Fallout Developer Profile - Jesse Heinig
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In your opinion, what are the key ingredients that every RPG should have?
An RPG is a role-playing game, so you are playing a role - that is, you are making choices about the protagonist. In some RPGs the only choice you make is which stat to increase when you level up. A good RPG, I feel, gives you more meaty choices. To do that, you must do three things:
1. Establish a setting with versimilitude. It doesn't have to be a simulation of reality, but it needs to have enough internal consistency that the player buys into it. Then the player can feel "grounded."
2. Create groups or individuals about whom the player has a sense of investment. In Fo3, you are trying to find your father, and since the entire tutorial section has interactions with your dad, this establishes a tie and a sense of character investment. In Fo1 you are trying to save your entire vault, and later humanity. In Planescape: Torment, you are just trying to figure out who the hell you are. All of these games put you in situations where you make connections with people - or even with just your own protagonist - so you have a sense of investment in what's going on. Your choices matter because their outcomes affect the people that you, the player, have come to know and perhaps care about. Sure, they're ultimately just pictures on a computer screen, but if you even paused for a second and thought about whether it was all right to steal from Killian, or to swipe the water chip from the ghouls, or if you cheered when your character killed the Overseer, you just felt investment in the game.
3. Give the player choices that impact that setting and that investment. The "slideshow" at the end of Fo1 (and now at the end of many an RPG) gives you a sense of closure. It shows you that your actions mattered and that you actually made things happen. Similarly, when you have a choice between helping two good people (but you can only help one of them) or having to work with bad people to fulfill your goals (people who would normally be your enemy, but you can't kill 'em 'cause you need 'em), this creates a real conflict of interests that makes you think about what you're doing. Given enough time, or some cheat codes, you can overcome any fight or problem that a game can throw at you. The question in an RPG is less whether you can pursue an option, and more whether you should and why. In the Fo series, you sort of see this in the sense that you can choose to gain karma by doing heroic things without pay or compensation - "heroism is its own reward," so to speak. A more telling sort of choice would be if you have to decide something where you're not sure what outcome is really best and you make a choice based on your investment in the story and your hope for how things might turn out - like the bit with Harold in the Oasis in Fo3 (I won't spoil any more than that).
