Chris Avellone Talks Van Buren

Polygon’s Allegra Frank has had the chance to attend the Practice 2015 conference at the NYU Game Center and write a report on the talk Chris Avellone gave about Van Buren, the codename given to the internal Fallout 3 Interplay had in development. The talk apparently mostly focused on the game’s pen and paper roots, an interesting design experiment that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been repeated by any CRPG developer since. Here’s a snippet:

For the purposes of his paper playtest, he had two separate teams of six fellow developers serve as the two sets of characters. Avellone would implement the effects of choices made by each group into the other’s gameplay session unbeknownst to them. In that sense, the tabletop version of Fallout 3: Van Buren became a tacitly competitive game in which you were actually fighting against another team to prevent or inflict further damage upon your world.

Details like these were not even the most fascinating or intricately developed. The audience was most taken with an idea Avellone described that allowed each player to choose theme music for their character. In the interest of creating a cinematic experience even without the visuals, Avellone’s guidebook asked that players choose a unique soundclip which would add a 50 percent stat bonus to any skill.

The theme music was up to the player to choose, but selecting something from the game itself would offer additional advantages.