E3 2008 News | Fallout 3
Bethesda’s Todd Holland Talks Fallout 3
July 15, 2008
Todd Holland, executive producer of Bethesda Softworks’ epic role-playing game, Fallout 3, knows that fans have been waiting a full decade for this game. He assures gamers that the wait for Fallout 4 won’t be that long, but this new game’s content should tide fans over for quite some time. Anyone who played Holland’s last game, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, knows that this developer crafts games that appeal to both the hardcore gamer and the more casual fans. They’ve taken the same approach with Fallout 3. Holland talks about what it’s like to blow up his hometown of Washington. D.C. and divulges some of the cool weapons available in the new game in his interview with Das Gamer.
Das Gamer: For those not familiar with the last two games or this one, what’s the basic big picture story in Fallout 3?
Todd Holland: The game starts with your birth. It’s actually you coming out of your mother’s womb. You’re born in this underground shelter where people have lived for hundreds of years. The game flashes through your life and you play little snippets of your own life as you learn the gameplay and do things. Your mother dies in childbirth and your father’s played by Liam Neeson. He teaches you things and you bond with him and when you wake up one day on your 19th birthday, he’s gone. And no one ever leaves the vault. The people in charge of the vault think you’re involved so you have to leave the vault and you enter this void of a wasteland. This is after playing the first hour of the game underground in the vault. It’s got a good flow to it. That’s the kickoff for the story: Why did my dad leave?
How did this backdrop impact the characters people will interact with in Fallout 3?
Todd Holland: With the stories and characters, because the scale would be a bit limited — in Oblivion we had 1,000 or 2,000 NPCs that would walk around – with Fallout 3 most people are dead so we have maybe 200 or 300 people to talk to. That allows us to make them much more believable and give them much more to say. Some of the stuff in Elder Scrolls can definitely feel a little more cookie cutter because it is, and a lot of the time it has to be.
As far as newbies who jump into this game, how have you handled gameplay for them versus the die hard gamers?
Todd Holland: They won’t get as much out of it, but it does play like a first-person shooter and you can just go around doing stuff right away. We’ve found that the graphics and the ease of play suck people in, but most players are pretty savvy. If you’re making a class in Call of Duty 4 and picking perks, it’s the same thing. It just goes on longer and is a bit deeper with Fallout 3. I think a lot of people can handle that. Some people might be intimidated at first, but you don’t want that moment of confusion. So we try at the beginning of the game to ease people into it with things like how you make your characters. If someone gives you a copy of this game and says, “Here, try this out, within an hour,” we basically have you, we think.
Are there any particular achievements you pulled of with this game that get you hyped?
I love how it looks. I’m a big proponent of great graphics. Some people complain that game makers are too focused on graphics. I don’t think we’re too focused on graphics. We should be focused on them. It’s the main thing a player reacts to and it’s how we tell a lot of the story. I love the art direction and the way the game looks and the way things happen when you go into V.A.T.S. I’m a firm believer that in this kind of game you’re going to kill a lot of people. As a game maker, you find things that people are going to do a lot, and in this case it’s killing people and watching them die, and you try to make that as entertaining as possible so that you want to do it a thousand times.
What was your focus when it came to the story?
Todd Holland: I really like the story, itself. I think it’s definitely our best story. I like how it intersects with the things the player actually does in the game. It’s really believable. It never feels artificial in terms of, “Why am I doing this?” Even in our fantasy stuff, we do stuff like, “I won’t tell you the password until you bring me my kitten.” We’ve really avoided that this time. The story comes across naturally. And I’m really happy with the whole flow of the story and how it came out.
When it comes to some of the more outlandish things you can do, can you talk about some of the weapons that will appeal to the Mature gamer?
Todd Holland: Being in a post-apocalyptic world, we have your pistols and your melee weapons like pull sticks–which are fun to see what you can do to people. And then we have the really big guns like the missile launchers and the fat man, which is the nuclear bomb catapult. You can have a lot of fun with that. We have guns you can actually make from scavaging parts and putting them together. We have a rocket launcher that you can build by taking a leaf blower, a vacuum cleaner and a wood chipper. It’s shoots rocks and other projectiles. It’s like the physics weapon. Anything you see in the world like ashtrays and junk that’s lying around, you can throw in there. There’s actually a menu that comes up that asks you what type of shit you want to throw into the gun and then it just shoots it out randomly at people. You can have fun with that. We have about five different weapons that you can make.
What’s it like to be able to destroy the capitol in this game, since your team is local to Washington, D.C.?
Todd Holland: The big advantage was that we know the lay of the land. We know the scale of the city. We pick our poison and get the local flavor so it feels a little more real, even if you’ve never been to D.C. We can pick up on elements like how the Metro system works and where the different lines go. And then we change them up, because we have the red, white and blue lines instead of orange, green and blue. It’s kind of fun to blow up your home town. The good news is that most people take it for what it is. It’s fun to nuke D.C.
What types of enemies do you have?
We have tons. I don’t even have a number of how many types are in the game. We have super mutants in the city and there are a few types of them. We have humans you fight like the Raiders and the Enclave soldiers. We have mutated creatures out in the wasteland like these big rat scorpions and giant molerats and ants and things like that. We also have robots of different sizes that are roaming around different places. We have ghouls which fill the classic zombie role. They’re people who have been eradiated so much they’re like rampaging beasts. It runs a pretty good gamut of stuff.
And each enemy will be a unique challenge?
Todd Holland: Yes. They’ll have different ways to attack. They’ll have different things that will happen if you target various things that are on them. There are robots that have chips on their back that if you blow up, they go crazy. You can find things on different enemies to target and see what they do.
In terms of scope, how big is this game compared to Oblivion?
It’s pretty close. You start out a lot smaller, but if you do everything in the game it’s about 100 hours. It’s a big game. The main quest is about 20 hours but we can’t stop ourselves from adding other side quests and things, so it’s a big game.
–John Gaudiosi
Fallout 3 hits shelves this fall. Get a look at the E3 trailer below.
