Emil Pagliarulo STORY Conference Keynote Speech

In case you’re interested in knowing how the developers at Bethesda craft the stories for their own games, you’ll want to watch this video. Emil Pagliarulo, who worked as lead writer/design director at the company since Fallout 3 (with an earlier stint on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, for which he wrote the Dark Brotherhood storyline), gave a keynote speech at the STORY conference in Copenhagen.

During the speech, Pagliarulo explained his three principles when writing stories (Keep It Simple, Stupid; Write What You Know; Great Games are Played Not Made) and offered some inspirations and examples from the projects he worked on. There is some pretty good advice and also what I feel are moments of bizarre logic (the assumption that killing the head of an organization would make you the head of an organization is… strange, to say the least), plus some interest insight into the cut content of Fallout 4.

Did you know the title wasn’t originally meant to be set in Boston? Me neither, but apparently Pagliarulo was happy he got to write about the city he grew up in: