STACK #145 Nov 2016

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Fallout 4

Generally speaking, we’re looking for studios that have a decent amount of experience. We want to work with people who have proven that they have figured out who they are and what they’re about. I mean, when you look at the Arkane guys - even before we acquired them, they were just a studio that we really wanted to work with, because we really respected and appreciated stuff they’d done in the past. There was this really clear dedication to immersive, first-person games that they had, which fit with our sensibilities and trying to do unique things. When you think about working with external developers, like one we’re working with right now, Dire Wolf Digital, doing the Elder Scrolls online – we thought, ‘look, these guys can take what they know, and work with us to take something that we know and love, which is the Elder Scrolls, and make something cool and unique.’ It’s not that anything that we do sets out to be earth-shattering, necessarily; it’s just if you can do something in a way that is different enough, or brings enough new content in, you can breathe a lot of new life into a very familiar experience. In all

of these cases, we try and look for that mix of experience and creativity, and a willingness to try and do new things. What about DLC for your games? Is that something that’s thought about during the development of the main game?Who ends up working on it? For the most part, it really gets no thought or attention until we’re done making the base game. That doesn’t mean the game has to have shipped first - it just means that there’s a point at which you stop making content, and stop making the game in order to finish it, right; you have to stop changing quests and changing things. You have to let it go. It gets to the point where it’s like, we’re wrapping it up and squashing bugs and so forth, and maybe somebody will start to think about

what the first drop of DLC may end up being. But, you know, a lot of the stuff we come up with, we don’t really do a lot of work on until after the game is out, because then you can start to see what people are reacting to, what they enjoy, what they’re asking about, the things they want more of. Otherwise you end up doing a bunch of stuff with no information, and potentially releasing a lot of stuff people may not care about. Fallout 3 is a perfect example; much to our surprise, although maybe it shouldn’t have been, people didn’t want the game to end. We were like, ‘wait a minute, all the previous Fallout games ended, and everybody else’s game ends, what do you mean you didn’t want it to end,

we thought that’s what you guys expected? It’s a Fallout game. Fallout

games have an end.’ There with this whole, ‘No, it shouldn’t end, I want to keep going’ concept going on. So,

Fallout 4

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