Why did Bethesda choose to pick up the Fallout property?
Pete Hines: Mostly because it was a franchise with games that we love. We like big, open-ended games, player choice, that sort of stuff and it fit with some of those basic things. But it was different enough from what we'd done before with the Elder Scrolls. It was a nice break to do something completely different.
...We own Fallout. Interplay has talked about the rights that they have got from us as it relates to an MMO.
So is there any progression down that avenue with the franchise at the moment, with the MMO?
Hines: We have a separate company, ZeniMax Online Studios, that's owned by our parent company, which has been set up to do MMOs but they aren't talking about what projects they're working on or what they're doing.
There's been a lot of speculation in the press recently about your MMO plans...
Hines: It's [ZeniMax Online Studios] obviously a new shop, a new startup, and given that it's an MMO, I imagine it'll be quite a while before they start to talk about what they're doing.
So nothing on an Elder Scrolls MMO at the moment?
Hines: Right now our big focus is on Fallout 3.
What are you working on at the moment with Fallout 3?
Hines: We're working towards getting everything into the game. The world hasn't finished being built yet so we're still in the process of putting all of the content in the game, fleshing everything out and playing quests. That sort of thing.
Are all three versions of the game at the same stage of development?
Hines: For the most part. 360 is our lead platform. Our devs are just big fans of the dev tools available on the 360 and so that's our lead. But PC, PS3, 360 - they're all chugging along.
How 'open' is Fallout 3? Is it like Oblivion in that regard?
Hines: One of the things about Fallout 3 is you cannot do everything in this game. It's not like Oblivion where it's just - basically, anybody could do anything. Fallout isn't like that. Fallout basically is fewer number of quests with lots of ways to complete them and things are opened up to you or locked off to you as you go through the game.
There will be somewhere between nine to 12 different endings to the game based on what you've done in the game. So it's something that is inherently a diverging path. It may be some of the same things but doing them in very different ways, and ultimately that will define your gameplay experience.
Then you'll have to go back and play again. So you may have to play through once and blow up Megaton [a major city in the game] and then play again and not blow up Megaton just to get to the bits that are all behind both of those paths.
Fallout has a real hardcore fan base. Would you say the biggest challenge has been creating a sequel that appeals to those fans but not at the expense of alienating a new audience?
Hines: Our philosophy with Fallout 3 was to make it as if we'd made Fallout one and two. Which obviously we didn't but we couldn't really spend a whole lot of time worrying about what we didn't make or what we didn't have control over.
We approached it the same way we approached Morrowind or Oblivion - we are doing the next game in the series, this is what the series has always been about, what are we going to do with the next one to make it cool and fun and the next big step for this series?
That was our approach for Fallout 3, was to say "What's our next big thing going to be for this series". What are the things we need to stay true to and can't change, and what are the things we maybe want to change or update and do differently.
Ultimately, that was our approach, to make to make the kind of choices to make the best Fallout 3 game we thought we could make.
To date that's what we've done. We've definitely changed some things, but we feel like we've stayed true to the things about Fallout that make that series memorable - which are the setting, the characters, the tone, the feats, the moral choices, the player choice.
The character system is the same, the dialogue system works the same. We didn't want to change the stuff we felt didn't need to be changed.
During the demo you quipped that "Destruction is our new trees". But how difficult has it been creating a post-nuclear world?
Hines: Very. Especially all the outdoor stuff. Our lead artist for Fallout 3 is very good and he's also really obsessive... We really do go into a lot of detail, we don't just make things for the sake of making them, they have to have a sense of why they're there, and what function do they serve?
For the outdoor stuff, it's definitely really difficult to render that kind of destruction. But for us the big benefit is, on this generation of technology that incorporates both the two new consoles as well as the stuff we're doing now on PC with DX 9 and DX 10. This is another go-around for us on those things.
