Xbox 360
It's almost been 12 months since gamers first stepped out of the rusty confines of Fallout 3's Vault 101 to leave their mark on the Capital Wasteland and still the game's bleak slice of post-apocalyptic Americana continues to grow, thanks to the continuing stream of downloadable content. There's no faulting the efforts of developer Bethesda for prolonging the title and it is clear that the team have a great love for their creation. As did the SquareGo staff and readers, naming Fallout 3 the third best game of last year in our poll.
While the uneducated lazily refer to Fallout 3 as ‘Oblivion with guns', it has left a lasting impression on those who spent hours trying to find their path in the deep game world. With the fifth and possibly final downloadable expansion pack Mothership Zeta launching on PC and Xbox 360 August 3rd, we got in touch with Bethesda for some reflection on this truly modern classic. There's no denying that the game is broad in scope and while it was smaller than the developer's previous hit Oblivion geographically, the Capital Wasteland is a much denser place.
We asked Lead Designer for Fallout 3 Emil Pagliarulo just how you begin to create something so ambitious: "We're talking about two completely different tasks, really: the creation of the fiction of the back story and the actual creation of the gameplay space. When creating the fiction, we adhered to the general rule that the Capital Wasteland is dangerous and lawless. There's no centralized government, which is one of the reasons the Enclave is so eager to take over. There are pockets of law, but they're isolated, and there's a real sense that each small group is concerned only with itself. So using that as a backdrop, everything fell into place naturally and we were able to concentrate on the game's core themes of survival and sacrifice."
"Creating the game world proved to be a bit more difficult. In a large open-ended game in which the player traverses the space by walking, scale is always an issue. Does it take too long to walk across the world and if so, is that boring? Does the player cross the world too quickly, thereby making the environment seem too small and, of course, there's the issue of it being a post-apocalyptic Wasteland. You've got to have a world that's desolate on the one hand, yet beautiful to look at on the other."
While the game depicts the last remnants of the civilised world, there is something beautiful about it all. The isolation felt by the player as they traverse the rocky plains, with only the wind and sunset as their companion allow for moments of reflection that occasionally get under your skin. Ask any of your friends who have played through the game in its entirety and it's likely they came away with a vastly different experience to your own.
We ask Emil how the team created something so personal and engaging. "That's a great question, and a fantastic compliment. I think that, in order to create a game that comes across as personal and engaging, you need to come from a place that is, in fact, extremely personal. Let's take Fallout 3's story, for example, which focuses on the protagonist's quest for his or her father, and the reasons that father essentially abandoned his only child. Both Todd Howard and I have young sons. So there was something intensely personal with the theme of a child searching for his father and the kind of love a father has for his young child. You know, we'd talk about our kids all the time, and it felt very natural for these themes to find their way into Fallout 3."
"But even beyond that, we had a dev team with something to prove. For most of these guys and gals, Fallout 3 was a labour of love. There was true passion there and when you're passionate about what you're doing, your work feels truly inspired. Combine that with a dedication to creating compelling gameplay and letting the player determine his or her own fate and you've got something that, hopefully, gamers feel was crafted by people who understand what they're looking for."
We feel at this point we have to ask the question that always seems to come up and get some sort of closure once and for all: Is this just Oblivion with guns? Emil explains: "It's funny, because this is something we at Bethesda obviously had to come to terms with really early on, so I think we have a bit of a different take on this. To get offended by the "Oblivion with guns" moniker, you have to view it as an insult; it almost assumes that Oblivion is a bad game. So we obviously beg to differ on that point. But, you know, there's no denying some similarities such as giant open-ended world, the player walks around, it's mostly first-person. We get that, and we're comfortable with it. Also, very early on, someone asked Todd Howard if he thought Fallout 3 was "Oblivion with Guns," and his response was something like, "In all the best ways." I think that pretty accurately sums up how we feel about the comparison."
Call it what you will, but one element that really set the two games apart is the superb V.A.T.S. system that was a breath of fresh air in a role-playing genre currently plagued by slow turn-based systems and real-time button bashing scraps. It's slick and it works well, but how did it come about? Emil describes the process: "We started with a fairly simple design, with two goals: to offer the player body-part targeting similar to what was offered in the previous Fallout game, and to give the player a really visceral experience, similar to Burnout's Crash Mode. It was meant to be quick, and easy for the player to use. However, for all the additional features we added, we had to continually ask "is this still fun?" When we found ourselves increasingly answering "no", we went back to the simpler version, refined it, and that's what we shipped with. We're really happy with that decision."
Fallout 3's expansion packs have all added something new to the experience so we ask Emil where they decide how to build upon the game world with each new pack. Emil reflects: "DLC has been incredibly successful for us, and we know our fans have loved the steady stream of content. We sort of view DLC as a way to stretch our creative wings, and offer players the types of things they maybe wouldn't normally get in the base game. Featuring a snowy environment in Operation: Anchorage, for example, or sending the player into outer space onboard an alien spacecraft in Mothership Zeta. With the DLCs, we're much more willing to investigate the weirder side of the Fallout universe, However, if you go too far in the opposite direction, you end up changing the core experience and not necessarily giving fans the type of gameplay experience they want. So it's been a real learning experience for us."
With time drawing short and Emil having to get back to the Bethesda Vault to finish up on Mothership Zeta, we ask the defining question: Did he blow up Megaton or save it first time round? Emil reveals: "For some reason, I have a lot of trouble playing as the evil guy in a game. It's weird, but I always like to play the hero. So even though I love creating evil content for the player to experience, it's very difficult for me to experience that myself. I feel like such an asshole. You'd think it would be cathartic, but it's not. It probably has something to do with my bad Catholic guilt complex."
"So I'd be a diffuser. Definitely."
Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta is available on PC and Xbox 360 August 3rd and Playstation 3 shortly after.