Fallout 3 Interviews
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GameSpy: What sort of differences does the Washington DC setting have on dialects and personalities, as opposed to the western U.S. setting of the first two games?
Emil Pagliarulo: Very little, actually. You have to remember that this is two hundred years after the nuclear war, so Washington DC hasn't existed as an entity for two centuries. There are no regional dialects, so sense of unified culture or society. And that's really the problem, isn't it? The Capital Wasteland is a mess. You've got all these these little isolationist factions, but there's no unification, no centralized government.
As you play the game and listen to President Eden's speeches on the Enclave radio station, you quickly realize that that's sort of his platform -- when and if he shows up in the Capital Wasteland, he'll make everything right again. He'll return America to the land of the free and the home of the brave, replete with white picket fences and apple pies. I mean, it's obviously propaganda, but when you've got nothing, and someone offers you everything, it's kind of hard not to listen -- even if your heart tells you it's complete BS.
And a snip from Gaming Nexus' interview:
It's been so long since there was a Fallout game. What were some of the things you did to prepare you for creating a world in the style that Fallout is known for? Did you play a lot of the previous games again? Did you draw on other influences?
Yeah, personally, I replayed all the Fallout games again, just to sort of get my head back into the experience. I was actually amazed how well Fallout ran on my machine with no tweaking!
I also watched (or in a lot of cases re-watched) pretty much every post-apocalyptic movie I could get my hands on. The amazing thing about the post-apocalyptic film genre is that there are so many variations of the theme. It ranges from the serious to the over-the-top to the comedic to the downright depressing. I guess global nuclear war has that effect on people it's the most horrible thing imaginable, so it's hard to look at it realistically. it's just SO soul crushing. In Fallout 3 we emphasize the comedic and exciting aspects so you don't have a nervous breakdown.
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Why develop a PC version at all? Given piracy and all the other issues with PC gaming why did you decide to release a PC version?
Bethesda's been around the block a few times now, and we got our start on the PC. So we've still got quite a few old school fans who played the early Elder Scrolls games (not to mention other stuff, like the Terminator titles) on the PC. So there's no way we're going to abandon those fans.
From a production standpoint, developing a PC game is fairly easy for us, since all of our tools are on the PC, and we can get the game up and running instantly on that platform. The real difficulty for us is in stuff like compatibility testing. Our games are huge, right? So it's difficult for us to test all the different permutations within the game itself. What if I do this quest, and then chose this path of this quest? Etc. Now throw endless hardware configurations into that mix and the amount of testing we need to do becomes mind numbing. But in the end, it's worth it for us, and for gamers, certainly.
