say, 'Oh, we can this, and that,' but we just didn't have time at the end to the development process.

IGN	People criticized the group combat mostly. How do you plan on altering and improving it?
Eric	Whether there was 10 guys or one on screen, they didn't work in cooperation together. They didn't really have any awareness of each other. There are also balance issues, like for instance with the Turbo Plasma Rifle; once you had that you could pretty much defeat anything or anyone. Once you got that and the power armor, you were unstoppable. So, we're working on group combat, balance, and NPCs. You'd start a fight and you'd be the super sniper guy (or I would anyway), and so you'd be picking guys off and be really happy, and your NPC guys would just run off into the middle of like 30 guys. And they couldn't wear certain types of armor or use certain kinds of weapons, and that will change.
Feargus	That's right, the NPCs couldn't be controlled that well before, and you couldn't tell them to do certain things, and so we added a lot of functionality into them this time around. You can now tell them to do certain things, you can modify them, you can have them do different things in combat. In combat they can now be told to charge or stay far back, or stay near the main player, or they can be told to charge a specific enemy. In total, they'll act a lot more like the player, rather than just drones. Also, the NPCs will have different personalities and characteristics so that you can really get into them.