Fallout 3 Interview
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How much do you think about balancing demands on the player's investment in terms of the main quest and the side quests? Although you can't dictate the pacing, do you try to guide it at all? Across different Bethesda games, the critical response has differed in terms of which is more engaging -- the main quest or the world and what you can find in it.
EP: Structurally, Oblivion and Fallout 3 are very similar. We have our main quest, and the main quest is where we like to tell our story. But all of the side quests that we do aren't really connected to the main quest in any way; most of the time, they're not even connected to each other. They just fill in the world, and they're just out there for you to find.
That's one of the benefits -- the player can jump between one and the other at any time. It's interesting how we concentrate our time, because we spent a lot of time working on the story for the main quest and its polish and stuff, but at the same time, we have almost two games there to make that the player's experiencing.
It's impossible for us really to track what that experience for the player is going to be. Do they do two quests of the main quests, do thirty hours of the side quest, then come back and finish the main quest? Do they just beeline through the main quest? We find that most people don't do that.
When we design the game, we tend to structure it so that the player traverses the map. We'll actually move the quests to achieve that: "Let's put this over here because when they're on the main quest, they're going to run into this location." They're two separate things, but they're symbiotic, too.
