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what they didn’t like, what they wanted
more of, what they wish the game
had included or done... It’s far more
helpful to look at those experiences in
deciding what to include or try.
So when you talk about a
game like Dishonored,
the team at Arkane pores
over and talks a lot about
the feedback on Dishonored.
Because that’s real, tangible info from millions of
people who actually played something and can
tell you what they thought.
We live in a world where just about every
game is leaked somewhere along the line,
but you kept Fallout 4 a secret right up to the
official announcement. How did you manage
that?
I put a lot of my S.P.E.C.I.A.L. points into Luck.
When you’re working on a game like
Fallout 4 over a substantial time period, is it
challenging to stay focused on the original
vision? How much does the game change
from the original brief?
Todd Howard has often said, “great games
are played, not made.” So the focus for BGS is
not really on briefs or design docs. Those are
really only helpful to a point. What really matters
is putting the idea into the game and
trying it and seeing if it works or
not.
For example, I think the combat
system in Skyrim is the third one
the team came up with. The first
two probably sounded good –
looked good on paper – but
when you actually played
it in the game, it wasn’t
what they wanted. So
they threw that out
and did it again. And
again. So our games
evolve a lot over time as a result, because much
like the earlier question about fan feedback,
the changes are coming due to actual hands-
on experience, not reading a doc and deciding
whether it’s fun or not. Much like the saying
about battle plans, no design doc ever survives
contact with the player.
How does the narrative take shape on a game
like Fallout 4? Does one writer pen the story
autonomously, or do you have a writing
team? Can anybody within the development
team suggest ideas for the narrative path?
It’s a collaborative process. There is one
person that runs point on the main story, but
others have input into that process and a lot of
people participate in the bigger story of “what’s
going on in this world? Who are the people and
factions in the world, what matters to them, how
do they feel about each other, and how does the
player experience all of that?”
With a game like Wolfenstein, for example,
there’s pretty much one story: the main story.
With Fallout 4, the story is really your story and
what you decide to do and who you want to be,
and so as a result there are so many more pieces
that go into it. We really can’t predict what any
given player might decide to do or see at any
point in time. As a result, you don’t have the
luxury of focusing in on one story that everyone
will experience in the same way. You have to
accommodate an almost infinite number of
stories and allow people to decide how
and when they want to experience those.
Which is part of what (IMHO) makes Fallout
4 so great. You take 10 people and let
them play the game for 10 hours
and they have 10 completely
different stories to tell
and share, of what they
did and saw, and what
choices they made,
and the way they
played the game.
Are you applying the same methodology to
the DOOM reboot?
In a lot of ways, yes. DOOM has the challenge
of not having had a new game in that franchise
come out in over 10 years. So there are a lot of
fans of first-person shooters who don’t really
know what DOOM is. They’ve been playing a
lot of other franchises that have come out far
more frequently. When you ask them about first-
person shooters they love, they don’t say DOOM
because they were seven or eight years-old
when DOOM 3 came out.
So the id Software team looked back at the
original games in the franchise and tried to focus
in on what made those games so fun,
and popular. Similar to Wolfenstein,
you get down to “what is the DNA of
this game? What made it special?”
And I think to their credit they have
been able to hone in on those things and
figure out how to bring those things into
a modern shooter. Demons, big guns,
fast-paced, visceral combat. No
cover system. No “if you stop
getting shot for a while your health
will go back to 100”. No backing
up. You want to stay alive? Move
forward and kill the demons before they kill
you. There’s even weapons that reward you for
movement. Multiplayer is fast and fun and erupts
into hundreds of back-and-forth duels between
players, rather than so many of the one-shot
“who pulled the trigger first?” encounters you
see in a lot of multiplayer games.
The reaction to folks playing it at QuakeCon for
the first time was great. They got it. It felt fresh
and nostalgic and fast and brutal and fun, which
is what they were going for.
How’s Dishonored 2 progressing?What can
we expect from the second instalment?
It’s coming along well. The team is excited.
Having spent a lot of the first game figuring out
the “rules” of the Dishonored world, they now
get to focus a lot more energy on what they want
to do new/different for Dishonored 2. So far, I
love what I see. The story, the development of
Emily as a playable character, the new things we
are adding to the game.
Many devs cite fan input as an important
process in the development of a game.When
you're building a game like Fallout 4, do you
incorporate any community feedback from
forums, etc?
For any game, we focus on feedback that
comes from playing the game. For the most
part, taking feedback on game mechanics or
design from someone who hasn’t actually played
the game isn’t productive. So for Fallout 4 , the
feedback that is most helpful is from people
who played Skyrim, or Fallout 3. What they liked,
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062 NOVEMBER 2015