» Tue Mar 16, 2010 4:27 pm My question for Chris is: What did you think when you heard Bethesda were making Fallout 3? And what did you think of the game when you played it?
I was pretty pleased - Oblivion + Fallout seemed like a great combination to me. Also, I heard they gave Tim Cain some advance looks at F3, and he seemed happy with it, so I was pretty interested in playing it. I trust Tim. In a minor note, though, I was a little sad that my alcoholic drug-addicted psychopath couldn’t murder everyone in Vault 101 during the escape, but maybe that’s a good thing. I must have chased that robot and my “girlfriend” (my psychotic mind knew she’d been telling lies and plotting my murder behind my back) around for a half-hour beating them both into constant states of unconsciousness before giving up and embracing my Vault freedom. I did enjoy the opening and the exploration afterwards, though, and had fun, and even more gratifying to me was a lot of developers I knew who weren’t RPG fans were playing it and loving it as well, so kudos to Bethesda.
I was pretty pleased - Oblivion + Fallout seemed like a great combination to me. Also, I heard they gave Tim Cain some advance looks at F3, and he seemed happy with it, so I was pretty interested in playing it. I trust Tim. In a minor note, though, I was a little sad that my alcoholic drug-addicted psychopath couldn’t murder everyone in Vault 101 during the escape, but maybe that’s a good thing. I must have chased that robot and my “girlfriend” (my psychotic mind knew she’d been telling lies and plotting my murder behind my back) around for a half-hour beating them both into constant states of unconsciousness before giving up and embracing my Vault freedom. I did enjoy the opening and the exploration afterwards, though, and had fun, and even more gratifying to me was a lot of developers I knew who weren’t RPG fans were playing it and loving it as well, so kudos to Bethesda.
Will we ever see Obsidian return to its Planescape roots, as we are seeing with Bioware and Dragon Age?
Probably not, I don’t even know who has the Planescape license now, and I’m afraid if I went back to it, I’d [censored] up a good thing. Then again, we’re going full circle on Fallout now and that’s going well, but I’m not working on that project (it’s in the very capable hands of Mr. J.E. Sawyer), so that probably explains why it’s going well.
Probably not, I don’t even know who has the Planescape license now, and I’m afraid if I went back to it, I’d [censored] up a good thing. Then again, we’re going full circle on Fallout now and that’s going well, but I’m not working on that project (it’s in the very capable hands of Mr. J.E. Sawyer), so that probably explains why it’s going well.
So he's not working on New Vegas.
Chris, you’ve worked on a bunch of games that have been cancelled (Van Buren, Torn) or had lots of content cut out (KOTOR2). How do you handle it when something you’ve worked on for months or years ends up being released in an imcomplete state or not released at all?
You drink, sigh, and move on. I actually got numb to it early on in my career (Monte Cook, an editor at Hero Games, would routinely reject my submissions I’d spent months or years on, and he was right to do so because they svcked – I also had ten module proposals to Dungeon all rejected one after the other), so it wasn’t too bad when it started happening at work. The only time it really hurt was Fallout 3, because that game felt like it had the potential to be better than Torment, and when I was working on it, I could feel the inner creativity “sing” because it felt like everything was clicking into place.
Also, as a consolation prize, you find you can usually transfer design elements from one game to the other in terms of systems or new uses for characters that you did for the “flushed” design that you can use later on.
You drink, sigh, and move on. I actually got numb to it early on in my career (Monte Cook, an editor at Hero Games, would routinely reject my submissions I’d spent months or years on, and he was right to do so because they svcked – I also had ten module proposals to Dungeon all rejected one after the other), so it wasn’t too bad when it started happening at work. The only time it really hurt was Fallout 3, because that game felt like it had the potential to be better than Torment, and when I was working on it, I could feel the inner creativity “sing” because it felt like everything was clicking into place.
Also, as a consolation prize, you find you can usually transfer design elements from one game to the other in terms of systems or new uses for characters that you did for the “flushed” design that you can use later on.
Edit: This is summarized, more questions are on the actual article.
