Fallout 3

You can't. You can't proceed feeling that way. It's like, you also can't proceed feeling like you owe the fans of Fallout anything, you can't feel bad that you're not making a turn-based isometric game. When I first started I think did feel like that, and there was a period of coming to terms with it, and just saying, "I'm going to make the best game I can make, it is what it is, and we have the skills to make an excellent game, so that's what we're going to do."

Each of the older games had a different team on it. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 had many different people working on them. We have a great deal of respect for those guys, but what we don't want to do is open up our entire design to someone outside the company who doesn't really get the culture here. For better or worse it's been ten years since the last game came out. We're very strict on authorial control. We don't want to bring someone in from outside and then only implement their ideas in a half-assed way. We have a vision for the game and we're taking it all the way through.

It's funny. Setting it in DC - it meant we knew what we needed to do. Originally we had it set on the West coast, but it just didn't work. Eventually I said, "Write what you know." So we have a location that doesn't appear all over the place in videogames. It's such a great place for a game. As for the story, I really like stories that are character-based, so how do those characters change throughout the game? So take the relationship with "my" father. He's my moral compass, a good guy, a noble character, so if I'm an evil bastard how does he react to me? If I blow up a town, what does he think?

Yeah, I'd not thought of that before. He is your moral compass too.

We really wanted to simulate growing up in the vault. Your dad is like this warm, inviting guy. He's Liam Neeson! Who wouldn't want Liam Neeson as their dad, right? Then you wake up one day and he's up and left. He hasn't told you about it, you don't know what's going on. A lot of the game is about, what is his motivation? What is he working on, why did he leave? What happened to him? That's one of the central themes of the game.

To an extent. A large part of the game is spent with him absent, so a lot of stuff happens outside of that relationship. We wanted the relationship as a central point of the plot, so we don't want you to be able to say, piss off your dad and ruin the plot. To have a narrative you have to have some parts that are more strict. We definitely want you to feel like he is a central character in your life. When he leaves it is the biggest climactic moment in your life. No one ever leaves the vault - it is entirely self-contained.

It was something we knew we needed - it was one of the key tenants of Fallout that we needed to do. Right at the top was, "choice and consequence in every quest line", as much as we possibly can. Every aspect of the game should have choice and consequence. Even choices like picking your character's stats. Those /don't change/ throughout the course of the game. You're stuck with your Special stats pretty much for the rest of the game. Every little bit from what equipment you pick up to whether you're going to shoot this guy in the head, is going to have that choice, and there are going to be consequences.