Pete Hines on Fallout 3 Interview

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Eurogamer: Any example comes to mind when the team have crossed swords?

Pete Hines: If I could think of one, I'd tell you, but nothing springs on me. It could be really little stuff, like how do you repair weapons? Is it a separate item in the bottom of your inventory? Is it a button off to the side? We've had all kinds of debates, like how do we convey to the player their level of being hit? How do you convey to the player damage to an enemy? Little stuff like that. It should be red! It should be green! It should be here! It should be here! Sometimes it's twenty different people with twenty different opinions and Todd [Howard - Ed] goes, "okay, here's what we're doing". That's the job of the executive producer: "here's what we're doing and why - let's move on".

Eurogamer: You talked about wanting the Fallout world. I wondered - if you could get access to any franchise, what would you take? I mean, from any medium. Books, films... hell, even albums?

Pete Hines: Me personally? Probably something Tolkien. Which is probably a bad answer. If you put a gun to our heads, we probably wouldn't, as it's kind of similar [to the Elder Scrolls]. But I so love Tolkien and all his stuff, and the films were brilliant. There's lots of stuff. Which direction do I get to go? Do I get to go Blade Runner? Do I get to go Escape From New York or Batman? Around the office we're always kicking around ideas for stuff we'd like to do.

Eurogamer: Bar Liam Neeson, any voice actors you can talk about?

Pete Hines: Not that we're talking about. The bulk of the voice acting will be voice people - people who are more in the voice-acting business. We're not going for an all-name cast. So we pick out key roles for people and who we'd like for those roles and what kind of presence we thought they'd bring to it. And we always thought Liam was the perfect father figure. We have one or two other roles which we have things in mind but the bulk of it - and we have a lot of voice-acting in the game - is done by voice actors.

Not a good time to use your conversation options.

Eurogamer: We were wondering - what's the corpse-eating statistic we spotted about?

Pete Hines: We'll have to wait and find out.

Eurogamer: And any plans for the demo?

Pete Hines: We build our game much like we did in Oblivion. That is one enormous seamless world. When you build it as one thing, there's no way to portion off a section and have it stand on its own, as a little level self without putting the whole game in the demo, which we're just not going to do. And it doesn't really capture the fun of a game like an Elder Scrolls or a Fallout, where you can go where you want and do what you want. It's all about player choice, but here's one little thing where you're a rat in a box. It doesn't really capture what's great about the game. The...what do I do now? So no demo, sorry.

Eurogamer: Something that struck me, post-BioShock the retro-futurism thing is back in style again.

Pete Hines: Yes. Yes. Those guys I think did borrow somewhat from some of Fallout's iconic things. Yeah.

Eurogamer: [Laughs]

Pete Hines: That's all I'll say.

Eurogamer: ...

Pete Hines: Buggers.

Eurogamer: [Laughs loudly]

Pete Hines: Actually, Ken Levine came by our booth at E3 last year. Which was pre-BioShock. We were announcing Fallout and we were chatting about influences and stuff. It was good. It was fun to hear the sort of things from the original games that had an influence on him and BioShock. He's a good guy.