Interviews// Bethesda's Pete Hines: The E3 '07 Fallout 3 Interview

SPOnG: What was it like working with Neeson?

Pete Hines: Oh, he’s brilliant. He’s such a good mimic! You see him get into this character, you put the script in front of him and it really is just like – all of a sudden – he becomes this completely different person. He’s talking to you like you’re an infant, then he’s talking to you like you’re sixteen. His ability to change in a moment [clicks fingers] – he’s such a good actor.

He also brings a great presence to this very important role of the player’s father in the game. Patrick Stewart, we used in Oblivion, but we always said that the whole story of Oblivion is that the emperor is killed and you have to find his son – so we kinda told you “He’ s going to die really early and you need to find his heir.” Whereas in this game Liam Neeson is the impetus for the majority of the main quest – it’s about finding your father, finding out what he is up to, finding out if you can help him.

SPOnG: There is a lot of talk about how next-gen formats allow for more emotional depth in videogames, but a lot of people seem to perhaps overlook the importance of storyline and character – would that be a fair point?

Pete Hines: I certainly think that storytelling in general is one of the areas where our industry has the most room for improvement. It is certainly something that we are keenly aware of in Fallout and something we are trying to spend more time on. When you do a game as big as Oblivion – with literally thousands of characters – it is really tough to make every single one of those memorable and special and give them a lot of depth. Whereas, in Fallout, it’s a much smaller scope.

We’re talking about hundreds of NPCs rather than thousands. So we can spend a lot more time crafting those characters, their personalities and their dialogue and we really hope that folks will get excited about what we’ve done in this area.

SPOnG: How many guys do you have working on the writing side of things?

Pete Hines: Probably about the same size team we had working on Oblivion. We have a group of designers who are focused entirely on quests and dialogue. Then we have a group of designers who are focused on levels and – for lack of a better word – ‘dungeons’ and that sort of thing.

SPOnG: One of the features in Fallout 3 that really stands out is V.A.T.S. (Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System) – can you explain how this works?

Pete Hines: V.A.T.S. was really born out of a desire to make the game work best as a first-person game – remember that the original games were third-person with turn-based combat. We feel that first-person is the most immersive way to put a player in a world. However, at the same time we wanted something that stayed as true as possible to role-playing. We don’t want something that rewards the ‘quick-twitch’ FPS player. We’re not trying to reward players who are good at Call of Duty or Halo or whatever.

We want the skills and abilities of your character to determine success or failure. So, one of the things we’ve included is this V.A.T.S. mode allows you to stop time and queue up moves for your character to implement, in almost a compressed time mode. And then we play it out in a cinematic fashion.

So, at any point in the game you can pause it and spend action points to target any particular point on a creature or creatures that you might be fighting. So, you might aim to shoot one guy in the leg to aim to slow him down as he runs to attack you with his melee weapon, while at the same time aiming to shoot this other guy in the arm so that he’s less accurate with his weapon, while you might aim to shoot a third guy in the head for a quick kill – and then you press a button and the game acts out all that stuff for you in a cinematic mode. Over time your action points are recharged. You get to make moves based on how many action points it takes to fire a certain weapon, or whatever the case may be.

So, it’s really a way of giving you a chance to pause the action, take stock of situations and make smart choices about who you are going to target. You know, a lot of shooters you play, there’s ammo all over the place. Whereas in this game, you’re in a post-nuclear wasteland. You can’t just go down to the local ammo shop and buy as much as you want. You have to scrounge for what you need to survive. You have to conserve ammo and resolve the battles as smartly as possible. A combination of the skills of your player and the conditions of your weapons determines how likely you are to hit the particular body parts of your enemies.