STACK #133 Nov 2016

GAMES

FEATURE

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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

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

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 .

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,

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 F allout 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

and share, of what they did and saw, and what choices they made,

• Fallout 4 is out Nov 10

they threw that out and did it again. And again. So our games

and the way they played the game.

NOVEMBER 2015

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