Fallout 4 Interview

Coverage from this year’s Gamescom is still trickling out this late into August, including this interesting interview with Pete Hines, VP of PR and Marketing at Bethesda Softworks, from the folks at Metro GameCentral. The interview focuses on the broader publishing scope of the company, but there are still quite a few questions about the company’s most important upcoming game. Yes, I’m talking about Fallout 4:

GC: In terms of the reception to the game so far, I was looking again online and I was surprised at how negative a lot of it is. There seems to be a significant proportion of the fans upset at the quality of the graphics and there also seems to be a Diablo III style reaction to the use of colour which was personally my favourite part of the reveal. Do those sort of complaints surprise or upset you?

PH: Definitely doesn’t upset us. Very little surprises me after 16 years in this industry. [laughs] Generally speaking. I think we’re an industry, we’re a form of entertainment. As with most forms of entertainment you never get 100 per cent agreement on anything. And so, at the end of the day, whether it’s what the graphics look like or whether the gameplay is what you want or whether you like the setting, or whatever it is, everybody is entitled to their opinion.

GC: I’ll say it surprised me. I knew how excited people were, and are, and I figured most of your fans know that a complex open world game like this is going to have some compromises in terms of the visuals. But they’re also complaining that the gameplay is too similar to Fallout 3, that you haven’t shown much that couldn’t have been done in the previous games. Is that something you would accept?

PH: I mean, certainly it ought to look and feel familiar. If you played Fallout 3 you ought to be able to see things that are recognisable or similar or whatever. Because we didn’t make a completely different game. But at the same time, when you’re playing it it’s a mix of familiar and different. There are things that are the same and there are things that are very different.

But those things are sometimes very difficult to demonstrate in a short video at a E3 showcase, or whatever. But if you jump into the game and you play it for an extended period of time you start to feel the differences and how much some things have changed.

…

GC: And the other issue [note: in addition to facial animations] I think is a fair complaint is the dark humour, which was a big part of the earlier games but you seem very reticent about introducing in your Fallout titles. Which can be a little dry.

PH: I think we steer a lot more towards the original Fallout and kind of use that as our bar. Because if you look at Fallout 1 and 2 they are pretty different from one another in terms of how many pop culture references and fourth wall stuff the second one does.

I think there is a fair amount of that in the game, it’s something that’s important to them and is part of the Fallout universe, but in the interests of time and so forth you only have so much you can show and show the context. Some of the stuff I’ve seen is much better served when you come across it and you’ve been playing the game for half an hour and you go in a house and you find this thing as opposed to, ‘˜I set it up as this kind of canned joke’.